Beat up

It’s a relief to be back at work so I can get away from physical labor for a few hours.  It’s been a pretty tough 4 days.  My initial hope was by the end of these past 4 days was to have half of the fence done, I wound up a bit short of the goal.  The weather for much of Saturday was shitty.  It looked like rain most of morning and then finally it started to come down in the afternoon.

Our day started at 4am as we had to load up and head to the beach to get ready for a race.  It was going to be the first large scale test of the timing system.  I was nervous about it.  Setting up computers and electronics on a beach is not my idea of a good time.  We had to bury the timing lines in the sand.  Initially they were about 6 inches down.  During my testing I had very poor detection results so we raised the strips to a couple inches below the sand.  Even at that height, detection was not great.   I had a few runners go across the line as a test before the race and missed a few detections, sending me into panic mode.  I decided to drop in the second set of timing lines as a fail safe and cranking up the power on the system to nearly it’s max.  Much of the time leading up to the race was draped in total darkness with the main source of light being the full moon.  There was a real cool moment when I was walking down to the beach after the equipment was set up.  The gulf was calm as a lake and lit up by the moon.  In the foreground was my table with the timing system and the laptop.  The screen was lit up with the club logo.  If I had a camera that could capture a picture in such conditions, it would have been a good one.

So the race starts and I hold my breath.  I managed to keep everything plugged in this time around.  The first two runners came towards the finish at a rapid pace.  As they both crossed without any sort of acknowledgement BEEP I immediately swore to myself.  Damn it!  Well we discovered that one of the two runners had lost his chip along the way, the other one just plain didn’t register for some reason.    It wasn’t a great start.  However the rest of the race went better with people getting detected.   Soon an obvious problem was identified, a lot of people coming across simply didn’t have a chip.  They either got there late and skipped it or were not told to get one.  We had at least twenty people that came across the line chipless.  Another issue was people not attaching the chips correctly.  Several people came across with chips flapping and loose and a handful had them fall off during the run.  Even so, the lion share of people were captured as they crossed the line.  I was able to import the times and prepare results relatively easily.   I would classify the run as a success but there are definitely more bugs to be worked out.  We were all cleaned up and back on the way home by 9:15.

  Even though Ali and I were both sleepy already from the 4 am wake up the fence was calling our names. We were working on the front section of the fence on the left side of the house.  The rain held off for awhile but then started to come down consistently.  Ali HATES being in rain but she toughed it out with me for most of the time, even donning an umbrella while holding posts in place for me.  Eventually the rain was too hard.  She went in while I finished up putting in a few line posts in a steady rain, it was pretty miserable.  The shitty weather resulted in me getting less done than I hoped for the day.  I wanted to have the front section totally done, complete with fencing up and attached.

Sunday was Easter.  Our Easter celebration at home was a simple exchanging of cards.  No Easter basket, no coloring of eggs, no gifts were exchanged.  Well I did buy Ali a pack of Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs the day before, woo hoo.  Before going to my mom’s we  had to run out to the condo where our neighbor is now living to drop off some stuff.  We had Nicki with.  Normally when Nicki is in a new place she gets excited.  Getting excited normally translates into her taking a dump.  True to form, shortly after we got there she left a pile.  As she was in the process of doing her business, a short, old woman with two little dogs came walking around the corner.   It only took me a split second to identify this woman as a condo cop.  A condo cop is normally a person over the age of 65 that lives in a condo community whose life is so empty that they fill it up policing condo association policies.  This annoying hag comes scurrying over and says something about how we needed to clean up after the dog.  Ali assured the woman that she had no intention of leaving it there and she was waiting for our neighbor to bring a bag out.  The woman was besides herself about the idea that a pile of dog shit might possibly not be picked up.  She offered the bag she was carrying to Ali.  Ali again told her that she would have one shortly.  Again the crazy hag encourages Ali to use hers.  Ali finally relents and takes the bag.  The woman watched as Ali picked up the mess and then took joy in telling her where to put it.  I kept my mouth shut during the entire incident.  If the woman would have taken that approach with me I would have not been quite as nice.  As soon as the woman walked away our neighbor confirmed that the woman was indeed a condo cop.  I told him I identified her instantly as such, how annoying.

