New floors!

We gots new floors, in the living room and hallways, anyways. The installer came yesterday and got started, and came back and finished up today, except for the transition pieces around the entryway tile, which never got ordered for some reason. They will come back and install those when they come in. As soon as Pat wakes up from his nap hopefully we will get the furniture moved out of the garage and back into the living room.

Our new flooring is called handscraped Maple, and is an engineered hardwood that locks together. No glue or nails. We learned in our flooring search that solid wood requires a wood underlayer, and since we have a concrete slab, no go. We didn't want laminate since we went that route in the Ridges. The solution was the engineered hardwood. It's a hardwood layer (pretty thin, like 3 mm) bonded to a plywood base, in our case a total of 1/2 inch thick. Mosts engineered hardwoods are 2mm layered for 3/8 total thickness, so we got a little better product, I think. Looks good too. It was made in the PRC though, so it's probably laced with lead or sewage or something I don't want to know about. We got it at Lowes, and they contracted out an installer.

Happy upcoming 4th of July!!

It has been a long time since I have posted. Shame on me. I hang my head with regret. Ok, I'm over that now. Last Friday and Saturday Cathy and I went camping with Lou and Dorothy. They had a camper, we had an old tent. We set up camp amongst the mosquitoes out past Vega reservoir Friday evening, and looked forward to Saturday when we were going to go ATVing. Lou and Dorothy brought some 10 year old kid that was a talker, and that stayed up until about 4:30 in the morning while everyone was trying to sleep. We had trouble sleeping because our air mattress kept leaking and we would wake up. The kid woke us up, the air mattress woke us up, the generator noise woke us up, and there wasn't room in the tent to move. We were glad when Saturday arrived. We spent 7 hours on the ATVs, riding around and having a great time. We got rained on, the trails got muddy so we were slinging mud all over the place. It was a blast. The picture above is to show the height of some kind of milkweed plant (I guess) I saw.
We got to drive through this stream. It was fun too. The country was really beautiful. We saw a couple of deer (except for Cathy who didn't see either one of them) and billions of mosquitoes.
This picture was taken moments before Cathy decided to drive and immediately rolled the ATV OVER! She had to make a hard left turn, and when she did, the right front tire climbed a bush while the left front tire went into a rut, and over we went. She had been driving for like 5 seconds. Luckily, we weren't hurt (Cathy found a minor bruise today) and the ATV wasn't even scratched. Everyone had gone ahead so we had to wait for them to miss us and come back because we couldn't right the machine by ourselves. We had to use a winch from another ATV to pull us over. Cathy wouldn't drive after that until we got off the trails and back on the dirt road.
These are the people we went with. Lou is the guy, Dorothy is the gal, and the annoying kid is the annoying kid. Actually he wasn't that bad. Anyway, after Friday night's crummy sleep we took the air mattress back and got a couple of cots, and a new tent that holds the whole ward if we want it to. It's 8 ft x 16 ft floor space. Love you all.