Tag Archives: Phil Jarrell (Precision Grading)

2015/05/26 (T) Reflections

I decided to put off doing the laundry until later in the week. Linda made a grocery shopping list while we had our morning coffee. I called Pat Davidson at Apex Roofing to discuss the installation of a roof access hatch. We did some online research for pest control companies in the Brighton-Hartland-Howell area and decided to call Best Pest Control LLC. I talked to the owner, Ryan, about his perimeter defense package, and decided to give his company a try. They will spray outside the house for ants, spiders, hornets, wasps, and yellow jackets. I called Phil Jarrell from Precision Grading and left him a voice message regarding some additional driveway work, a French drain for the west end if the property, and a hole for a ham radio tower foundation.

I showed Linda the pullout pantry slide hardware I found last night on the Rockler website, a German made top-bottom pair specifically designed for this application and able to support up to 450 pounds. It’s pricey, but it looks like the right stuff for the job. We also found some assembled pullout pantries online, including some that were 5″ wide, but they were not deep enough and getting just the right height looked tricky. We really want to maximize the use of our available cubic inches.

Keith showed up around 10 AM with his new Scag riding lawn mower. He is still going to have the Hustler repaired as a backup, but the Scag is a nicer/better machine. It is fuel injected, which should be more reliable, and it is faster, which makes more efficient use of Keith’s time. It also has a seat that can be adjusted from soft to firm, making for a more comfortable operator experience over the course of a long day.

As much as I need to work at my computer and drafting table I need to work even more in the bus right now. I started by reassembling the inside of the cabinet above the refrigerator, except for the liner carpet, and reinstalled the fluorescent light fixture on the ceiling. I am keeping the carpet pieces for now, but mostly to use as templates for new material. I would have preferred white Formica interior surfaces, as they are brighter and easier to keep clean, but the bus has a lot of curves and carpet is a very conformable and forgiving material.

The interior of the bus deconstructed in preparation for a new floor, seating, and custom desk.

My next task was cleaning out and securing the area under the bed platform. I removed the half box covers, the flexible ducts, and the floor-mounted cleats. I threw the ducts away and stored the other pieces in the garage. I then reattached the strip light on the top edge of the forward side of the base, reinstalled the two circular HVAC registers (so the cats could not try to get under the bed through the holes), put the cover plates back on the two duplex AC outlets and reinstalled the outlet expanders which also have dual USB charging ports. I need to put some sort of temporary netting over the port holes in the section of the HVAC chase under the bed, but I need to find a suitable material for that. The long term plan is to seal those holes and install registers in the sections of chase outside the bed base. I thought about disconnecting the lift struts for the bed platform so I could raise it higher and reinstall a drawer onto its glides, but decided to leave that for another day.

While I was working in the bus Ryan from Best Pest Control called me back and said he had a crew that could fit us in within the hour so I said “sure.” I closed up the house as they would be spraying around all of the windows, doors, and doorwalls. Two guys showed up a little while later and I walked them through the job, wrote a check, signed the work order, and they got busy. They found two hornet nests by the east end of our deck and destroyed them. I hate to kill even a hornet but they have been buzzing around our windows and doors, poking at voids in the mortar on the face brick, and occasionally getting into the house and we need to put a stop to their use of our residence as a place to build their homes.

The pest control guys were already gone and Keith was driving away as Linda returned from the supermarket. I helped get the groceries into the kitchen. After they were put away we had a light lunch around 1 PM of fresh baby carrots, mini bell peppers, sourdough pretzel nibblers, hummus, and red grapes.

The dinette seat used to fit in this corner The strip mirrors have been removed from the outside wall next to the window.

I have been taking a lot of short breaks while working on the bus. It was warm and humid again today and warmer still in the coach even with windows open and the roof vent fans exhausting air. But the breaks are not just to rest, they are also to ponder the details of how the interior will get rebuilt and what additional deconstruction still needs to take place.

In the front of the coach there was a 120 VAC electrical cable coming out of an access hole in the passenger side HVAC chase, passing through a 4″ flexible duct adapter, and disappearing through a hole in the floor. I originally thought the cable came from the duplex outlet on the wall just above the access hole but I discovered that it did not. It was routed through the chase from somewhere farther back in the bus. I determined that that the hole in the floor appeared to go into the OTR HVAC bay and sure enough, when I opened the bay there was the cable coming through the ceiling. It turned towards the center of the bus and then went through the wall into the bay to the front. It was then easy to determine that it was the power feed for the electric heater mounted on the rear wall of the front bay.

The storage area under the end platform with the 4″ flexible ducts and cover boxes removed.

At that point I knew which circuit breaker to turn off and was able to cut the cable in the living room without risking an electrical shock. I slipped the 4″ duct adapter off and set it aside. We don’t generally use the electric heater in the front bay, and certainly do not need it this time of year, so I wire-nutted the ends of the hot and neutral wires, coiled them up, and stowed them in the HVAC chase for the time being. I coiled the end of the wire coming out of the floor around one of the Aqua-Hot coolant hoses so it would not drop into the bay below.

The area of the bus that was the outside rear corner of the dinette kept drawing my attention. That corner was decorated with vertical strip mirrors with beveled edges. There are also strip mirrors used as wainscoting on the lower portion of the outside wall of the hallway and at the end of the hallway opposite the bathroom door. The strip mirrors are the one thing in this bus we have never liked but they did not bother us enough to not buy the coach. Now that we are involved in a major interior remodeling, however, we are looking for ways to remove them or cover them up. We really do not like them.

In the case of the former dinette mirrors, I had previously determined that the ones against the wall of the coach were mounted (glued) onto a sheet of plywood that appeared to be mounted to a pair of cleats along the two vertical edges. I tried prying under the bottom of the first strip but it cracked and chipped. It quickly became apparent that removing these strip mirrors from whatever they are glued to was probably not a viable option.

The beveled strip mirrors in the hallway of our bus. We really do not like these things.

[p4 R] After removing a 1-1/4″ wide piece of thin trim wood I was able to loosen the left (forward) edge at the bottom. The walnut trim around the fixed window just forward of the mirrors, however, prevented me from pulling it out any farther. I had a reasonably good idea how the window trim was attached but first I had to remove another piece of 1-1/4″ thin trim that covered the gap between the window trim I needed to remove and the trim for the next window forward. With Linda’s help I removed eight screws and the 3-sided window trim came right off. We set it carefully aside and returned to the mirrors.

With the window trim removed we were able to pull the left (forward) edge of the plywood mirror backing out enough to see behind it. Our lucky “break” (no pun intended but, whoops, there it is) was that the screws holding the plywood to the left cleat pulled out of the cleat. I say lucky because the screw heads were under the glass mirror strips and none of the mirror strips broke. We kept working it out until the upper edge bumped into the return air grill trim on the underside of the upper cabinet. We removed the grill and set it aside. We were then finally able to pull the left edge out far enough that I could remove a couple of screws that were holding the right cleat to the panel that forms one of the back walks of the pantry. Something was still holding it and when I changed position I saw that there was another screw near the top. I removed that screw and the whole panel came out with the right cleat still attached. Three more screws and the left cleat was also out. We reattached the return air grill to the underside of the upper cabinet and then reattached the window trim.

