Tag Archives: front sidewalk and stairs

2014/08/03 (N) Birthdays

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Madeline slept well again last night.  She was awake before 7 AM this morning but still a little tired.  Linda warmed her bottle and gave it to her.  She stretched out in Linda’s lap to drink her bottle.  She’s a busy girl and a good eater and is usually up and active as soon as the bottle is done, but this morning she stayed quietly in Linda’s arms for almost 45 minutes playing with her (own) hair and carrying on a conversation.  I think Madeline really likes her Grandma Linda.  I know Linda enjoyed being able to hold her for that long.

Madeline likes her hat and her chair!

Madeline likes her hat and her chair!

The Howell Farmer’s Market opened at 9 AM and we decided to go there and stroll around.  We stayed about an hour and bought a couple of onions and several different dried fruits.  Madeline was curious about everything she saw including a woman playing the guitar and singing.  The Howell Farmer’s Market always has musical entertainment.

Back at the house Linda played with Madeline while I raked out the part of the pull-through driveway the landscapers tore up (as best I could) and then compacted it using the Honda Element (as best I could).  Madeline positioned her little plastic Adirondack chair by the front door and watched me work.  I then started the main engine on the bus, let it air up, and moved it forward about eight feet, but stopped short of the disturbed area.  I reset the parking brake, put it in high idle, turned on the over-the-road air-conditioning, and let it run for 30 minutes to get the engine up to operating temperature.  I then turned off the A-C, let it high idle for a couple of minutes, dropped the idle down for another minute, and shut everything down.  It is not good for big diesel engines to be started up and then shut down before coming up to operating temperature and is not good to shut them down with giving them a few minutes to cool down and let the head temperatures fully equalize and the turbo to spin down.

That's some sunflower.

That’s some sunflower.

Brendan, Shawna, Chris, and Meghan were due to arrive around 3 PM, so there was no way for us to work in the garage while Madeline napped and still have time to get cleaned up.  Madeline laid down for her nap a little ahead of schedule.  While she was napping Linda cut my hair and then prepped the ingredients for a porcini mushroom quinoa risotto while I got cleaned up in preparation for company.  Linda was done prepping dinner by 2 PM and then got ready for company.

At the Howell Farmers Market.

At the Howell Farmers Market.

Madeline awoke just before 3 PM and Linda had her up and dressed in her new Winnie-the-Pooh jumper before everyone arrived a short time later.  Within the span of 15 minutes she suddenly had a house full of admirer’s and had a very engaged and energetic afternoon.

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Linda, Meghan, Madeline, Shawna, and Brendan (new steps and sidewalk).

Dinner consisted of a salad, the quinoa risotto, and roasted Brussels sprouts.  The salad was good and everyone liked the risotto; most of us had seconds.  Meghan pronounced the Brussels sprouts roasted to perfection.  The outer layers were crisp like kale chips and the insides were soft without being mushy.  We had fresh strawberries and coconut milk ice cream for dessert.  Chris’ daughter, Katie, was unable to attend because she was “up north” with her mom/family, but it was nice to have the rest of our immediate family gathered for dinner.

Linda, Shawna, and Chris on the front porch (new steps and sidewalk).

Linda, Shawna, and Chris on the front porch (new steps and sidewalk).

There was more vigorous playing after dinner but eventually everyone had to leave.  Once they were gone I picked up toys while Linda loaded the dishwasher and then we relaxed on the deck for a while.  Sometime during the day a “Check Tel Line” message appeared on our phone and we did not have a dial tone.  I decided we should do something about it before we settled in to watch an episode of Doc Martin.  The procedure required us to open the Network Interface Box, unplug the house from the AT&T line, wait 60 seconds for a reset, and then plug in a known good telephone to check for a dial tone.  We have a couple of old phones (not cordless) but could not find them, so we took our cordless base station out and used it.  The problem was definitely somewhere in the AT&T system, not our house.  We filed an online trouble report and were told the problem would be fixed between now and Friday at 6 PM.  We turned in and watched Doc Martin, which we streamed via our AT&T DSL connection without difficulty.

