Progress Report

The NY on the Yankees cap stands for Next Year.

The house we are living in, like the one we are building, is carved into a mountainside. You dig vertically into the mountain creating a flat spot upon which you put a house. Nice. This does,however,leave you with a wall of earth directly behind the house. When it rains really hard, as it has been doing off and on for days, there is the danger of erosion and small landslides that can cause - and here I will go into my extensive Spanish vocabulary to find just the right word - got it- problemas. Por ejemplo, this house, the rental, has a trench dug behind it that diverts water that streams down the hillside over to a quebrada, a small creek, that runs down the side of the house. A couple of days ago a small slide filled the trench with dirt and the rainfall's progress to the back door was not impeded. Alrighty then. We called that Brown guy from Katrina for advice but he just started screaming "I didn't do it!" so we were left to fend for ourselves. Old towels shoved under the door slowed the water's flow to a managable degree and mops were employed to gather up the rest. The next day, before the rains began again, our neighbor,a young college student, was hired to redig the trench and all is now well. Well, that is, until the next rain, the next slide.

At the new house site there was only the lesser problem of our foundation diggings having been filled with water so that concrete could not be poured that day. Because the house site is near the summit of the mountain, far less water accumulates behind it as much of the water runs off in the opposite direction. Still, at some point we will have to address a retaining wall or something of that sort. Gradual erosion will occur, though I doubt we will ever have a slide.

The timing of the house construction is all wrong, of course, the rainy season is not a good time to start, but that is just how things worked out. We will have to be patient and just put up with the continual rain delays. Once the foundation is poured and stable, the M2 walls will go up very rapidly and a roof can then be added. Roofs, I'm told, are a good thing to have when it's raining.