Bobby the contractor called last night. He assured me that the water heater situation wasn't holding them up because the Plumber might not be there until wednesday anyway. He's swamped. However, they'd about have to ship that water heater TODAY for it to be here by then.
Left him about $2,200 for the completion of phase 1, so a total of about $3,500 has gone out so far.
Cut a hole for the electrical sub-panel for the new water heater last night. The housing wire that goes to the outlet for the current water heater was right behind the hole I cut. That's good and bad. It's bad because I can't put the subpanel box in right now because the wire is in the way. It's good because that means we have easy access to that wire and we might be able to use it to pull the new wires to the subpanel through the wall.
Hala's happy. They heard from her family in Baghdad. They're all right. They line up at hotels and use the TV people's sattellite phones to call whichever of the 5,000,000 Iraqis that live outside of Iraq they're related to what their status is. So they get like 30-40 seconds. Someone in the family in Baghdad called someone in Canada and left a 30 second hurried message on their machine. How wild! Hala says everything will get better from now on. She got the spam sales pitch about the deck of most wanted Iraqi cards... said she thought about it for a second and decided she didn't want to look at the faces of the people who had been torturing her people for years. Move on. Good attitude.
Learned a new picking pattern on the guitar at the Lee Ruth lesson yesterday. Same "bass-strum", but you pick up the first string again as your index finger comes back. Seems like it would be easy, but it throws off my thumb position for the next "bass" pluck. The 3/4 arpeggio, which would seem harder, is actually easier for me. I've kind of gotten away from playing the songs I love to play to learn this stuff and because life is busier in general because of the remodel. But I need to learn to get my barred "F" down before I go back to playing a lot of those songs so I don't play the cheater "F" anymore. It's coming very slowly.
