Company picnic at Wild Waves

We just got back from a great day at my company's summer picnic at Wild Waves. It is the first time we have been to an amusement park where both kids were tall enough to ride almost all of the rides. We had a really good time, although it was a Saturday and there were an awful lot of people there so some of the lines were very long. Ilea went on her first adult rollercoster called the Timberhawk. Both of them also went down the Python tube water slide in our laps. Kyler got pretty stressed when he saw the water and the slide when we were at the top, but once we got going he had a great time. The picnic was also very good as it was catered by the Longhorn BBQ.

Massive website update

I'm posting our latest website changes for the first time since February. These pictures include everything from Easter, miscellaneous day trips, California/Cancun vacation, deck construction progress, dives and more. Every page is now and has a new look. We published everything with Picasa so it has a very new look. I would like to make it a little prettier, but the sheer volumn of pictures in this update made that task a little less important.

Some of the updates included a few movies. For some reason, those didn't work on our system locally, you may have to just open the movie file directly to see it.

Deck progress - Dug out grass in the outline of the planters that are going to be around the deck. We also got the final cross bar put up on the trellis as well as started to paint it white (the color of the house's trim). I'm working on extending one of the sprinkler pipes behind the deck (in this picture) from the path behind Kyler to the blue garbage can on the far right of the picture.

We got 17 more boards in place. It is going much faster although it still takes Jenny and I about 25 minutes per board row. It appears that I was severly off in my computation of the square footage (which translated into too few boards that we originally bought). We are going to have to buy about another 1/3 more boards. Oh well...

Deck progress...

Deck progress...My dad did a great job and has left the remaining work to us.

We are using CorrectDeck composite boards and their Correct-TY fastener system. We thought it would be sooo much faster and better looking than using nails or screws into the boards. It turns out that if the joists are not all at the exact same height the Correct-TYs are a pain in the butt to install. They tend to dip down on the side that the next board is to be placed and therefore will not fit into the groove on the next board. It took us about an hour and a half to figure this out and how to resolve it and make it work. That is why you only see 5 and a half decking boards installed. Oh well, we have next weekend, and the one after that, etc...