Tag Archives: Fiskar’s lopper

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.

 

2014/07/07 (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.