Make your bed, part 5 - the end

Finished the fence along the front bed today. Just in time too, as I have new neighbors moving in this evening. As they say, tall fences make good neighbors:


The beans are starting to grow in the back bed. Haven't seen any action from the New Zealand spinach, however:

Make your bed, part 4

Finished the front bed and dry creek today. Just need to finish building the fence. Maybe tomorrow:



The basil is rooting well. Should be able to plant in a few days:


Duck mole is just as good the 2nd night. Yum:

Make your bed, part 3

Made a nice dinner tonight with gifts from Betsy's garden - white eggplants, 2 kinds of tomatoes, and 2 kinds of basil - over a bed of organic pasta:


Speaking of garden, my backyard bed is finished. Still working on the hose situation, but Geo Growers dumped 3 yards of soil in front of my house this morning. This represents probably one and a quarter yards:


I'll be working this weekend on the fence and side garden with Clay - a foolish person who's agreed to trade labor in return for bike parts:


And this is just a bonus:

Poem

Apologies to Joyce Kilmer...

"Hackberry Trees"

I think I will breathe a sigh of relief
When chainsaws take down this hackberry tree.

A tree crew will arrive at my behest,
And lay to rest this ruinous mess;

A tree whose greatest testament of peeve,
Angered me with downed electricity;

Upon the ground where fallen limbs stain;
Who stump grinders soon will consume of remains.

Poems are a great gift for the likes of thee;
But only a fool would plant a hackberry.

Yes, I just spent a lot of money to have yet another dying hackberry removed from my back yard. I wish I had been home this afternoon to see the stump grinders in action. While the crew was at it, they removed the stumps from my front yard also. A truckload (3 yards) of dirt is arriving tomorrow morning. Finishing up the side fence this weekend. Hopefully, beds will be planted by Sunday evening. Hopefully.

Before...



After...

Make your bed, part 2

It's been a long week. So what better way to finish it off than to come home and spend 3 hours in the yard. 104 degrees outside be damned.

I dug holes in the backyard to anchor my raised bed I built last weekend. The ground was rock hard, so I had to use a pickaxe:


I think I want to put a raised bed along the side fence here (after I finish the fence):


However, I need to remove a yard of large rocks and roots before I can do anything:


Nothing like moving a crap load of rocks by hand:


Next up, stump removal. Should be fun...

For now, this is my just desserts:


I like how the specific gravity separates the 2 liquids. Not really a black and tan; more like a cab and clear.

Before and after

The past week or so in pictures:

Fallen tree removed:



Island found:



Sunday dinner with George (Foreman):

Excessive...

Load. Storm knocked down a couple of trees in my yard today. One hit the house. Looks expensive:


Technology. Dustin, Emily Sue, Diego and Eric stopped by Saturday to chat and work on bikes. Actually, Emily Sue surfed the web on her iPhone, Diego played a game on the iPad, and Eric watched the game on the iTV:


Food. After cable-ling Dustin's bike, we went to III Forks for dinner. I had the filet mignon with an Oscar topping:


And Maurie stopped by with Julia and Mylo tonight with some homemade chili:

Lessons learned

You should never accept the last service appointment of the day on the last day of the week. Live and learn.

This all started Thursday night when I dripped a drop of grease onto the carpet in my office. You all know how I feel about grease in the house. Anyway - I got out the Resolve and spot treated the area. While I was down on the ground blotting per the directions on the spray bottle, I decided the carpet could use some professional help - there were distinct traffic flow lines that I wasn't too crazy about.

So Friday morning I called Chem Dry to see when I could get an appointment. They had an opening that afternoon at 5:30PM, which seemed like a perfect fit for my schedule. I came home from work, moved some crap out of the office to make things easier to clean and waited for the cleaning crew. They showed up at 5:30 as expected, went over the pricing with me, tried to up-sell additional services (which I declined), then set about to clean. And they were done - just like that. Honestly, I think they spent a total of 15 minutes to clean the carpet in my office, the stairs, and my bedroom upstairs. I'm positive they spent more time talking to me about my bikes than they did actually cleaning. Whatever...

After they said they were done, I noted to the crew that the carpeting downstairs still looked pretty dirty. It looked like the dirt had just been feathered out, so the transition from clean to dirty was just harder to distinguish. They said they did the best they could and to give the carpet a few hours to dry, and it might look better then. Foolishly, I agreed. Things dried up around 10:PM last night. Carpet still looked dirty. 10:30 at night and I was at Target looking for DIY carpet cleaners. Came home at 11:PM and started scrubbing the carpet by hand. And scrubbed and scrubbed. Still doesn't look great, but it's a lot better than it was.

