Bricks, stroke of luck, high bar construction, pay cut

Ali was very excited that on Saturday morning she didn’t have to get up early.  It was the first time in quite awhile that she didn’t have to get up early to either work, run or swim.  I let her stay in bed while I started on chores.  Knowing Ali was going to be leaving Saturday afternoon made me want to get as much done as early as I could.  I even treated Ali to breakfast in bed during a break in the action.

Ali did come out later and run the tractor while I weed whacked the property which was nice.  It was one less thing I would have had to do.

Once Ali left my work continued but first I wanted to quickly buzz my hair.  I pulled the rugs and shelf out of the guest bathroom and did the deed in front of the mirror.  Working the clippers in this way was much easier than some of my past efforts trying to do the same thing while looking at the viewfinder of a camcorder.  I did a pretty solid job if I do say so myself.

I then loaded the girls up in the van to go get some more small project supplies.  I needed new brackets for the collapsed garage shelf and some gutter sealer.

The shelf that collapsed was 6 feet long.  It originally only had three supports.  This time I went with the “2 foot rule”, installing a total of 4 brackets to support the shelf.  It now should be able to hold more weight although the pool chemicals were already relocated to a new permanent home on the industrial strength wire shelf unit.

I then pulled out the ladder and headed up onto the roof with my two tubes of gutter sealer.  My plan was to use it to seal up the new super screws that were leaking instead of reinstalling the rusty original screws.  I had plenty of sealer left so I headed around the roofline and gooped up other seams in the gutter that I knew had leaking problems.  I had a close call when I momentarily felt my balance tip towards the ground below when I was getting up from the highly pitched roof angle.  Luckily I was able to reverse my direction before it was too late.

My work on Saturday was pretty relentless, in addition to the projects described I attended to various indoor duties like floor sweeping, counter cleaning, laundry and dishes.  I wanted my Sunday to be pretty clear of “must do’s”

I decided even though Ali was not around it shouldn’t stop me from doing a brick on Sunday.  I drove down to the water park and did a bike/run/swim.  I pulled my best average pace ever for the Livingston Road ride, keeping an average pace of 19 mph even following Randall’s rules of timing where you don’t stop the GPS unless the bike stops moving.

It was hot and humid as hell so I decided to keep my run short, the same 2 miles that I did the week before.  I picked up the pace though, knocking over a minute off the time it took me to run the course last week.  My 1200 meter swim was pretty decent too. I was finished up a little after 11 and wasn’t feeling starved so I decided to forgo the normal pizza/fries lunch and instead just eat a healthier lunch when I got home.

You may recall that last week I had to abandon my high bar project because of high ground water levels.  I had resigned myself that short of a miraculous dry spell, the project was going to be postponed until the fall.  Well believe it or not, we went through the entire week with minimal rain.

I thought I would head out with the post hole digger and dig a new exploratory hole to see how deep I could go. I was pretty pumped when I got three feet deep before the hole started getting wet.  Now with my original 15 foot pipe section three feet would not be deep enough, but I thought that if I shortened the section by a foot or so I should be ok.

So I removed the three foot section of pipe and took the girls with to Lowes to exchange it for hopefully a 2 footer.  Lowes didn’t have any 2 foot sections in stock so I opted for an 18 inch section and a 4 inch section.  It turned out I just needed the 18 incher.  While I was there I also bought the biggest slip joint pliers they had to allow me to really crank the pipe tightly into the couplers.

On the way to Lowes I pass a Chrysler dealer.  Last week when I went there I saw they had a used Inferno Orange Camaro in the front of the lot.  Well I saw the car was still there this week so I parked quickly to take a peek, maybe there was deal to be had?

As I walked towards the Camaro I passed by a SRT Challenger.  I had to stop and admire it, it is a damn good looking car.  They really did a nice job of catching the aura of the original 70’s supercar.  The good looks come at a massive price, this thing stickered at $49k and change.

The Camaro only had 7,000 miles on it but it was missing a couple things that I would want like a 6 speed, the 2SS techno goodies and a top that folds down.  The price seemed a bit high for a 2010 model even with the low mileage, they wanted almost $32k for it.

