Month: September 2016
UPDATE: FIVE donors have sent enough to cover 15 new gift memberships! Thank you, MS, JS, SL, JW, and FT. 🙂 I’ve extended offers to five likely recipients and hope to hear from others who are interested in joining the Cabal but not able to afford membership on their own. We’ll “bank” any excess funds to help others who come along or to provide renewals for those who can’t afford them.
Getting there. The Wandering Monk will finish the north-side wall (the one he’s sitting on) by early this afternoon. I’ve been out there working with him all week, but today I’m indoors, online, taking care of new-site business. Anyhow, face it. Though I can shovel rock and make artistic decisions, he’s about twice as efficient as I am at the heavy lifting. We’re leaving the east-side wall just two blocks high for now so we can monitor the drainage behind it when the rains come this weekend. But that north wall, the long wall, the high wall, the wall requiring…
And the new member site is (ta-da!) ClairesCabal.com. If you go there as a non-member, you’re going to wonder what the fuss is about. You’ll see one page. It’ll try to give you an idea what the fuss is about. But to see more, you have to become a Cabalista. All qualifying donors in the late fundraiser just got their invitations and free-membership coupons. Well, all but a couple. (SK, I don’t have an email address for you. Michael L, your email bounced. Anybody else didn’t get an expected invite, let me know.) So what’s Claire’s Cabal all about? The…
Thursday (Sept. 15) is the day for going live with the new member site. That morning I’ll send qualifying donors instructions and codes for free membership. Then the place will be open for paying members. Got another heavy work day on the retaining wall tomorrow. Although there will be other such days in the next week or two, Thursday was the most auspicious day to open the doors of the new operation.
Yesterday began the retaining-wall construction. The Wandering Monk arrived at 8:00 and when I made the fatal mistake of asking, “What do you need me to do?” I got dragooned into nearly nine hours of hard labor. First job: shoveling dirt out of the footer trench as the Monk made several passes through with a pickaxe, deepening it and shaping it for the concrete pour. While he finished that and began placing rebar, I cleared the hillside of large rocks, concrete pipes, bricks, and old concrete chunks he and Lester had earlier dug out of the ground. By lunchtime we…
Earth moving last week. Check. Interview today. Check. Tomorrow … retaining-wall building. Followed by blissful peace. Well, followed by the official opening of the new member site on Wednesday or Thursday, followed by more webwork. But blissful peace is definitely in sight. What seemed like weeks of sheer scariness at the end of August now seems like no great big deal. I’m exhausted tonight, though. I’ve been turning down interviews for years. The last on-camera interview I did must have been in 1999 (for John Stossel when he was still with ABC News). Both then and now, I agreed to…