After our delivery trip we had time to go home and drop the van off at home before heading out to mom’s.  Mom said she had some outdoor landscaping things that she could use help with so we took the truck to her place, complete with the chain saw, loppers and pole saw in the bed.  Once we got there mom also asked me if I could hang a venetian blind in one of the front windows.  Before we had our Easter lunch we had some time to kill.  I brought up to mom that she didn’t respond to the emails I sent her that had several example condos that were both for sale and rent that could easily be afforded by her.  As expected my inquiry was met with a barrage of excuses why she didn’t want to pursue such a move.  I told my mom that I didn’t like her living in a place that she constantly complains about.  It’s old and not well maintained, I said how I would like for her to get into something newer with less maintenance requirements.  I went so far as to call her place a “dump” which I don’t think she liked.  I told her now was a GREAT time to make a move, the market is jammed full of great rental or purchase opportunities.  I told her that I would help her along the way.  Mom’s counter was she can just wait till a hurricane knocks the place down or something just happens to pop up magically and is presented to her. (I’m paraphrasing)  Mom hates to talk about things that involve her changing in some way and I could tell I had run the meter out of time on the subject.  I was frustrated that she wouldn’t even agree to actively look for somewhere else to live that would raise her quality of life and instead is content to passively sit by just hoping something will change. Some of the reasons mom gave for wanting to stay put just made no sense.  As the discussion ended an exclamation point was put on my point of view when a small lizard poked it’s head up on the back of mom’s sofa.  They come in through various openings in the building structure.  Oh well I am going to keep looking at the ads and keep presenting the options to her. 

We had a non-traditional Easter meal, instead of ham, mom made eggplant parm from scratch, something that would slide into Ali’s vegetarian diet easily. It was quite good.  Shortly after the meal I changed shirts and we headed outside to cut back various vegetation.  I hacked into the Bird of Paradise, coconut palm and sea grape with both my chain saw and pole saw.  We quickly amassed a large pile of brush.  The three of us made quick work of the chores.  Afterward we went back in and had a refreshing desert, strawberry shortcake, something I hadn’t had for years and years.  Mom knew I had fencing construction plans for the rest of the day so she encouraged us to get going.  She thanked us for our help and we thanked her for the meal and that was that.

  I whined to Ali how empty holidays feel in comparison to years past on the ride home.  She pointed out correctly that unless we have kids, and since we have limited family close by that is probably the way holidays will be.  It’s just reality.   When I think about positive holiday memories it’s true, they involve the scenarios where there were considerable numbers of family/extended family members present.  I guess you just can’t recreate that with two or three people.  I couldn’t remember if I normally called family on Easter.  I decided that I normally did not.  I guess I was right because we didn’t receive any calls from family members either.  I didn’t even bring up the idea of calling grandma while we were at mom’s and felt guilty about it.

So we were back home and I dug into the final part of the front fence, installing the actual fencing.  We cut a section of fencing slightly longer than was needed and then secured the one end on the H post by the house.  Then I brought the truck down to the other end and attached the neighbor’s come-along to the frame and then attached that to a steel cable that was hooked around a pole that I had threaded through the fence.  As I cranked on the come-along the fence sprung to life, standing up straight on it’s own.  I let Ali crank on the come-along a bit, she enjoyed it.  Once the fence was taut I started nailing it in at a few spots.  The area we were stretching across was very challenging.  We came off the house mound, into a small valley and then back up and over Nicki’s area which is elevated then back down to normal ground level out at the property line.  When I attached the fence to the post in the valley we had an obvious problem.  After telling Ali to release her downward pressure on the fence, the post immediately started to lift out of the hole from the tension, shit!  So Ali and I threw around ideas about how to address the problem.  What we settled upon was Ali’s idea of bringing in fill to raise the low area and raising the fence post to relieve the upward tension.  I was leery of the idea but had no better ideas of my own.

So it was off the fill pit with the tractor and yard cart to get a couple loads of fill.  It didn’t take very long to raise the problem area enough to alleviate the pressure on the post.  It looked a bit weird to have a raised ridge at the fence line but we said we would cover it with sod.  So I continued attaching the fence to the posts.  When I was almost done Ali uttered one of her discerning “Hmmmms…” “What’s wrong?” I asked.  Nothing, she says which I know means something.  On the second half of the fence the bottom part of the fence line was lagging somewhat behind the top section.  I had driven so many staples in by that point that trying to undo it at that point would REALLY suck.  I think the reason for issue was the up and down terrain, causing the bottom of the fence to get hung up on the high ground.  Ali admitted that it is the sort of thing that only she would notice.  I agreed with her but felt bad afterwards that she saw that section of fencing as less than perfect.  I secured the rest of the fence, cut it and that was that.  The front fence line across both sides of the house was completely done.  It was a bit of a relief as I knew those sections were the most challenging because of uneven ground.  The rest of the project would take much longer but should be more straight forward.

