Well, I’m about to sign off for the year, but I think it’s in character that we’ve been working up to the last minute of it.

The work bench that I uncovered last night has been re-covered, and there are still some miscellaneous boxes hanging around. Along with a lot of miscellaneous junk.

We’re not currently using the shelves or bins to their fullest potential, but we did find the garage floor which was something we hadn’t seen in, oh, eight months.

And this is a start.

Okay, that picture isn’t even remotely focused, but hey, neither am I a lot of the time.

Here’s to hoping we move out of the garage and into the house some time in 2011.

Happy New Year everyone. See you next year (on Monday, when the winner of the $150 true value gift card will be revealed!)

It’s not like I’m some New York City girl. For all intents and purposes I was raised in just as much country as MysteryMan, just without the donkeys and farm equipment. But some days, when standing next to a bale of hay that is 32 times my body mass, for example, I no longer recognize my life.

On these long summer weekends, I forget that I spend most of my life in front of a computer.

And that’s not such a bad thing.

There’s some new tools in the Station, and the first batch of baby birds that were living inside have vacated the premises, so it’s time to start bird-proofing. In this case, replacing the rotted-out soffit.

This took an obscenely long amount of time since we had to rip a half inch off the width of these boards to get them to fit, but the end result is worth it.

We tend to run into issue after issue on these “small” projects, which MysteryMan insists is due to his bad luck, and which I insist is called “construction”. This is just how it goes. But we’re learning some important things about framing, and building soffits, and what to replace, and what not to replace, and how to work together as a team, while practicing on the out-buildings. Hopefully we’ll make most of our what-the-hell-were-we-thinking mistakes before it’s time to move on to the real house.

Before I start this story, I just have to say… these things always happen to MysteryMan. When we first started dating forever ago (okay, okay, two years ago, but it feels like forever and plus he’s been flirting with me since sometime back in 2004) he told me that he’s like a magnet for extremely unlikely concidences, and I probably rolled my eyes at him.

Because, you know, when you think that something coincidental is going to happen to you then you’re more likely to recognize said coincidences and blah, blah, blah. Then I hung out with him for two years and holy hell, does the weirdest shit happen to this guy. Like, daily.

So anyway, our story beings back in June when I was trying to get MysteryMan the perfect birthday present. I settled on home brewing equipment so he could make his own beer and spent hours on the internet agonizing over the right types of fermenters and bottling buckets and siphons and hops.  And lo and behold, come July, not only did MysterMan have the best equipment the internet could offer (and oh how I searched for a brewing supply store within 100 miles that employed an actual person I could talk to) but we also successfully had beer!

When it came time to bottle the beer two weeks ago, we realized there was a serious gap in my brewing knowlege, since I’d bought him all of the equipment to brew beer, but no bottles to store it in. So sue me.

When I was in Dallas for work, MysteryMan happened upon the jewel of all jewels. A store that sells home brewing equipment right here in our humble little city. Apparently the brewing thing is just a side business, because Titgemeiers main staple of business is actually selling feed (yes, like for cows and chickens you city folk) which explains why it never came up on any of my google searches.

Neither MysteryMan nor myself had ever heard of Titgemeiers before in our lives, but we sure were happy we found the place, and everyone lived happily ever after in the land of home brewed beer.

By some odd twist of fate, today as MysteryMan continuted digging a trench at the Memorial House (steering clear of any gas lines, I might add) a woman stopped by who — in the manner of small towns– was the sister-in-law of so-and-so’s cousin’s granchild’s whatever, and just so happened to have copies of some pictures of the original gas station that was on the Memorial property.

You can see this was before the garage and traditional roofing was added on:

And you may notice the name on the original gas station.

Titgemeiers.

The wonderful woman who gave us these pictures also labeled the people in them to the best of her ability. The snazzily dressed guy on the left is Fred Titgemeier…

The same Fred Titgemeier who opened a feed store in South Toledo in 1888. Which Philip would walk into 120 years later to buy beer bottles for our home brewed beer.

(You can read all about the Titgemeiers feed store history here.)

Even though this picture doesn’t show the little boys with scraped knees drinking Coca~Cola on the stoop the way I like to picture them, it’s pretty damn cool to know a little bit more about the story of building on the Memorial property.