 

2014/08/01 (F) Schmoo Returns

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(Note:  I have posted two photo galleries dated August 1, 2014, one for the front sidewalk and stairs project and one for the rear retaining walls and drain lines project.)

We took a break from personal construction projects today to get ready for another 2-night sleepover by our grand-daughter Madeline.  Her folks (our son and daughter-in-law) needed to do some painting on their rental house over the weekend and the most efficient use of their time was for Brendan to bring Madeline to our house late this morning.  That allowed him to return to Ann Arbor to work on their front porch this afternoon and will let them get an early start on Saturday morning and work as late as they want/need to.  It will also give them the option to work on Sunday morning if needed before coming to our house for dinner and to retrieve their daughter.  Brendan and Shawna both have birthdays in early August, and Brendan’s happens to be on Sunday.  Our daughter (Meghan) and her husband (Chris) will join the celebration gathering.

The landscapers were here early for what they hoped would be their last day on this job.  Linda left early to do some grocery shopping and was back well before Brendan and Madeline arrived or I had to leave for my dermatology appointment.  I got back on my computer for the first time since Monday, checked e-mails, off-loaded photographs from our digital SLR, and installed updates on four WordPress websites.

Today was also the first day to log in to edX and start the free Introduction to Linux course, but I did not have time to deal with that.  The course is self-paced and should take 40 – 60 hours to complete.  I would like to spend two hours each day on this and have it completed by September 1st.  The timing has turned out not to be that good, but I am under no obligation to take/finish the course; it’s simply a free opportunity that I would like to take advantage of while it is available.

I left for my doctor’s appointment with time to spare and ended up needing it.  There is a lot of road and utility construction going on in our area and I did not have a good way out.  I still made it on time, but not by much.  I did not have to wait very long to see Elizabeth, the dermatology PA.  I got a thorough looking over and a clean bill of health.

On the return trip from the clinic I stopped at Teeko’s to get some coffee.  Jeff had the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe in both regular and decaffeinated, so I got our usual 50/50 blend.  He was out of Sweet Dreams (a decaf blend) that I have him mix 50/50 with his Seattle Blend to make Sweet Seattle Dreams.  He did, however, have the Seattle Blend in decaf so I got a 50/50 regular/decaf mix.

Madeline was still napping when I got home.  Linda said she fell asleep a little later than normal so she let her sleep until 4:30 PM.  Once awake, she was go go go right through dinner until bedtime.

Steve (Village Landscape Development) worked on the front sidewalk in the morning, laying rectangular brick pavers in a herringbone pattern and then cutting it all the way around for border bricks.  He finished placing boulders on either side of the top steps by the front porch and had one of his crew mix up a small batch of concrete and place it along the two long/free edges.  Another crew member finished grading out the soil on either side of the sidewalk, spread grass seed, and covered it with straw.

Steve, Linda, and I did a walk-around, and the project has come together very nicely except for the leaking drain line(s).  Steve spent much of afternoon digging in very muddy conditions and ultimately unearthed about 30 feet of plastic drain line that was punctured or completely crushed.  He replaced what he believed was all of the damaged line, but until we put water down them we won’t really know.  They were not able to finish the grading because the clay soil was so wet that it was unworkable, so they will be back next Tuesday (or later) weather permitting.  They had to come back anyway as they needed a bit more egg rock to finish a bed that we added at the last minute.  As a result of the walk-around we added another bed of egg rock at the east end of the deck to tie in with rock under the deck, and two more downspout drain lines, all of which they will do the next time they are here.

 

 

2014/07 – Front Sidewalk and Stairs

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Village Landscape Development of Fenton, Michigan was at our house (off and on) for the whole month of July, 2014 working on two projects.  This gallery post has a selection of captioned photographs from the front entrance sidewalk/stairs project.

2014/07/31 (W) Wrapping Up?

