spiders and snakes

On this trip, we had more animal encounters. We saw our first cow of the season standing at the stock pond when we drove up. It ambled away by the time I fumbled for my camera.

But we did get a photo of this snake. Gerald saw it first and called to me to come out and look at what he found. At first, we could only see the tail and thought it might be dead. As it turned out, it was only digesting dinner. When we checked for it later, it was gone.

Our phoebe fledglings were also flitting about. They seem to think they own the place. Of course, they were born on our porch rafters, so for all they know they do. One even flew into the house and landed on the refrigerator. Gerald told it to get out of the house. And it did!

We saw this tarantula on our way out. It wasn't moving much either, but it was alive.

Last weekend, we also saw a bobcat. It was bounding away as we were driving out of the Ruger Ranch entrance, looking like a giant house cat. That was the most exciting thing we'd seen since the foxes.

Getting ready for the inspection

We made a quick trip to the land this week to do the final corrections for our combo inspection.

Our framing crew had failed to install one I-joist, so we had to get a letter from a contractor indicating a fix. We did, and Gerald and J.C. installed some additional material to bridge the span.

I had to hold my breath. I think even J.C. was nervous on this tall ladder.

Afterward, J.C. installed steel shims between our support posts and deck.

While he was doing that, Gerald started to skin the bottom of the master bedroom. We had decided on wainscoting and drywall. The plywood is the height of the wainscot.

After lunch, Gerald and I did some deckwork. J.C. helped after he finished some last-minute electrical changes. By about 3 p.m., we had about two-thirds of the south side of the porch done.

Rain and more rain

When we next left Phoenix for the land, our car thermometer said 109. It was about 1 p.m. When we got to Yarnell, we had to call friends and gloat. The temperature was 70 degrees! It seemed we had missed the rain, but not by much. And it must have been a real gullywasher, as Gerald put it. The roads were all rutted and the washes were running. There was even quite a bit of water in the stock pond.





We were relaxing on the porch, enjoying our good fortune, when we heard a truck. Traffic noise is pretty unusual, so we looked to see what it was. I had to look twice. "It's a UPS truck!" I said. We cracked up. We were the proverbial "last house on the road." Our nearest neighbor was two miles in the other direction, so he wasn't going to make any deliveries the way he was going. There's no way out except back up the road, so I went down to the end of the driveway with my camera.

"I just had to take a picture of the UPS truck in the middle of nowhere," I said, and we both laughed. Turns out he was on his lunch hour. He had a delivery to make to Linda, at the first house near the ranch gate and wanted to see what was down the road. He wondered if it connected to Sorrells Ranch. 

"Nope," I said. "The only way out is the way you came." He apologized for disturbing us and asked what our address was. "I don't know," I told him. It never occurred to us that we could have anything delivered out here. But it was good to know UPS apparently went everywhere.

There were a couple of things we could do on this trip. Gerald was keen on tiling the shower, but we also had all that wood for the porch, so we ended up working on the porch. After what felt like a lot of work on Saturday, it still seemed like we had a long way to go.








Gerald was pretty red faced by the end of the day, as it got up to 103 right after lunch. We were grateful that we were able to work in the shade, and a nice breeze blew constantly.

We picked up Kathleen and Linda for dinner at Rumors. We had 6:30 reservations, and it was 8:30 by the time we left, but the second time the power went out, we took it as a sign.

It was raining and lightning as we headed back to the ranch. On the way home, our car registered 63 degrees! At 6:30, it had said 97. I was still wearing shorts because I couldn't stand the idea of putting on long pants. Now I wanted a blanket. We were excited by the prospect of listening to the rain fall on the tin roof, but we wanted to get home before it really got going.

But by the time we got back, the rain had passed. There was a good deal of new rain on the ground, so it must have rained pretty hard. We sat for a few minutes watching the lightning that raked the sky every few seconds, then gave in to our tired bodies and went to bed.

We worked on the porch again until lunch. We kept thinking it would get easier and faster, but there was always something. On the corner, we had to splice boards and so had to find ones that were the same width and thickness. Then we still had some of the wood from the Congress sawmill, much of which was bowed.

The wood from the Prescott saw mill was, indeed, better, but far from perfect. We still wrestled with warped boards and boards of different thicknesses that had to be shimmed and boards that didn't want to fit underneath the siding. We were both pretty tired by lunchtime, so we packed up and headed home. Here's how it looked at the end of the day.

Birds and lions... oh my!

Gerald's son, David, flew into town the following week. He's a musician and sound engineer, and Gerald asked him to come out and wire the place for sound. They got most of the work done in a day.

After the last inspection, we needed to visit the planning office in Prescott, the last time, our inspector promised. The meeting with the plan reviewer went very well. We added the woodstoves that weren't on our plans, and he reviewed some items that were of potential concern to the inspector. He didn't seem particularly concerned about them, but we would need to get a letter from concerning the safety of a missing I-joist the framers had not installed.