Sunday evening we brought over the neighbor’s Jack Russel, Zoe.  He was out of town for a week so we agreed to dog sitting duties.  Zoe is very high maintenance as I have described multiple times before, demanding attention during most of her waking moments.  Sunday night I had a MISERABLE night of sleep.  Initially I was woken up around 2am by Zoe moving or making some noise.  After that my mind kicked into overdrive.  I started thinking non-stop about various things going on like the fencing, cleaning out the spare bedroom to accommodate a treadmill, getting stuff together for the yard sale, the worthless litter box and even other unrelated things that were depressing as well.  I couldn’t quiet my mind no matter how hard I tried.  I bet it was close to 4:30 until I managed to fall back asleep, only to crawl out of bed again at 7 am.

Monday was going to be a lot of fence building, plus I wanted to rent the power auger from Home Depot.  The plan was to get the two middle H sections built and then I would go rent the auger.  Building the H’s is by far the worst part of this project as it involves several grueling tasks.  Digging the three and a half foot deep holes for the 8 foot posts is hard enough.  However quite often after I would drop the 100 to 150 pound post into the hole it would either be a few inches too high or too low meaning I had to lift the damn thing back out again which was a real bitch to do since there was little clearance between the post and hole.  Making an H also meant I had to twist the brace wire around and around until it was tight.  To do so I stuck a big Craftsman adjustable wrench in between the wires and start twisting.  After the first three or four revolutions each cranks gets considerably tougher.  The last few turns require tremendous amounts of torque.  The second brace wire, required by Ali for visual symmetry is even tougher because you have to work the wrench around the first brace wire with every turn.  By the time I am done with each H my forearms and hands are burning.

We got the two middle H’s done around noon so we took a break and headed up to Home Depot to rent the auger.  I viewed the auger as a gift from the heaven’s, something that would make the job exponentially easier. I was wrong.  Once we got home I was anxious to try to zip in some line posts with my power tool.  I fired it up, and squeezed the throttle.  It didn’t take me long to realize that it wasn’t going to be a huge help.  The auger ripped into the sandy soil easily and dug down quickly.  However it doesn’t come up by itself, you have to pull up against it’s natural direction to pull the dirt out of the hole.  As you do this it creates a huge loose ant mound of dirt around the hole.   You repeat the up and down process several times and then when you pull the heavy device out of the hole a bunch of the mound of dirt falls right back in.  Then in order to measure how far your post is above the ground line you have to clear more dirt away which inevitably causes even more to fall into the hole.  The 8 inch bit made a hole way too big for the small line posts, creating tons of backfilling to do as well.  After two posts I realized that I would be able to do line posts faster just using the damn post hole digger.  I decided to switch gears and take the auger to the back of the property to dig the holes for the remaining H braces since those holes need to be much bigger. 

Again it was a tough go.  At one point I went too deep in one run without pulling the auger up, getting it stuck with a bunch of dirt on top of it.  I had to enlist the help of Ali on the other side to get the sucker out of the hole.  Using the auger for the big holes saved a bit of time and the large holes it created were helpful with some of the 8 foot posts that had large, outwardly tapered bottoms.  By the end of Monday we had the one rear corner done with just one more corner left.  We were both very tired by the time we stopped between 6 and 7.  But I was not done working.

Like I said, the night before I was going crazy laying in bed thinking about various things I wanted to get done.  One of which was getting the treadmill the neighbor was giving us into the house in the spare bedroom.  In order to do this we needed to do something with my mom’s daybed that has resided there since she moved out of our place.  On Easter we tried to talk mom into putting the day bed in her second bedroom but then the issue with the existing, landlord provided twin beds created a roadblock.  Mom said I could just take the daybed apart and put the parts in the garage, shed or attic but doing so would surely warp and damage the wood in some way.  The week prior Ali was all excited after working on the room a bit and coming up with the plans to make room for the treadmill.  After leaving mom’s she had pretty much given up on the idea.  Well I always hate to see Ali disappointed so I planned to address the issue after rolling several plans of action through my head during the day.

So even though I was exhausted from a day of fence building I ripped into the spare bedroom with wrench and socket set in hand.  I took the day bed apart and then propped it all against the far wall.  It at least took up far less room this way.  I had to move around a bunch of other stuff as well but I eventually I had a space where a treadmill could go.  Ali repeatedly told me to just relax, that it didn’t need to be done right now.  I told her I wanted to be able to sleep that night.  So now we had to get the treadmill to our house.  We drove the truck next door to load the treadmill into.  Getting the treadmill out of their house was quite challenging.  Several doorways left us a fraction of an inch clearance. We managed to get it out the front door without damaging the walls thank goodness.

