Low rider, on your knees, SSR roller coaster, free pass, 4 months in 15 minutes
On Saturday morning Cindy was coaching at her first track meet, leaving me alone to run wild at the house. I did a number of chores around the house including having all four of my cleaning robots running simultaneously scrubbing/vacuuming all of the flooring. I then decided I was going to head out to Home Depot.
Cindy and I decided we were going to add an extra level of castle stone to the landscaped border around the pool. We are both sick and tired of the chickens going into the area and kicking the rubber mulch out into the grass. It has become a constant see saw of work. So our thought was adding the second layer of stone would be enough of a wall to deflect their shrapnel back into the bed where it belongs.
Cindy had counted and we needed a little more than 90 of the 12 inch stones to do the second layer (we already had bought a few). I had bought these stones in bulk once before and just had them bring them out on a pallet which I requested once again. The immense weight immediately bottomed out the Tacoma’s suspension. I am sure I was well over the posted maximum payload of 1700 pounds. I drove very conservatively on the way home.
On the drive home my cell phone rang from an Oregon number. It was a guy named Al that was calling about the SSR. He had not seen the ad on Craigslist. In fact he didn’t see any ads at all. He was called about it from one of the main guys from SSR Fanatics. On Friday I decided to also post my truck on their forum for sale. I didn’t expect a lot from the posting but obviously I was wrong. Al was called because the SSRF guy (Dick) knew he was looking for a 6 speed truck. So anyway Al said he could leave Cape Coral right away to come see the truck so I told him to come on down.
When he showed up I was a bit shocked to see ANOTHER SSR parked in the driveway. I had no idea he already had an SSR, a 2004 with a slick custom paint job. He actually has owned his truck for 4 or 5 years but he was interested in a 6 speed. Since Dick has met me and worked on my truck at a few of the meet ups he personally vouched for my truck, letting Al know it was nice.
Al was like the vast majority of SSR owners I have met, of retirement age and very nice. Of course I didn’t have to give him a walk through of the truck like I did last week since he was already very familiar with the vehicles obviously. When I told him some of the upgrades I had done like the LS7 Corvette clutch swap he knew exactly what it was and why it was a good thing. We went on a decent test drive and he confirmed he liked the truck, just like Dick said he would. Unlike last week where the buyer was all about lowballing, Al was fine paying my asking price, his background as a SSR owner made my price fair to him when compared to other trucks out there.
After the test drive Al hung at the house for quite awhile talking with Cindy and I. Most of the conversation was not SSR related at all, just exchanging snippets of our background. Al has been retired since he was 55 and spends 3 months out of the year living on his boat in Oregon. It sounded like he was very fortunate the way things fell in place for him when retirement came around and he was grateful for it. So we got around to making plans for the sale. He left me a check for a deposit and said to call him Sunday after he checked his calendar to see when we could do the sale.
We worked it out that I am leaving work early today to get it all done. I brought the SSR to work and will be driving it to Al’s house with Cindy following me in the Tacoma. We will then leave the truck there and head to the bank and DMV office to finalize the paperwork. It will feel weird for sure to walk away from the R but it is offset by getting much more money for it than I was willing to accept a few days prior. It’s funny how things work out. It’s also funny that Al will have two SSR’s in his driveway until he manages to sell his 2004. 🙂
After Al left I wasted little time heading outside to work on the 2nd level of our castle stone border. Cindy and I first unloaded all of the stones, putting them in place on the wall where they would go. It was only temporary as I needed to go stone by stone and reset both the first and second layer. When I originally put the castle stone in place I just used the sandy soil as the base under the wall. Over time areas of the wall have shifted as a result. A good number of the stones had a slight downward facing angle which looked shitty.
Along with the pallet of stone I also bought 6 bags of substrate normally used under a paver installation. The substance was basically very small stones, designed to give a firm base to support the blocks. I began a very arduous process of pulling up each and every stone and re-leveling it, using the stone base to provide support. It was not enjoyable as you can imagine. Most of the work required me to be on my knees which gets painful very quickly. I just kept my blinders on and focused on getting done. Before I called it quits for the day I had about 75% of the wall complete which was cool.
We cleaned up and headed out to Germain arena for an Everblades game. We had not gone to see the local minor league hockey team for a couple years. I saw it was Star Wars night so I thought it would be fun to go. When we got there the parking lot was pretty full, something we arent used to with the sparsely attended Tarpons games we are used to.
As we walked up to the ticket window I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw signs on the window saying SOLD OUT. WTF? Germain seats between 5000-6000 people I could hardly believe the game would be sold out. Cindy and I looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders.
Just as we were ready to start walking back to the parking lot a couple behind us stopped us. The man said he had spare tickets and we could have a couple of them. I told him I would gladly pay for them. He said to not worry about it they were already paid for by his business. Cindy and I could hardly believe our good fortune. When we got inside I tried to repay their kindness to at least a small degree by buying the guy a beer. It’s always nice to confirm that not all people are assholes.
Now I am the farthest thing from a hockey fan you can get but it was still fun to be at a live game. I downed a couple large Shocktop drafts to help up the fun level. We also enjoyed chowing down on our standard arena menu of pizza, a soft pretzel and roasted nuts. At the end of the second period Cindy wasn’t feeling great after downing her alcoholic cider. The home team was down 2-0 at that point. I told Cindy I was fine heading out and although she didn’t want to be the impetus to leave I could tell she liked the idea. After thanking the couple once again for their generosity we headed out. I saw later the Everblades wound up losing 2-1.
On Sunday morning there was no way I felt like running/riding after the block work Saturday afternoon. Plus I wanted to take advantage of the cooler morning temperatures to finish up the wall. Of course I was just a little short of what I needed to finish so Cindy and headed out for yet another Home Depot trip. We grabbed more castle stone as well as 12 more border stones that looked like smaller cousins of castle stone. We wanted to lay them down as a test in the rock border area to see how they look. Unfortunately the chickens have no problems kicking small river rock out of a landscape bed either. Cindy has been putting the displaced stones back in place several times a week. Surprisingly the chickens don’t listen when we ask them to stop scratching in those areas. 🙂
When we got back I finished up the main wall. Both Cindy and I liked the finished product and we have not seen any projectile mulch clear the wall since it was extended. We laid down the smaller stone border on a small section of the river rock bed and it looked good. Although it is significantly smaller than castle stone in height we are thinking it should be high enough to block the stones since they won’t fly as far as mulch.
I was pooped from the labor that covered portions of both days of the weekend. Late in the afternoon I decided to finally get to making a video that told the story regarding my drone prosecution. Although I kept the video pretty in the middle, not trash talking the NPS tactics as much as I could have, I wanted to get a video out there shining a light on what happened. Perhaps the same ranger that thought it was fair game to ruin my Xmas holiday will stumble across this video as well. Hopefully it makes him sleep better at night.
The video is about 15 minutes long. I don’t believe I have ever talked at that length on film at one shot. As expected there are some stumbles along the way but all in all I give a pretty clear outline of what went down and why I feel it was handled poorly.