Weekend work, right is the new left, tractor hell

I left work a little early on Friday for my trek across state to Jeremy and Mandy’s place in Boca Raton.  The truck was loaded down with my pressure washer, my extension ladder and a bunch of other stuff.  I had my tri-fold bed cover in the open position.  Well once I got up to highway speeds I noticed it was catching wind like a sail, despite the two clips that are used to keep it closed.  I had scenarios in my head where the straps break and my cover goes flying off along I-75.

I had a couple 25 pound weight plates in the back of my truck which I was using to add weight to the front of the ladder.  I grabbed one of them and plopped it on top of the cover to keep it down.  The weight was enough to keep it down even at 75 mph.

Having the bed exposed with the pressure washer in the back definitely affected gas mileage, the gas gauge was dropping faster than normal.

Once again Jeremy ordered pizza for dinner per my request.  This time he got a large which was better suited for our hungry man appetites.  Plus we had a bunch of work ahead of us.

The reason I had the pressure washer and ladder along was to clean out the gutter area around Jeremy’s pool.  He had described the scope of work to me.  I believe he said at one point “I don’t think it will be too bad”  Haha, it wasn’t too good either.

It looked to me like whomever built the pool did some miscalculations with the gutter installation.  The gutter along the roof line is too low and too narrow to catch the water if there was a real heavy rain.  Their solution was a rig job.  They cut a gutter section apart and made a crude splash guard that attached to the outer edge of the gutter and laid on top of the pool cage.

Over the years this splash guard caused tons of organic material to get trapped underneath it, pinned between the guard and the pool cage.  It was this material that Jeremy initially wanted to get out.  Well once I got up onto the roof and looked around  the job scope got bigger.

The house has a terracotta roof.  There were a number of tiles that had some hairline cracks in them.  Navigating the roof required careful placement of your body weight.  I didn’t want to break a roof tile in the process.  Once I got up there I saw that the gutter itself was PACKED with sludge.  It had to get cleaned out.

There were some other issues that came to light once we got up high.  The gutters did not drain well.  They were not installed in a manner that routed water to the downspouts on either side.  To compound the issue the holes that were cut for the downspout were ridiculously small, making it very easy to clog them.

I warned Jeremy that blasting out the gutters was going to be a very messy job, there was going to be a LOT of junk flying everywhere, including into the pool.  He knew there was no away around that so he gave me the all clear.

The pressure washer did a nice job of blowing the junk out but with the splash guard contraption in place it was blowing a lot of the junk on top of the screening where it would eventually just find it’s way trapped under the guard.  I suggested to Jeremy that we just remove the guards, they were only held in place by a few screws.  I told him removing the guards would mean that during a hard rain some rain will drop in the pool off the roof but I thought it was the lesser of two evils compared to having a clogged gutter with junk lodged under the splash guard. Jeremy took my advice, I removed the guards.

Once the guards were off I resumed cleaning the gutters.  The power washer had pushed the solids all towards the one end.  I decided I would just scoop the gunk out with my hand to minimize how much gunk would get blown onto the cage.  After getting most of the organic material out I resumed using the pressure washer to get out the residue.

In addition to the gunk in the gutters issue there were a few spots around the pool cage where the spline had pulled out.  I did my best to get it all back in place.  There were a few spots that were along the roof line, these were very challenging.

Jeremy’s house has a VERY high roof.  As a result it also has a very steep pitch.  In order to re-spline the screen I had to lay spread eagle with my head pointing downward.  I wanted to maximize the surface contact my body had with the roof to minimize my chance to slide off and drop through the pool cage.  It was a very delicate and awkward procedure but I was able to manage.

Jeremy and I worked into total darkness on the area.  By the time we were done the pool cage looked much better.  The same couldn’t be said of the pool that had a layer of crud in it, something the pool vacuum took care of.

Jeremy and I returned inside both wet and dirty but proud of the end result of our labor.  Before we got too comfortable Jeremy reminded me there was another furniture moving project yet, woops I forgot.