The wallpaper behind this panel was in very good shape except for the screw holes where the cleats were attached. We plan to put shelves in this corner to utilize the space and they may get used for some ham radio equipment. Regardless of what ends up there having the mirrors out gives us more room for the shelves and will just plain look better.

A view from the kitchen of the dinette corner and hallway. A custom desk will go where the dinette seating used to be and double as work surface for the kitchen.

The mirrors on the other wall of this corner are glued directly to the walnut panel that forms one of the backs of the pantry. I tried loosening the bottom edge of the one in the corner and it cracked. That area will be concealed by the desk, but we will cover all of the mirror strips with some sort of thin panel. We have the same problem with the mirror strips across from the bathroom door and may just have to live with those as I have not come up with an attractive way to cover them. I need to investigate the strip mirrors in the hallway. There is a good chance that they are glued to plywood panels that are screwed to the wall at locations covered buy wood trim. If we are lucky removing the trim will allow us to unscrew and remove the mirror panels. If not, we will just put the trim back on.

I have had the idea for a while that we could make another low pantry or shallow storage area along the hallway wall above the HVAC chase where the strip mirrors are currently located. Linda does not like the idea as she is concerned it will make the hallway to narrow. The storage would not be any deeper than the HVAC chase is now, and would not be any higher than the wood trim along the top of the strip mirrors, which serve as a kind of wainscoting.

By this point it was 5:30 PM. Linda headed inside to fix dinner while I got trash and materials out of the coach and carried them to the garage. Linda let me know that a severe thunderstorm watch had been issued effective until 10 PM. It rained lightly off and on until we sat down to eat and then the downpour came but we did not have anything severe, just heavy rain for a while. She made a dish using garbanzo beans, garlic, kale, salt, pepper, and fresh lemon juice. It was delicious and the fresh lemon juice really made it sparkle. She also served the last of the risotto she made for dinner when Steve and Karen were here on Saturday. We had strawberries with Lotus brand Biscoff cookies for dessert. I worked on this post on my iPad, took a shower, and went to bed. I never did make it to my office today.

2015/05/01 (F) May Day

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Wow, another month gone.

We got up after 8 AM this morning, were having coffee, and had not yet had breakfast when I got a call from Diane at SteelMaster Building Systems. They are certainly prompt in their follow up as I just submitted an RFQ last night via their website. I had a very informative conversation with her that left me favorably impressed with the company and inclined towards their products should we decide to build our barn this way. By the time I finished with her and we spent time studying SteelMaster’s website we sat down to have breakfast at 9:45 AM.

I started a load of laundry and puttered at my desk until Linda had chores for me to do. She vacuumed the main floor and tidied up the kitchen in advance of tomorrow’s dinner visit with John and Diane and wanted to take the storm door insert out of the front entrance frame and put in the screen. We like fresh air and have an abundance of it out here in the country.

We drove to the Sears Outlet at Fountain Walk in Novi to buy a box spring mattress foundation. They were already discounted and also on sale. The shipping was 50% of the sale price but we could not get it home in our car so that was our only choice. It was still a bargain and we will have it next Tuesday. We have been using the heavy, elaborate foundation that came with our Sleep Comfort mattress years ago, but it is broken and needed to be replaced.

We stopped at Lowe’s on the drive back to look at vinyl floor tiles and bought some Oxygenics shower spray heads and soap. We took a drive up Latson to see if we could find a metal arch garage that Phil Jarrell had recently spotted. We think we caught a glimpse of it on the west side of the road as we headed north towards M-59. Heading east on M-59 we took a detour up Argentine Road to see if we could find Phil’s place but never saw anything we felt confident was his. We headed east on Clyde Road and took Old US-23 back to M-59 where we stopped at Kroger for a few things before returning home. To Linda’s surprise and delight, the Kroger has some of the mock dairy vegan products, like Daiya cheeses, that she occasionally uses and cannot get at Meijer’s.

Linda had an agenda for today and next up was putting the umbrella in the outdoor table. Once that was taken care of we sat outside enjoying blue skies, bright sunshine, an air temperature of 71 degrees, and a slight breeze, none of which required the umbrella, but the point was to get it off the floor in the library where it was stored all winter. Next we moved the natural gas grill from the garage to the lower rear deck, reassembled it, and connected it to the gas supply (it has a quick connect and shutoff valve). I then busied myself removing the three shower heads and replacing them with the removable spray heads we bought at Lowe’s. If I did not do that right away they would still be sitting around in their boxes months from now.

Linda used the grill to make dinner. She grilled seasoned Brussels sprouts, tofu hot dogs, and bananas sliced in half the long way. This will be the first summer in a long time that we have had a grill. Linda is excited to have it as it expands her cooking options and provides a way to not heat up the kitchen in the warmest weather. I am looking forward new dimensions in our meals.

I had planned on reviewing an article for BCM but ended up involved in two phone calls after dinner. One was with Pat Lintner from GLAMA and our GLCC chapter and the other was with Lou Petkus from the SKP Photographers BOF. That left just enough time to watch Season 1, Episode 1 of Sherlock on DVD before turning in for the night.

2014/08/15 (F) On The Level

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I got dressed this morning for physical work, but ended up doing very little. I worked at my desk most of the morning, including working through the first chapter of the Intro to Linux course on edX. I came up from the basement to have lunch at 12:30 PM after which I moved my car out of the pull-through driveway. I then started the bus and, with Linda’s assistance, backed it out of the pull-through driveway, drove it the short distance to our straight driveway (which ties into the other end of the pull-through driveway), pulled it up onto the concrete driveway as far as it could go, and parked it. The concrete driveway runs uphill from the road to the garage and, not knowing how long it might be there, I lowered the front end and raised the back end; not enough to level it but enough to make it better. Linda chocked the drive tires while I hooked up the electrical shore-power. The front bay had gotten water in it from the recent rains so we opened all of the bays to let them air out while Linda soaked up as much water as she could with a couple of old towels.

Spreading 21AA road gravel to fix the driveway.

I got out our 8′ step ladder and pole saw/lopper to prune some large (1 – 2 inch) dead branches that were hanging over the pull-through driveway where the rear end of the bus normally sits. I no sooner started this work when Phil from Precision Grading showed up right on time with his dump truck, tracked front-loader, and rolling compactor attachment to repair the damage done to the pull-through driveway by the recent landscaping work.

Phil off-loaded the front-loader from the trailer and then disconnected the trailer from the dump truck. He had a small load of 21AA road gravel (with lots of fines) that he dumped in two different spots in the pull-through driveway. He then put the truck back in the street and set up his laser level to see just what he needed to do. He used the front loader to move the gravel around and distribute it evenly and finished by back blading it with the bucket to level it.