The plan was to load the treadmill into the truck and drive it over, however this thing was quite heavy and getting it into the truck with just Ali and would have probably resulted in us damaging it in some manner. Ali came up with a simple yet strange idea, I should just wheel it to our house.  After weighing any other options I agreed that would the the simplest choice although slightly unconventional.  So I start pulling the treadmill down the neighbors driveway and out onto the main road.  I hoped no vehicles came during my brief road trip but was not so lucky.  A couple cars drove by.  I did not look into the vehicles to see the weird stares at the strange man pulling a treadmill down the street.  I made a right turn onto our driveway and got the unit up to the front door.  Getting it into our house wasn’t too bad, easier than getting it out of the neighbors place.  We slid it into the spare bedroom and it fit with a couple feet to spare.  Ali got on it for a quick test and all was well, it survived it’s trip out onto the roadway.  Having the treadmill will make it far easier and convenient for Ali to keep up with her running.  I am sure I will use it quite a bit myself. 

My thirst for getting things done wasn’t quenched quite yet.  I decided to tackle the stupid automatic litter box.  This new model has been a disaster, jamming constantly with cat excrement.  I told Ali I would just pull the good old fashioned litter box out of the shed and use that.  I scooped litter for the past decade, it is simpler than having to babysit the “automatic” unit.  So I disassembled and dumped the litter out of the new box and set up the “manual” box.  The manual box is a lot deeper so it will do a better job of containing the mess.  I left the new box out in the garage in pieces, in the hopes that Ali will clean it up and try to return it for a refund even though we threw out the box.  I know she isn’t looking forward to it.  Finally my manic Monday of work had come to an end.  I slept better that night, still waking up quite a few times but at least able to fall back asleep quickly when I did.

Tuesday I was up and out the door early before 8 am.  I had to go back out to the place we got the fencing from.  I had miscalculated in the number of 8 foot posts and was one short.  I also needed to get another roll of brace wire and some gate hinge pins.  It was quite chilly Tuesday morning, right around 50 degrees.  Any other day I would be less than thrilled with such temperatures but on a fence building day it was more than welcomed.

I only had the power auger rented until 1pm so I wanted to use it to dig the four remaining holes for the big 8 footers in the back corner.  By the time I got those in it was a bit after 10.  I hosed off the auger, threw it in the truck and had Nicki accompany me on the trip to Home Depot to return it. On the way there I had to stop for gas.  As I did I noticed the self storage facility near by.  I decided on a whim to check it out, my thoughts being that with a small storage box we could throw the day bed in there along with anything else that we didn’t know what to do with.  I knew I would have to get climate controlled storage because of the furniture which costs more.

So I pop in and tell the girl at the desk I was just sort of looking for basic rate information. Well all of a sudden the place morphed into a car dealership.  The girl wants to know what size I am looking for and what price range.  When she presented me the numbers I cringed.  She immediately said she would talk to her manager and see what she could do.  In seconds she came back with a rate 25% lower.  WTF?  I never imagined someone would be trying to hard sell me storage space.  I again told the girl I was just getting some information and was not going to make a decision at that moment.  She handed me her card and said the “deal” was good till the end of the month.  Geez she should be selling Chevy’s, not boxes.  When I relayed the idea to Ali she shot it down.  She wasn’t interested in paying $600 a year to store a bed.

After getting back from Home Depot I quickly laid down sod I bought to cover the area we raised on Sunday then it was straight to doing line posts.  I came up with a system that worked pretty well.  I laid out the line posts every 10 feet first so I wouldn’t have to be stopping to measure each post I put in.  After that I would dig the hole, step back and close an eye to visually line it up with the posts behind it the best I could.  After that I would push a bit of dirt in the hole to secure the post while I used the level to plumb it.  Then I would tamp down the dirt, add more dirt, tamp some more, dirt, tamp, dirt tamp, until the hole was filled.  I finished off by giving it a good foot stomping.  Getting the posts lined up exactly was nearly impossible due to the undulating ground and the less than symetrical line posts.  Many of them had curves and bends in them.  I had to f with them quite a bit to minimize the effect of the twists.  I got all the line posts to the middle H set and then jumped to the other side and got another 6 or 7 in the ground before calling it quits around 6:30.  I was just plain wore out.  Even though the temperature was great, right around 70, driving the post hole digger into and out of the ground hundreds of times is quite tiring.  Shortly after the time Ali got home from work I was in the shower and ready for bed.   Ali was impressed with what I got done and said it looked great.  I knew it wasn’t perfect but it was pretty darn good in my opinion.  I hope to knock out more line posts after work during the week.

It was a tough four days but a rewarding time period as well as I slowly see the project taking form.  Busting ass on the fence project for a few days doesn’t compare with roaming the country and surviving in the the Alaska wilderness for three months but it did succeed in making me feel a bit more alive at least.  The virtual/cyber related events in my life just don’t compare to getting out there, getting dirty and building something with your own two hands.