This is a Dave I Know

In our hands, we hold what is commonly called "the construction order," but here we're having it stand in for the purchase order that we spent two and a half hours signing this afternoon. That lengthy document has somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred sets of initials and at least fifty signatures from each of us, as well as a report detailing what kind of soil the house is built on and a notice of our right to be notified if somebody wants to graze "range animals" nearby. For real on that last one. Gunfighters in the streets.

The picture was taken by Dave, who spent three years teaching English in Japan and seven years working as a translator for Japanese high-rollers at the Mirage. Dave is not the sales consultant we've been working with on this deal, but vacations happen, and so today Dave was our man.

After slogging through all that paperwork, we went down the street to lot #156, where we strolled around in our house. Now that the drywall is up, it looks a lot more like a real house (and less like a pretend house made out of Linkin Logs).

Here, for example, is the living room, complete with sheetrock scraps to accentuate the delightful Found Art nature of our new dwelling. One can almost hear the mariachi music of the deliciously pastoral laborers who toil tirelessly 'neath the azure dome of heaven to hew our darling pied-a-terre out of the very desert itself.

Seriously though, this picture might have had a little more impact if I had a picture of the bare framing for you all to contrast with, but the progress on this house really is remarkable. We'll be going down again next Saturday with the camera to check up on the builders, and I feel quite certain you'll be mentally Shanghaied by how quickly the construction is going along.