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We were tired and went to bed early last night.  Naturally, that meant we were up earlier than usual this morning.  Linda made her fabulous vegan blueberry pancakes to get us fueled up for a long day of work.  The landscapers were also here reasonably early and had a very productive day.  More on that later.

Our first task this morning was installing a switch controlled dual LED floodlight fixture on the back of the garage above and to the left of the door (when viewed from the outside).  The location was determined by the construction of the rear wall of the garage.  I measured and re-measured the location of the cable hole to make sure the surface mounted junction box ended up in the center (vertically) of one of the siding boards.  I drilled a 1/2″ hole through the back (north) wall of the garage just to the right of the back door (when viewed from inside the garage) and just below the top plate.  I ran a 14-2+g (NM) cable (that I had previously prepped and left in the wall cavity) through the hole in the wall and then through the hole in the back of the junction box.  This was the part of the north wall where I had to remove concrete backer board, a burned 2×4, and singed insulation, so the studs and back side of the exterior plywood sheathing were exposed and accessible.

We moved around to the outside and I caulked the hole around the wire, put a generous band of while caulk around the hole on the back of the junction box, and a half circle of caulk around the top back edge of the box and mounted it to the outside of the house with the center knockout centered over the hole in the wall.  I installed the dual LED light fixture and put a bead of caulk around the top half of the junction box where it met the fixture.  (The heads of the cheap machine screws that now come with electrical fixtures and plates strip very easily making it difficult to get a tight fit.)  I caulked the wire hole from the inside and then dressed and secured the cable.  I turned the circuit breaker on, and checked for proper operation of the switch and light fixture.  It was all good.  I like it when that happens.

Our next task was to install three round blue plastic junction boxes for bare bulb light fixtures; two for the garage attic and one for the garage end of the library attic.  I was originally going to install a switch near the top of the fold-down ladder to control the lights and run power to it from a new ceiling light fixture in the utility closet, but we came up with a better solution.

There was a three-gang electrical box in the east wall of the garage just inside the door from the library.  It had two switches installed and the cover plate had openings for a duplex outlet in the third position, but no device installed there.  We thought this would be a better place for the switch—as there was already power to the box—if we could get a wire through the wall from the attic to the box.  The drywall is missing from the lower half of the wall so we had good access to the underside of the box.  (The drywall was removed by the previous owner to repair the frozen hot water baseboard heat pipes.)  I checked in the attic and it looked like we had a good shot at making this work.  The icing on the cake was that we could install a switch with a pilot light that is designed to fit in a duplex outlet cover plate.  Not only would it be convenient, it would provide a visible indication that the lights were on.

I did the attic work while Linda took care of the garage end of this task, passing me parts and tools as needed and helping feed NM cable. We ran 14-2+g (120V, 15A) wire from the attic through the east wall to the existing outlet box.  I pulled the cable over to the location by the library attic, mounted the box, cut the cable, unsheathed it, stripped the wires, ran it into the box, and secured it to the truss.  I repeated that process with the end of the free cable.  The plastic light fixtures I bought very conveniently feature pass-through wiring terminals so all I had to do was hook up the cables, fasten the fixture to the box, and screw in the 100 W rugged service bulb.

I repeated this process for the next box/fixture which I positioned just to the west side of garage ridge 1/4 of the way in from the front (south) wall.  Finally, I repeated most of this process for the third and final (for now) box/fixture which I positioned on the east side of the ridge 1/4 of the way in from the back (north) wall.  Somewhere in the middle of all that we stopped for lunch.

With the attic lights installed I needed to pull the wire that supplied power to the outlets in the west half of the garage out of the rear/north wall and up into the attic.  Easier said than done.  The cable was originally part of the circuit that powers the outlets in the northeast wall of the garage (and now powers the new floodlights on the back wall) but I disconnected it a week ago knowing that I wanted to feed it from a separate breaker.  The cable went through a hole in the top plate and I discovered that the bottom cord of the gable truss had been set partially covering this hole with the cable pinched under it.  I cut the cable from above and ran it into a plastic switch box.  Linda was then able to pull the tail end loose from underneath.  I will run a new cable from the sub-panel to the junction box after I get more pressing work done.

