Archive for March, 2015

Baima Gabu has help from the rainbow spirits as she works in the garden during this weeks work retreat. These rainbow light beings have manifested in many forms in this area. The flowers and plants in this area are especially beautiful. This is where we normally do the offerings for the local spirits. Could this be their response?

On Saturday they poured the concrete floor, filling in the old sunken living room pit, and added the new entryway floor and footings. Today Charlie, Adam, and Tim erected the central beams and supporting posts on top of that floor and its footings. Adam & Tim fill in the studs. The insulation will be blown in on Friday from the front entryway.

Once the county inspectors reviewed their work today, the contractors will be able to pour concrete for the footers and living room floor this Saturday. Replacing the door to the community room resulted in removing the wall used to convert garage to living quarters, something we had not planned on. David has the back porch ready to be stuccoed, while Steve continues to finish the mud work on the dry wall. It is progressing, but it takes time.

(Published by Xinhua.net (web affiliation of the China News Agency) at: http://news.xinhuanet.com/finance/2015-03/28/c_127631891.htm)

The international economic slump of recent years has strained business livelihood and development; as real estate, petroleum, finance, and other industries across the board end up in precarious situations. Terrible business environment and gloomy market forecasts caused many investors to lose confidence. As a result, they shifted large sums of hot money to the collection of artworks. The flood of large amounts of capital created even more space of ...

The construction crew expanded the Buddha Hall by adding a grand hall where the office closet was and widening the entrance to the Green Tara Chapel.

While working on the remodeling of the Holy Vajrasana Temple, Sean and Adam of Pacific Construction reported that they and Reuben, the electrician, had experienced the Vajra Poles shaking and could not believe what they saw. First one pole would shake, then stop while another started to vibrate until all five had exhibited their powers. When they told their supervisor, Charlie, he refused to believe them as did others they told. Understandably, it is hard to imagine that such a ...

Adam removes door frame to hallway while Sean works on taking out the back wall of the office closet. Jack Hammers and lots of concrete dust prevail as the foundations are carved out of the concrete floor to allow for the load bearing posts that replace the old wall separating the sunken living room and what was the family room.

Adam is seen here removing the closet wall next to the Green Tara Chapel. We spent this weekend moving into the dorm area and relocating the office to the library so that the hallways could be widened to meet ADA requirements. Thanks to the Grogers and Travis we were able to do this. We still managed to have a class on one of the preliminary translations of a discourse given by H.H. Dorje Chang Buddha in Taiwan. However, we will need to ...

Jeremy and his crew finished the posts and will deliver them next week. The two large ones will be used to frame the new entrance to the temple and the others will go into storage or elsewhere until we can raise the funds to install them.

The fireplace is gone and the tile floor is being ground away. We had hoped to keep the old floor and just install the new flooring over the existing tiles, but that was not possible. It has been a messy process.