Rolling and compacting the driveway.

Once he had the gravel the way he wanted it, he removed the bucket and attached the vibrating roller/compactor. He went over the driveway several times, always making his final pass going backwards while pulling the roller to smooth out the tracks created by the machine’s drive treads. The roller/compactor worked the fines down into the base and by the time he was done the driveway looked and felt tight; even better than last year when Phil did not yet have this attachment. The machine also shook the entire house, especially the rear deck which is mostly supported by tall 6×6 and 4×4 posts. He indicated that we did not need to wait for rain, or anything else, before putting the bus back in its spot, so after he left that is what we did.

But before Phil left, he used his laser level to check the grade in the back. Although it does not appear to the naked eye to drop very much in the first 70 feet, the laser level indicated that there was a steady down slope over that distance with a total drop of over 1 foot. He checked all the way to the edge of the cattails marsh, at which point the ground was down 4-5 feet from the deck. The surface of the neighbor’s pond looks to be at least two feet lower from there.

The compacting roller really makes a difference.

There are several implications to this. For one, it means the surface of the pond is well below our basement slab (6 – 7 feet) and at least 2 feet below the bottom of the footings for our house, so it is probably not the source of the water that runs into our sump. It also means there is adequate grade to allow surface water to run off once the grass grows in (although it would be better if there was more grade than there currently is in the first 50 feet). Equally important, the grade is more than adequate for a very effective French drain should we decide to have Phil pull up the existing drain lines and replace them. Finally, having a hole dug at least 8 feet deep for the ham radio tower base should not pose a problem as the starting elevation is at least 6 feet above the basement slab.

With regards to the tower base, Phil suggested that I have the rebar cage, mounting bolts, and alignment structure built ahead of time and ready to go. He could dig the hole first thing in the morning with his mini-excavator (up to 8’ deep) and figured it would only take an hour at most. The assembled rebar could be positioned, plumbed, and secured in an hour or so, and the concrete could be delivered and poured in the late morning. He indicated that spreading the work out over more time than that, especially letting the hole sit overnight, was not a good idea

Close up of the compacting roller attachment. This thing shook the whole house!

We discussed how to get the concrete into the hole given its location about 40 feet northeast of the northeast corner of the house. Our two options appear to be the little dump carts or a pumper. The carts would have to drive up the east side of the house between the house and the septic tanks, but Phil thought that would be OK as long as they put down plywood to drive on. He said a pumper truck would be very expensive but that a separate pump is available that can be towed to the job site. With that equipment the concrete mixer truck would simply unload the concrete into the pumper, which would then pump it to the hole. Both the truck and the pumper would be in the east end of our pull-through driveway. Phil suggested that I call Carl Russell in Byron, Michigan as he is a good concrete guy and probably has a concrete pump.

After Phil left we reversed our earlier steps and moved the bus back into the pull-through driveway. It rolled right up onto the level pad area and did not leave any noticeable tire tracks. Nice. We hooked up the “50 Amp” shorepower cable, turned off the chassis batteries, checked that all of the battery chargers were working, and shut/locked everything.

While Phil was working, Linda went to the Howell Library to return children’s books and came back with a card for the Howell Melon Festival. The Festival started today and runs through Sunday. She wanted to go walk around so we skipped dinner and headed out around 5 PM. At the first turn in our road we encountered two workers from Roese Construction. They were working on installing the natural gas main line down the street and said another crew would be coming along behind them in 1 – 2 weeks doing the branch runs up to the meters on the houses.

The Howell Melon Festival was just getting started when we got there but parking was already at a premium. We parked a few blocks away in an empty church parking lot. Some of the smaller side streets were already blocked off but Grand River Avenue and Michigan Avenue were both still open to traffic. They will be closed tomorrow and Sunday and filled with vendor booths.

The weather was perfect and all of the downtown restaurants were very busy with lots of outside seating. In the 16 months we have lived in the new house we have never really visited most of the downtown Howell merchants. We went into Country Squire, a business that sells fireplace logs and inserts as well as outdoor cooking grills. They had a couple of natural gas fireplace logs that were 99%+ efficient and did not require the flue to be open. We thought they were a bit pricey but they were actually capable of heating a room. We don’t use our existing propane logs because they are mostly decorative and require the flue damper to be open, which just wastes fuel and money. The Country Squire also had a couple of natural gas grills that would mount to our deck and attach to our existing quick disconnect.

We walked through the food vendor area but did not see anything that interested us. After walking past the starting gate for the Howell Melon Run we ended up at Uptown Coffee, on the northeast corner of Grand River and Main, where we had some brew and Sabra hummus with pretzel chips. We started back towards our car and paused at the Old Courthouse long enough to hear the first number by the band. They sounded good and not too loud. We had our folding camp chairs in the car but decided to pass on the concert.

We stopped at Walmart on the way home to buy a microwave popcorn popper bowl and stock up on flavors of ICE brand sparkling flavored water. Meijer’s sells a few flavors but Walmart has the broadest selection, including my two favorites (pineapple-coconut and blueberry-pomegranate). Our final stop was at Lowe’s for a 100-pack of bright orange marker flags. I will use these to mark the powerline that runs under the driveway to feed the RV outlet, the propane line to the house, the drain pipe from the corner of the house into the first septic tank, and the drain pipe that connects the outlet of the second septic tank to the beginning of the drain field.

It was a long day but a good one. We watched another episode of Doc Martin and then called it a night.

2014/08/13 (W) Bad Times

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Linda had a rough night last night. The tooth on which she just got a new crown two weeks ago started throbbing and even Tylenol did not do much to dull the pain. She finally got some sleep early this morning and slept in while I had toast with jam and coffee for breakfast. She called the dentist when she finally got up and they said they could see her at 10:30 AM. She tried drinking some coffee but the hot liquid immediately aggregated her bad tooth.

Linda has been following a story in the news about Ferguson, the town in Missouri where we grew up. There was an incident there over the weekend in which a cop ended up shooting an 18-year-old African-American male. There were limited witnesses, so the truth about what happened is obscure at best. The town, a northern suburb of St. Louis, is now experiencing “riots” and looting.

It is difficult for me to picture what is happening. Although Linda’s oldest brother still lives in Ferguson we have not been back there in years. This is the kind of situation that “happens to other people in other places” not in the Ferguson of my memory from the 1950’s and 60’s.

Darryll and Alec (DCM Heating &Cooling) showed up just after 9 AM and Linda left for the dentist at 9:15 AM. The stormy weather of the last two days cleared out overnight replaced by cool northwest breezes, abundant sunshine, and blue skies. When the weather in Michigan is nice it is really nice. I took a few minutes to get the trash to the curb, made sure Darryll was all set, and then retreated to my desk to work on the membership and financial records for our FMCA Freethinkers associate chapter, of which I am the current vice-president and secretary.