On that note I also realized today that I do not have to get the cables for the new circuits through the top plates above the sub-panel, which was going to be difficult-to-impossible.  The sub-panel is surface mounted and I already planned to box around it.  With the supply air duct coming out of the new HVAC unit and running straight out along the ceiling above the utility closet door I will have 16 inches of clear ceiling space.  The sub-panel is about four inches deep so I will have about three inches of ceiling above the panel and in front of the top plates where I can run new cable into the attic.  Brilliant!

Our last attic task for today was to disconnect two telephone wires in the wall cavity to the right of the sub-panel, pull them up into the attic, reroute them, and reconnect them.  One of them turned out to be the main phone/data line coming into the house from the AT&T box at the southwest corner of the garage.  There was a telephone wall outlet to the right of the old sub-panel that this line ran to before continuing on to the rest of the house.  The wires are very small gage, are unshielded, and the cable is draped through the attic over multiple 120 VAC cables.  I need to replace this with a single run of much better (shielded) cable when I have time.  Perhaps we will get less static on the phone and faster Internet data transfer rates.  (Nah, probably not.  It will still be an AT&T landline.)

While I started working on re-wiring the three-gang box in the east garage wall, Linda made a run to Lowe’s to get a 32′ roll of 16″ x 3.5″ (R-13) insulation and a switch with a pilot light.  I got the box rewired, we energized the circuit, and everything worked.  Yippee!

The landscapers today consisted of Steve (the owner), Spencer (his nephew), and Tommy.  Steve used the excavator to place four large boulders on the sides of the new front steps.  That was the last work to be done in front that required the excavator so he used it to back blade (level off) and compact (with the bucket) the pull-through driveway.  He was not able to return it to its existing condition but did the best he could with the equipment he has.

He took time out to use his chain saw to cut down a dead pine tree, cut it up into 4′ lengths, and carry the pieces back to his truck with the excavator.  He then used it to fill/grade a large low spot just southwest of the garage.  This was the route they used to get the excavator to the back yard.  It was also where all of the construction debris was piled until yesterday, and the excavator really tore the ground up in that area over the last four weeks.

Spencer and Tommy worked in the back hand-grading the slopes beyond the retaining walls and the area that was trenched for the drain tiles.  They worked in a layer of good topsoil, spread grass seed, and covered it with straw.

Steve plans to lay the brick pavers for the front sidewalk tomorrow and have the whole project wrapped up by the end of the day.  It looked like they were on track to accomplish that until Spencer informed us that there was apparently a leak in the drain tile somewhere in “the valley.”  Leak was an understatement; we had an area at least 8′ x 12′ that had turned into a pond.

It appeared that the drain line for the sump pump was somehow discharging its water at this point rather than it flowing all the way down to the drains at the back of the yard.   Spencer dug up some of the line coming down the slope and found several holes on the top side, but it did make sense that these were the source of the problem.  Our guess is that that line, which is not one continuous piece of drain tile, has become disconnected at the valley floor allowing all of the water to escape at that point, and/or crushed, causing the water to back up through a connector (which is only designed for water to flow one way).  Fortunately we kept the original PVC discharge extension pipe from the sump pump outlet so we temporarily disconnected the buried drain line and reconnected the extension pipe.

Whatever the cause of the leak, we are sure it will be found and fixed, we’re just not sure that will happen by the end of the day tomorrow.  I had thought about “testing” the system by using a garden hose to put a significant volume of water into each of the drain lines.  As of now, I will definitely be doing that.

Our final task was insulating a section of the rear/north wall.  We got three of the four plus cavities filled and ran out of steam.  Besides, it was dinner time.  Linda made one of her “go-to” dishes; angel hair pasta with onions, garlic, mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, basil, and mixed baby greens lightly sautéed in olive oil.  This is a dish she can throw together from ingredients on hand without a recipe and it is always delicious.  We had a small glass of Leelanau Cellars Summer Sunset wine while she cooked and a small glass of Meiomi Pinot Noir with the dish.  No salad and no dessert; just a great pasta dish and nice wine.  I got cleaned up and we watched the first episode of season five of Doc Martin.  As we were drifting off to sleep we thought we heard the distant howl of a coyote.

