"A Picture a Day" challenge

Vanessa and I were texting about pictures and we decided we need to just take more of them. She came up with the idea of a pic a day posted here. I like this plan. Here was yesterday's effort:

It is the top down view of one of my solar lights and the annoying samaras let loose by my tree this year. Bumper samara year, apparently. 

Here is today's effort: 

This is Fergus' first trip outside in his life. He was not excited. The students were. 

It's Spring! (Spring Break, anyway)

I look forward to spring break every year. Most years I have nothing luxurious or exotic planned, I just relish a week off and time to be completely lazy without a lot of guilt. Ok, I always manufacture guilt, but I like the time off anyway.

This year, true to form, I stayed home. I scouted a few locations for field trips. One place I visited was the Rocky Point side of Klamath Lake. The springs with mare's eggs had water bubbling up through the sand below and ice on the surface. Very cool.

I also made a quick trip to Bend to scout traffic patterns for a field trip later this spring. Luckily, Vanessa went along to navigate for me. I'd much rather have Vanessa telling me where to turn now than ten shrill teenagers in a month. We had vague plans for lunch and possibly some shopping, though both of us are in "austerity" mode for a while. Our one necessary shopping adventure revolved around finding beer for Bill. After a miscue at a bar, where the looks from the regulars clearly said "Yer not from around here are ya?" we found our way to the Broken Top Bottle Shop. Siri, I'll never doubt you again. Both Vanessa and I found it very funny that we drove to Bend on essentially a beer run for Bill.

Later in the week, after much lazing and reading, I took the dogs up to Gerber for a day. It was gorgeous, warm, and just what we needed after being cooped up this winter. The first picture below was the best I could get of two sandhill cranes wading in a pond. I've never seen sandhill cranes anywhere other than in open meadow/fields, so I was fascinated. I did have my binoculars and bird book along, so I know they were sandhills. Maybe they were bored with land bugs and decided to try shellfish.

The water level at Gerber seems to be very low for this time of year. I saw lots of birds, watched the jets from Kingsley Field having big swooping fun, read a lot, got some sunshine, and didn't get one decent picture of the dogs. They had a blast, though, and didn't seem to think March was too early for a good swim and splash. :)

New floor, going in!

Today was the day! Dad and Mom came over and brought a table saw with them (thanks for the loan, Dave) and Dad and I proceeded to figure out how to install the laminate flooring. The first short row went well enough. Then I thought we had it in backwards and that we had to start in the other part of the room to boot. Approximately an hour or so (at least) later, with many cut boards and another row in, I realized I was wrong and we had done the first row correctly. Back to that part of the room! Save the cut boards for later! With many measurements and thinking things through, Dad and I got past a partition and a width change, and got several rows in today before they had to return to Lakeview. This is the gorgeousness of the new floor:

After Mom and Dad left I put in another couple of rows, and managed to damage myself pretty well:

If that doesn't look sufficiently painful, let me tell you that the camera and lighting don't do the massive blood blister justice. This is what happens when I'm using a hammer and I look somewhere else to check a gap. I didn't say nice things and I had to pause to put something cold on my wound. The only thing I could find was a bag of frozen cranberries. Those probably ought to be tossed before next Thanksgiving...

Tomorrow I plan to start up the table saw at about 8am. That ought to please the neighbors!

Projects...Continued

After a month of supreme productivity (for me) while house-sitting for Bill and Vanessa, I can list the following as accomplished: installed back "dog patio," painted bedroom, painted dining room, painted living room, tore out carpet and pad from living room/dining room, fixed toilet, put new filters in faucets (ok, that was an easy one), installed new shower head, removed brush from yard, crawled under house and right back out after spiders and dust freaked me out, contemplated how to fix squeaky floor, dismantled old cookstove (wood/electric combo from the 40's...quite the monstrosity), had old stove removed/new range put in, fixed screen doors.  I'm pretty happy with myself, but the BIG project is about to start: installing laminate flooring. Dad's bringing me a saw and I get started on that tomorrow. Whew. I'm hoping to take a short vacation before school starts, but we'll see how it goes. Here's a picture of what part of my living room looks like right now. Oh, and I've also torn out the linoleum at the door and the particle board underneath. Still haven't figured out how to effectively fix the squeaks, though. Cheers!

