Her Side Funnies

This post follows Slipforming, part 17 – Turret’s Syndrome. To see a complete index of slipforming posts, click here. For an index of comical posts, click here.

Ken Bogart, who lives in New York, was inspired to build a slip-formed stone home and has graciously agreed to be guest interviewed for this blog. Following is an informal interview with Mr. Bogart. He promises he will start his own web page for those who want to explore more possibilities with rock homes. Thank you, Ken, for sharing your story here. When his website becomes active, I will happily provide a link to it.

Dani: How did you decide to build a slip-formed home?

Ken: I saw your house on Tom’s (Elpel) web page. My wife thought the idea was crazy until I showed her your story, and your home, and then she was all for it. She even bought me the cement mixer for Christmas and said “Go for it.”

Dani: Wow! Only a fellow stone home builder can appreciate a gift like that! So, what size is your home and how long did it take you?

Ken: It took me two summers to complete my 32′ x 48′ house. I worked my full time job during the week, and built mainly on weekends. Usually the weeknights were spent gathering stones.

Dani: That is fast! Especially since you were working full time, too.

Ken: It seemed to have taken forever! How long did it take you to build your house? Your house is so much bigger than mine, it should have taken longer to build. I love the looks of your house. Those turrets are beautiful, and it really sets it apart from anything out there. You went up one-and-a-half stories with stone. What were you thinking! When I got up to the first story I had gone up far enough for stonework.

Dani: (Laughing) My dad told a friend that I would get smart after laying a couple feet of rock. He suspected I would realize rocks are heavy and quit. After we were setting rocks 14 feet above the ground, dad maintained I never did get smart. That said, I was not holding a full-time job at the time, as you were. My rock work was done in two seasons, but I did run the “seasons” long—from April to November.

Ken: Mine was two summers of laying stones. The first summer didn’t go very well and I got frustrated with the process. The stones weren’t right, the concrete oozed out, it was kind of disheartening. After thinking about it over the winter and reading and researching and thinking of different ways to make it better the second summer went great. I very much enjoyed it, and would do it again, and I may someday on a smaller scale.

Dani: Did you have any help on this project? Read the rest of this post »

This post follows Some girls ruin all the fun.  To see a complete index of slipforming posts, click here. For an index of comical posts, click here.

My husband was diagnosed with brain cancer this summer.  July 7, 2011 to be exact. It’s tough to be funny when one gets news like this. In the interest of keeping this blog column upbeat, I want to offer some insight into one of the highlights of this discovery.

Ken’s work colleagues sent a care package. They are a bunch of computer geeks, and Ken was supposed to travel to California to work with them this month, so they bought a Tickle-Me Elmo doll and photographed Elmo in a variety of poses representing Ken at work. Suspiciously, most of the photos involved Elmo and snacks, Elmo goofing off in the file cabinets, or Elmo playing videogames.  Hmmm.  Anyway, they also sent the Elmo doll—a sort of challenge, I guess, to see if we could return pictures of Elmo, duplicating Ken at home in his new life.

We decided to put Elmo through cancer treatment along with Ken. Elmo got to sit in the ambulance, ride in a wheelchair, sit in a waiting room, look at an MRI, hug a model brain, and have his blood pressure taken. We will stop short of radiating Elmo…some jokes always get taken too far.

Interestingly, of all the gifts of food and flowers, it was the Elmo doll that proved the most distracting. Son Ben plotted for each new photo, which was a welcome diversion from being an 18-year-old hanging out in the cancer ward. Read the rest of this post »

This post follows Slipforming, part 16 – Balcony railing…at last. To see a complete index of slipforming posts, click here. For an index of comical posts, click here.

I’m calling this chapter “Turret’s syndrome” not because I intend to mis-spell and discuss Tourette’s Syndrome, which, for those who do not know, is an affliction that often results in someone blurting out profanities at inopportune times.  Instead, I intend to share some ideas on turrets, which are those cone shaped roof toppers that adorn some homes and government buildings.  Frankly, they cause the same symptoms…profanity.  For Tourette sufferers, there is medication and therapy.  For turret sufferers, no remedy exists, aside from ditching the idea of adding a cone-shaped roof topper to one’s home, or profanely gritting one’s teeth through it.

My own case of turret syndrome began with an old book on German castles, many of which were over 500 years old.  This inspired me because, ignorantly, I figured if they could do it 500+ years ago, without all the power tools we have at our disposal today, the project ought to be a cake walk with our advanced technology.  Oh my!  Ignorance truly is bliss.

Above left, a curved turret that adorns a Victorian home in Delta, Colorado.  I actually wanted the turrets on our home to be curved like these, but my husband, Ken, thought the idea was too “girly.”  Considering the extra labor, I conceded, but I still love this look.  The carpenter, who built this in the early 1900s, probably knew it would still be appreciated this much later, as it will 100 years from now, if the home stands that long. Read the rest of this post »

Of course, I’m speaking of Heidi. In the last column I mentioned that she had shown up with a new boyfriend who got initiated to our clan by way of Ken’s chicken pen…er…cathedral. Jayde, as I must now call him—instead of buggar, eraser head and hey you—is a great guy. Just the kind of prospect we had hoped to pester through a Bible-length torrent of “boyfriend-break-in-pranks.”

Perhaps sensing we were up to no good, Heidi flipped the table on us mid-December by announcing she and Jayde intended to marry.

No surprise there. They were in love. It was written all over them. I was picturing three years out. Maybe we could host the reception in Ken’s chicken pen….

Then, Heidi—using logic only Heidi would use—said, “We’ve thought about this and feel that our education will be compromised if we have to attend to wedding details during our college semester.”

Good, I thought. Put this wedding talk to rest. Get a puppy instead. Read the rest of this post »

I repeatedly mention that my husband is from Denver. It explains his innocence and gullibility and his resistance to accepting my core Redneck values.

Last spring we bought some chicks from the farm store. Buff Orpingtons. Golden Rolls Royce’s of the chicken world. They were cute. They were fuzzy. They quickly morphed into flapping balls of feathers coating the interior of the house with more dust than my liberal housekeeping policy allows.

A chicken house needed to be constructed, which brought the first of many misunderstandings between Ken and myself.

Ken believed that the chickens needed a far more “sturdy” home than I recognized from my childhood. My family’s chicken coop consisted of patchy chicken wire, baling string, a German Shepherd dog, and a door with a tricky latch that allowed cousins to be locked in the chicken coop for games of cowboys, Indians, robbers and jail until their mothers played squawk-n-swat, an unpopular farm game involving yelling and spanking. But, I digress. Read the rest of this post »