I got a call from Linda around 11:15 AM letting me know she had a 2:15 PM appointment with an endodontist down the street from our dentist. She was going to go to Fairlane Mall to kill some time but since she did not get much sleep last night I suggested she go to the endodontist’s office and sleep in their waiting room. Given her discomfort and sensitivity to hot liquids she will likely come home today with a new root canal procedure having been done.

Darryll and Alec finished the 2″ iron pipe installation, connected an air pressure gauge, and pressurized the pipe to 12 psi to check for leaks. The natural gas pressure in the line will only be ~4 in-WC (inches of water column). 1 PSI = ~27.67 in-WC, so 4 in-WC us is approximately 1/7 PSI, a relatively low pressure. Still, there cannot be any leaks in the piping connections.

With the pipe done for now they turned their attention to hanging the Reznor garage heater. To support the unit Darryll installed two U-channels in the attic spanning the top side of the bottom cord of three trusses. He determined the location of the threaded support rods from the garage ceiling side using a cardboard template and drilled the holes up into the attic. He and Alec then assembled everything with Darryll doing the attic work. The Reznor is not that heavy, but he prefers to hang the unit when possible rather than screw it into something.

To position the unit they set it on top of one of our 6′ tall plastic shelving units and blocked it up another six inches with scrap wood. (We used the same technique to install the pull-down attic ladder a couple of weeks ago as described in a previous post.) The unit is 12″ high and they set it 6″ below the ceiling near the center of the rear (north) wall. That location will optimize getting heat to all parts of the garage and put the unit right where Darryll needed it to connect the exhaust flue pipe using the existing flue that was originally used for the wood-burning stove.

Linda usually fixes our meals, but I used to do a lot of the cooking during “tax season” when she was working ridiculously long hours as a C.P.A. Lucky for me we had chickpea salad in the refrigerator and I remembered how to make a sandwich. A few almonds and some of this morning’s coffee (Teeko’s Seattle Blend half-caff) made for a tasty, quick, and easy lunch. I checked the pressure on Darryll’s gauge and it had dropped quite a bit, so there was a leak (or leaks) somewhere that he will have to find and tighten. That’s unfortunate given the size of this pipe and the number of connections, but “it’s all part of the job” as the saying goes.

I was hopeful that Phil from Precision Grading might come fix our pull-through driveway today, but as of 1 PM I had not seen or heard from him. There’s still a chance we could see him later today, but it was a long shot at best based on the premise that with all the rain on Monday and Tuesday he might not be able to work anywhere else today.

Linda called around 1:45 PM to let me know the endodontist was able to see her at 12:15 PM. They did some tests to confirm it was the nerve in the suspect tooth and then did the root canal procedure. Apparently sensitivity to heat and a lack of sensitivity to cold is indicative of a nerve gone bad. They gave her an initial dose of antibiotics and some pain killers (Motrin) and sent her on her way with prescriptions for more of the same.

Darryll and Alec wrapped up for the day around 2:15 PM and walked me through what they had done and what was left to do. While I was eating, talking, and working they had run the gas pipe through the back wall of the garage and installed the flue pipe for both furnaces. Darryll needed a few more parts to finish the job and needed to get home to deal with a flooded basement situation from the recent rains. He indicated they should be done by the end of next week, at least with everything they can do until the gas line gets run to the house and hooked up to meter. The timing may turn out to be tighter than expected. When Linda turned onto our street she observed that Roese Construction had started running gas line down our road and appeared to be hooking up houses as they went, but that turned out not be the case.

I was questioning Darryll about the exhaust flue for the Reznor garage furnace and discovered that it is not a sealed combustion unit like the one we had at the other house. He assured me it was approved for use in garages and that he has installed a lot of them over the years, but would double check to make sure. He can return this one if needed, but said the sealed unit is more expensive. It would also require completely different fresh air and exhaust ducting that would have to go through the back wall of the garage. I suspect we will stick with the one that is already installed.

Darryll sprayed every iron pipe connection with soapy water and the only leak he found was the cap they put on the end of the run this morning. Apparently they did not tighten it fully when they installed it. He snugged it down and had Alec re-pressurized the pipe to 12 PSI but did not recheck for leaks. (Hypothetically, if the leak at the end of the pipe was big enough other leaks might not show up anywhere else until that one was fixed.) If there are no other leaks then the pressure should stay at 12 PSI indefinitely; certainly until they come back on Monday or Tuesday.

For dinner Linda made a nice green salad and a pepper seitan dish served over white rice; simple but delicious. I checked the pressure in the black iron pipe after dinner, when it was cooler and the sun had dropped lower in the western sky, and it was down to 11 PSI. That seemed like a lot of pressure loss to me, but the Ideal Gas Law (PV=nRT) says that for a fixed volume (V) the pressure (P) and temperature (T) are directly proportional (by the factor nR). We know from experience that the pressure in an RV tire changes a little with changes in the ambient air temperature even when sitting still and quite a bit when the tire heats up from driving. If all the tire pressures are set to the same value first thing in the morning and one side of the RV is facing south on a sunny day the pressures in the tires on the sunny side will be measurably higher than the shady side at mid-afternoon. Of course there is a lot of air in our bus tires since they run at 100 PSI, more or less. Most of the black iron pipe is not exposed to direct sun for most of the day so tomorrow I may re-pressurize the pipe at 10 PSI and record the pressure and temperature every 30 minutes until 2 or 3 PM to see how it varies. Or not.

Phil (Precision Grading) called back this evening and said he could take care of fixing the driveway on Friday afternoon for a very reasonable price. Sold. That means we will not be going to the Clio rally on Friday for the 1 PM roundtable discussion. So be it. We will probably drive up on Saturday after our ham radio breakfast. While Phil is here we are going to shoot the grade in the back with his laser level if he has time and see what we really have. He and I agree that just eyeballing it things do not look quite right.

It’s obvious to me after the heavy rains on Monday and Tuesday that the two plastic drain pipes running out into the back yard should have had a third drain tile line put in the trench with them (perforated with an oversock) and the trench should have been filled with pea gravel to create a French drain that would remove the water flowing into that low lying area and keep it from saturating the ground. It would also have made the pipes better able to withstand being driven over by a vehicle. As it stands, anything heavy that drives over that area while it is moist/soft will most likely crush the pipes (again). I’m annoyed because I did not know enough to specify this as part of the job and because Steve, for whatever reason, did not recommend it.

To fix this correctly we would need to have Phil locate the existing plastic pipe and dig it up back past the Y-connector for the two downspouts and up into the two slopes far enough that it is out of his way. That would allow him to re-grade the entire area properly, dig a new trench starting from the edge of the lower deck, install the three drain lines, fill the trench with pea gravel, and then finish grade the slopes and valley correctly, all of which Village Landscape should have done, in my opinion, but did not. It would also give us the opportunity to replace the corrugated plastic drain line with PVC pipe which would better withstand the weight of a vehicle once encased in pea gravel. The rear retaining walls and front stairs/sidewalk look nice and appear to have been built correctly so we did get something for our money, most, in fact, of what we paid for, just not everything we needed.

