Been.... too..... lo----ng

(obscure Beach Boys reference)

The water-sealing was indeed done on the weekend specified in the previous post. Looks good!

Well, I bought some citronella tiki torches for the deck and made stands for them out of PVC and quick-crete. Looks pretty cool. And to my surprise, you get 4 of those things going in a 12x12 area, they work!

Did a briskett last weekend and had the neighbors over... I've been working out with Ryan across the street, which is forcing me to do more than my regular "just stay toned" exercises. We always have a good time when we cook out.

I got the electric fence re-hooked up for the garden and ran a wire up the bird feeder pole to keep Mrs. Raccoon out. I THINK it's working, but I can't be sure she's actually shown up the past few nights. If I keep filling the sunflower seed feeder and there's not sunflower seeds all over the deck the next morning for a week, I'll call it a success. She was also pulling the screens off the hummingbird feeder and drinking all of the sugar-water out of them! Bugger!

Lee Ruth is teaching me "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" & "Blowin' In the Wind" with some pattern picking, and "Yesterday" with an arpeggio strum -- I'm still sloppy on most of the pattern picking, and although the barred "F" is coming along, it's still frustrating. Well, just keep playing every day and it'll come around.

Ran into a girl (ok, woman) here at work I didn't know who's a technical writer and she goes to Lee as well learning Mandolin --- so I talked to her a bit about her mandolin, and she also has a Martin 00-15 guitar (smaller version of the D-15?). I dig talkin' to chicks about music. Actually I like talking to anyone about it --- anyone whose interested, that is.

My Arapahoe & Roosevelt National Forest maps came yesterday so Mark & I can figure out where we can and can't hike and camp --- I'm already psyched. Vicki knew the evening was lost as soon as she saw it in the mail. July 17 is the day (night) we take off for a whirlwind front-range trip.

Well, to the Winery with Vicki's SDA crowd tonight. Coulda gone to Harrisburg and had frog legs with Sam & Connie... but they weren't going this week anyway. Maybe next week.

Hit the deck

Last weekend Ryan and Daryl went to Lowes with me and we picked up $165 worth of material and made the deck 25 square feet bigger. 26 inches by 12 feet, so now it's a 12x12 deck instead of a 10x12 deck. I've been wanting to do this for about 4 years now. I was just going to treat the deck, but there was so much wood that was no good I thought I really needed to replace that wood -- and it would be silly to replace the wood without expanding the deck to the end of the house (why the original builders didn't do that is beyond me except for that it probably saved them $50.) There is a large wild grape vine for privacy that grows up one side and there's a trelis that sat on top of the south rail. That top rail was the one that was the most rotten. Since I wanted to get the vine up for privacy and to block the smell of the neighbor's deck (he lets his pit bulls just go on their unsealed deck and he sprays it off with the hose but that stuff is in the wood now and it is RANK!)

Anyway, I need to wash the old wood now and treat everything which meant I couldn't put the vine back up on the rail... didn't really want to anyway, so I built a support about 6" out from the rail and put it up there. It's working out pretty well. Put some of the deck scrub on some of the old wood last night and it revealed nice yellow wood underneath.... so the wood isn't as far gone as I thought it might be.

Hopefully this weekend I can get it scrubbed and water-sealed or stained (depending on how the old wood cleans up) and we can stick the plants out there and I can get the automated watering system back up and going for the hanging plants.

I did get the trumpet vine trelis up on Saturday, by the way.

Well, off to work.