Catching Up

After realizing that I really haven't posted for a couple of weeks, I thought I would take a few minutes. We are all home sick from church, though we would all rather be camping. We planned to leave yesterday and Van came down with some bad congestion and Rusty was covered with red spots. Now Stone has a few of the same type of spots. They don't itch or secrete fluids, they are just pimple-like red spots. No fever but obviously contagious. Stone is still getting over his annual summer rash. I have some sort of a stye in my left eye and Janna is also congested. Normally we might just go camping, but last time we did with a sick Rusty he ended up getting pneumonia.


The picture above I took at work last week. The cranes are supposed to have topped out 2 weeks ago but are behind schedule. This unfortunately has forced us to switch from swing to day to swing and Tuesday back to day shift. It is hard to plan anything with the family with this type of schedule. Wednesday one of our vendors is taking the engineer's to a Rockies v. Giants game and has box seats for us. I am looking forward to that. The crane on the right is now moved and the one on the left will be done and pull back this week to start the face of the building. As engineers we do nearly all of the layout for the entire building. It is up to us to make sure everything is right where it is supposed to be. Yeah, no pressure.

We are getting closer to breaking ground on the hotel next door. This week we started getting materials for the excavation. The hole we have to dig will be about 30 feet deep. It will have 2 levels of underground parking. After the hole is dug we will have to drill and pour several dozen caissons down from the bottom of the hole, which are what hold the weight of the building like a footing. We will form up and pour concrete grade beams which sit on the caissons. The building walls are built on the grade beams, held down by anchor bolts. If I lost you somewhere in this paragraph don't worry about it, I am typing this for my dad. He likes to know what I am doing at work.

This is the view out of the west side of our building. We overlook the Coore's Amphitheatre. Every few days in the summer they have concerts and tours. I have heard some decent shows this summer including Evanescence, Atreyu, Ciara, Wierd Al, Click Five, Hilary Duff, and tomorrow night several bands are coming including Linkin Park & My Chemical Romance. Below is a picture of Hilary Duff I took for my siter-in-law and her kids who are Hilary Duff fans, through our builder's level. It seems like every afternoon we get intense rain storms passing by or on top of our project. The upside is that we welcome the rain as we need it, and usually the sun breaks free from the clouds and gives us some of the brightest rainbows. In this picture you can see there is a double rainbow. Also I took all of these pictures on this post with my camera phone.

I want to wish Tim Dickman a HAPPY 30TH BIRTHDAY today. We also want to wish our friends who are expecting babies soon the best of luck, the mom's a speedy recovery, and all of the parents lots of sleep. We are thinking about you.