When people see our considerable body of work I often get asked if I ever get a chance to relax or sleep. The answer is that while I love to work hard, and move fast, I also relax and get plenty of sleep. Our shop time is limited to eight hours a day - five days a week... with the exception of personal (non-paying) projects. That's my hobby. Janis & I seldom watch TV but most evenings we do enjoy sitting on our double recliner, together, with the dogs snuggled beside us. Janis' hobby is playing computer games. If I didn't get paid to do what I love I would still do it in the evenings. I am hardwired to create (non-stop) and so I often do a little reading, sketching or writing in the evenings when I am relaxing. We generally get a good seven or eight hours of sleep each night too. Although it is a real challenge to fit everything into 24 hours that we all get, Janis & I save a lot of time each day by working where we live. Because our shop (and work) is just out back in the yard we spend zero time commuting. That time really adds up for most people and that's our secret ingredient to getting plenty done each day and still have time for the family, for relaxing and also squeeze in a good night's sleep too.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving a whole month ahead of our American friends. Our harvest seasons is a little earlier. So this weekend is a holiday weekend and the shop is dark. Instead of working it is a time to gather with extended family and have some fun, and eat some turkey. We had a great time.
We have so much to be thankful for at our house. Everyone is well and happy. We get to do exactly the kind of work we enjoy. And we live in a beautiful part of the world with few cares or worries. Life is indeed very good!
Today, as our house was filled to the brim with family of all ages it made me smile. We are especially blessed to have a house big enough to fit them all in comfortably. There were twenty sitting at the dinner table.
The day was warm and and sunny so I took the opportunity this afternoon to give the kids a ride in the newly finished rail truck. I'm sure our neighbours chuckled at the loud ringing of the bell and tooting of the whistle as we tootled up and down the track a few times. The young kids sure enjoyed it and it made the adults in our crowd smile too!
It was indeed a day to be thankful for - as is every day. Happy Thanksgiving to all from our house!
Icing the cake
A large part of the construction of any commercial project is the infrastructure. This is largely invisible when the project is complete but just under the surface are many, many thousands of feet of electrical conduits, drainage and water pipes, communication lines and a host of other things. Footings and foundations, with their miles of hand tied rebar lie there too. Around all of this the ground is shaped and built up. This involves countless truck loads of fill and many hours of levelling, shaping and packing it all into place. Then at last the building starts.
A commercial project is built to a much higher standard than residential. There is far more rebar, tons more concrete and the process is much more involved. In the case of a theme park everything is multiplied for the sake of safety. We don't build to a failure rate of one in a hundred, or one in a million as the cycle rate would mean an eventual failure and be catastrophic. Everything has to be engineered and double checked and then monitored all the way through construction.
All this of course takes time and in a place like Trinidad there is an extra level of difficulty for many things that are common back home, here need to be sourced and most likely imported - itself a much more difficult process by virtue of it's remoteness.
Now we are almost through all of that drawn out process at last and the features are being placed onto their foundations. Concrete is being poured around them, which will completely hide all the work that has gone on before. As the finishing starts the pace seems to quicken. The crews who have been labouring for years on this site suddenly are able to see exactly what it is they are building. The theme work we do in our shop is the icing which will decorate a very complex cake.