2014/08/12 (T) Popcorn And A Movie

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It rained long and hard all day yesterday and into the evening past bedtime. Today brought more rain, though not as hard and not quite as persistent. Although we have low spots around our yard that turn into small temporary ponds when we get this kind of rain we are not in an area that is prone to flooding. That’s because we live just south of the boundary between two watersheds–the Huron River to the south and the Shiawassee River to the north–so water tends to flow away from here, eventually.

Phil (Best Precision Grading) stopped by around 10:30 AM to look at the pull-through driveway he built for us last year. He said it looked solid enough to drive the bus on it, but was obviously no longer level and had a low spot in front of the new front stairs. He will need a half day and a small load of 21AA road gravel to repair the damage done by Village Landscape Development while building our front stairs and sidewalk. The cost won’t be too bad (although it shouldn’t have cost us anything) but getting him to find the time to come do it could be a challenge. He’s had a busy summer and suffered the same delays as other contractors who do outdoor work due to the wet spring and summer we’ve had.

He was also here to see the work Village Landscape Development had done. He agreed that the hardscape work looked good but the grading in the rear did not look right and the tracks in the yard from the equipment had not been raked out properly. He suggested I let the grass grow in and the ground dry out before assessing whether anything needs to be done.

He also looked at the west end of our property, which sits lower than the east end where the house is located. The timing of his visit was good as all the low-lying areas had water standing in them, allowing him to see clearly the exact nature of the (lack of) drainage problem. His suggestion was a “French drain.” Basically it’s a trench that is shallow at the far/high end and gets deeper as it goes towards the place where the water needs to end up. Plastic drain tile, the kind with perforations and a nylon “sock” covering, gets laid in the trench and then the trench is filled to grade with pea gravel. The dirt that came out of the trench gets spread around to cover the pea gravel and blend in to the undisturbed soil on either side.

When completed, the drain would take all of the standing water plus much more out of the surrounding soil and allow it to flow to a culvert that runs to the southwest under the road just west of the culvert along the side of the road that will eventually be the entrance to our bus barn driveway. A French drain is cheaper to build than hauling in large truck loads of top soil and re-grading that part of the yard. We probably should have had Village Landscape make a French Drain around the two plastic drain lines they ran out into the yard from our basement walkout. Oh well, “can’t should‘a done it.”

We had tofu hot dogs for lunch and then Linda left to meet up with Diane to see a movie (Boyhood) and then go out to dinner at Bahama Breeze. I stayed home and worked at my computer, taking a break mid-afternoon to make popcorn. The worst weather of the day was happening at that time, so I stayed upstairs for a while and read the new 2nd edition of The Mobile Internet Handbook that I had just downloaded this morning. I worked until 7 PM and then stopped to have a light dinner consisting of chickpea spread on whole grain toast and half of a small watermelon. Linda got home as I was finishing my watermelon.

In spite of AT&T switching our phone and DSL service to all new wire pairs our Internet service went out occasionally throughout the day and evening, although it usually returned quickly. I think the sad truth is that their landline infrastructure is not as tolerant of wet weather as it should be and most of their money is going into expanding cellular service. We had the same problem over the years at our house in Farmington Hills.

2014/08/11 (M) SLAARC/WordPress

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Some of the members of SLAARC are former Detroit Edison employees (now DTE Energy) and one of them (Bruce, W8RA) currently works for Intercontinental Transmission Company (ITC). Bruce was curious what size transformer we had and said that there were likely numbers on it that I could read with a pair of binoculars. I went out this morning to check, but the only info on the transformer can is a metal plate that is too small and illegible to read from the ground even with our fairly good binoculars.

Darryll (DCM Heating & Cooling) had not shown up or called by 10:30 AM. His work doesn’t make a mess of our yard or house, at least it hasn’t yet, so it is less of a concern that he is not here working today than it was with the landscaping. When he left Thursday he had a short list of parts he needed to get and perhaps could not do that until this morning. Or he may have gotten emergency service requests, which take priority over new installations. Still, we would like to have the new HVAC work completed in the next week or so to make sure it is done ahead of the natural gas hookup.

As part of that work I have to complete some of the electrical pieces, finish dry-walling the utility closet, and continue cleaning, repairing, and organizing the garage while we have the storage pod. I then need to get to work on a long list of bus projects. I also have a lot of desk/computer work to do and I prefer to do that when I know I can settle in for a long stretch. I tend not to be in the right frame of mind for desk work when I do not know if/when contractors are going to show up. It’s turned out to be a busy, and in some ways complicated, summer that way. Darryll called late morning to say they would be back first thing Wednesday morning. That information allowed me to adjust my expectations and settle in for a long day and evening at my computer.

My main focus was working on the page content for the new SLAARC WordPress website, which occupied me until dinnertime with some e-mail mixed in. After dinner I started uploading blog posts beginning with the one for July 7th. I decided that I would not select and upload photos for most of the posts in July and early August and instead create more extensive gallery posts for the landscaping work and the garage/HVAC project.

One of the things I have noticed in the past week is that our Internet connection seems to be faster, or at least my e-mail processes much quicker than it used to. That could be the result of the AT&T repair on the 4th, which ended up moving us to entirely new wire pairs, or a change that AT&T made to our DSL service back on the 3rd (when it kept going off temporarily), or it could be that QTH upgraded their e-mail server system, or some combination of these. Whatever the case, it seems to be an improvement.

Phil from Precision Grading called at noon to see if he could stop by sometime after 3 PM today. It was raining gently at the time but when he called back a little after 3 PM the rain had finally opened up into a sustained downpour. He had an 8 AM appointment in Hell (Michigan) and we agreed that tomorrow morning after his appointment would probably be a much better time for him to stop by.

We ordered a “cat tent” the other day and it showed up this afternoon. We opened it and set up in the living room with the “door” tied open so the cats could explore the inside. They were wary, but did go in briefly. It’s kind of like a back-packing tent but all the fabric, including the floor, is mesh. We thought the floor would be a solid material, but it’s not. It will be OK for use on our deck at home, but seems less suitable for use on the ground when we are RVing. We intended to use it for both so we are not sure if we are going to keep it.

For dinner Linda made a tomato-onion-mushroom ragu and served it over a three rice blend with a dark mixed greens salad on the side. Later she served fresh strawberries with Lotus brand cookies and dark chocolate with bits of almond and sea salt. Seriously, what’s not to like about that?

