It was 66 degrees at 7:00 AM this morning.  Very pleasant, but it is usually in the upper 50’s at that hour, so we knew we were in for another hot day.  The forecast high was 93 degrees F.

View of Bighorn Mountains to the SW on our drive to the Works site from Peter D’s RV Park.

Although reduced in numbers, our team reconvened at 8:00 AM to continue working on the Works house.  We were only scheduled to go until noon today, but we had significant tasks to try to accomplish.  First was getting the walls plumb and square followed by setting the trusses and starting to wrap the house in Tyvek.

Trusses laid out and ready to lift into place.

We learned at “circle” that 4-6 more volunteers would be joining us for the morning.  They turned out to be a group of four, but were an experienced group from Castle Rock Colorado, and they worked right in to the tasks at hand.

Trusses being nailed in place.

Linda and I nailed some wall bracing in place, but we quickly had more bodies than we had tasks or room to work, so I took up my semi-official photographer duties for a while.   Posey , John, Linda and I then went in Brian’s HFH truck to the Poplar Grove site to fetch the 5/8″ OSB roof sheathing.  It was a big stack and if took us two trips.

We learned that being idle on an HFH build is a minor “sin” unless you are “taking a break”, so Linda and I grabbed a couple of shovels and started back-filling the small trenches along the east edge of the slab.  The sun was very hot, made worse by the reflection of light and diminution of breeze from the Tyvek, so we found a shady spot at the northwest corner of the house and moved dirt around until Jack whistled for the team to quit for the day.

We did not get lunch today as it was originally scheduled as a day off and no one expected Angel to arrange food on short notice.  Brian worked with the new crew after lunch to finish setting most of the trusses.  Tomorrow he is supposed to move them to the Woodland house to develop a final punch list and get it wrapped up.  That house has been under construction for almost a year.

It ‘s starting to look like a house.

Although not our personally most productive day, the team accomplished most of what it set out to do.  Tomorrow we will finish setting trusses and wrapping the house and should start sheeting the roof.  There is still a lot work to do at the Poplar Grove site, but no indication that any of us are going to work there.

When we got back to our coach we had a light lunch.  We were both surprisingly tired but opted for different solutions.  I took a nap while Linda went for a four mile walk to downtown Sheridan and back.

Jan stopped by around 3:00 PM to see if I was available to work on their Internet connectivity.  She and Kent have a WiFi Ranger X (WFR-X) and it has the same web browser control panel as our WiFi Ranger Mobile (WFR-M), so that was a plus for me.  I suspected that the SSID and Password for the WFR-X followed the same pattern as the WFR-M, but we found the instruction sheet and confirmed that.  They also had a Motorola cable modem (that they had used at a fixed location).  It wasn’t hooked up correctly, but it didn’t matter as cable modems are generally of no use in a mobile lifestyle.  I was able to connect their iPad mini to the WFR-X and reconfigure the password.  We then got Jan’s iPhone and Mac connected to the WFR-X.  Finally, we got the WFR-X connected to one of the public/open/free WiFi networks in the RV park and from there to the Internet.

I suspect that their setup is fairly typical of full-time and extended-time RVers, for whom connectivity has become a significant part of the lifestyle.  Smartphones, tablets, laptops, even cameras, often two of each, create a complex arsenal of devices with multiple methods of connectivity, including cellular, WiFi, and Bluetooth.  Even if you have some understanding of this technology, this is a complex environment that requires active management by the user.  Devices like the WiFi Ranger products (X, Go, Mobile, etc.) appear to add to this complexity initially, but properly configured and used, actually simplify the user experience.

After dinner we watched an hour-long presentation by Dr. Michael Greger, M.D. on the leading causes of death and the preventative and curative effects of a Whole-Food Plant-Based Diet.  You can find it at http://nutritionfacts.org  but if you are not interested in changing how you eat in order to be healthier, you probably shouldn’t watch it as it will just make you unhappy.