And Now, a Word About the Weather

So, after contemplating doing this for months, I have finally acted. Sort of. I don’t have any idea what I’m doing, and watching instructional videos takes too long, so we’ll just see where this gets all of us.

I don’t do much writing anymore. I’ve even turned into a dreadful e-mail correspondent, and have yet to fall in love with the Wonderful World of Texting. So why I think I will keep up with a blog I don’t know, but this seemed the least obtrusive method of allowing people to stay abreast of the Someday Ranch, the house we thought might never get built, without us sending out e-mails, texts and photos of things you just might not care about. That seems like it could become self-indulgent. “Another picture of your house? How nice.”

This way, it can all be up to you. If you’ve ever watched the show Corner Gas, which you probably haven’t but which I highly recommend, there’s an episode where everyone encourages Hank to write a blog so that they don’t have to listen to his wacky theories and they can just pretend that they went to his blog. This can be just like that.

(And may I say that a proficient blog/website owner would provide a link to someplace where you could find information about Corner Gas, a show set in fictional Dog River, Saskatchewan, but that would likely mean watching instructional videos. I can either watch videos or launch this, but not both.)

Back to the main topic at hand, if there really was one:  as of Thursday we have a hole in the ground, suggesting that Some Day might really become a Real Day somewhere down the road.

Now, since I didn’t launch this when I thought in my head that I would, we’re all several months behind in what has happened. So here is the dollar recap:

Lynn and I are getting older. I don’t know how or why, but it is happening. One of us has creaky knees and one of us slips on stairs, so it is time to ditch our tri-level home. So we looked for existing houses to buy, and the first thing you learn about Gunnison that you never knew, despite living here closing in on 50 years, is that there are very few single-story homes. And we mean single-story, not single-story like my family, who buy ranch-style homes with full flights of stairs.

So then we looked for lots in town, and then we started looking out of town, and that’s how we ended up at Riverwalk Estates, a very tony-looking entrance with private roads that started out hopefully in 2005 and crashed hard in the recession. We paid less for our acre parcel than some lots a quarter of that size in town. But the purchase process took from August 2017 to February 2018, when we meant to take a picture of us standing on our lot with a “sold” sign.

[That is likely to be the main theme of this blog: everything I meant to do but didn’t. There’s a lot of that in my life these days. I also realize this is growing longer than an instructional video, and I only recently learned of tl;dr, which I thought I should know because it has my initials, but it really means “too long; didn’t read.” I am what I am, and long-winded in a short-wind world is me all over.]

The house design process started in January and was supposed to take three to four months, but it got finished in September. Maybe October. And now, here we are, getting ready to pour concrete in November, which is what Lynn and I said from the outset was the one thing we didn’t want to do. Our contractor assures us it will be okay, and we have company: two other houses are going up in Riverwalk right now as well. One is in the framing stage; the other seems to be about four days ahead of us, so it will be a race to see which is the ninth and which is the 10th house in the 40-ish house subdivision.

Somewhere in this process Lynn christened our acre the Someday Ranch. I would tell you the address, but when we bought it it was 142 Riverwalk Drive, and when we got the building permit it was 60 Riverwalk Drive (and the neighboring lot turned into 142 to confuse things), and when we went to the electric company on Friday, their map has us as 42 Riverwalk Drive.

But it is progress, and as soon as I figure out how to add a picture to this post, we can all be on the same page. Dirt is turning; things are happening!