I mostly took last week and this week away from my work to get caught up on tasks around M.T. Acres.  It has been a crazy time!

Last week was hot as hell here – highs in the high 90’s.  So that slowed our progress on the Art Shack because it was just too hot to work without frequent water breaks.  Still, we managed to get all of the sheetrock hung and the first coat of mud on the taping.

I am the world’s absolute WORST sheetrocker and taper.  I am not only extremely slow, but I am also very sloppy.  Tina had never done taping before and I had high hopes that her artistic instincts would make her a natural.  She watched a bunch of You Tubes on it.  I gave her the book that I bought explaining the process.  She is only marginally better than me.  That means, she did not throw as much mud all over the floor, ladders, other walls etc. as I do, but her joints suck just as much as mine.

In the end, we got the first coat on, the tape was mostly embedded in mud. (We only missed about 4 inches in the whole shack, so that is not too bad.)

But I am always extremely depressed when I see how the first coat of mud looks when it dries.  It is an extremely demotivating experience.  Real tapers don’t have that problem, but we have already established that we are not real tapers, or even a close facsimile thereof.

We finished the first coat of mud about 11 AM last Sunday,  Since there was nothing else we could do in the shack until the mud dried, I suggested that we clean up and go have a late lunch/early supper over at one our favorite restaurants in the area, the Longhorn, in Tombstone.

If you have never been there, Tombstone is definitely a “bucket list” place to visit.  Yes, it is an absolute tourist trap just like Wall Drug or the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  I would not live there on a bet, but it is one of my favorite local places to visit for a few hours on a lazy afternoon.

The temperatures cooled off quite a bit this week back into the low to mid 80’s, so we were able to pick up the pace of our work some.  We got the first coat of mud sanded.

Then we got the second coat of mud applied.  We did the first coat pretty thin, just enough to embed the tape and get a very thin layer laid on top of the tape.  The second coat, we did much thicker.  Since I have almost zero skill taping without getting tool marks in the mud, my general philosophy is to apply the mud crazy thick and sand it back to being smooth.  It is a technique that works, but it also a slow and labor intensive process.

We spent yesterday, Wednesday, sanding and sanding and sanding some more.  It was a miserable and dusty job, but we got it done and I think the shack came out looking surprisingly good.

We were planning on doing 3 coats of mud around the windows and I did have a mistake on the ceiling that I needed to touch up.  But finishing that only took about 2 hours this morning, which was a very good thing.  But noon today, both Tina and I were physically and mentally exhausted and needed the afternoon to recover.

Tomorrow we will do the last bit of touch up sanding and the inside of the shack will be ready for paint!  I have a brutal travel schedule for the next 3 weeks, so Tina will be able to continue working on the shack, painting.  I think she said she is planning on some weird thing with making the ceiling some kind of blue with glow-in-the-dark stars on it or something?  She wants the walls bright white.

We also got the sign hung above the door so everybody will know what the shack is and not confuse it with a cumquat.

We also decided on our next project after the shack, or more correctly to coincide with completing the shack.  We are going to raise a steer.

We spoke to our friend Eve, owner of the cattle ranch.  She is going to sell us a steer calf at fall round-up.  Round-up is the second week in October, so we will probably get it the third week in October.

I enlisted the help of our friend and fence builder Smiley to fence off about 3 acres with a couple gates and catch pen for it.

For this first year, it will not be an optimal situation because we do not have water lines run out to the area yet.  So we will have to water it with a long run of garden hose.  A hose will work, but it will be a pain in the neck until next spring when I can bury a water line to it.

I plan on building several raised gardens this winter, so it makes more sense to live with the hose for the beef this winter and then rent a trencher once and dig all of the trenches for the gardens and the steer all at once.

Lastly, Smiley has a really smart Kelpie dog that accidentally got bred with a Great Pyrenees.  The puppies just turned 7 weeks old last weekend.  The 2 we adopted are named Odin and Loki.  (For those of you not from Minnesota, those are NOT alternative snowflake spellings of common names.  They are the proper spelling of two gods from Norse mythology.)

Odin

Loki

In Norse mythology, Loki is the god of mischief.  The dog certainly fits his namesake!

Both are males and we expect them to grow to somewhere between 70 and 90 pounds.

Until next time Acre-Heads!