2014/07/09 (W) vCard Magic And Adult Tonka Toy

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This morning when I turned my computers on there was an update available for Adobe Creative Cloud so I let it download while we had breakfast using our new Corelle dinnerware.  Adobe updates are either very large or their servers are very slow or both.  Whatever the reason, their updates seem to take a very long time to download and install.

A couple of the landscapers arrived at 8:00 AM and resumed work on the front stairs.  It was overcast at dawn but the clouds were forecast to clear by the afternoon with temperatures in the low 70’s and zero chance of rain.  That would normally be a perfect day to work outside, if the ground wasn’t saturated with water from the recent rains.  They worked on the front stairs until lunch time, took a short lunch break, and then worked a little longer.  When they quit for the day they had all nine of the large precast steps installed and the crushed limestone base built for the brick paver sidewalk.  I think they left because there wasn’t anything else for them to do at our site until they either had some additional materials (slag and paver bricks), more crew members (for moving dirt in wheelbarrows or digging trenches by hand), or dry enough conditions to get the excavator around back ( to trench and set boulders in the retaining walls).

Linda decided not open more boxes today and focused instead on deep cleaning the kitchen, including the freezer/refrigerator, stove, and microwave and getting things ready to go to the recycling center and the Salvation Army donation center and resale store.  While all of that was going on I put a load of laundry in the washing machine and got to work on my computer tasks.  I checked my e-mail using my new ASUS laptop computer.  Everything looked OK, so I started reading and replying to e-mails on the new laptop.  That was a major milestone in that I am now committed to using the new machine as my primary computer.

With that transition in mind I spent much of the morning copying files from my old laptop to both the old and new NAS units.  I then copied critical files having to do with my websites and photographs from one of the NAS units to my new laptop.  Getting the new laptop setup with everything I need will take quite a while, but that’s OK as it also affords me the opportunity to move over only those things that I absolutely need when I need them.

I installed the vCard Wizard (vCard4Outlook) add-in without difficulty but the installation of the Duplicate Killer add-in failed.  I checked the 4Team.biz website and then e-mailed their support address.  My ASUS is running Windows 8.1 / 64-bit and apparently my Outlook 2013 is also 64-bit.  According to their website the vCard Wizard add-in supports the 64-bit version of Outlook 2013, but the Duplicate Killer add-in only supports the 32-bit version.  One of my reasons for buying vCard Wizard was that I figured the companion Duplicate Killer program from the same company would work better with it than it would with a vCard converter from another company.  If I had realized it wasn’t compatible with my configuration I could have pursued other options.

I sync’d my Palm Tungsten T3 to my old Dell laptop and then did a vCard export of all my contacts and moved it to the ASUS laptop via one of the NAS units.  From there I was able to import all of my old Palm contacts into the Contacts folder in my Personal Folder, creating duplicates if/as needed.  The Personal Folder is a carryover from my previous conversion from MS Outlook Express to MS Outlook 2007.  I am a bit unclear about the distinction between the “address book” and “contacts” within the context of MS Outlook and I am not sure I have accomplished what I intended to accomplish with vCard Wizard.  I have accomplished something for sure–my Palm contacts are now clearly in my Outlook 2013–but I thought they would be added to my address book, which does not appear to be the case.  Perhaps I chose the wrong destination folder?  More research is needed.

By 4:30 PM it was obvious the landscapers were not coming back today so that gave me the opportunity to practice using the Kobelco 35sr excavator again.  I worked for about 90 minutes digging more junk out of the woods just southwest of our house and adding it to the pile I started on Monday.  Think bricks, cinder blocks, railroad ties, landscape timbers, dimensional lumber, cut up tree trunks and large downed tree limbs and you will have the picture.  In addition to the bucket for digging and transferring material, the excavator has a claw “thumb” that can be closed to hold things in the bucket, like tree limbs, or pick things up, like boulders and cinder blocks.  It turned out that the bucket/claw combination are much stronger than a cinder block; I broke several trying to pick them up.

