Where does the time fly? - The Patio Part Deux

Okay, another whole week has rolled by, and I think I blinked and somehow missed all the free time I had to blog. Okay, well maybe I was just lazy, and enjoyed lounging in front of the TV a bit too much. All that aside, I once again return to continue my tale of the patio from hell…

So the wife and I had returned home feeling the satisfaction of knowing that we were finally started on the project. I unload the bags of sand and head out to the area where we planned on setting up the patio. I started to scout out the locations in the back yard, and decided on an anchor point where the whole patio measurements would be based from. I marked out the distances with stakes, and felt that despite my not paying to much attention in my engineering notation classes (where we discussed surveying and staking) I had done a fairly good job of getting the measurements correct, and the lines square. This was a pretty good days work, and it was time for me to head to softball, so I decided to call it a day and finish up the next day.

Of course softball provided some wonderful complications, seeing how I managed to completely rip my big toenail off, and drive part of the nail into the top part of the skin that is under your toenail. I love beer league church softball! As you can imagine, this is a quite painful little injury, and I can now completely understand how college and pro athletes can be forced to miss games due to having turf toe. Ouch. It just plain hurt to walk, and now I was going to be undertaking a major construction project in my backyard the next day! I have linked a few pictures below, warning they are kind gross. The wife would also like to let all my readers know that she is completely opposed to any pictures of my toe being posted, and thinks that as a result of me posting this I have become a crude and disgusting boy! Personally I would like to use this as a bit of a social experiment, because I have always noticed that if you post something and say “ah it is so gross and horrible… my eyes are burning” that people will still click on it. The curiosity just can’t be overcome…. So remember I am watching!

Toe 1

Toe 2

Toe 3

I get home and clean my toe up (the wife would have helped, but she has problems touching her own feet, much less my mangled one!) and basically sit there dreading the fact that the next day I am going to spend the whole day on my feet, and then come home and start breaking round and digging thru our amazingly thick and hard sod/clay mixture. The pictures I posted earlier don’t really do the sod justice, but I am proud to say that my lawn had some great root structure (Pebble Beach groundskeeper better watch his back!) I managed to limp my way through a whole day of work (thank goodness for sandals and a very understanding office staff) and come home to start digging. The wife decides that she is wants to do the ceremonial first ground breaking, so she takes the shovel and tries to dig into the ground. All she manages to do is to almost fall over as the shovel completely fails to cut through the sod. I claim this is because she just doesn’t have enough weight behind it, but the wife just rolls her eyes at me and gives me one of those looks that she is now becoming a quasi -internet celebrity for.

What the wife failed to realize is that not only do we have incredibly thick sod, but we also have very dense clay which had not been watered very recently (I was trying to prevent working in a mud puddle) so the clay had kind of backed into a brick like consistency. I even had to jump on the shovel sometimes to get down to the level we were looking for, and occasionally had to throw my gut into it! Every time I stepped on the shovel, my toe ached, and by the end of the night I was pretty sure my toe was swollen up to the size of a bratwurst. I however gamely plugged away, and managed to get about 16 total square feet cleared down to 6 inches below the sod level before darkness over took us.

The next night I rushed home ready to take delivery of our bricks that were to be arriving, only to find myself in a familiar situation of hurry up and wait. Finally we start checking the paperwork and notice that the delivery date is wrong, and our friendly little home improvement clerk never did manage to get the date correct. We were just about to call and make some poor customer service guy’s night, when I saw the delivery truck drive by on the street behind us. Now this is a common thing, as the road behind us has the same name, only is a “Road” while we live on the “Street”. Unfortunately mapping services like Yahoo Maps and MapQuest can’t handle that distinction so many delivery guys find themselves trying to make a delivery to an alfalfa field. This guy must have finally figured it out and arrived to drop the stones off. He quickly unloads his truck mounted forklift, and proceeds to unload the pallets of stone right in the middle of the driveway! Not only would this make it very difficult to use our driveway, but since both vehicles were in the garage, we would never have gotten out unless we moved the stones. The driver was putting the fork truck back on the delivery truck about the time I managed to get his attention and told him he had to move the pallets. Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking or if there is any brain function whatsoever in guys like that!

Well I think this is long enough for now, I will continue sometime soon.. Oh yeah, T I will only use tasteful picutres, as I know that you are a celebrity now, and would hate to be one of those sleazy tabloid sites that post unflattering shots of celebrities! In the mean time, please enjoy this picture of a rainbow /stormclouds that appeared near our house the other night.