Demo Day is Here

Demo Day is Here

-Monday February 4th, 2013


Wow.  We've been waiting for this day for so long, it is hard to believe that it has arrived (and gone). 

The alarm clocks started sounding off at 6:15 am.  We needed to be on site by 7:30.  The goal was to leave our house at 7:00 am to be sure that we did not miss anything.

I was up late, the night before, making sure that all the batteries were charged and the recording devices were prepped and ready to go.  I was amazed at how smoothly the morning went.  We were dressed and ready to go by 7:05 am, although it was a bit of a hustle at the end to make sure that everything made it out the door and into my truck.

We arrived at the site about 7:20 when my husband looked at Sienna and asks her if she was dressed warm enough.  She tells him, "this is what Mommy told me to wear".  He looks at me and asks, "is she dressed warm enough?".  I am shocked to see that my child has no winter coat on.  How did we miss that?

Fortunately, she was wearing many layers of clothing, but still not enough for the -10C weather.  He drops us off and rushes home to get her winter coat. 

The plan was to get a family picture of us with our construction hats on ... sadly that picture will have to wait for a later day but I at least grabbed a picture of the kids.

We set up our observation area across the street and waited for the action to begin. 

Mark returned to the site just seconds after the first "crunch" tore into the roof of the old house.

The biggest challenge for us was the FREEZING COLD.  Our new neighbour popped by with a handful of hot paws (hand warmers!).  My toes were beyond frozen (it's been a long time since I've had to dress for extreme temperatures!).    We got the hot paws activated and into the children's gloves and into my boots!  I was the only one who was not prepared with below-zero graded footwear.  When Mark returned with Sienna's coat, he brought a few sleeping bags back with him, so we were able to stay warm.  It was only a few minutes later that we abandoned our chairs and hustled into the tailgate of my truck. 

The cold ate away at the life on my camcorder and camera batteries.  I lost 25% of my camera battery having taken only about 3 pictures.  My 6 hour camcorder battery died after 90 minutes.  I got most of the demo footage filmed.  I'm a very novice film-editor ... I was just happy that I figured out how to speed up the footage.  Here is 90 minutes of filming condensed into 2 1/2 minutes.

We left to run some errands and came back an hour later to this progress.

We returned at the end of day around 3PM to see that they had wrapped for the day.