By the time I parked the machine and turned it off Linda had dinner ready.  She made a salad of dark greens with almonds and grapes and a barley, split pea, lentil risotto with carrot, red onion, celery, garlic, and a few chopped up greens.  We finished the bottle of Merlot we bought at Whole Foods on Saturday.  At $3 per bottle (750 ml) it was competitive with box wines like Franzia, and of comparable quality.  Although slightly dry for my taste, it was a good accompaniment to the somewhat savory dishes Linda has made this week.  I would be tempted to stock up at that price if I liked a bit more than I do.

After dinner I edited photographs on my new computer for the first time.  They will appear in the various blog entries starting with July 1st, which I will also edit and upload using the new machine.  Although the transition to a new computing platform always feels awkward for a while, and there is desire to return to the comfort of the old familiar one, from here on out I will be focused on making the ASUS my primary computing platform.

 

2014/07/07 (M) Needs And Wants

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My first task most mornings is to make coffee and my second task is to eat breakfast.  Linda puts a lot of thought, time, and effort into our meals so I take my responsibility to eat them very seriously.

Bruce operating the excavator!

Bruce operating the excavator!

After breakfast I called Steve at Village Landscape to check on their plans and he said they were headed our way shortly.  He was bringing the excavator so I let him know that the retaining wall worksite behind the house was a muddy pond from last night’s rain but the front of the house looked suitable for working on the sidewalk/stairs project.  We would really like to have a front sidewalk and stairs before Ron and Mary get here on the 20th of this month.

My first computer task of the day, after starting my machines, is always to log in to RVillage and my second task is to check e-mail.  Those tasks usually recur throughout the day.  Beyond those tasks it’s whatever else needs to be done that I also feel like doing and there is often a considerable lack of congruence between those two ways of considering the tasks at hand.  At the top of both lists this morning was installing the Jetpack plug-in on the other two WordPress websites I run; the FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches and our personal one.  I actually managed to get this done today, but not until the afternoon.  Go back to any of the previous gallery posts and click on one of the images to see how much nicer they are to view now.

When the power flickered last night it interrupted our viewing of Doc Martin.  I was momentarily confused by that until we realized that Linda’s iPad was connected to the Amped Wireless access point in the basement which was not plugged in to a UPS unit.  It was at one point but that UPS unit failed and I had not yet replaced it so I went to the Best Buy store in Brighton this morning and bought a small APC unit.  It will be adequate to maintain power to the access point and also provide surge/spike protection for the audio equipment.  And it was on sale.  While I was out I picked up a new pruning lopper at Home Depot (a Fiskar’s ratcheting model) and some soy milk at Meijer’s.  Such is the way with tasks and errands.

The landscapers had not yet arrived by the time I got back from my errands but did arrive around noon.  Steve brought the excavator and a crew of four and they worked all afternoon on the front stairs.  They removed the old half circle step from in front of the porch, excavated for the new steps, back filled with crushed limestone, leveled and compacted it, and set the top three steps and the bottom step.  The steps are precast concrete 46″ wide, 19″ deep, and 7″ high.  They are being installed with a 17″ tread depth which is very comfortable for walking up and down the stairs.  The stairs flare out at the bottom by the driveway, so the bottom step is three of these precast units set end-to-end.  The next step up will use two of these precast units.  All of the other steps are a single unit in width.  The area between the upper steps and the lower steps will be a brick paver sidewalk.

