Travis and Michelle Fitzgerald's blog

The Fitzgeralds are going to Italy! Work is sending Michelle to Turin, Italy at the end of the month so she can observe testing on Node 3 (the third connecting module for the International Space Station). She'll be gone for 3 weeks (that's going to be rough for me. I apologize in advance for my grumpiness during that time), but I will then join her after she's done with her work, and we're going to spend a week doing the tourist thing in Italy.

We haven't figured out what exactly we're going to do, but, rest assured, there will be plenty of pictures and stories to tell when we get back.

I thought I should stick my $0.02 in at some point. :-) Don't have much to say, so it may really be two cents' worth of bandwidth. Work is busy, and I'll be in Italy for a month this summer. Fortunately, the last week of that will be vacation with Travis! ...Other than that, what Travis said. Yeah.

Hello, world!

We just finished building a new deck in our backyard. It took a little over a week to finish (two weekends with some work done a couple of weekday evenings). It's 10' by 12', and is built using a floating foundation system.

Basically, instead of digging through clay that is the consistency of concrete in order to dig traditional footings, we bought 18 pre-cast concrete blocks. We layed them on the ground to establish a foundation, and built the deck on top. The system, and plans, were taken from www.deckplans.com, and the whole thing wasn't that hard (yeah, that's what the advertisements said, which I normally don't believe, but this time it was true!!).

We started out by clearing out the grass where the deck was supposed to go. Now, the plans say that this step was unnecessary ("Just throw the piers on the grass"), but I didn't want to worry about what it would look (or smell) like while the grass underneath the deck died and decomposed. Besides, the deck was already going to be at least 1 foot off of ground level, so dropping it down a couple of inches would be good. It was a lot of work (and in fact, I started this phase of the project last summer, oh, about August, and the heat pretty much drained my motivation for that year), but it was worth it. That took us most of Saturday and half of Sunday.

Saturday morning we made the materials run to Home Depot to get 18 concrete piers, 8 2"x6"x10' pieces of pressure treated wood, 2 2"x6"x12' pieces of pressure treated wood, and a 5 lb box of deck screws. Even the mighty Suburban had a tough time handling all that material. We had the 12' boards laying on the dashboard (good thing I'm planning on replacing it soon anyways).

The rest of Sunday we spent levelling all the blocks. Ugh that was a pain. By Monday we had the framework assembled, and realized that we needed something to cover the erosion-prone dirt under the carefully levelled deck. So, after 2 trips to the nearby garden center, and with Luke and Rob's help, we had about an inch of red lava rocks laid underneath the deck. Luke was moving the rocks one at a time, but he was persistent. We also installed a soil anchor kit to make sure the next hurricane doesn't put the deck in our living room.

By Saturday, we had the deck boards down. Rob thinks we went a little overboard by using 2"x6"x10' pressure treated boards for the top of the deck, but it makes for a very solid deck. This sucker ain't moving.

Then, in celebration, the next weekend we bought patio furniture (and, eventually, a new outdoor light). So here's the final product, all decked out.

There are more pictures at our Picture Page (look over in the links area).

Welcome, one and all, to our brand new weblog! Travis will most likely be the one doing most of the posting, but he does intend to describe (and brag about) what's going on in his lovely wife's world, also.

Okay, so I have yielded to peer pressure. Other friends have blogs (Rob, Todd, Josh), and I realized that it would be a really cool way to describe to our friends and family what we've been up to. Part of me hopes it will reduce the number of guilt-induced "I haven't heard from you in so long" phone calls that I tend to get. But I know that probably won't happen.

And be sure to check out the other new blog: Travis' Star Wars blog. If you ever wanted to know how deep Travis' Star Wars obsession goes, then that's how you find out. If you prefer to remain in the dark (and I don't blame you), then you should probably avoid that link.

And...just to see how well this whole blog thing works, here's a picture of us, taken at the base of the University of Texas tower the night it was lit up for UT's National Football Championship.