My Dog Ate My Paintbrush

First of all, happy Cinco de Mayo! The day means much more to me than it otherwise would because it marks the luckiest day in my life. Nineteen years ago on this day, I met my future wife. So, happy Cinco de Mayo!

It's been nearly a month since I last posted. At that time, I was fixing to mask so that I could paint the middle dormer. As I write, I have masked off the roof flashing, and that's it. It's not that I've been lazy, it's just that life and the weather intervened. Honest!

I've been working on the grading for a larger gazebo pad since February, whenever I had some time to spare, but the work got to a stage where the pups were starting to mess it up by their cavorting. And so, with the prospect of questionable weather approaching, I decided to give the gazebo project top priority until it was done.

The old gazebo pad wasn't large enough, and there was a lot of erosion towards the back of the lot, so I decided to double the pad's size and build a little frame at the low side to keep things level and neat. It was a lot of hard work, because I had to move a lot of dirt from elsewhere on the lot. I took it from the far side of the garage, where I need to do a lot of regrading anyway.

I finally finished it last week. I had planned to do some how-to posts on the surveying and grading, but I couldn't manage to make the telling of it anything but boring. Perhaps I'll try again later. Anyway, Wifey and I put up the new gazebo a few days ago, and here is the finished project:

The pets of course all love the open area of fake turf.

The pups, Peter and Sally, are six months old now, and starting to look like half-sized editions of their future selves.

They've become significantly more well-behaved in the past few weeks, which is a fortunate thing, because they've entered another big growth spurt. Peter is going to be huge once he grows into those ears; Sally should end up to be about Nellie's size.

Oh, yeah, the painting. Anyway, the weather has been wet with annoying unpredictability and timing, which has either made it impossible to paint or led me to believe it would be impossible to paint. It looks like I've got some clear sailing now, however.

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"Ay, ay, ay ay, canta y no llores. . . !"