Before Steve left for the evening he positioned the excavator over by the trash pile and walked me through the controls.  After dinner I spent a couple of hours “practicing” with the machine by picking cinder blocks, bricks, and cut up trees out of the woods and putting them in a trash pile.  The controls were “touchier” than I expected and I had a tendency to jerk the machine around rather than operate it smoothly.  I also found it tricky to coordinate the two joysticks to make it move in certain ways.  There wasn’t anything intuitive about most of the controls; certain functions are simply assigned to the two joysticks, and the buttons on them, and you have to operate it enough that it becomes second nature.  As fun as it was to play with, you would be pretty sore at the end of a long workday if you had to run this machine for a living.

Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard of Technomadia hosted another live video chat this evening for the Mobile Internet Aficionados (MIA) private/membership group.  We were going to participate but did not because I was playing with the excavator, a task that wasn’t even on my list this morning.  Membership in the group was one of our premiums for contributing to their Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign.  They used the campaign to finance the re-write of their Mobile Internet Handbook.  This is THE definitive resource for people, especially RVers, who are mobile and need to be online.  The technology is changing so rapidly that a re-write and expansion was already needed just a year after the book was originally published.

I did not accomplish all of my computer tasks today, but I did accomplish the one at the top of both my need and want lists.  It happens; sometimes.  I also got to play with a life size Tonka toy, which was very cool.  I think that is the first time I have operated a piece of construction larger than a two-person posthole digger.

 

2014/06/25 (W) Summer Start

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I am normally aware of the two equinoxes and the two solstices each year and take note of their passing.  I just realized today that the summer solstice happened four days ago (on June 21st).  I checked several online sources and discovered that it occurred at 6:51 AM in the Eastern Time Zone, although it wasn’t clear if that was standard or daylight savings time.  Since that time the hours of daylight have been declining slightly each day.  Perhaps that is why I am not getting as much accomplished as I need to.  Although the summer vacation season begins Memorial Day weekend and runs through the Labor Day weekend, and climatologically “summer” corresponds to this, solar summer runs from the summer solstice to the autumnal equinox.

Linda went to the bakery today while I sat at home and waited to see if the landscape contractor would show up.  I left a message for him at 9 AM and had not heard anything by 9:30, so I headed to South Lyon to help move the SLAARC Field Day equipment out of the water tower and into Steve’s (N8AR) trailer.  We were done by 11:15 and I was about to head to Scotty’s (AC8IL) shop to return a couple of chargers when the landscaper called to let me know they would be at the house around noon.

Steve, who owns Village Landscape Development, showed up with four young men who looked up to the initial tasks that needed to be accomplished.  Three of them were not long out of high school, but the forth one, Lucas, was a few years older and more experienced.  He was the crew chief.  I indicated that we wanted to save four hosta plants, a large group of day lilies, and a large decorative grass plant, and had to show Steve where I wanted them re-planted.  I also had to indicate where I wanted the blocks from the existing retaining walls stacked.  Once that was sorted out I went inside and left them alone to do their work.

Mid-afternoon I heard the sound of Keith’s riding lawn mower and went out to check on his progress as well as the landscaping crew.  I had loaned our string trimmer and wheel barrow to the landscaping crew to clear the two slopes above the retaining walls and move the plants they were transplanting, but they needed Keith to mow the flat grass areas where they be working.  I flagged Keith down and got that sorted out with him and then went back inside and left everyone to their work.

I was not as productive during the afternoon as I would have liked to be.  I worked at my desk dealing with e-mails, RVillage groups, and computer apps, but having people at the house working is always somewhat distracting.  Linda eventually got home from the bakery and we settled into conversation about our days that took my mind off of the landscape work and other projects, at least for a while.

Steve had indicated earlier in the day that he would be back in the evening to check on the progress of the work.  His original target was 7 PM but he called around then to say that it would be around 9 PM.  He typically has 3 or 4 crews working, weather permitting.  The persistent rains this spring have carried over into summer and created big challenges for builders and landscapers.  To catch up, he puts in 14 -16 hour days.  When he got to our house at 9:20 PM there was just enough light to see and we made a quick inspection of what had been accomplished during the day.  Considering that the work did not really get underway until 1 PM, he seemed satisfied that the crew had put in a good effort and followed the directions he gave them.  That was good enough for us too.