Le Patio

I mentioned to Dad and Mom that I had projects for July. Lots of projects. I knew I would need help cutting out a dead plum tree and some other brush and I knew that the man with the chainsaw would be Dad. So, I mentioned needing help and he and Mom grilled me for more information on said project, which was the first step of patio construction. Not only did they bring the chainsaw, but they also arrived with: the huge pickup which can carry a full pallet of pavers, hand saw, shovels, extension cords, level, hammers, buckets, T-square, and themselves. I had gained some much needed engineering assistance AND laborers to boot!

This is what we faced:

The weeds and baby trees look innocent enough, but they are a rude bunch, which we were to find out later when the shoveling started. But first we needed to frame in the area and do some measurin' and figurin' and calculatin' of slope. That was a bit comical. Mom and Dad were at either end of a string line and I was in the middle hunched upside down eyeballing a level and hoping to direct them to lift or lower to match a nice centered bubble. I know there are devices made for this, but we had to make do with my cockamamie skills. We got it done and framing began. A side note: holy crap, pressure treated lumber is spendy!

After the frame went in, Dad then figured out how to engineer the screed which would run along at the correct depth, thereby showing us where we needed to dig down and where we needed to fill. This is mom, happily digging away after I had pooped out. By the way, Vanessa's digging fork was a miraculous tool that made this job SO much easier than it would have been. Thanks, V!

Mom finally agreed to take a break. It was 91 degrees at this point. We had the frame dug down and it was time to call it a day!

Extremely early the next morning, the parentals got a load of gravel (those people start the day pretty early, and that's coming from someone who rises at 5:30am to feed the dogs) and we prepared the frame for filling. First we put in some weed barrier that I had the fortune to find on sale a week earlier. Yay, impulse shopping finds!

Then we started the process of filling with gravel and releveling with the screed.I like this picture of the bucket standing guard over the weed barrier.

I don't have a lot of pictures of the gravel going in, because Dad and I were a well-oiled machine with the "haul, pour, level, haul, pour, level" routine. Poor mom was stuck in the back of the pickup shoveling buckets full for us. She does well with that shovel. Here's Dad hosing off the finished gravel.

At this point, we were ready to go get the pavers. A very stern lady with a forklift scared the bejeesus out of me and Dad by hefting a pallet from the highest possible rack of stone products at Home Depot. I guess she knew what she was doing, but I've never taken that little orange barrier fence they put up more seriously. In the end, the pickup was loaded with pavers, retaining wall stones, and a dolly. I don't know how hand-trucks became known as dollies, but I'm glad we had one because we had a LOT of pavers to haul. One hundred twenty six of em, plus the extras on the pallet for the future patio part deux. After getting things stacked up, we called a halt and cleaned up, then went to a Gems game. Yay, baseball!

Bright and early the next morning, we set out to place the pavers. Unfortunately, we had too much gravel. I blame myself for the slope and screed measurements. All that beautiful gravel was pretty much now in the road.

We soon had a system, however. Dad was the "grader" and proceeded to manually remove gravel as mom and I packed and placed each paver. Each paver had to be leveled individually, which sometimes involved a lot of discussion, moving of problematic lumps, and stomping. To those of you wondering about the slope to the right, I live on a hill (which Dad loves to point out and complain about) and I also wanted to retain enough slope in the patio to have runoff go AWAY from the house. It looks more extreme in the picture than it really is, for some reason.

Finally, after getting all 126 pavers in place and then using the gravel to create nicely filled sides, we put in a small retaining wall on the uphill side of the patio. I was happy to have the gravel to fill in and hold the sides and retaining blocks. Here you can see some fisticuffs in action.

In the end, there are a few spots which will have to settle out and may need a bit of "help" in getting tamped in again, but this is the finished product. The dog's kennel will go on the right side, up against the fence and retaining wall, leaving an L-shaped area free. The total dimensions ended up being a 9x14 patio with about a foot of graveled area on each side. I absolutely could not have done this without the help of my parents. They are awesome. I love them, and I love my new patio.

