A beautiful morning + newly reinstated health insurance = time for a 25 mile bike ride before we started our yard work. All was well until about 6 miles from home when Jonathan smashed into a chunk of asphalt with his bike tire. Insert familiar sputter and hiss of a flat tire. After I disposed of the old tube and was returning to Jonathan's bike repair location I heard a not so comforting tube explosion. Apparently during the attempted inflation the tube jumped the rims causing a blowout. To add to the comedy of errors, the tube I had for back up wasn't the proper size and would do Jonathan no good.
Confident that on this morning Jonathan would make the ride home faster than I, he headed off on my bike to pick up the car while I sat with his broken ride in the pool parking lot of a hoity-toity private prep school. Entertainment during my wait was provided courtesy of a few dedicated swimmers. First a 2010 Mercedes SLK pulled in and parked. The stylish driver attempted to enter the pool area, then upon reaching locked gates approached me to ask if I knew if the pool would be open today. "Not sure, I don't live around here" I responded, to which she walked back towards the still locked gate. Shortly there after an equally lovely 2009 Porsche Cayman S parked alongside the SLK in the completely empty parking lot. Mid conversation between the two drivers, a brand new 5 Series BMW pulled into the parking lot. Yet another swimmer equally defeated upon figuring out the gate was locked.
Desperation had apparently set in, because when I looked towards the pool fence I noticed that, with some assistance from her trusty friend, the SLK driver was now sitting on the fence attempting a pool break-in. Desperate times call for desperate measures indeed. About a minute or two later I saw that the fence hopper had thought better of the situation and was back on the appropriate side of the fence.
Defeated, and with no life guards in sight they disband and drove off. It wasn't until I was again alone in the lot that I realized during a good 4o minutes of mini drama no one had even bothered to ask the single female sitting next to her noticeably out of commission road bike which sat upside down sans a front tire, if she was ok and/or needed any assistance. Oh humanity, how you continue to entertain.
Back home we enjoyed breakfast, headed down the street to assist some friends equally consumed with home improvement tasks, then returned home to again work on the front yard. I started by tamping the west side dirt into a darn near perfect grade while Jonathan worked at removing a portion of block in our fence which would allow the front yard drainage pipe to drain into the back yard. With the hole created we started the task of arranging the pipe so that it would drain from the front to the back. Something that should have been easy was of course, not quite so. As we kept raising the pipe to maintain a decline towards the backyard we realized our current set up wasn't going to work. In order to keep our existing grade, and utilize the drainage pipe successfully we needed to lower the end point of the pipe. Luckily our friends down the street still had their rented jack hammer.
Taking turns we worked at funny angles to jack hammer a hole in the concrete footer to meet the needs of our drainage pipe. Thanks to the jack hammer we were able to create the hole in about 10-15 minutes flat. Now that the drainage end of the pipe is so much lower we'll need to continue to dig out a good portion of the trench to maintain a steady decline towards the back. Today's pipe arrangement was a bit of a set back in our progress, but now that we've solved the issue, we'll continue making progress through out the week.
Did I mention this kind of dirty work?
No comments:
Post a Comment