Go away Fay, personal hurricane

This is going to be brief as I have my own data hurricane to deal with.  Evidently whatever happened to my hosted web files that reset all of their permissions also went in and appended bullshit code to all of my .htm/.hml files as well as many of my PHP files. I am not quite sure how I am going to fix it all.  It is a f’ing mess.

The weekend was extremely busy.  Even though Ali really helped out by knocking out some of the chores early, I had other things to do to replace them.  After weed whacking Saturday morning I headed to Home Depot to buy paint for the door/trim as well as some other stuff.  On a whim I thought I would look at lawn sweepers since this time of year every grass cutting results in huge piles of cut grass piled on top of the thick sections of our lawn.  I was amazed when I stumbled across a John Deere Lawn Sweeper that normally sells for $299 marked down to $175.  It was meant to be.  After getting the green light from Ali I loaded the huge box onto a flat bed.

I then headed over to the paint department and got a quick lesson in paint.  Originally I figured I would be getting one can of paint to do both the stucco trim on the front of the house and the door since they are painted the same color.  I also figured I would need primer for the door part of the job.  Well I was wrong on both counts.  I wound up getting special masonry/cement paint for the stucco that is designed to cover up hairline cracks and stretch to prevent them from reappearing.  Then I got a small can of paint for the door area that had the primer built into it which eliminated the need to primer separately.   My biggest concern was having the two different paints match but the clerk said it should match just fine.

Once I got home I dug into assembling the lawn sweeper. Whew, it was a long process that seemed longer as I was doing it in the middle of the driveway, baking in the sun.  It probably took me and hour and a half to get it all together.  Once it was assembled I had Ali come out to do the first test run.  It worked GREAT.  It ripped through the clumps of grass with no problems, throwing them into the big catch bin.  It’s a cool design that allows you to empty it without even getting off the mower.  We had a couple near disasters during the testing where Ali didn’t think of the dangers of running over the extension cords we have down in the grass.  In a split second the sweeper had sucked up the cord and wrapped it around the brushes.  That took awhile to sort out.   The bottom line is it is an awesome tool to help our lawn look nice.

My Sunday was filled with painting, lots of painting.  I put 3 coats of paint on the door area and two on the stucco.  When I started painting the stucco I immediately noticed that the paint was considerably lighter in color than what was there even though we matched up the existing color with a swatch of color.  It was light enough that it was hard to discern the difference between the bare walls and trim.  Thankfully after two coats and allowing it to dry it darkened up enough to again see a contrast.  The stucco paint also did a great job of masking any cracks that were present.  It makes me anxious to repaint the entire house with the stuff.

I was involved with the painting for the majority of the day.  After that we did some hurricane prep, picking up loose items and cleaning off the patio.  Even though our neighbor across the street put up his shutters we elected not to.  The forecast track for this thing has shifted left and right a number of times and depending on what the final track is, we could have some substantial wind or wind that is on par with our summer thunderstorms.  I just hope I am not being overly optimistic by not putting up the shutters.  2005 proved to me that hurricane forecasters really are just making semi-educated guesses.  We also could get lots of rain with Fay.  If we get the 4-8 inches they say is possible our entire property minus the mound the house is on will be underwater.  I’m sure this will be 24 hours of drama. Yay.