Ohiopyle
June 29, 2005
Today we spent the afternoon in Ohiopyle State Park. I’ll let the pictures tell the story…
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Gone Fishin’
June 22, 2005
Jess and I went fishing with my dad this evening at the Hopewell Township Community Park, or at least that’s what I think it was called.
Here’s a pic of Jess reeling in a whopper:
And here are some friendly neighborhood ducks:
Sidewalk & Landscaping
June 20, 2005
The topsoil has been spread and the grass seed planted over much of the front yard, so here are some pictures for you.
1950 Called. It Wants Its Kitchen Back.
June 15, 2005
One of the first projects we did when we bought our house was to remodel the kitchen. The kitchen was in an unusable state when we closed. That was a year and a half ago, but I’ve never put the pictures online. Well, here they are!
The Pit of Dispair
June 12, 2005
Here they are, 85 pictures of our French drain project. Be sure to go on to page two when you get to the bottom…
It took about 10 days to complete, and now we have a wonderful mud pit that covers about 2/3 of our half-acre lot. There’s lots of landscaping left to be done.
I Hate Mike Brookins
June 12, 2005
I take every weather forcast with a grain of salt. After all, they’re only predicting. There’s no guarantee of the accuracy of what they say. Still, there’s one “Meteorologist” that seems to be a factor worse than all the others: Mike Brookins. My new rule: when this guy is forecasting, change to another news station.
Yesterday’s forecast was the same it’s been for the past week-to-ten-days – hot, humid, chance of brief, scattered afternoon thunderstorms, some strong. Well, we finally got one of those “brief, scattered thunderstorms.” Only it wasn’t brief; the heavy downpour lasted for over an hour and when it was done, we had received over two inches of rain! I don’t know about the State Univerity of New York at Brockport, but in Pittsburgh, 2+ inches of rain over 70 minutes or so is not a brief, scattered thunderstorm.
We set out to work on pouring our front sidewalk yesterday. We were finishing up the first, big pad when the skies opened up. It still needed a lot of float work and edging. We managed to get a makeshift structure up to cover it, but it required us to stand there and hold the tarps, in the 2 inch per hour rain, for over an hour. Not exactly fun. Well, actually, it wasn’t that bad as we have yet another story to tell and to look back and laugh. And in the end, the pad came out looking alright.
The Little Small Block that Could
June 7, 2005
Our French drain is complete and functioning; There’s water trickling out of the outfeed pipes as I type this! Now we’re onto the landscaping portion of the project – regrading and then planting grass seed. I promise I’ll post the pictures of the French drain soon. There are a lot to wade through and webify.
As many of you know, there’s a rumor in my town that John Skarry, the former owner of our house, didn’t want to pay the fee to junk his 1956 Chrysler, so he quartered it and buried it throughout the lot. According to local folklore, it makes up a portion of the fill used to build up the “shelf” in our back yard. One neighbor told me that he believed it was in the front yard, though. This evening, we unearthed a strong level of plausibility to this myth. When knocking a hump out of the front yard with the skid steer, we found an engine! It appears to be a small blockV8, with the automatic transmission still attached. Here, for your viewing pleasure, are pictures of our archaeological find…
“Jack Melted the Bathroom”
June 5, 2005
Our bathroom sink drain was running slowly. So in my attempts to fix it, I ended up melting the shower-surround! Yup, I’m that good.
The story goes like this: The lavatory drain was running really slowly. I was going to clean it out and replace the missing pull rod, but it turned out it was all damaged. The whole drain assembly needed replacing. One could either buy the drain assembly, or buy a new faucet and the drain is included. I liked the latter option, because the faucet we had was ghetto. Off to Home Depot we go…
A Cala Lily
June 5, 2005
Jess grew a couple of Cala Lilies from bulbs that Niny gave her. While sorting through all the pictures we’ve taken since my last post at the end of april, I came across this one and really liked it.
