I’m a little behind on posting the May photos. Sorry about that. Last month was a fun one with Michaela (see Becky’s previous Post). One of my favorite new things was seeing her cute smile! Now she’s even more expressive and she recognizes her Mom and Dad and of course her Big Sister. Other highlights of the month included Felicity’s first hair cut (just to even things up), Uncle Kenny’s 25th Birthday where Michaela finally got to meet her Papa Ellis and Uncle Louie, Mother’s Day and learning to roll over.

Last weekend was a fun event on Saturday. The new Library by our house (Cortaro and Silverbell) had its grand opening. The Wheeler Taft Abbett Sr. (WTA) Pima County Library is build on a site that will eventually be part of a rather large Town of Marana park. It borders along the Santa Cruz river and the Architect did a fantastic job capitalizing on the great views of the surrounding mountains and the future views of the park. We know the girls are going to love going there for storytime and to check out books.

It was particularly special for me because my firm, NCS Consultants, was the geotechnical engineer on the project. It wasn’t the run of the mill project either. There were problem soils down to a depth of about 20-ft. We looked at several options to mitigate them, but it would have been too expensive to dig down to 20-ft. So we had them overexcavate 10-ft and used layers of what’s called geogrid in between the compacted soil layers. Even though most people will never appeciate what went in to making a safe and long-lasting building foundation, it gives me a great sense of accomplishment and pride to have helped put our new library on solid ground. I’ll probably post a description of the project and construction photos to our compan website sometime soon. Maybe I’ll post here when I do if anyone is interested in the engineering of the library.