The girls do, too.

It be time to get busy!

Wow, I spent over a year in apparent blog hibernation! It wasn't really something intentional, just that I lost inspiration and went into a tailspin of funk for a while. Last summer was a near bust for traveling (a week at the coast, some good pics of the girls that maybe I'll post one day or use as a Christmas card...ha! like I remember to send cards anymore!) and this summer I don't have huge plans for travel either. BUT, I have MASSIVE plans for house remodeling. At least massive for me. So, I hope to post some "before and after" shots of the living room grunge-o carpet and the back yard dirt patch. Hopefully they will be transformed into gleaming hardwood floors and a terraced patio, respectively. This will all go down while I am house-sitting for Bill and Vanessa. It will be a little schizophrenic working/living in my house and sleeping/living in their house, but without the girls underfoot I hope to get a LOT accomplished. We'll see! Cheers to everyone and happy summer!

On a Sunday

Sometimes I get restless.  I get tired of staring at my little house with all of the monumental tasks that I should be doing, and instead I decide to take the dogs and go exploring. Often I have no specific location in mind, just a vague "I think I'll go north" attitude. I end up interesting places, the girls get to run and run and run, I get to sit in the sun, and I usually take pictures of obscure things.  I also dance with disaster, as I don't have a map and the roads I choose can be tenuous at best.  Luckily enough for me, I spent numerous weekends as a kid with my parents in the Oregon desert and woods, and that has given me a decent sense of direction, if not distance. Additionally, somewhere along the line I learned the following lessons: put it in four wheel drive before you need to, you can always turn around and go back out the way you came in, pack snacks. One of these days my indestructible explorer attitude may bite me on the butt, but today only reaffirmed that my dogs and I can get into and out of some interesting places unscathed (scratches on the pickup notwithstanding.)

Today's destination ended up being the top of the rim above Hagelstein Park and beyond. The view was great, buzzards were in attendance, rocks were picked up, sticks were thrown.

Then we got bored and decided to try a different road back.  I had vague notions that the road would dump me out somewhere towards the Swan Lake area, maybe Chiloquin, maybe Beatty...I wasn't too worried, because I had gas, snacks, and the dogs. Life was good. A sunny spot near a creek provided a few hours of reading and soaking up the solitude while the girls romped and got me, my book, and the blanket muddy. Then we drove on...to find this:

I was dismayed at the thought of having to turn around before I was ready. The tree was far too heavy for me to lift out of the road. Someone had sawed it into two sections, but still, I was puny.  Then I remembered that I have a tow strap in the pickup! Hooray! Log-skidding began!

Log number one proved no problem for the trusty old Ford, no matter what my friends and relatives say about its ilk being found on roadsides dead and despite the fact that it has actually caught fire at one time.  We drove on! We found log number two.  It also succumbed to my towing skills. I forgot to take a picture of it until I had yarded it down the road out of the way, but you really can see the drag marks if you look hard enough.

With two logs under my belt, I had a cocky lumberjack attitude and I drove on, thinking nothing could stop me (at least nothing under 6,000 pounds) and that the girls and I would find our way on this road without backtracking. Even a very large mudhole did not stop us.  No picture of this one, since I was going so fast and yelling "Don't get stuck! Don't get stuck! Don't get stuck!" that I didn't think to stop to photodocument the feat. A bit further on, I took another interesting offshoot that abruptly proved itself to be a logging spur road and anything less than a D-8 Cat would not make it further. The girls needed a stretch, though, so we piled out and they found an old ball presumably left by a logger with some whimsy. Just prior to the first toss for an impromptu game of fetch, however, three rapid gunshots rang out in the hills above us.  My survival skill-set also includes avoidance of being on shooting ranges, so we piled into the pickup and hastily beat a retreat. Long story short, we came back the way we went in, passed three pickups of guys with guns, got to spend some quality time outside, probably have carried home 8 ticks, and survived to tell the tale.  Not a bad way to spend a Sunday.