This is Break? - A recap of the last week...

12/22/2013 Advent , Break , Christmas , Dentist , Dominican Monastery of St. Jude , Fun , Humility , Love , Mary , Snow , The Hobbit 4 Comments

Terrible at the beginning

Last Friday I filled my day helping out around Brute (they were about to have an open house), packing everything I wanted to take home (always takes longer than I expect), and doing a little bit of ice-skating with a few guys (which is fun, but a bit freaky considering I never figured out how to stop).  Early Saturday morning I went to Mass and pretty shortly afterwards threw my stuff in the car and started towards home.  As forecasted, about 6 inches of snow had fallen the night before, so the highways were absolutely horrible.  I was hoping that they would be cleared off by the time I got going, but they were anything but clean.  The snow had softened on the pavement, only to refreeze into a slippery, dangerous, frozen slush.  Along with that, I couldn't see half the time because snow was streaming down and whenever I got behind someone it was just a cloud of slush that even turbo mode on the wipers couldn't fix it was probably the worst road conditions I had ever driven in and there were way too many moments where I was legitimately doubting how much control I had over the car.

beautiful at the end!

Thankfully (and showing, once again, just how awesome of a guardian angel I have), I didn't get stuck in a ditch anywhere or slide into any other cars (but it was pretty close a few times)...   Anyway, it was only really bad for the just the first 100 miles or so.  Once I got past Springfield it was much better and I finally started appreciating the beauty of the snow covered landscape.  Actually, it was quite stunning - everything was covered in a fresh layer of snow and all the intricate branches of the trees were outlined with a thin layer of snow - it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

I got home around 4 PM and found that Dad and my younger brother, Alex, were over at Church building a outdoor crèche so that we could have a nativity scene outside.  Mom said they had been working on it all day and apparently weren't going to finish it that evening.  I was a little incredulous that a simple stable would take hours and hours, but I decided to head over there and see what was going on.  Anyway, to finish off the rest of the story, this project was much, much bigger than I had imagined it and the skeleton that I found constructed in the basement of the hall was nearly 10 feet on each side and poking up into the ceiling (it's a dropped-ceiling, so they had removed some of the tiles so that it would fit.)  As it turned out, it was quite the project because it had to be fully able to be disassembled into several pieces so that it could be reused, so they had two platforms bolted together for the base, 4 different wall pieces (in varying states of completion), three of which would have glass once they were finished, and the back one which would be solid wood, 4 trusses to hook onto the walls and hold the roof panels.  

the semi-finished creche

Now complete, as it appears at night

Needless to say, it was a much bigger project than I had anticipated, so I lent a hand that evening, and several more evenings that week, to hash out how everything would go together, assemble it, and slowly figure out each section by repeating that process.  Finally, this morning we took the (now disassembled) stable-thing out of the basement, across the iced over parking lot, and assembled it in front of the Church/rectory.  I again underestimated the time it would take to get everything put together and the complications that we would run into (apparently, once you take something like that apart it is difficult to put everything back the way you had it, and then you get a piece almost in place only to be unable to fit that last bolt in place...)  It was drizzling and 30ish the entire time, so that was a bit miserable, but we did eventually get it together, so it was all worth it.  I'm glad I was able to help, I haven't been able to do projects like that in a while.  Good times!