Summer in Granby

For Ian, summer in Granby consists of hours and hours and hours spent at the skate park. As I've stated, Ian is planning on becoming a professional skateboarder and his method to attaining this lofty goal is to video himself and others and post them on YouTube. I guess Justin Beiber was discovered this way...which is too bad.

Ian always has a goal when he's dropped off. He works on his "tricks" for hours and then comes home and watches skateboarding videos. He uses Mike's tools (and doesn't put them back) and expensive pieces of lumber that Mike has purchased, to create jumps and rails and all kinds of cumbersome dangerous things. Then he spray paints them and leaves skeleton marks in various colors on the garage floor. I keep insisting to Mike that this is a selling point - not too many garages have neon orange, green, blue and black spray paint in various shapes on their floors.

We've had one couple come and look at our house four times in the past two weeks. You know how much cleaning that entails? Anyway, they're supposed to make an offer sometime this week after we tell them: when the roof was put on, where does the irrigation water come from, how do we plow the snow and what are those funny marks in the garage. I think that they should buy the house for the following reasons and not even worry about the above questions and answers: They are right next to Skip and they'll never have to buy a TV - he will keep them plenty entertained, for example, just yesterday his cows got out, trotted down the road, turned around when they reached the paved road and came back home. The second reason - we have elk that, for no cost at all, will destroy your fences every fall. Third reason - no one seems to know how to manage the irrigation water so you often get your yard and driveway watered without even asking and fourth reason - you can shoot fireworks off and build as big a bonfire as needed no matter what the fire bans say.

These people haven't asked us the important questions like - what do you do when Skip's horses/sheep/goats/cows get out and come over? What do you do when the county snow plow plows all the snow over your garbage cans that have blown out into the middle of the road? What happen when you accidentally knock down a neighbor's fence - do you fix it or pretend it never happened and blame the elk?

Last Thursday we had what are called "straight winds." This is a new term for me. If I had known these existed I really wouldn't have ever moved here. Apparently they are tornado force winds which do not touch down (they go straight) because of the mountains. These winds tore the roof off our loafing shed and sent it through our corral, our fence and our neighbor's fence. They collapsed our pig barn. They sent our metal water tank above the pond into the pond. They tore part of the high school roof off, overturned a semi parked at the new hospital and snapped the only living trees left at Skip's place.

We called our realtor the next morning to tell her of this news since this couple were planning on coming out again on Monday. She said, "Get if fixed or these people will not buy your house, they do not want to buy a house anywhere there is wind." Hm mm, why are they even in the state of Colorado? So we spent three days, way into the night, "fixing" things as best as we could considering our time frame. The pig barn was completed, the roof on the loafing shed, not so much. We ended up just setting the new metal roofing on top of the new joists without screwing it in since we ran out of time. Then we prayed it wouldn't get windy Monday morning. It didn't. Monday afternoon it did. The new metal roofing blew over next to the old roof at our neighbor's place. My job this afternoon is to go bring it home. I'm hoping they make an offer this afternoon and I won't have to - maybe they won't notice that there's no roof. We'll be a 1,000 miles away by then......