I am never in front of the camera.(Or Happy 4th of July)

After seeing these pics, I remember why now!



Karen and I cooked out for the 4th.







We didn't go to see any fireworks this year. We had hoped to get to see them from Bettys house where we spent the 3rd. The town fireworks were on the 3rd. The park where the shot them off at was about 3 miles from our house. If we would have been home, we would have likely had a great view of them. We did get to see some of them from Bettys though, so not all was lost.

Did he or didn't he?

Back on May 29th we had a snake enter the house. Or so we think. We were not sure if he made it all the way in or not. We we think we have an answer now.
I found this little fella deceased in the garage this morning.

I am assuming it is the same one, but I could be wrong.....I have been wrong before....lol

This

is one of the houses that was constructed out of the same brick that ours was.

From what we have learned, the person who owned the brick factory in Pahrump built 5 or 6 of these type homes believing that they would be very energy efficient due to the near 12 or so inch brick walls. We have located 2 additional homes constructed like ours so far.

These home owners are apparently in the process of fixing theirs up also.

Tom and Betty had their yard worked on Friday. The leveled out high/low spots, removed rocks and weeds from the yard.

you can definately tell this is not sand. After the work was done their yard was like the moon. The dirt/silt here is like moon dust. Once you break the crusty top of it anyways. So we took our hose and sprinkler to them to use for a bit. This was in an attempt to prevent theor yard from blowing away.

When wet, this silt sticks to everything.

Toms shoes used to be dark brown.


Here you can see Tom adjusting the sprinkler.

More

pics from the house.
Originally the top of our brick wall was painted. That was many, many years ago. We decided to paint it again.




one of the many lizzards at our house.


There is much to do, but we have made a big dent in it.

Short term we hope to:
1. Replace all of the bathroom faucets.(Already purchased and on my "honey do" list)
2. Get my DSL hoked up.(just need to run the phone line)
3. Make more improvements to the front yard.
4. Get the weeds out of our lands so the dogs can go out in the big area without fear of stepping on Foxtail.

Long term we hope to:
1. Run electricity to the second garage.
2. Get a flag on the flag pole.

More improvements

This is where the "Piggy" door was:


We also replaced the front security door:
The old:


The new:


Jack also stopped by to see the new door:


Here are some shots from Tom and Bettys house:

A project, a project there.

When moving here I wanted to keep our electric bill as low as possible. I envisioned using a clothes line to dry clothes. And we did.....for a while.

Who knew a pair of my underware could take up so much space! When I imagined a clothes line in my head, my underware only took up a few inches at most! Well that just wasn't the case.

Not having a dryer became bothersome. In addition to the taking up of space, the clothes line was in the garage, your clothes felt like sand paper. No need to sand our feet anymore, our socks could do it for us! Got an itch on your back? Put a shirt on! You may end up bleeding, but your itch will be gone!




There was no vent for the dryer, so I made one.


The start of the hole for the dryer vent. You'd be suprised how easy it was to go through about 18" of brick and mortar.

Pasing through the wall.


The completed project.


Its far from perfect, but it does the job.

This is the bathroom we were afraid to use in the begining. Its looking pretty good now.

Finally

a reason to like the bank bail outs. We got our loan through First Option Motgage. Our loan was quickly bought up by Bank of America, who then sold the loan to Country Wide. As you may recall, both of these banks were "capitalized" by the U.S. government. Our first payment is due in July of 2009. As I write this, it is June 26th, 2009. Having not received a payment book yet, we called our mortgage oficer. He said, not knowing Bank of America had already sold our loan, to call Bank of America. Upon calling them, we were told to call Country Wide. Neither bank of America nor Country Wide, had any record of my name, SSN, or my adress and then each denied any knowledge of me, my SSN, or my house,

I often joked to my dad about the bank deciding they didn't want any money from us. His response was always "Yeah right!".