20140711 (F) Nice Weather Lately

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Steven’s nephew, Spencer, was here a little after 8 AM and spent some time cleaning up the driveway. He was joined by Tommy, who was only available for the morning. Tommy got instructions from Steve by phone and they tried working on the retaining walls, but I’m not sure what they accomplished. One of the large boulders Steve positioned yesterday on the lower west wall had dropped 6 inches and they were unable to re-position it.

It was another pleasant day, so I decided to work outside during the morning. I cut up some previously trimmed tree limbs and then started pruning our apple tree. I tried to cut all of the dead limbs and branches I could reach from the ground using our new Fiskar’s ratcheting lopper. With that material removed I was able to use the pole saw and compound lopper to remove some larger and/or higher limbs. By noon it was getting warm and I knocked off for the day and had lunch. Linda made the chickpea (garbanzo bean) salad that we both like so much and served it on a bed of greens with red grapes and sweet Bing cherries on the side.

Tommy had to take off for the afternoon and left Spencer to start moving smaller rocks onto the slope of the east retaining wall. We would occasionally hear one thud against the foundation and I decided I should check on his progress. He was doing a fine job of tossing rocks into place, but I did not like the way the earth was pitched as it appeared to slope back towards the house. I examined the west wall and it appeared to have the same problem.

Since the whole reason for this project was to get water to flow away from the house, I asked Spencer to take a break while I called Steve. I told him that something just did not look right to me and that I could not see any evidence of a drain tile behind the upper wall on the west side. He was running the excavator at another job site and wasn’t able to come look at our job so he sent Kyle over to pick up Spencer, who did not have a car. With a chance of rain in the forecast for Saturday through Monday it is looking more and more like this job will not be done until the end of July.

In the afternoon I continued working on configuring my Windows 8.1 laptop. My challenge today was getting Outlook 2013 to preview PDF files. I used the search feature on the Start screen to locate information, some of which indicated I would have to create and/or edit the registry. In the end the solution only required two steps: installing Adobe Reader 11 and then setting it as the default program for PDFs.

With that problem solved I edited my blog posts for July 1 through 9 and started uploading them. I managed to get the posts for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd uploaded before dinner. I also got a return call from Darryll at DCM Heating and Cooling and we agreed he would come to the house tomorrow at 10:30 AM to finalize the work we need done and pin down a start date to prep the house for natural gas and install a small HVAC unit for the library and a furnace for the garage. We also need the main air-conditioner serviced. Luckily it has been a cool summer so far. The conversion of appliances will have to wait until the natural gas line is connected to the meter and turned on, which could be as late as early October.

I got a call from Gary at GM Construction sometime in the last few days. He finally had all of his supplier quotes for our pole barn / bus garage project and had a price for us. It was higher than I would have liked, but less than the quote from Morton Buildings, which was for a much smaller barn. Last night I called Phil from Precision Grading to update him on the status of the project and to see if he would swing by and look at the pull-through driveway which the landscapers have torn up more than I expected. My best guess is that we will get a barn up somehow, but I’m not sure when or how.

For dinner Linda made pan-grilled sliced tofu with onions and Bar-B-Que sauce served on a toasted sandwich bun with a side of lightly oiled and baked potato wedges and a few fresh strawberries. Of course, that meant ketchup with Tabasco sauce. We split a can of cold Yuengling beer which was the perfect beverage for this meal. Sometime in the last two days Linda made a raspberry sauce from frozen raspberries we picked last year. Earlier today she made a vegan chocolate cake and this evening the cake and raspberry sauce came together for dessert.

2014/05/03 (S) Ham It Up

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Today started with breakfast out and felt like we were finally starting to get back into the flow. We drove to South Lyon for the Saturday morning breakfast gathering of our South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club, as we do almost every Saturday morning when we at the house. Steve (N8AR) gave me a lead on someone who might be willing to build our pole barn. After breakfast we returned home and I walked Linda through the project I discussed yesterday with Steve for redoing the rear basement walkout retaining walls, drainage, and yard grading.

I worked on our blog and Linda worked on lunch preparations while we awaited the arrival of our daughter and son-in-law. They have had Linda’s Honda Civic Hybrid since December and were returning it, so they drove two cars. Linda got to visit with them in late February / early March, but I had not seen them since mid December. We had a nice lunch of mixed greens salad and vegan Sloppy Joe’s with sweet gherkin pickles on the side. Fresh strawberries and carrot cake cookies provided a sweet ending to the meal. We had a nice visit.

Steve from Village Landscaping Development stopped by with a brochure, business card, and the project proposal written up on a more official estimating form. We will take a few days to think about, but it’s a very good proposal and I am 99% certain we will hire him to do this work. It would be nice to get it done in late May to early June, between The SKP Escapade and the GLAMARAMA rallies, but it may not be dry enough by then. If not, it will have to wait until early July after we return from the installation ceremonies for Linda’s sister who is assuming one of the top leadership positions in the St. Louis Province of the Congregation (Sisters) of St. Joseph.

A little later Phil Jarrel, from Best Precision Grading, came by to take a second look at the site preparation and grading work for the pole barn. We walked the site and agreed that I could/should change the orientation of the building just a bit from where it is currently staked. We also discussed how to make sure the barn was located behind the front line of the house and talked through the permitting and construction process. He did not have any builders to recommend, but he did recommend a concrete contractor for the pit and floor.

We did quite a few construction projects at the previous house over the years but the pole barn involves elements that are new to me, and I now have to deal with a Township for a land use permit and the County for building and grading permits. I am fairly set on the size, location, and basic design/materials, but we not have settled on a builder or materials supplier. Consequently, we still do not have an accurate total cost estimate. Until everything is in place, and the cost is known, nothing can move forward. Meanwhile, the days keep flipping over on the calendar.

2013_10_25-31 (M-R) FOOD At The Phase Place!

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Sometimes I get busy and don’t keep up with my posts. When I go back even as little as a week, as in this post, I find that many of the details are already lost in the continuous flow of daily living.

With the bus work in Williamston wrapped up, I turned my attention to figuring out what body panels and small parts I needed to order from Prevost to fix the damage I did to the passenger side of the bus leaving the campground in Townsend, TN. I spent a fair amount of time in the Prevost CatBase Viewer database. There were enough parts involved that I made an Excel spreadsheet. I called Prevost U.S. Parts and got Roger Anderson on the line. After discussing this for a while, we decided that it would be easiest for me to e-mail him the spreadsheet.

Next up was final preparations for the annual business meeting of our FMCA Freethinkers Associate Chapter (FTH), of which I am the vice-president and secretary. There are a surprising number of documents that are involved in a simple meeting of a small group: an agenda (from the president), minutes from last year’s meeting, financial statements (which Linda and I prepare based on data from the treasurer), proposed amendments to the bylaws, and an updated roster. All of these get converted to PDF files and uploaded to a folder in our Dropbox account. I have provided a link to that folder to all of our members.

