Today Barb, daughter Jaime, her fiancé Sherry, grandson Bryce, and I went on a hike to a small waterfall near Coal Creek Parkway. Bryce led the pack with Barb and I trying to keep up. Jaime and Sherry enjoyed the stroll to the rear except when we stopped to examine things.
Barb was acting like a wonderful grandmother:
Bryce decided no one should get ahead of him on the trail:
The fence on the Northeast side was only just completed when She looked upon the gate near the Southwest corner and She was displeased. And She thereby looked upon me with pleading eyes and a pleasant voice and asked, “Could you help me build a new gate?” And so it was that yesterday we began to build a gate:
And when the gate was complete She looked upon it and was well pleased for it was a thing of beauty:
But the day was not yet done for there was much clean up to be done. There were many old pieces of fence and large concrete blobs to haul to the Bellevue Transit center. There it was found there was 450 pounds of old fence stuff to leave with them for proper disposal.
And then She looked upon my car and saw that it had small pieces of wood and dirt on the inside from the fence clean up. And so, She then vacuumed it and made it clean once more.
After a few days of basking in the glow of the awesomeness of Her fence on the Northwest corner Barb came to see that the Northeast corner was lacking and was within Her ability to reconstruct in Her own image of perfection. As so it was done (with a little bit of help from me) last week.
First the old fence was disassembled, and the boards, posts and concrete blobs removed:
Then we carefully measured the depths of the holes to make sure the new posts would be the proper height:
We added a bit of concrete at the bottom to get the posts exactly the right height:
After that set for a bit we added posts, braces, concrete mix, and water. Then, She looked upon Her work and saw that it was good:
The next day She built the fence on either side of the gate. And on the day after that we put up the gate:
And She was extremely pleased:
Barb was almost rapturous with the fence but, as is usual, within a couple days began to see improvements were possible. She went back to Home Depot and bought some more boards and changed this:
Into this:
She is getting quite good with hammer and nails.
Barb has some rhododendrons. We weren’t really watching them and hadn’t noticed the profusion of blooms until the neighbor mentioned it to her. From our perspective it was just grass, trees, and green shrubbery until POOF! It’s a collection of blossoms taller than our heads:
Nice!
The fence near the west side of the house was dependent on a tree for one section. This wasn’t good for the tree or the fence. Many of the boards were rotting away and the gate was almost unusable.
Barb had a vision to move the fence to the south about eight feet. The old posts were embedded in concrete and couldn’t be moved easily so yesterday we put in new posts. The concrete was set by this morning so we did the move and renovation. This involved moving one section, cutting off a few inches, removing boards from other sections, placing them on a new section and adding some new boards.
Barb contributed more time but I contributed a little more engineering to the project.
She LOVES the new fence.
There was a minor injury with a rogue handsaw. Barb patched me up and we continued. 
Finishing touch: the end cap.
Done!
And from the other side.
Barb was, as usual, a tremendous help with Boomershoot this year. Here are a couple pictures of her:
This was after we had finished putting up all the signs.
We just finished putting up the canopy at the target production facility.
Also in the picture with Barb and I are son-in-law Jacob, daughter Kim, and volunteer Terry.
This is a personal fireball target which Barb helped make. It was shot (detonated) by an immigrant from Venezuela.