So when I got home I immediately set to work on completing the high bar project.  I put the 18 inch and 4 inch section on the vertical part of the project and stuck it in the hole to see how close it was in height to the pressure treated mounting pad on the shed.  It was too high.  It looked like if I removed the 4 inch section it would be just about perfect so that is what I did.

I attached the elbow and horizontal section to the bar and again raised it into place.  Trying to manipulate the fully assembled pipe was much more challenging.  I was excited that it lined up almost perfectly right off the bat.

I took out my level and made sure both my vertical and horizontal spans were as close to level as possible.  I had to sink the pipe just a little further.  I did so by grabbing on and using my body weight as an anchor to pull it down into the wet sand just a bit further.

I made several trips up and down the ladder making sure everything was aligned.  I kicked a small amount of sand into the hole to stabilize the pole position a bit before climbing on the ladder again to screw the flange in place.  I drilled pilot holes in the wood to minimize the potential for it splitting later before driving four 3″ wood screws into the flange to secure the high point of the bar.

The skies had been getting progressively more menacing as time was passing.  By the time I was ready to cement in the base of the bar there were dark clouds all around me with rumbling of thunder.  Well despite working on what was essentially an 11 foot tall lightning rod, I was not going to abort the project at this point.

I quickly ripped open an 80 and 50 pound bag of concrete and back filled the hole, alternating between filling the hole with water, pouring some cement, adding more water, etc… until the hole was filled.   As I was finishing up the storm was basically right at our doorstep.  As I was putting the tools away the first few drops of rain started to fall, followed by a downpour.  I thought it was quite ironic that the summer rain waited until just after I finished to let loose.

I am curious how sturdy this new bar will be.  By it’s design it is definitely not meant to be swung back and forth on violently.  However it should be fine for supporting elevated up and down pulling movements.  I will throw my rings up on it this week to see how it holds up.  Compared to my pull up bar station, construction of the high bar was simple.  As a bonus I don’t have to worry about the wood warping which has already started on both the pull up station and the parallel bars.

Finished high bar

For those of you looking for the materials used in this project they are as follows:

(All pipe 1.25″ INNER diameter galvanized)
Two 6 foot sections
One 18 inch section
One 5 foot section (horizontal span)
One threaded flange
Two couplers
One 90 degree elbow
One piece of pressure treated 2″x6″
High quality 3″ deck screws
130 pounds of high strength cement

I will offer up a performance report of the new high bar as soon as I get a chance to hang up there. If you would like to see all of the pictures I took for the project you can see them here.

From High bar construction, posted by Shawn Duffey on 7/11/2011 (10 items)

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The last thing on my “must do” list for the weekend was to pay the bills, something I NEVER do anymore.

For the first 5 or 6 years of our marriage I was the bill payer.  I brought an organized bill paying / budget system into the marriage that I actually picked up from my ex-mother in law of all people.  At some point I turned this responsibility over to Ali, I believe it was an effort to spread out household duties more evenly.

Ali has fine tuned and tweaked the process since she took over but it still follows the same general format we always did so I didn’t have to much trouble grabbing the financial reins once again.  Doing the bills put a big ugly spotlight on the end result of Rick Scott’s assault on the state employees.

You see this was the first paycheck of mine that reflected the new pension changes.  As a result I now have approximately $200 less coming in each and every month.  When you team this up with my salary being stagnant for three years and counting it is a rather large and bitter pill to follow.

I posted this on the Facebook page for a group that has been reporting on all of the shenanigans.

Well the new pension “reform” just started hit this last pay period. Anyone want to chime in how much less they are now taking home? I am out at least a couple weeks of groceries each month. Thanks Rick, so glad you targeted state workers that have in many cases gone without a raise for half a decade as a logical source to “tax” to fix a pension system that was not broken.

The idea of getting my pay cut to meet his political agenda has always angered me greatly.  Now that the end result of that agenda is actually grabbing dollars from my pocket that anger is amplified.

Ali returns Wednesday afternoon, leaving me to steer the ship alone for a couple more days.  The weekend went well I expect smooth sailing until she returns.