We made our usual trip to South Lyon on Saturday morning for breakfast with members of the South Lyon Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC). Linda worked on recipes. I installed the WP-Recipes plug-in and she has started using it to capture and publish recipes for some of our favorite whole-food plant-based (WFPB) dishes. She is evening taking a photograph of the finished dish and adding it to the recipe page. (Click on the Food & Health Tab and then on Recipes in the dropdown menu.)

While Linda worked on recipes I worked on WordPress websites. Besides our own, I am working on websites for our FMCA Freethinkers Associate Chapter (FTH), our FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches Chapter (GLCC, of which Linda is the Treasurer), and our South Lyon Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC).

WordPress is constantly releasing updates and new versions. This generally a good thing, but they always strongly advise that you backup your site (folders/files/database) before installing an upgrade. I haven’t been doing that, so I decided on Saturday that I should. The GLCC website is an add-on domain for our primary/personal site, so I was able to back it up using the backup utilities in the QTH.com cPanel. The FTH website is hosted by iPower and the SLAARC website is hosted by GoDaddy, neither of which use cPanel nor appear to have built in backup utilities. There is some provision for backup built in to WordPress.

When I used the cPanel backup utility to backup our primary/personal site and the GLCC site it was about 1 GB. We only had 2.5 GB on our free Dropbox account, so I signed up for the 100 GB Dropbox plan. I then went on a search for a WordPress plug-in that would do the backups on a schedule. I selected WordPress Backup To Dropbox (WPB2D) and then installed and activated it on all four sites. I am going to test it for a couple of weeks and see how it works. I hope it works well as it is a very simple plug-in to use.

Our FTH meeting was scheduled as a conference call for 6:00 PM EDT on Sunday evening, October 27. We have 40 memberships in the chapter and needed 10 to make a quorum. 6:00 PM came and went and at 6:15 PM we only had 8 people on the line. The president polled the group and decided we would try again the next night; same time, same place.

Our SLAARC information net is held every Sunday evening at 8:00 PM. I was a regular participant up until we moved to the new house. Although I have our 2m/70cm base station antenna mounted on the old TV tower, I do not have the coax run to the ham shack in the basement. Hooking up the radio is inconvenient, especially in cold/dark/wet conditions, all of which we now have. I would like to have the ham shack set up and functioning, but it has not made it to the top of the list yet.

On Monday I drove the bus to W. W. Williams in Dearborn, Michigan to have them look at the auxiliary air system and the speedometer. They thought the constant cycling of the main engine air-compressor was either the governor or the air-dryer purge valve. Since the governor had just been replaced, I authorized replacing the purge valve. They thought the speedometer issue was the “tone wheel”, the sensor, or the gauge. The sensor was just replaced, so I authorized them to check that it was installed correctly and to pull the output shaft housing on the end of the transmission to check the tone wheel.

I called Roger back at Prevost U.S. Parts. He had filled in my spreadsheet and prepared a Prevost quote, so he e-mail those back to me. I decided to hold off ordering until Michele at Phoenix Paint has a chance to look at the damage and decide if she can fix it.

Linda and I had staked out the size/location of our planned bus barn and driveway. We adjusted the stakes slightly, moving the barn 5 feet farther from the road and squaring it up. It’s currently 32 ft. wide by 56 ft. long with a driveway that includes a spur for turning around. Phil from Precision Grading came by Monday evening, measured the area, and dug a couple of test holes to see what soil conditions we had. He said we had 13 inches of good top soil in that area. This will have to be removed and replaced with crushed concrete and 21AA road gravel, so we discussed possible locations on our property for the top soil. Some of it will go in a depressed area behind the proposed barn location. This area forms a lake whenever we get heavy/persistent rain. Some it will probably go on the west side of the main garage driveway, which currently drops off more than we would like, and somewhat unevenly. There are also low spots on the far west end of our property, and some of the topsoil will likely go there.

I spent the rest of this period working on the various websites. In particular, I finally figured out how to configure and use the WP-Members plug-in to restrict access to selected portions of a WordPress site based on a Username and Password. With that feature working, I focused on design (structure) and content for the FTH and GLCC sites. I got sidetracked on Halloween with the idea of installing a “slider” (automated slideshow) in place of the default graphic in the RESPONSIVE Theme I am using for the GLCC site. I selected and installed Meteor Slides based on its demonstration by the authors of RESPONSIVE. It had the appearance of being very simple to install and use, and it was/is once I figured it out. It took me 5 hours to do that, but I did. The site is not ready for viewing yet, but I will share the address when it is.

2013_10_07-10 (M – R) Wrap-up and Re-load

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Linda did double duty this week (Monday and Wednesday) in the babysitting department as she will miss her regularly scheduled shift next week while we attend an RV rally / photography workshop. So our daughter got Wednesday “off” will fill in for her next Monday. I took the opportunity to work at my desk and finally prepared the various materials that I have to supply to the members of our FMCA Freethinkers associate chapter for our upcoming annual business meeting. We also took care of errands and finished cleaning up from the open house.

One errand I had not ever been on was taking boxes of paper to a shredding facility (Royal Oak Recycling in White Lake Township). This place has you drive onto a scale with your car, drive to a dock and unload your stuff, and then drive back on the scale. I had 10 copier paper boxes of mixed paper and hadn’t really thought about the fact that “20 lb” paper means that a case of 10 reams weights 20 pounds. I didn’t think I had that much paper, but the difference in the before and after weight of the car was 220 lbs. ROR charges 15 cents per pound if you want to watch them shred your paper, or they pay you 2.5 cents per pound if you are willing to just drop it off. Since the papers to be shred were mostly old personal and business financial records, we wanted to verify that they had indeed been shredded, so I paid. They only take cash, so it was a good thing that I had enough to cover the $33+ amount.

At one time I sent updated rosters to the members of our Freethinkers chapter by attaching the PDF to an e-mail. More recently, I decided to put the roster and other documents in my personal Dropbox, generate a link, and just e-mail the link to everyone. That technology works very well, and is capable of even more sophisticated operating modes. But I have also been thinking about, and working on, a website for this group using WordPress. I decided that I would put some effort into giving it some structure and preliminary content, and use it to deliver documents and other materials to the members. The challenge is that some of the materials, like the roster, contain information that is for the members only and cannot be available for public view.

I was able to password protect individual pages, but the protection is less than ideal as web browsers apparently remember these passwords even when you ask them not to. It’s may be that this is being done using cookies, but however it is being done I could not figure out a way to defeat it. I also played around with WordPress user roles, but the only thing that WordPress seemed to have built into it was the ability to require users to log in to post a comment/reply. This is apparently one of the reasons for the “subscriber” user role. If have been looking at a WordPress plug-in called S2, or S2 Member, or S2 Framework, that appears to have the ability to place all or part of WordPress website behind a user login function, but I have not had a chance to install, configure, and play with it yet.

On Wednesday I drove Linda to her babysitting gig in Ann Arbor and then I drove back to Ann Arbor in the afternoon to visit with Madeline and her mom and dad. Shawna had an evening appointment so Linda and I had a quiet dinner with our son and then drove home together.