I brought over my furniture sliders for this project and they helped a ton.  We moved an old two piece china cabinet that was very heavy.  The sliders made the job much more manageable, especially once we got onto the tile in the main living area.

Finally the work was done and we could relax a bit.  Mandy made a really tasty blueberry sorbet that we all enjoyed.  Before I hopped in the shower Jeremy took a few minutes to introduce me to the world of hardcore online poker.

Jeremy is a VERY good poker player.  I have screwed around with Texas Hold Em enough to know the basic rules but I am a complete novice.  In a few seconds Jeremy was playing online at 5 tables simultaneously.  As he deftly jumped from table to table making instant decisions about the various games he explained some of the minutia about what he was doing.  It was enough to make my head spin.

The scariest thing of all is he said that at times he can be playing as many as 20 tables at once.  It just seemed beyond comprehension to me, not to mention mentally exhausting.  During the quick session Jeremy made an easy $40 preying on some “fish”.  He explained to me that a FISH is a player that has a big wad of chips and poor playing skills.  Taking his money is like going fishing.  A “donkey” is another player with equally poor skills and a small chip stack.

I was pretty beat.  I took a shower to wash the grime off and hit the sack.

Saturday I had my alarm set for 6AM.  I inadvertently woke up Jeremy when I was out on the lanai inspecting our handy work in the daylight.  The tournament was only 15-20 minutes from Jeremy’s place so even with leaving at 7:40 we still got on site on time.

We checked in and found our spot on the beach.  We saw Randall coming down the beach towards us after we got situated.  Randall decided to play in the tournament last minute.  Earlier in the week I told him I was playing with Jeremy.  He seemed disinterested at the time and said maybe he would swing by and take a few pics.

Well somehow that plan changed last minute.  Randall grabbed Tabby, a solid A player to play with him.  He followed up with a Facebook onslaught of trash talk that I mostly avoided intentionally as I knew that would annoy him more than anything I could say. I did however make some provisions the day before.

When I grabbed groceries for the tournament I also picked up a sympathy card.  Jeremy and I signed the card Friday night and sealed it.  The plan was if we planned Randall and beat him we would give him the card, a great jab in the ribs. Anyway we greeted Randall in a warm and friendly manner with no hint of our desire to beat him, badly.

Jeremy and I had only played in a tournament once before several years ago with limited success.  He had not played a single beach tournament in 2010.  My recent track record at tournaments had been nothing short of pathetic so needless to say I did not have very high expectations.

I also agreed to do something I never do on the volleyball court, play the right side.  I have pretty much always played the left side in doubles, it just feels natural for me.  Well Jeremy really dislikes playing the right so I said I would play it.  I figured I couldn’t do any worse, why not try it?

Our first match was against two young guys, one graduated high school a couple years ago, the other graduated this year.  They both played on the same high school volleyball team.  One was the outside hitter and the other the setter.

They were good at controlling the ball.  Jeremy and I struggled a bit, making a number of unforced errors.  The kids beat us pretty easily 25-16.  Oh well, here we go again.

We only had a 4 team net.  If we wanted any chance of making the playoffs we HAD to win our next match.  We were playing two older guys, probably in my age range.  I reffed their first match, both guys seemed solid but not spectacular.

We played better against these guys and got up to pretty large lead midway through the game.  However then we started to struggle a bit.  You could feel the tension level start to ratchet up as our lead kept dwindling. At one point our 7-8 point lead was trimmed to 2 or 3.

Up until this point in the tournament my hitting was poor once again.  My timing was bad, I wasn’t hitting with any sort of authority and I was just struggling.  Well on the last point of the second game I hit a ball hard on a set that was in the middle.  It actually felt good. That hit was a turning point for me.

In my normal beach hit I would typically pass the ball (hopefully well) and then angle my approach to the net in a left to right manner.  I typically liked my sets on the inside so I would need to angle pretty significantly to get to the set. Well that causes problems.

First of all you are playing on the beach where there is wind, sometimes significant wind.  Often the set will get blown around.  If you start your approach thinking the ball is going to be in one spot and it suddenly winds up a couple feet in another direction you have to basically stop your approach and start it again.  Well I am too old/ too slow to do that effectively.  I also NEED an approach to get a good swing at the ball.  I can’t just stand in place, jump up and expect to get anything on a hit.

