Face of the Pizza Oven is Done

Hi Mom and Family,

I'm sitting in the Starbucks on Power Road. I've done about five miles of my weekly eight-mile hike.

To insure that I would walk the entire eight miles, I parked in the parking of a shopping center which is 4 miles from one of my favorite restaurants, (according to Google maps).

This Starbuck's is about a mile from the restaurant, so I still have around three miles to go to get to my car. 

Wednesday I went into Tempe for my Arabic lesson, and had drama club with those kids who are in the older elementary grades. In spite of my phone calls the day before, only two of the four girls were there. However, I was in a really jubilant mood when I walked out of there, because the two who were there were enthusiastic about rehearsing, for the entire hour.

One of the little girls in the younger group has real trouble reading, though she's 8 years old. She was willing to practice, so I stayed later and had her read over the two pages which contain her two short lines. She is only able to read very short words, so I would read each line first, running my finger beneath each word as I said it, and then have her do the same.

I've done this twice with her, and both times she has been very excited to do it. If she continues to be cooperative, by the time April rolls around, her reading ability will have progressed as much as her acting ability! I get the impression that because reading is so difficult for her, she's basically just given up on trying to do it. She is a charming little thing.

(Each actor must know what the other actors' lines are also, at least the gist of it. Otherwise, if the person with the line before theirs forgets their line, the whole thing falls apart like a line of upright dominoes.)

Yesterday it seemed to take most of the morning just to catch up with the dishes and the house.

It was exciting to go out to look at the pizza oven, mid-day. The front of it is all done. Most of the huge pizza oven/smoker/firepit combination will be covered in stucco, but the front of the pizza oven will be left as exposed brick. It is so gorgeous, with all of the bricks cut and fit together so exactly into the two arch shapes, the larger one for the roof and a smaller one for the hole.

Here's a photo of John Ducette (Dale Sr.'s bricklayer/friend) Cam, our neighbor (& friend) who is making the custom steel doors for the smoker and the storage compartment, and Dale Sr., "home-owner/assistant" to the bricklayer. Dale and John D. have been working many, many long hours.

Dale says that if they call him back to work the day the pizza oven is finished, he'll be too tired to go back to work!

 


Yesterday afternoon they went over to "the shop" on 5th Avenue, to make the form for the smaller arch. You can see the smaller form here. 

 
I will be glad and relieved when Dale Sr. finishes making all of the cuts to the brick. (He is the one making all of the cuts to the bricks, as John Ducette calls out the measurements and does the actual bricklaying). The reason I will be glad is that Dale Sr. refuses to use safety gloves. I put Ziggy in the house, because I feared that he might suddenly rush to bark at the chihuahuas next door, startle Dale Sr. and send his hand into the rotating blade of the water saw.

Here is a detail of the cut brick: 

In the afternoon I went to the laundromat, writing a few checks to pay bills while my wash was in there.

  


Later I worked on weeding one of the vegetable beds. (Nothing has been planted in them since the summer crops, they are just full of weeds.) After watching Doc Martin, I finally brought the five baskets of wash out of the car and hung up all that would fit on the line.

Only one of the four compost bins is suitable to use on the vegetables. That compost is ready to be sifted, but I couldn't start sifting it because Dale Sr. and John Ducette are using the wheelbarrows in mixing mortar, and they have a lot of cement dust which has color mixed into it. plus they also had the all mortar tools all lined up (in my wheelbarrow), I just didn't want to mess with their system.

I transferred the compost to the weeded bin, just to get it out of the way so that I could start pruning the tall oleanders. (I don't want the bitter oleander leaves to fall into the vegetable compost.) The oleanders have gotten so tall in the last two years, and I have started to think that their height is taking away hours of sunlight from the tomato bed. 

There is a lot to do before tomato plants have to be set in, and they need to be set in soon.

Last but not least, a shot of Ziggy relaxing on the grass in the late afternoon:

 Love,
Lennie