This Cob Oven adventure....

 The foundation clean, and ready for next step: The insulation. The book says pumice gravel is good, our local 'everywhere' stores  says "what?" ok so the book says perlite or vermiculite not the best but better than nothing. Our local 'everywhere' stores say "what?" After a long frustrating search we find perlite at the farmers co-op 30miles from here. AND it is 8$ for small bag! Three bags =29$! There goes the essential point of the adventure = cheep and simple. 
However is still a cheep oven. Still will be a beautiful oven.

Sand sand sand everywhere. We hauled it in our little Mazda 3. WOW. It is all wet, we got some dried yesterday but not nearly enough to fill the rest of the foundation with dry sand. It rained hard again this morning, while the sand did not get wetter it is NOT get drier. We are drying as much as we can in the house with fans. 

We have a party planed for today. Lots of people coming to build the oven proper.  We have lots of food. let us hope we will have some luck this the rest of the building.