Well that last hit in the second match I started in the middle of the court and approached the hit more or less straight instead of at an angle.  Doing this helped me several ways.  It was much easier to drift a little right or a little left to hit as opposed to having to stop and change directions abruptly.  It also kept the ball in clear view, out in front of me making hitting much easier.  The rest of the day my hitting was much improved.

Our third match was against a team of two fish that had no business being on the court.  We stomped them 25-7 without really trying. So we had made the playoffs, a nice feather in our caps.

Once the other BB nets finished up (3 of them) the playoff seeds were set.  Our first match was against Randall and Tabby!  Randall had an up and down day with some spots of both good play and bad but they got off their net as the second team.  We were the second team on our net as well.

This match was our Super Bowl, Jeremy and I wanted to win badly. We had visions of just how perfect it would be to hand Randall the sympathy card afterwards, now all we had to do was win.

Early on the match was pretty back and forth with both teams siding out.  About midway in Jeremy and strung a bunch of points together and opened up a sizeable lead.  When we were sitting at 19-11 (game to 21) we pretty much knew we had the victory locked up.  The final score was 21-13.

Jeremy and I kept our celebration mild.  We were both proud to have won convincingly, especially with the added pressure of having the sympathy card waiting in the bag.  Once we made our way back to the tent we handed Randall the card.

He was like “WTF?”  he opens his sympathy card and had no choice but to laugh, it was damn funny.  It’s something he wished he thought of himself no doubt.   He was good natured enough about the loss although I know he wanted to win as badly as we did.  We tried to not rub it in too hard.

Even though the victory over Randall was all we really could ask for, we had more volleyball to play.  Our semi-finals match was against another pair of skilled indoor players.  Jeremy and I really played consistently that game and took care of them rather easily, paving our path to the finals.

If you would have told me that we would be playing in the finals on Saturday I would have asked if I could smoke some of what you were smoking, yet there we were.

Ironically we were playing in the finals against the only team that beat us, the young guys from our net.  They managed to carve through their playoff opponents to set up the rematch.

Randall was in good enough spirits to offer to tape our finals match which was nice.  The finals unfortunately didn’t go all that well.  Jeremy and I didn’t play bad but the kids played better.  They dinked the hell out of us placing balls deep if we were short and short if we were deep with great precision.  They were both very fast so it was not easy scoring points, they chased down a lot of balls. We wound up losing in the finals 21-14.

Despite the loss I was still in very good spirits.  How could I not be?  The day went much better than I had hoped.  After collecting our 2nd place prizes, a t-shirt and sand socks, we headed back to the tent where Randall conducted a post game interview.  As is the norm in our videos, the commentary was more entertaining than the action.

Eventually we packed up, said our goodbyes to Randall and headed back to Jeremy’s place.  I was anxious to get back on the road and back home.  I thanked Jeremy and  Mandy for their hospitality and said goodbye to heir adorable little boy Connor.  I was back in my driveway in about two hours.

I told Ali of our adventures, she was proud that we did so well.  She had been very busy herself all day, doing lots of stuff around the house to minimize what I would need to do on Sunday which I greatly appreciated.  As I did a physical inventory while washing the sandy grit off in the shower I realized I came out of the event basically unscarred.  Besides normal soreness my problem areas like the knees and shoulder felt fine, that’s awesome.  I was also very glad that the off and on lethargy I had been feeling did not creep into my body at all during the previous 24 hours.

Sunday morning the first thing I did was rip off the volleyball video and dump it to youtube. I knew Jeremy and others would be anxious to see it.  After that I decided to do some tractor work.  I was excited to see that all of the parts I ordered for it showed up on Saturday. I had grand ideas of getting everything installed and being able to actually mow grass later in the day.

So I first started with putting the new mower deck together.  I opened up one of the spindles.  I immediately noticed that the spindle did not have the dust caps installed over the bearings, instead they were just laying in the bag.  I opened the other spindle and that one had the dust caps installed correctly. Grrrr.

