Haulin’ Ass Tour 2010: The Countdown Begins

The nice thing about sitting in 3 hour classes together a couple of nights a week is that it gives MysteryMan and me plenty of time to write snide remarks to each other in the margins of our notes, and occasionally work out the logistical problems of retaining our Actual Real Jobs, building a house, and traveling to Texas to pick up the donkeys at the same time.

Since we’re in the final 25% of work at the Station, it’s time for some serious planning on our next steps.

Wherein MysteryMan’s Eyeballs Fall Out of His Head and Roll Across the Desk

The way we stay sane when we lock ourselves in the house together for 24 hours is by working in separate rooms.

Occasionally this dude with his big-ass calculator will call me downstairs to “help” him with something and then proceeds to hide behind a wall and wait for the opportune moment to jump out and scare the shit out of me. I retaliate by periodically doing jumping-jacks in the office directly above his head.

It’s the little things that make our relationship work.

I also sometimes like to mess with his math by dropping sketches on his plans that turn the previously 4-beam porch, into a 15-beam architectural marvel.

Sketches like these make me glad that I get to be the half of this team that deals with vision and not physics.

Seven Weeks & Counting

We have managed to find a week in our hectic schedules to take the road trip of a lifetime, and we think we’ll be heading down to Texas in seven short weeks to pick up these little girls.

In the meantime, we have a couple of important details to take care of before we set off on that great adventure.

1.) Finish the Station.

2.) Build the donkey shed.

The donkey shed has been a nebulous idea for the last few months. For a while, MysteryMan thought he was going to drag the old one-car garage over to the pasture for the donkeys to live in. He did it once with the garden shed, and now he’s got delusions of grandeur.

I only had to stare him down for eleven minutes before he agreed that we would be building the place where our donkeys will reside, not dragging it 150 feet across our yard.

Now I’ll share a little secret with you… the only place I’ve found online that has actual free shed plans is here.

I’ll be using a combination of these two plans…

To achieve something like this, but smaller.

And I will be doing that over the course of 4 days. 56 working hours. Because that’s all the time I have allotted for this task. So that should be a couple of fun weekends in the end of February.

Particularly since it took me at least 15 weekends over the course of 2 summers to build this.

So everyone cross their fingers and pray it doesn’t rain and that I don’t loose my mind before the 30 hours we’ll be driving back from Texas with donkeys in the truck.

Haulin’ Ass Tour of 2010, here we come!