It seems like it has been forever since we’ve made tangible progress on the house, but that changed this week. I suppose getting the final plans was progress and not that long ago, but we’d almost been to that point before. We can officially say that we are finally farther along in the process than we’ve ever been, as we got the official bid back from the builder this week. That was early in the week, so Jes and I spent a few days gathering our list of questions and on Thursday I met with the builder for about 2 hours going over everything. Most of our questions were answered pretty quickly and easily, but there are a few that he had to go get a new quote for us. By early next week we should have those numbers back and that will give us “final” number. We are close enough to the right budget that there isn’t any danger of not getting it done, so we will just need to make sure we are happy with the final numbers, and then sign on the dotted line. But of course, that won’t be the end of it. At that point we still have to get approval from the bank, and most importantly, Larry’s new house (previous owner of our house and our current renter) needs to be completed. And then the real fun begins!
In other news, we continued our photography classes this morning. The assignment for this week was all about shutter speed and how to control movement in a photo. We both had to take one photo that had a fast enough shutter speed to “freeze” motion, and one that had a slow enough shutter speed to “show” motion. The shot of the bikers below is actually a technique that they teach in Photo 2, but I wanted to take on the challenge, and Jes was the one that nailed it! As you can see – she is coming along rapidly in her photography skills:
As for my shots, I went to the lake on Thursday evening with a few coworkers, including my boss and CTO, so I had lots of “motion” opportunities, as you can see from the image of my boss’s kids:
Finally, Radar is finally starting to get the idea of the training we are putting him through. I wanted to move to clicker training and that has spawned what appears to be some pretty rapid improvement. I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think he is a couple of days away from a real breakthrough. That breakthrough will be when he understands that he is in total control of when he gets rewarded, where right now he just knows that he has been able to sit and produce treats. We got him to respond to the down cue today without unlearning the sit cue, and once he is super consistent with that I think he will truly understand that different cues mean different responses, which will get rewarded. At least that’s the plan anyway 🙂