Memorial Day

This will definitely be a weekend to remember. My sister Michelle flew in from PA to visit us for the 3-day weekend. We had planned a quiet relaxing weekend hanging out at the house. When Kev went back into the hospital on Wed, obviously we figured there’d be a slight deviation - probably involving a lot of driving back and forth to Houston, but we never thought…

Laura called me at the hospital on Thursday and said some of the guys wanted to build a ramp for Kevin over the weekend to help him get in and out of the house. I was speechless, mostly because I was still trying to figure out what we were going to do in the next five minutes, much less in a couple days. But it didn’t take me long to realize we would have to do something about the stairs in and out of the house and gladly accepted the offer. I was a little worried these guys had underestimated the scope of the project so told her if it didn’t work out not to worry we figure something out.

By Friday night, Kevin had spoken with Dan concerning design ideas and Alan had made a CAD model getting final approval from Kevin. When I picked up Michelle at the airport at midnight I mentioned there might be a few people coming over to work on a ramp the following day. Dave and Alan showed up early Saturday morning to borrow the van as I was heading out to the hospital. Michelle and Kelden were planning on coming up later and Nick was going to stay home to help the guys out. Next I knew, Nick was calling me about 7:30pm and telling me to check out the blog – I was astounded at the progress. Apparently there were more than “a few” people that arrived – I heard it was closer to a couple dozen. And a handful even stayed later (about 10 pm). When I came home about 11pm everyone was gone but it was also very clear the blog was way out of date – the ramp was essentially finished! On Sunday another good group showed up to finish the details, and were completed by early afternoon. The finished product is absolutely beautiful! It is beyond professional – your craftsmanship is amazing – and all in less than 2 days. If the Space Program gets cancelled, fear not, you have a second calling :-) You were so generous to give up half of your holiday weekend to work in the heat and build this for us. I’m sorry I was not able to thank each of you personally and I won’t be in the office much in the coming weeks; so please accept this huge THANK YOU from us. You are all wonderful!

And a BIG thank you to Laura for organizing all this talent and energy – I can’t imagine anyone else you could have accomplished that.