The silver lining to all this is - my office hasn't been this clean in years:




Nor has my bedroom upstairs:

Carne mechada

"Hammered meat." That's what I feel like right now. I've been coughing non-stop for 48 hours. It's a dry cough that sounds horrible, and each one feels like I'm doing a stomach crunch. I am so sore. If I conservatively count 6 coughs a minute (that's a cough every 10 seconds), in the past 48 hours I've coughed 17,280 times. At this rate, I'm going to have six-pack abs by Sunday.


At least I might be able to get some sleep tonight. I've had this buzzing in the upstairs bedroom wall for months. A pest service came out to poke holes in the wall thinking the culprits might be bees or wasps. They didn't find anything, and I was left with a bunch of holes I still haven't patched. The buzzing is quite annoying - it's random, and not predictable - I liken it to water torture stories I've read about.


My workaround for this situation was to sleep downstairs in my guest bedroom. That worked fine until this week when my brother came to stay with me for a while. So back to the upstairs bedroom I went. I think I got about 3 hours of sleep the first night. The second night I started banging harder on the walls, thinking if there were insects in the walls, they would be annoyed by my pounding. All my pounding did nothing for the buzzing and just made my hand sore. Next, I opened the window to try banging from the outside. While beating on my outside siding, I happened to brush against a telephone line running from the telephone pole in front to an anchor point near where I suspected the buzzing to be.


Turns out the telephone line was vibrating. When I grabbed the line, I dampened the vibrations and the buzzing went away. Let go and the buzzing returned. And the wall anchor made things worse because it turned my wall into an amplifier - like when you were a kid and used 2 cups and string to simulate a telephone. Anyway, I called AT&T and had them remove the old line today. The buzzing is gone. Silence has been restored. And there was much rejoicing.

Flapper flop

I can be stubbornly cheap (as evidenced by all the half full Diet Pepsi cans in my fridge). That's why I spent the better part of Sunday afternoon searching my house for a $3 flapper to fix my leaking guest toilet. I've purchased a number of flush repair kits over the years, and know I have a few unused flappers somewhere. Damn if I know where they are now.

Anyway, a trip to Home Depot this evening, and I come home with this:


It's suppose to make my 600 gallon per flush toilet environmentally friendly. I figure the $100 I'll save per year (as stated on the box) will more than pay for the $18.00 device. Although, my water bill is usually only $8.50 a month, so my water will be practically free now. Nice.

Btw, the device I purchased should not be confused with this device endorsed by Austin Powers:

Grooming

Thus far, my efforts to have my back yard declared a wildlife preserve have met with little success. Thankfully, Hyde Park does not have an HOA. If it did, I don't think this would make them very happy:


Unlike my front yard, I rarely receive complements on my back yard. Guess it was time to do something about it.


So far the weekend has just been gorgeous. Yesterday was a great day for a bike ride. Getting to see Cedar Park was just an added bonus.

Oh, and speaking of riding, I saw the following segment (pun intended) on how bike chains are made recently. Makes me wonder how chains were made before companies had million dollar machines to do most of the work.



WHOA - did the narrator in the video just refer to my neighborhood as 'the hood'? - damn, those Canadians are progressive. And urban.

Thermodynamics

Entropy ( ΔS ):

+ entropy:


- entropy:


Enthalpy ( ΔH ):

+ enthalpy:


- enthalpy:


Thanks again to Diego, Eric and Gaby for inviting me over for dinner last night, thus saving me from an evening of ramen (high end ramen, mind you). Homemade hot wings with 3 different sauces and all the trimmings. Yum!

Tri again

Pete and I rode out to Elgin last Sunday. It was a nice day for a ride - not too humid and a little overcast. Around Decker Lake we rode in a coned off lane. Didn't think too much about it at the time, but on the way home we realized it was a protected lane for a local triathlon - the Couples Tri, I believe. Regardless, it was nicer to be riding with other cyclist than with cars zipping by.



Since I was already sweaty, after the ride I decided to repair the cracks in the concrete skirting around the house. The cracks are the result of leveling my house a few months back - when they raised the front of my house 2 inches.




Unfortunately, a 60 lb bag of mortar was the smallest I could find at Home Depot. A bit of a waste, since I only needed 15 lbs or so. It's not my best job, but it certainly looks better than before.