Storms in the South

I thought I would title this one Storms in the South because three weeks ago we got some pretty heavy storms including a few tornadoes. Albertville got hit hard. This is the town Guntersville borders. Our church, shopping, gym, ect. are all there. So we are in Albertville everyday. Fortunately, only an isolated area got hit hard. It destroyed many homes, knocked down trees and power poles, and damaged over 400 homes. We volunteered for a week at the church. Sandra and the kids worked all day making and serving meals to those affected. I worked with the guys cutting trees off of houses. It has been crazy around town. The police had the city cut off and you had to have a permit to even get in. They were trying to keep traffic down and allow the roads to stay open for the power company to reinstall new poles. It really brought they community together. It's amazing to see people from different churches and other organizations step up to give of their time and resources. Many took off work, donated saws, food, diapers, and other items came pouring in to the church. It's too bad that it takes a catastophe for this to happen. Imagine if people did this everyday. There wouldn't be any needs that couldn't be met (sounds like and Acts 2 church to me).
We installed our water line two weeks ago. What a job! It took longer than I thought, of course, but it's done. We have water pressure but I think we may still need a pump to help it. It's a little weak. It's fine if you only need to run one thing but I don't think it's enough for an entire house. We also did a few improvements to the road. I brought in 6 more loads of stone to help smooth it out. When I dozed the road last summer I did not dig any ditches to control water run off and over the past 8 months it has taken it's toll on the road cutting in some pretty big ruts. I fixed them and added some new drainage ditches. Hopefully this will minimize the water damage to our road. I installed 3600 feet of piping with 180 connections. Only 8 of them leaked, mostly due to damaged sustained during backfill. I fixed all of them but I think I still have one that is still leaking slowly. Thankfully the waterline only has to be about a foot deep here. No ground freeze.





Yesterday we took the kids to the beach at the Lake Guntersville State Park. They loved swimming in the lake. they have not had a chance to go swimming since last summer and it's been hot here for a month. Afterwords I toke them to McDonald's for a bite to eat and some ice cream.





Here's a pic of a roof that I did last week, I will post finished pics later, we put steel on it. The back is 32 feet long with a 12/12 pitch, and it has a 4 ft skylight. FUN!!