This morning the cement people came and set up the forms for the cement footing of the studio. This truck showed up and poured the cement into the forms. It was very exciting.

This is the finished form with the footings. It'll dry overnight and tomorrow the foundation will get walls. Now you can see the separate rooms. The closest room is the storage; the further and largest room is the bead studio and the room on the left is Robert's forge area.

All this nice cement will be covered up with dirt. Back-filled, they call it. The building will be resting on this nice foundation.

We've just been through a huge ordeal. We lost our cable and internet for 5 days! It was horrible, being without baseball and without the web. Our house got struck by lightning, or at least we suffered a power surge and knocked out some lights and the cable. What a nightmare. It's back now and we're in business again.

But on a happier note, we broke ground on the bead cottage. Tuesday night they dropped off this machine to dig out the hole for the foundation:


Here it is grading the backyard and starting to dig the hole:

Here is the hole after the first day. The view is from ground-level.

Here's a view from the bedroom. It's not all the way dug out yet. This is Wednesday afternoon:

Thursday morning they came and finished the digging. Here's the hole from the ground level, looking toward the house.
No one came to work here on Friday, except Keith. I guess it's cause it's summer and Friday. They'll be here on Monday to start the foundation.

The game went off with only a 30-minute rain delay. This was a miracle, as we thought no way is this game going to happen as we drove down to Boston through torrential downpours. The Red Sox lost, which sucks, but it was a great pitchers' duel - scoreless until the 7th inning. It was great to be in the crowd. Cheering and screaming with 37,000+ other people is much more effective than me by myself in the living room. Here are some pictures:

The blurry blip on top of the antenna is the Fenway hawk.


This is someone who is waay too excited to be at Fenway.

When we got there, the tarp was on the field. This picture shows how close our seats were. We were in the 8th row up, right behind home plate. Sweet.

Taking off the tarp.

The Green Monstah.

Folding up the tarp:

Beckett on the mound!

Mike Lowell and Manny on deck:

Manny at bat:

Mikey Lowell at bat.

Arizona Diamonbacks' Eric Byrnes. I took this picture for Tanner, the Doofus. Java reads his brother's blog.

Jacoby Ellsbury at bat.

More Jacoby:

Brandon Moss watching a foul ball.

Rain, rain, go away.
Come again some other day.
The Boston Red Sox want to play.

*doing my anti-rain dance*

Last week we went to the Museum of Science to see the exhibit "Baseball as America". It was awesome. We saw all kinds of cool stuff from the Hall of Fame. It makes me want to go to the real HoF. The coolest thing there was not one single item, but was the whole message of the exhibit: baseball is intertwined with America. It was very moving to see how prisoners of war (our boys overseas as well as the Japanese interned at home) would fashion balls, bats, and bases out of sticks, boards and whatever they could find in order to play ball. After the exhibit, we went to a talk given by Bill James, inventory of sabermetrics and Rob Neyer of ESPN. Fun!

Tomorrow we are going to Fenway to watch the Red Sox. I am so excited I can hardly wait. Josh Beckett is pitching. I am so so lucky the rotation fell the way it did. I'd be happy with any starting pitcher, but I'm happiest with Becks. Here is the view from our seats:


I had a very quiet weekend. I have a cold, so have been taking it easy. Saturday I slept until 10:30 and Sunday I slept until 9:15. The whole weekend has just been very relaxing and mellow.

Here's the new floor in the dining room. This was my gift to my mother for her birthday.

Hooray! We got the permit!

Over the last few months, we have been working with our contractors on a design for my new studio. After years of working in my garage for three seasons a year, I'm finally going to be able to work year-round. We signed the contract last week and Keith the contractor staked it out. There will be three separate areas of the building: my studio, a forge for Robert and storage for miscellaneous stuff. So in the first picture in the foreground is the storage area. Just past the storage area is the area for my studio. The squares in the middle shows where my workstations will be. (The little black dot behind the fence is Barney).


The picture below shows the area for the forge:



A closeup of my studio area with my workstations marked out:


So the next step is getting the permit. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.