Hundreds of people have sent in cards and letters asking "what happens when the Solar Decathlon is over?" The answer is simple..........open up the event to the teeming masses, er, public, we mean.
Thousands of people patiently braved Saturday's rain and Sunday's chilling north winds to tour all twenty homes, kinda like a real estate agent's worst open-house nightmare. It was so crowded organizers kept a big display board that gave times estimates for waiting in line at each site. The bone-weary Show-Me crew played perfect 
hosts to a steady stream of wide-eyed strangers, all of whom asked the same questions over, and over, and over and...................so by 5:00 p.m. all you can repeat is, "yes, our beautiful cabinet doors are made of sorghum straw waste products." The upside of all the company is that so many folks commented on how open and spacious the Missouri house was compared to some of the other structures, and one perfectly charming little Italian woman said "oh, this is the house for me! The kitchen is just perfect, with lots of light. I just love it!"
Right at 5:00 p.m. the crowds melted away until Team Missouri set out all the landscaping plants, and then it was a feeding frenzy. We couldn't put them out fast enough to the grateful public, and some people even said "no, not that one, the red one next to it!" Anyway, it was better than hauling them back to a Missouri winter.
And then, as the night crew staggered back to the Mall, disassembly started in earnest.
First the shade louvers came off, and as night fell the deck did, too. By 3:00 a.m. the night crew had removed the huge deck, and by the dawn's early light the evacuated tube system was, well, evacuated. Surprisingly, few other teams worked through the first night.
Morning was mostly site clean up while we waited for the first trucks to arrive, then it was a case of "lift 'dat barge, tote 'dat bale" and get the deck sections loaded on the truck. The Miners couldn't do much to the house itself until our western
neighbor Rice University craned their house directly over Missouri airspace onto another trailer. That was a great time to evacuate the site and slip out front for a quick crew photo with team advisors Dr. Katie Grantham (S&T), six-week-old Logan G, and Mizzou's Barbara Buffalo.
The crane arrives tomorrow to lift the roof just enough to swing in the north window wall, and then they'll raise the house high enough to drive the second truck under it, set it down, secure it, and hit the road until 2011.
We keep referring this amazing group of undergrads (you listening, California?) as "the team", and that barely describes it. This group works so well together as to defy description. No drama, no tension, just go about the work as if it were no big deal. These Miners and Tigers (oh, my!) clearly enjoy each others' company and work as a unit. Everyone pulls their own weight and no one seems in charge because everyone simply takes care of business. Do they have fun? You bet, every chance they get!
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