A few quick hits today. I want to thank all my friends and support so far and I will continue to thank you guys through my stay in prison town. You often hear you will find out who your real friends are when something bad happens. I think when most people say that they in a negative light. That may be the case in some situations but fortunately that has not been the case for my family or I. I feel like my friends and this area have really stood behind us. You know the friends that you know are friends but you don’t talk to them much because life gets so busy but you know they will always be there for you? Well even those friends have come out in support and we feel fortunate. All of you who have said “what can we do to help” we appreciate it. Please know it means alot to us even if we don’t let you know what helps. Its crazy what a community will do to help. My in-laws have been nothing short of amazing and our biggest help. Again, thank you! Travis and Cori took the family out to the beach this weekend. Several members of the knights football team have helped with Sawyer and football. Christina Diaz has helped with the kids this week and before and to the numerous others. I hear about all the help and don’t know how else to say thank you except for making these comments here. Wish I could show more gratitude. I appreciate all the mail everyone has written, please know that I am receiving all of it and I get every comment from my website and face book.
Ok, so I figured I would give you an idea what our carpentry shop looks like and what tools we have. Its a brick building on the other side of the units. Its about 2 football fields away from where I live. Its a nice walk in the morning. The building has our shop, HVAC, welding, painting, a tool room and mechanics. We all have about 1000-1500 sq ft of working area. Our area is the largest because of all the tools and equipment. Every morning I go over and check out our large tool box which is on wheels and taller than myself. We have all our hand tools in there. It has everything form screw guns, skill saw blades, nail guns and router tools. Its very important that at the end of the day we do a tool inventory of it before we take it back. If there is a tool missing they will call us back to the office over the intercom system. Its embarrassing when it happens. LOL. Yes we also have all type of tools that someone would think could be dangerous like knives and blades. In the shop we also have several different machines. We have a large table saw. Multiple table chop saws. We have 2 routers with hundreds of attachments (Its always difficult find what attachment to use when we are trying to match something that was made 50 years ago). We have a large belt grinder, a band saw, a lathe, and a press. I was not real efficient with any of it until now. I’ve actually learned quite a bit, however I have no motivation to continue with carpentry once leaving here. Every machine has a hose connected to it that sucks up all the saw dust and goes into some barrels outside. Once the barrels are full we take them off the camp to a horse farm.