Christmas Eve

Ok,

I was bummed out in the last post, but we really don't have any problems.  Kids are healthy, employed, wife is normally pretty happy with me, etc.

So, I should share our little Christmas Eve thing...  Homemade Pizzas...

I have traveled the world many times over, and my one thing I like to do is try pizzas everywhere I go to see how they differ.  By far, the best pizza I ever had was in Paris on the Champs des Elysses one Christmas Eve.  Jambon and champignon with some light sauce and fresh mozzarella...  Yum (oh, and of course an 8 dollar Coke with 1 cube of ice).  Only thing better would have been to eat that pizza at home.  I probably topped this off with a crepe "complete".  Ouf, fromage, salt, pepper, yummy.  The French know how to eat almost as well as the Italians... (although the best food in the world is actually El Salvador). 
So, here it is...

Pizza dough...

3 cups unbleached flour
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 pkg yeast
1/4 cup EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL (don't skimp on this)
1 cup warm water

Let that rise for a couple hours, and then roll it out as flat as you can...

450 degree oven (or hotter if you can), pizza stone, PARCHMENT PAPER (works better than cornmeal, which burns and smokes at temps greater than 450F)

We all get to pick our toppings. 
You should not put things like BBQ sauce or pineapple on your pizza... 

Kids stick with simple stuff.  Cheese and bacon...

Here is our favorite...

Fresh ball mozarella
Comte cheese (from Costco, it's a hard cheese you can grate)
Very Very light sauce, or just some chopped tomatoes
Salt
extra virgin olive oil (got some in Artentina that is awesome)
shaved Boarshead Prosciutto ham (it's expensive...deal with it)

bake for 6 minutes and then watch it till crust starts to change color.

top it with COLD fresh chopped Arugula (known as Rocket to some)

This pizza will change your life....

Remind  me when I download those photos and I will attach a pic of it later...

Merry Christmas!

PS, also spent 3 hours digging drain trenches trying to get all the water out of the plumbing trenches.  Windy, rainy, cold... Fun.  But, I have talked the plumber and concrete guys into both showing up on the 26th (yes, a Saturday).  So I want to have this thing as dry as I can...

Plumbing

Beginning of Underground Plumbing

Just a simple old outhouse would have been a lot simpler.  1 hole, 1 door with designer door cutout, etc.  Somehow we have all been talked into a far more complex system... 

This is where the plumbers began.  It is called the cleanout... I was concerned about this because 120 feet across the house causes problems for the "drop" in plumbing.  They drop the plumbing about 1/4 inch for every 10 feet, which keeps "things" flowing, I guess.   But, in my puny brain I was thinking 1/4 inch per foot, which would equate to several feet of drop...  Anyway, as usual, I was thinking wrong.

From this location, the pipe will make a turn due West and head over to an aerobic septic system, which will magically transform "things" back into water, and then make a trip due East about 450 feet to the septic field (watch out you East coasters). 

Well, this was the start of my first big problem other than weather.  Plumbers got off to a bad start, their digger broke, had to rent a new one, showed up later, wanted to finish, etc.  Anyway, we had about 2/3 of the plumbing "penetrations" miss their intended location.  We didn't know this of course until the next day when I went over to do a random audit of locations... I was agitated, stressed, and tired.

I didn't intend on having to do this, but I actually then stayed up till 6 am on the 23rd calculating out every single pipe penetration point as it was measured from the edge of the form boards.  In the plumbers defense, this house is very confusing.  There are 5 1/2 inch stone ledges, but sometimes there is another 6 inch of taper thrown in on top of that, and sometimes in several directions.  In addition, the exterior walls are 11 inches thick, which is not a normal dimension for the trades.  Interior walls range from 3 1/2 inches thick to 8 inches thick....and, the dimensions aren't called out very well on the plan, which is sometimes off as much as an inch due to where they "snapped" the dimension endings. 

The good news for the day, however, was that he did install a 6 inch PVC conduit for pulling the geothermal lines into the garage later in construction.  I had him go 4 feet deep on those based on some HVAC expertise.  Also put two 45 degree bends with a wide sweep rather than one 90 degree sweep to make pulling those lines easier.

Also noticed that there was several thousand square feet of roof that would dump water directly into my courtyard...  So, to remedy that, the plumber put 4 inch drain line penetrations through the slab that extend out beyond the courtyard.  I will hook those up later to the rainwater collection system.

Ok, another picture...

In this picture, the big pipe is a toilet drain, the one to the left is it's vent.  The one to the right is a shower drain.  The sink will later tie into the vent in a "wet wall" fashion, which as you can see has all the water from sink and shower chasing the toilet water.  The only trap needed here is for the shower, as sink and toilet have traps themselves.  This is a fairly typical bath setup.  In the background you can see the drain lines headed for the cleanout.  The farthest point starts out with 3 inch drainline, picks up the powder bath, and then turns into a 4 inch line as it picks up the rest of the house. 

As the sun goes down, you can see the trench being dug for the 6 inch geothermal conduit.  This stuff makes all the other plumbing out there look small, but I don't have a picture of it installed. 

There was rain in the forecast, and sure enough, by midnight, the place had turned back into a mudhole... 

We would find out the next day that most of this plumbing needed to be reworked.