Through rain and shine, snow and wind….

No, this isn’t the Post office motto. It was actually my Thanksgiving weekend. It started on Thursday, Thanksgiving, by first cleaning around the house. Nothing too special, but this year, we usually have a lot of food to cook. In previous years, I would wake up to the smell of my parent’s cooking for that night when we have everybody over. But not this year. This year is different. This year, I’m building my house!
Like I said, we started the day by cleaning around the house. However, we didn’t spend much of the day doing that at our house. We left to go to my place to work on it before we went to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt’s house just down the road. We got to my place around 12. I haven’t been to my property for over two weeks now because we haven’t had much to do. I was surprised to get there to see that the foundation was up! We started off by smoothing the ground inside the foundation to be ready to put on the floor joices. After three hours using a pick and a shovel, I was getting worn out! But by then, it was ready to go to my aunt’s and eat!
Friday started off at the wee hours of 5:30 in the morning to get up and go work on my house. I asked off from work to go and build my house. I got up to find that it was raining a bit. I thought it wasn’t good to work on a house in the rain, but we did anyway. We got to my house around 7:30 while a light cold rain fell. I’m building up in the Blue Ridge mountains so the temperature is about 15 to 20 degrees cooler than it is in the lower parts of the valley. The sky was a dull gray and misty. As I looked over to the other side of the mountains, the fog and mist rose like ghosts floating away from their graves. We spent the day working on the floor beams on top of the foundation. Throughout this time, the weather would change from a light misty rain, to stop, then pick up a little, get harder, stop, and then pick up again until it began to pour. I had several articles of clothing and the only spot on my body that faced the elements was my face. The combination of the cold and the rain stung my face at times. We all were miserable, including my father who told me he could work in the snow but not the rain. He complained to me that line several times. Finally, around 3 o’clock that afternoon, we had enough and left. However, we were soaking wet to point where our bodies were soaking wet after the rain soaked through our clothes.
Saturday began the same way as Friday did, waking up at 5:30 in the morning. However, it was raining. The bad news was it was WINDY AND COLD!!! Again, it’s a 15 to 20 degree difference in the mountains. It was cloudy that morning to start off with. It was so cold that there were snow flurries for about an hour that morning. We finally got some sun and it warmed up a bit around 11 but we then had to face the wind. It was so windy that it almost blew us off our feet at times.
During the day, we were able to put on the floor of my house. I know I spent the day moving all the wood and 4x4’s. After about an hour of moving the wood, my arms got tired, but I kept going. I told myself that the pain was good, the pain is my friend. I never stopped or complained, but I’m paying for it today. By 6, as the sun was setting, we were able to get to start on 2 of the walls of my house, though we didn’t put them up. I was glad that we didn’t have a light to finish or I would have died there from exhaustion. The best part was that as we were putting all the equipment up to leave, I spilled gasoline all over myself! I had to strip down before getting in truck and that was the most agonizing moment since it was so cold up there!
Today, I could not get up to go to church. I don’t how my folks did it but they went. I woke up around 9, my whole body sore. It was difficult to walk around but I soon got the ability to walk. I got a call from my girlfriend telling me she got back from Ohio for Thanksgiving. I won’t be able to do much with her the next two weeks since she has exams/tests to study for but I am meeting for dinner tomorrow. Around 3, I decided to go into town to see the movie “Timeline”. It was about archeology students going back in time to France in 1357. Not really a great movie, though it had a lot of action, just not enough plot.