Bathroom –
Now that our harvest is in, we can focus on completing the new addition to the home: the bathroom. The circled red area is the new addition to the home. There will be a shower, a bathtub, a toilet, and a vanity in the lower half of the mushroom-like dome, and then there will be a staircase that wraps around the dome and leads to a loft-like area above. The smaller dome acts as a retaining wall and will be the entrance to all the domes and will include a mud room for shoes and firewood.
Before the 21 tons of concrete is poured, we have to do all the plumbing. I know things about plumbing that I didn’t know before: where to vent a pipe and why, the slope the pipe must be at so the solids don’t clog the pipe, why pipes are angled or curved certain ways, etc.
In the photo, Daniel is up on our totally OSHA-certified scaffold. We were measuring where the center of the new dome would be in relation to the other domes.
Believe it or not, but I actually had to do algebra when pounding rebar into specific spots in the ground.
Everything must be very precise before the concrete is poured. This can sometimes be a pain because we can spend the entire day working on only a couple things, giving the feeling that nothing much was accomplished.
The past couple of days have moved much faster than before. We have more help from another woofer and we are no longer excavating the dirt, but rather layering the top surface now with easily compactable gravel, insulation, and reinforcing mesh. The plumbing is finished, metal lath is reinforcing the blue barriers and plaster is being added now.
Meow Wolf –
Wow. This is certainly a trip to take if you are in Santa Fe. It’s a weird interactive art walkthrough with this complex mystery you can solve, although solving it is no easy task. There are about 70 different rooms and each one is completely different from the last because each artist has their own room.
I barely made an attempt at solving the mystery because all the oddities and overall weirdness were overwhelming. It’ll take multiple visits to get an idea of what to begin to look for. I began in the house where I wandered through the refrigerator into another dimension and crawled through the chimney to reach a hidden room. I don’t want to say or show too much because it really is a place to experience in person.
Musicians can perform live here, making it one of the trippiest music venues you’ll come across. There are more southwest locations I’d love to visit in the future.
Hiking –
I was told to head to the Wild Rivers trail near Cerro, but I took a wrong turn and ended up in Sunshine Valley. Nevertheless, it was a lovely escape from the house. There was no trail, so I was making my own. Some sand was settled along the river and was the perfect place for me to rest.
Half of my left leg plunged into the water on my way out of the gorge, but that was the closest I got to swimming in the frigid water.
The sagebrush that coated the land deceived my sense of awareness and I, in fact, did get a little lost. I kept following dirt roads north thinking they’d turn back east and connect me to the main road, which they eventually did.
I did, fortunately, make it out alive, which I was questioning if I would or not when I kept passing bullet-holed refrigerators and run-down campers in the middle of the desert.
Leave a Reply