The week before Thanksgiving, my Dad came to visit us for a few days. My dad is the owner and big boss-man of Backwoods Home Magazine (www.backwoodshome.com), and we just got off deadline the day before his flight to see us. He was supposed to come and relax, hang out with his grandkids, sit around and enjoy our mild winter weather. But of course I had forgotten–my dad is incapable of sitting around doing nothing. He actually tried to retire last year, after he unexpectedly had triple bypass surgery, but by the time his six-month recovery was over, he couldn’t stand it anymore. So of course I should have expected him to walk thru our front door and look around for something to do. And he sure found something.

I keep all of my fabric, yarn, and equipment in the garage, on a fairly inadequate bit of shelving. I have way more fabric, etc. than can possibly fit in the storage available. Most of it is stacked willy-nilly all over the garage (sorry, Honey). It’s pretty much a mess. You can get a little glimpse of the chaos here in the background. That’s me, demonstrating for my dad the finer points of handspinning wool with a wiggly baby helper.

Dad decided to insulate and drywall my garage, then put up new shelving for me. Mind you, we live in a rental house. We like it here, though, and plan to stay for a few more years. More importantly, our landlord likes us and gave us the go-ahead.

We moved all of my stuff (a rather daunting task, let me tell you) and took down the shelves. All of the moving and shuffling yielded a pickup load of miscellaneous garage garbage, so we made a run to the dump, too. Dad bought insulation and drywall at our local lumber yard (unfortunately, the were all a bit grumpy that day). I had no idea before, but insulation goes up incredibly fast. Here is the bare wall:

And here it is an hour later, with drywall already going up. Can you see my little helper?:

Maybe you need a little helper closeup. That’s 10-month-old Gavin in his favorite place–snuggled into his cowboy Mei Tai, and close to mommy. You can check out my Mei Tai’s for sale at http://AnnieMakes.etsy.com.

By sundown all the drywall was up, and we had taped and mudded. Erik got home from work just a few minutes before this photo was taken.

He was so impressed, he wanted to entertain us for a while. Olga wanted to help, of course.

The next day we had a real breakthru moment. Not only did we get paint on the whole wall (didn’t even have to buy any–we found enough leftover from other projects) and new shelves up, but Gavin crawled for the first time. We think he knew how to do it all along, but he finally decided that the cement was too cold for his tummy to continue low crawling. (That’s a Marine Corps term… think of Marines dragging themselves along under wire fences on their bellies… that’s a low crawl.)

On Saturday we had a good time at the city park:

Then we went to Joshua Tree National Park, and stopped to take a few nifty pictures:

We made a new friend. I’m quite sure he would have crawled right into our hands if we’d been foolish enough to let him (although ever since I learned that my mom once had a pet flying squirrel, I’ve been tempted).:

By the way, if you’re wondering what the heck a Joshua Tree is, it’s this rather uncomfortable looking specimin. Not many tree-huggers rallying around these beauties. They have incredible huge blossoms in the spring.:

Gee, I nearly forgot.. this was about my garage. Well, here it is! You can see all of my junk–I mean valuable craft material–is all fairly well organized, and most importantly, off the floor. Yay!

Thanks, Grampa!