it's beginning to look a lot like...

For five seconds I considered this little gadget for Parkview's Christmas season. Okay...six seconds.

retaining wall almost done

The temporary finished retaining wall. Since I build the wall out away from the foundation, I have to find some fill dirt. The most annoying and challenging part is leveling every brick, but the brick layers on top of the base layer stack nicely once the foundation is true. The funnest part is the roof gutter drains from the wall, so it hides the pipe and keeps the yard looking tidy.

I needed to thin the number of layers as the wall reached the gas meter and air conditioner.

landscaping work

These are some older pics, but this work was allowed to happen because the weather has been so cool here this summer. I believe the two days I worked on this, the temp didn't even hit 70 degrees and it was cloudy the whole day. PERFECT for outdoor work.

This project replaces large railroad ties that were built with 12" nails for use as a retaining wall. After removing most of the ties (and discarding them with the dumpster we had during the roofing project), I was able to rebuild the wall with landscape bricks that don't attract bugs and won't deteriorate as quickly as wood. The bricks also look cleaner and allow for curves to contrast the straight lines and 90 degree angles of the house.

Robin returned to check on my work...maybe even snatch a quick meal.

fruit of the spirit design

This should've been posted more than a month ago, but here are some pics of the stage design for the Fruit of the Spirit series last month.

I wanted to mimic the tile-style design on the stage backwall, which were painted with more warm, earth-tone colors to match the rest of the colors in the room. So, I built Jeopardy-esque shelves--5x5 spaces at a 4:3 ratio. Each unit stood 92" tall, spanning 120" in length and 12" deep. Each space was backlit with little kitchen cabinet lights.
Used aluminum drywall outside corners as the track for lights and cable management.

The lights came from IKEA, and their setup allows up to six lights being plugged into a single wall plug.

Then added light gel filters with some paper to diffuse the backlight. The colors came pretty close to matching the backwall paint colors.

Definitely a four-sided shape theme going here.

What the tiles look like all lit up.

The last touch was setting some par lights with shutters and the same gel colors...then focusing them on the backwall tiles to give the appearance those tiles are similarly lit as the sides.

biblical social network

The next installment of Chris Harrison's biblical data visualizations. This visual focuses on people and places throughout the Bible and the way in which they interact. So, taking 2,619 names and, if a name occurred twice in one verse, a connection was made.

Any name that happens 40 or less times is drawn at an angle; names with 40 or more times are drawn horizontally. The larger the name size, the more connections are made.

Interesting to see David and Jesus occurring adjacent to each other.

visualizing the Bible

Here is a beautiful depiction of Bible cross references by Chris Harrison and Christoph Römhild, a Lutheran pastor.

The bar graph along the bottom shows each chapter in the Bible (the bar length shows the length of each chapter). The white/gray colors above the bar show each respective book of the Bible. The color of each arc shows the distance between the connecting chapters.

In total, there are 63,779 cross references!

nesting begins!

We borrowed the family carpet cleaner...a) because we NEED to clean our carpets and b) because we're starting to put the baby room together!


We also put the crib together as our inaugural furnishing to the room.

30 weeks

I've been very sparse in my blogging lately, and I'm backed up with content to post, so, hopefully, I'll hit a good stretch here to get caught up.

Little Carmichael is now in his third trimester and 30 weeks along. He's almost 16 inches long (probably closer to a foot-and-a-half if he caught the Carmichael height gene!) and weighs as much as three pounds.


The eyes continue to develop more keenly at this point. He is born with 20/400 vision, which means he can only see short distances. It also means close cuddling and nursing are incredibly important for facial recognition.

The little tyke is really active in the womb. Holly often feels movement (as do I) and is now able to discern body parts as they are pushed up against her belly. The coolest feeling is when he rubs his arm across the womb as he stretches...it's more than just a kick or punch when you feel a full gesture. Holly likes to play a responsive game with him--if he's pressing against a certain spot on her belly, she'll respond by pressing that same spot toward him. Sometimes he returns with a shove. :)

He rests very low in the womb (supposedly a great sign of a favorable birth later) but ends of cramping Holly's organs and even momentary paralysis because he's got his foot against her spine or something. Pretty riveting stuff!

Holly is also beginning to feel restless and antsy. Assuming this is the nesting stage settling in, we've begun preparing the baby's quarters.