We found that the window from the master bedroom gave us a great view of our newest neighbors.

Through the window, I was also able to get a better picture of their mom.

The porch turns out to be a great place to watch birds. They get fairly close and don't seem too concerned that we're there. Here's a scrub jay that was making a fuss.

And one of several finches that were flitting around.

I took David on a couple of short hikes to show him some of my more interesting finds: the old car, which, after David did some sleuthing, declared as a Buick truck; the mica mine, the strange coffin-shaped holes in the ground of a neighboring parcel.

The area had gotten quite a rain storm earlier in the week, and there were tracks everywhere. We saw what  could only be a mountain lion track, as large as David's hand. 

On June 3, "The Yellow Sheet," which passes as a local paper of sorts, said the Arizona Game and Fish Department had received numerous sightings of mountain lions near Yarnell, one of which resulted in the demise of a pet. We had seen tracks before, but not for some time.

The tracks were in an area that was covered with tracks of all kinds. Along with the large mountain lion track, there seemed to be smaller cat tracks. We thought they might be bobcat, but after re-reading the Yellow Sheet, there was a separate article by a resident who had seen a mountain lion and her cub. So maybe we were visited by mother and child.

A bird in the... porch!

After our last attempt at a combo inspection, we had gotten the go-ahead to skin the interior walls, so Gerald worked on the west kitchen wall so that we could start working on wall coverings, cabinets, etc.

Meanwhile, J.C. came up on Friday and did some of the electrical work the inspector had noted.

Gerald's manager, Dave, came up on Saturday to help finish the siding. We had done everything except installing the bats on the south and west sides. Gerald and I thought, naively, that it would go quickly. But it took all day and wore us all out. Dave was a real trooper, serving as "ladder man," while Gerald and I took turns assisting. 

By the time we got to the west side, Dave began to muse whether the house was growing. We started running short on galvanized nails and it was a toss-up whether we would first run out of nails or steam. But we lasted until the nails were gone, frustratingly close to finishing, with just 13 bats left to install.

 
"Encounters with nature" was a recurring theme over the weekend. The first was unexpected and not entirely pleasant. When we arrived, I pulled out a T-shirt we had stored underneath the bed in the travel trailer. It was covered with little white specks. We shook out the T-shirt and other clothes and hoped the specks weren't something unpleasant, like insect eggs. I'm not sure if they were, but when I went to the trailer in the evening, the whole corner of the bed above where the T-shirt had been stored was swarming with ants.

Fortunately, we had stored some blankets in the house in plastic tubs and we also had a couple of cots we used to take afternoon naps on the porch. So we constructed rustic little beds and spent our first night in the house. The next morning, the ants were gone. Their absence was so astonishing that I had to check the wine to be sure I hadn't drunk more than I thought. Just to be sure, we went to town and picked up some ant killer.

Next, Bubba had an encounter with a bunny. We had seen cottontails in the meadow, but never near the house. This weekend, we saw two. Or maybe the same one twice. Anyway, it ran up to Bubba, which startled us all. But once Bubba got his composure, he chased it away.

Finally, we'd been noticing this bird that seemed to hover around the porch, particularly when we were around. From our bird book, we identified it as a Says Phoebe. I spent the whole weekend trying to photograph it, but it flew away every time I finally got the camera in focus. Finally I got him, or her as it turns out. Here she is.

We noticed she got more and more frantic the closer we got to the west side of the house. Gerald looked up and said, "Is that a nest?"

It was. Dave got this picture from the top of the ladder, capturing one little bird with his mouth open.

The great flood

Once again, we arrived on Wednesday, hoping to do finish up what we needed to do on Thursday to call for a Friday inspection.

J.C. brought his daughter, Michelle, to help with the wiring upstairs. Meanwhile, Gerald built the pony walls that would house some of the electric.

Here's Gerald and J.C. putting one pony wall in place.




Gerald and I had talked about installing the rest of the bats on the siding while we waited for the inspector. But on Friday morning, Gerald thought he'd just as soon uninstall the toilet, insert the test plugs and charge the lines. Because you never know.

It was a good thing he did. The test plug for the toilet just wouldn't hold. Every time we got the water lines close to full, the plug would blow. Here was Gerald putting it back in place after the first flood.

It didn't hold. We tried it two more times. By then, there was so much water, Gerald had to drill holes in the floor to drain the water out. The inspector was expected between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. At about 10, Gerald called Yarnell Hardware to see if they had a test plug. They did. I drove to town and got it.

It didn't hold either.

We tried everything we could think of. First, we filled a 5-gallon bucket full of water and put it on top of the plug. It blew. Then we tried two buckets, one on top of the other, separated by a board. It blew, too, and made the flooding situation worse.

As a last resort, we rigged up this compressor over the plug using a complicated system of shims. We were still charging the pipes when the inspector arrived. But, miraculously, it held, just long enough to get through that part of the inspector.