We spent Thursday re-loading the bus for our trip to Tennessee and Virginia. Phil from Precision Grading came by around 6:30 PM. We talked about the approximate location of the bus barn/garage and he set up his transit so we could measure the contours of the site, the driveway in from the road, and the surrounding yard. Based on his measurements, it looks like our planned site should work very well in terms of drainage, which is always a prime consideration.

Linda spent the rest of the evening working at her desk and following the Detroit Tigers in game 5 of the first round of the American League playoffs. I spent the rest of the evening updating the firmware in our Sony Alpha 100 digital SLR and updating the Sony Image Data Converter and Motion Picture Browser programs.

2013_09_01-04 Driveway Success, Raspberries, And Old Friends

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Sunday September 1^st found us at our son and daughter-in-law’s house for a Labor Day family pot luck along with our daughter, son-in-law, and step-grand-daughter. Grand-daughter Madeline handled the crowd pretty well, but still was still wary of Grandpa Bruce, so I had to be content with mutual admiration from a distance. She is starting to crawl and pull herself up to a standing position, and is fascinated by books, especially ones she can try to eat.

We awoke Monday morning (Labor Day) to overcast skies and the threat of rain. We had planned to drive to Middleton Berry Farm near Ortonville to pick raspberries and decided to go in spite of the weather. Ed and Betty, our RV friends, were working/staying there and we had said we would try to stop by. The rain never materialized and the overcast skies made the picking experience more pleasant.

Neither of us had ever picked raspberries, or anything else other than apples, pumpkins, and Christmas trees. We enjoyed the experience, collecting 12 pints of fruit between us. At $4.00/pint it seemed expensive until we checked raspberry prices at the grocery store and Door-to-Door Organics and saw them ranging from $5 – $6 for 6 ounces. We didn’t weigh our pints, but Linda estimated that it would take three of the 6 ounce contains to match one of our pints.

It seemed appropriate that we were laboring on Labor Day, even though this is the one day of the year that labor typically doesn’t labor, but rather relaxes and celebrates importance those who labor and the work they do. Although we have been sourcing fresh fruits and vegetables from local farmers markets when we can, it was very satisfying to personally harvest even a small portion of our own food from a living plant. It also gave us an appreciation for those who do this kind of work for a living. As we were checking out we also bought a fresh pepper and tomato.

When we got back to the house Linda washed, dried, and froze all put three of the pints of raspberries. With that task initiated, we turned our attention to the pull-through driveway. It had not rained for the past several days, and it was time for the BIG TEST. We unplugged the electrical power from the bus, pulled the chocks, fired it up, and backed it out of the driveway and down the street, positioning it to drive in to the pull-through driveway. Linda watched the tires as I drove in, and seeing nothing more than tread marks I brought in, across the pad, and out the other side, back on to the concrete driveway. Success!!!

We inspected the pull-through driveway. In some places there was no evidence that the bus had just been there, in others only tread marks, and in a few spots a slight channel of not more than 0.5 inches. Phil had told me previously that compaction of up to 1 inch might be possible but would indicate that the driveway was finally locking together, so we were very pleased with the result. I pulled the bus out and around again, but this time I tried to go back and forth over slightly different paths on the approach and then again on the parking pad area. I did not pull the bus all the way this time, but got it lined up on the pad with Linda’s help and parked it with the entrance door opposite the front door of the house.

I e-mailed Phil Jarrell (Precision Grading) to give him the good news. Phil has been an absolutely outstanding guy to work with, standing behind his work, and doing what was needed to fix what turned out to be a problem with the load of 21AA road gravel used in the project. Besides building this pull-through driveway for us, he dug up and repaired our septic tanks and regarded an area in the back yard to help move water away from the area outside out basement doorwall. We plan to eventually put up a bus barn to house the motorhome, and we plan to have Phil do the site prep, driveway(s), and final grading.

Linda spent Tuesday baby-sitting Madeline while I worked around the house, trying to clean up and arrange the ham shack/office and get all of the technology hooked up and working. I made good progress, but I didn’t get it done. It’s never done. I took time out to have a long chat with my best friend from high school. J. C. has lived in Olympia, Washington for years with his wife, Julie and their three girls, but we have managed to stay in touch. He was my best man at our wedding and I was his best man at theirs. In the early years we corresponded by letter with an occasional phone call, but that was in the days before cell phones and “unlimited local and long distance” plans. Eventually it was by e-mail. We tried instant messaging, but it doesn’t work well for me. We’ve even Skyped once or twice, but it requires broadband to work well, and we don’t have that at the new house. We’ve even had an occasional but all-too-rare face-to-face visit. I drove to Ypsilanti to meet up with Linda and our good friend Kate de Fuccio for dinner. Kate is a former colleague from my educational service agency days, the graphics designer for the agency and a very talented photographer. She is also a kindred spirit traveler, excellent researcher, and perhaps the most considerate person I know. We don’t see her enough.

Kate had suggested Nirmal Indian Cuisine in Ypsilanti and Linda had checked out their menu online, which has become standard practice for us. Nirmal has several vegan dishes, and others that can be made vegan, so we agreed to give it a try. They also serve chicken, but their specialty appears to be goat. They place is a bit “preachy” about the health benefits of Indian food, but the way they do it is kind of innocently cute and we enjoyed that aspect of the place; it’s true after all, and we are sympathetic to the sentiment. Most importantly, the food was excellent, and the staff was very attentive. We had a leisurely dinner which was fine with us as it gave us lots of time to talk. We adjourned to the Starbucks just up the street and continued our conversation.

Wednesday was errand day for us. We picked out stain and paint colors for the rear deck, which Jim Pipoly is going to redo later this month. Jim did all of the painting on our old house and new house. He’s the only guy we use, and friends and family use him too. When you find a good contractor you stick with them. We dropped off old prescription and over-the-counter drugs at the Livingston County jail, where they have a special “no questions asked” collection barrel. The Howell Recycling Center is only open on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so we stopped there. We don’t have curbside recycling like we did in Farmington Hills. We’ve been recycling for so long that it doesn’t feel right to throw things in the trash that can be recycled so we gladly paid the $22 annual membership fee. We picked up some drawer cabinets for the office, a free-standing cabinet for the basement bathroom (which has no other storage), and unpacked the wine refrigerator and plugged it in. We always seem to have just enough bottles of wine that they can’t all go in the regular refrigerator so they end up in the pantry where they take up space we need for other things. They are not cooled, which is bad for storage, but even worse in terms of limiting our choices when we decide we want to open a bottle. It’s one of those things I’ve always wanted and it just wasn’t that expensive. I am now trying to figure out where the popcorn machine will go in the basement rec room. After dinner Linda continued to work on finding an RV park/campground where we can meet up with her brother and his wife in October and I worked on configuring our e-mail SpamExperts and updating this blog.