Well my fears were confirmed once I installed the spindles.  The one that was sans dust caps had a much higher friction level than the other one.  Presumably the lack of dust caps allowed the bearings to dry out while it sat in storage for who knows how long, great……  Well I could either hope this doesn’t present a problem or once again contact the place I got it and send it back.  I opted for the latter.  If I am going to spend all of this money and time on the tractor I want the parts to be in good working condition.

I installed whatever else I could on the deck until I moved to part two, replacing the transmission belt.  I was already frustrated enough by the spindle problem.  In retrospect my level of frustration was about to increase tenfold.

I have replaced many belts. Mower belts and most recently van serpentine belts are on the list.  Well the transmission belt on a Cub Cadet took things to a new level.  I looked up the procedure in the owners manual and immediately dismissed it.  First the manual said I needed an air/impact wrench.  I have a compressor and an impact wrench but I hardly use it.  The compressor I got off ebay seems pretty shitty.  I have had poor luck using it to do stuff like remove lug nuts.  I figured if it couldn’t do that it would be pretty useless in the tractor repair too.  I further dismissed the instructions when it talked about removing a battery tray that was supposedly under the seat.  My tractor has the battery in the engine compartment.

The transmission belt is in an extremely bad spot, tucked up tight to the body under a bunch of stuff.  I struggled mightily to gain access to the belt with no success.  I turned to the internet for assistance and found some advice that seemed extreme, unbolt the motor.  Not only did I unbolt the motor, I unbolted the muffler, a piece of the suspension and anything else I thought could possibly get me access to the damn belt.  I was so frustrated, I had wasted my entire morning f’ing around with the damn tractor.  Tools and various tractor parts were strewn about the floor  of the garage as a testament to my nightmare.

Then shortly before going inside to eat lunch I said f it, I might as well try my impact wrench.  I fired up the compressor, put my 5/8″  socket on and squeezed the trigger on the bolt holding the pulley on.  It popped right off!  Mother f I couldn’t believe it.  I had tried turning the bolt off with my socket but was unable to get it to break loose.  Evidently the quick and sudden force of an impact wrench was exactly what was needed. If I only tried that 3 hours ago.

After lunch I went back outside and was able to complete the belt install in short order although in retrospect I still would have needed to unbolt the motor.  I put everything back together and fired it up.  At first I panicked when I stepped on the pedal and nothing happened. I quickly realized I still had the tranny disengage lever pulled.  After I released it the tractor was once again moving under it’s own power.

I had Ali to come out to test the clutch that engages the PTO while I laid down and looked.  That worked correctly as well.  So at this point all I need is a spindle and I should be back in the mowing business.  I certainly have become well versed in advanced tractor maintenance in the process.

I was really burned out by the time all the tractor crap was over.  My weekend was quite full of energy expenditures already.  Despite this I found more to do.  Ali and I worked in the garden a bit.  We had to thin the corn which has come in fast and furious.  Instead of throwing out perfectly good plants we tried to transplant them to open spots in the garden to give them a chance to grow.  We also thinned out beets and onions.

We harvested our first ever watermelon from the garden. We may have harvested it a bit early but we were afraid that if we left it out much longer the bugs would destroy our prize. We have attempted to grow watermelons several times but never were successful.  Usually the bugs and/or excessive rain killed them.  We actually have three melons growing, hopefully we get to enjoy them all.

Another first is our blueberry harvest.  Again we have tried to grow them before unsuccessfully.  So far we have probably picked a couple dozen perfect blueberries.

Ali has been on a roll lately with cooking.  When I got back Saturday night she made a really good Boboli pizza.  It tasted great and was healthy as well with a wheat crust and a ton of vegetables.  On Sunday she made a real tasty dish with potatoes, egg and more vegetables.

I got to do my first full run with the recently repaired Scooba.  My repair held up just fine.  Replacing the cleaning module and squeegees made a dramatic difference in the amount of the water it siphoned up.  I dumped much more than normal out of the dirty water tank.

Bed felt good last night, it was a tough but satisfying weekend.