We hoped for the best, but prepared for the worst. The inspector was much more encouraging. He found the plumbing to be "very clean." He noted that there were "many improvements." He said this was a big house for an owner/building. But he said we were "drilling down on it" and he would "get us through it."

There were still things we needed to do. One would involve another trip to the planning office in Prescott, but he promised this would be the last. He and Gerald looked at the poles at the entrance and while we didn't get it resolved, Gerald felt good about it. It started to seem like we would, indeed, get approval some day in the not-too-distant future. We felt a whole lot more optimistic.

As if to authenticate our good feelings, we enjoyed the nicest sunset we'd seen at the land in quite a while.

A very bad day

We arrived at the land on Wednesday night. We hoped to get an early start on Thursday and head to Prescott's planning and zoning office to take care of some last details before our third (?) attempt at a combo inspection.

Gerald and J.C. had spent the previous weekend getting the last of the wiring done, and Gerald had changed out our nice wain-edge stairs for something plain and boring that would, at least, pass inspection.

We hoped to clean up a few details on Thursday and call for an inspection on Friday.

We hadn't gotten off to a good start. The Webber grill that had served us so well for 25 years quit working. We went into Rumors for dinner, and thought we'd just pick up a new regulator the next day when we were in Prescott. We should have taken it as an omen.

Gerald didn't have a good time at the planning office. A major sticking point was our entryway. When the inspector saw it on a previous visit, he said we needed a permit and wouldn't do another inspection until we applied for it. Gerald had made drawings and hoped to get the permit approved. We also had some additional questions. For example, we didn't plan to finish the loft right away and was that going to hold us up? Also, the inspector said we needed two electrical outlets in a 2-foot passageway that led from the guest bedroom to the bathroom. That seemed silly. Was that really necessary?

We had bad news on all fronts. On the loft, we either needed to change the plans to show nothing up there, or wire it according to the plans. And, yes, we needed those two ridiculous outlets. But the kicker was the entryway. They wanted an engineer to come out and say our little three-pole structure was sound. Oh, and did we have those poles graded and stamped? When Gerald got upset, the clerk told him if he did it right in the first place, we wouldn't be in this predicament.

It all seemed crazy to us. What danger did our entryway really pose? It was well off the public roadway and we had used plenty of steel and concrete. But now we were in a pickle. Gerald understandably didn't want to pay an engineer to come out and ok it. The engineering report we had to get that said the holes our contractor had drilled in the ridge beam wouldn't compromise its integrity cost $400. And that didn't require a trip to the land.

As far as stamping and grading, John at Old Santa Fe lumber said he didn't think anyone in Arizona did that. All the graded logs were coming from out of state. He said, in fact, that in Coconino County, people weren't allowed to use the logs from their own land in building, which stuck us as odd. People had obviously been building up there for hundreds of years using those trees. Did people with perfectly good trees really have to get logs from out of state. Had the world gone crazy?

But what worried us most was the logs we had used in our house. Gerald pointed out that if they were concerned about the entrance way, they would "sh**t 14 little bricks" over the 14 logs that held up our porch. Not to mention the ones inside. We were concerned, to say the least. We got a regulator at Home Depot and headed back.

We stopped at the Skull Valley Cafe and asked about Ryan, the boy who had driven off the road two weeks before. His mother was there and she said he was doing great. He had cracked his skull and broken C5 in his neck and cut a shin to the bone, but was healing well. It didn't seem there was any spinal cord injury and we all agreed he was one lucky young man.

We got back to to land to find out that Home Depot had sold us the wrong part. Then Gerald got a call with bad news from work. Obviously, we weren't going to get our inspection, which I knew was a huge disappointment. Gerald didn't say much, just went quietly about his business.

I didn't realize how upset he was until I said I had noticed that our prickly pears were blooming. Did he see them? When he didn't respond, I thought he must not have heard me. I asked again. "I don't feel like looking at any prickly pears right now," he said glumly. That's when I took my book and headed for the "casita." "Let me know if you need help," I said.

On Friday, we got another lumber delivery from Old Santa Fe, the balance of our bats and some decking material. We didn't plan on using that this weekend, so we covered it up with a plastic tarp.










Inside, we reseated the toilet and Gerald re-hooked up the utility sink. Then Gerald worked on the pony wall around the loft, so he could run wiring. He built until he ran out of 2x4s, then drilled holes and installed outlet boxes.

It was an unseasonably cool day, and incredibly windy, which made it feel even cooler. I kept a fire going in the fireplace all day, which was nice. It was cool enough that I was glad I hadn't brought home our down comfortor. We had a nice sunset, the first really good one in weeks, though the sun was now setting in a whole new patch of sky. It surprised us just how much the sun had moved over the course of the year.

By 8:30, we were ready for bed. J.C. was camping with his family, so we decided to pack up after breakfast and head home.