September 4, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
We have (a) started the house, (b) acquired an unhousebro-ken kitten, and (c) had a houseguest on our hands for three days when we literally have no room nor facilities for an ill houseguest-so we are running in circles…
The kitten is a fine little girl cat who buzzes all the time…and craps right under this typewriter with healthy regularity…and gets herself lost under the house…and insists on sleeping under Ginny’s head…and throws our tomcat into a bad state of nerves most of the time. Apparently she isn’t old enough to smell like a girl cat to him; she is simply a monster who has invaded his home and who takes up entirely too much of Mama’s and Papa’s time. But she is another lame duck; Ginny rescued her when she was about to be sent to the pound. Oh, me. Once we get her housebroken and once she comes into heat I think she will turn out to be a most welcome addition to the household-right now she’s a burr under the saddle.
I finally fired our silly architect and took over the job myself…
We have water now, on a temporary pump hookup from a temporary tank…The site is no longer the horrible dust desert that it was; [Ginny] has it watered down (endless shifting of the single sprinkler the temporary hookup will run) and little green shoots coming up to hold the soil against the coming rains. Between times she keeps coffee and lemonade and candy bars on the job and passes them around (very good for morale), and makes trips down to Santa Cruz as needed for almost anything-and keeps house and cooks and keeps books, and falls into bed dead beat each night. (But the extreme effort-is going to get us into our house by the rainy season-we can hardly wait.)
…asking me to lecture. The fee is satisfactory and I have in mind an outline for an appropriate lecture. Will you take over from here and accept subject to the following conditions? Mr. Heinlein’s terribly busy schedule (i.e., mixing concrete, carrying block, and pushing a shovel, which is none of his business) will not permit him to accept a date to lecture earlier than the first of the year, and also I would expect transportation, to wit, round trip by air from San Francisco to Chicago.
…I guess that is about all, and I’ve still got to do some electrical work tonight-calculate the maximum working loads for the whole house and try to see if I can use a four-wire, three-phase cable underground…This is just one of the hairy little jobs the architect left undone.
The new cat is out again and again under the house-no way to get under, but she manages. Ginny has just gone out in the dark with a dish of cat food and a flashlight, to try to lure her out. Never a dull moment around here —
November 21, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I enclose a picture taken last week of the state of the job. As you can see, the masonry walls are almost complete. Four courses of “bond beam” now go around the top of what you see (looks like all the other courses but has buried in it four half-inch steel bars, poured in place-this building is for all practical purposes a steel-reinforced monolith; there are hundreds and hundreds of pounds of steel concealed in it).
But we are having trouble: (a) the winter rains have started; (b) our mason is being childishly temperamental. The contractor is quite disgusted with him, and I have refrained from telling him off simply because I did not wish to joggle the contractor’s elbow-he being a number one conscientious and mature person.
December 4, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
We are now building between raindrops, but thank God the masonry on the house is at last all finished. We still have two little masonry outbuildings to put up, a pump house and an electrical service housing, but these won’t take long and are neither urgent nor difficult-even I could lay them up. We need about two weeks of dry weather to frame the roof and put on the roofing-but the winter rains have set in unusually early and unusually hard and it could very well be some time in January before we get the roof on. The contractor has decided that the job will work every dry day from now on, including Saturdays and Sundays. But dry days are scarce. There have been only two fairly dry days this week, it is storming right