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In the last 6 weeks since the last letter some items of note are as follows:  If you remember the property that we live on, there is some room on the east side of our house.  The nice part about this ground is that nothing has been built on it, and no underground utilities exist.  This makes it perfect for the location of a shop.  I have been wanting to build such a building for a long time, and we finally decided that it was time to act.



We settled on a 30x40 metal building.  Every decision we have made on this building has been one that we have debated about.  We finally settled on a metal building.  Here is the building just sitting by the side of the house prior to being erected.



The building was purchased from Muller Inc.  It was delivered from El Paso, TX.  Landen has been very excited about the entire building process.  He has always been fascinated with tractors, and this gave him the opportunity to see them working up close.  He really enjoyed supervising the erection of the building.



The dirt was trucked in from Wilcox.  The tractor also came from Wilcox.  As this haul was a bit much for the contractor, they decided to modify the design a little bit.  I had requested a 5" floor, and rather than bring in all of the dirt to compact for the sub-floor, they got it level and then just used extra concrete for the remainder of the fill.



The floor ended up being between 7.5" & 8" thick.  I didn't complain about that decision as I am of the belief that you just can't have too much concrete in the floor.  We had 5 trucks show up for the pour and ended up close to 45 yards of concrete in the final pour.  The trucks showed up at 8:00 am and the concrete was finally finished up by 3:00 pm.  It as an all day job to finish the concrete.



After the concrete set up, then the beams were stood up.  The steel was all set in place using a fork lift.  I was planning on doing the erection my self, but after seeing the effort that was exerted in getting them up and in place (never mind the fact that I don't have a fork lift) it worked out really well having a contractor perform the erection as well.



Then the siding and roofing was put on.  This was done using a 40 foot man lift.  After the building was finished the Genie lift stayed at the house for a few days, so I gave all of the kids a ride up in the basket.  They were rather taken by the view, and I must say that when you get about 40 feet up you can see for a pretty good ways.



Landen loved to be able to play on all of the equipment that showed up.  He would go out and supervise by riding his bike around the construction site and then when they left, he would crawl on and inspect the equipment.  It is really too bad that he wont remember doing this when he is older, because he so enjoyed it.



As most of you know we have been raising a pig this summer.  When we got the pig it was about 65 pounds.  We just turned the garden spot into a pig pen and let the pig have free range of the entire enclosure.  This arrangement seemed to work out pretty well.  When the time came to load the pig (to take to the market), this large enclosure proved to be a bit problematic.



Here is the pig about 2 months ago.  I still don't know the final weight of the animal, but I would guess it was between 275-325 pounds.  We fed the pig all of the food that was left out in the shed in Oracle.  There was wheat and other canned food from 1972-1974.  Some of the wheat I tried to germinate without any success.  The pig seemed to like everything we fed it, and I look forward to tasting the meat to determine if feeding the animal this type of food was wise.



To load the pig, we built a shoot next to the gate of the pen.  Then backed up a horse trailer to the end of the shoot.  We put a ramp in the shoot for the pig to walk up to enter the trailer.  Then we just had to get the pig to go up the shoot.



This part was not as hard as I thought, but basically with the help of a friend, we chased the pig around the pen trying to get it to enter the shoot on its own.  It would not.  So Lane (my helper) held a small child's pool against the pig pinning him against the edge of the pen, and I pushed from behind to force him forward.  This was much harder than I anticipated.  One shove would only move the pig about 12 inches.  I pushed and pushed until finally he entered the shoot.



At this point, Lane got behind the pig and using the shoot fence for leverage pushed the pig forward toward the trailer.  Once the pig entered the trailer, I jumped into the truck and drove it forward so that we could shut the door of the trailer.  I met Lane at his house at 6:00 am to start loading his pig, and then at about 6:40 we were building the shoot to load our pig.  At 7:30 we were pulling out of the drive way with both pigs in the trailer, and at 8:00 we had both animals safely in the hands of Wilcox Meat Packing Company.  We were informed that our meat should be ready to be picked up the week of the 22nd of December.




One last item of note is that we trimmed the thorn bushes in the front yard.  I wanted to cut them down entirely, but Terra insisted that she liked the flowers produced by these thorn bushes.  I was surprised by the amount of brush this produced.  I (with the kids help) piled the clippings up on the trailer and was amazed at how much room that occupied.  We are going to let these dry out and then they will be burned at a bon fire in 11 days when the youth finish up caroling for a mutual activity.



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