Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

I have done a couple of blogs on organization in the past and also talked about pairing down to what is essential.  I have talked about one of my favorite shows, Tiny House Nation on FYI network with John and Zack.  John's main focus on the show is to help prepare the family for living in the tiny house.  On the surface that sounds really simple, but the reality often is that they want to take everything and have everything in a tiny house that they have in a full size or oversized house.  One of the big things about the show is having less stuff so you can focus your attention on what really matters and on having experiences. In the military this was easy.  You had one bag for each type of deployment and that was what you lived out of for that deployment.  More importantly, everything had a place in your bag, your various pockets of each pair of pants or shirt.  That way you knew where it was when you needed something.  You practiced relentless...

Most that know me also know about my love of all things concrete.  From concrete canoes to translucent concrete in buildings, I have always loved concrete as both a building material with structural properties but also as an artistic element. When my parents first moved into their house in the Rolling Green retirement community, I did several upgrade projects for them.  The hardest was the back patio expansion.  Partly it was harder because the person in charge of approving architectural changes would not let us pour concrete to the existing concrete curbs.  Instead only to the building extents.  This meant there were about two feet between the patios and the existing concrete curbs.  We came up with a pretty decent solution of using river rock and concrete stepping stones that can be easily moved to fill the space.   Mom wanted to stain the back patio and seal it to hide some of the rust stains from her furniture.  I have stained co...

A couple of odds and ends before I get into the meat of today's topic.  I have installed a bike rope pulley system to store my parents large A frame ladder. I have started working on their garage floor and have cleaned the siding on the outside of the house Now the  big news:  I have accepted a chance to be a missionary engineer with Blessed2BlessU Ministries, Inc. out of NC.  Specifically, I will be working on their project KATIE (Keeping All Tots In Education) not to be confused with Kisses from  Katie.  This project is in Kiruani, Tanzania which is roughly 1 hour below Moshi.  It is in a Maasai Tribal area, in fact it was the local Maasai tribe the donated 22 Acres for the Tumaini Maasai School Campus.  They are currently building a Primary (Elementary and Middle school) at the site.  They have  classrooms, an office and a house for the headmaster of the school as well as a kitchen, bathrooms and a bored well water system. ...