A lot of things going on. For those who don’t know, we decided to buy a lot outside of Coyhaique to build a house closer to town. Work still moves forward at the lake, but there is a ton of stuff to do before we can think about building or living out there, and Elo�sa will need to be closer to schools, friends, etc. So, we plan to build a place in El Claro, about 5km from Coyhaique and right off the road to the lake. It’s got a great view of Cerro McKay and also has a lot of native trees (notro, �irre, coigue, etc). Our friend, Carolina Fernandez, is helping us design a place. Her specialty is “bio-climactic” architecture, especially straw bale construction, so we’ve been thinking of building that way. There are other straw bale houses in the area and they all seem to work great. We’ll use post and beam construction for the structure and the straw bale walls will be non-load supporting. We’ll try to finish them smoothly so that the place looks more modern than rustic. I’ve been cutting up posts and beams with Muttel out on our land for the past 3 weeks or so and we’ve got a good start.

Shawn Strange, an old college friend from American University, was here to visit. We got reconnected through Wendy after Shawn ended up doing a stint at Palmer Station, Antarctica. She’s in Santiago for a year now, and came down to visit and help out at the land.

Elo�sa is growing fast and is already 4 months old. She is very sociable, doesn’t complain much (unless she is being ignored while she thinks she should be part of whatever is going on), and makes all sorts of noises and sounds. She has pretty good coordination and studies things intently. She loves the guitar and tries to play it with me after studying my hands for a while.

Click on the image for a hodge podge of pictures from the past three months or so.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 1:32 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.