captainsblog | Turning the Tables on the Ordinary Routine

After a long and mostly unproductive day spent mostly in Rochester yesterday, I decided I would give my brain a bit of a break today. We had a vet appointment scheduled for Pepper this afternoon, I had some work I could do from home, and no appearances or appointments to go anywhere for. So I resolved I'd just hang around here and try to help Eleanor in between work annoyances with as much of the outdoor work as I could before she went off to work before noon.

Soon as I got home last night, though, the Big Dig patio project took an unexpected step forward that didn't involve much new work at all. The work out there involves replacing a mostly useless and overgrown garden area along the back garage wall with (except for one cutout) new bricks previously attached to our front wall, redoing the stone and sand underlaying the slate squares making up the current patio, and then filling in the dirt area in between these two. The brick part is essentially done, as we saw last week when Pepper adopted it as her outdoor doggie bed:

So the current plan is for each of those squares to come up (the inverted triangle between dog and little red wagon was the first to go), get their existing underlaiment of stone shoveled up and rinsed from 20 years of erosion and creeping of dirt from near them, and then put back down mixed as needed with newer stone before the squares go back on top. The patio table will then be on top of everything.

Just not the one we have now:

Yeah, it's kind of a wreck. It's at least a dozen years old, has sat outside in mostly brutal winters, is crumbling around the edges and the top is just that- more like a spinning top if you so much as push your fork onto a plate. So last weekend, I thought it would be a nice idea to pick up a new one. Eleanor was suspicious about finding anything this late in "the season"- you know, summer, which just passed the one-third mark. She mentioned that Tarjay had some, so I went over there last weekend.

Ha ha ha. “If we have anything left, it’d be in the far back corner of the store,“ said the helpful redshirt. Past the sign saying “Beware of the Leopard,“ no doubt.

“What they had left” consisted of one metal table, smaller than the one we already have, with no price tag, nothing indicating dimensions, and a fold down top. It was closer to a stepstool than a table. Plenty of back-to-school shit out though, barely a month after school let out.

Ah, but Amazon knows no season. I found a glasstop-ped metal table, it’s somewhat bigger than the current one, with a hole for the umbrella and no need to buy matching chairs, for just over a buck -fitty. They threw in free shipping, but apparently it was too big a package to qualify for two-day Prime. They promised delivery sometime between tomorrow and the end of next week.

Ha ha ha. Guess what was waiting at our door when I got home last night? Best of all, I didn’t have to figure out how to get it in the back of small car.

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It's not out of the box yet- that glass top worries me, for one thing, while construction goes on- but at least it's here and gives some motivation to finish. So it was that I headed back to the back once Eleanor got going this morning, to do my part on getting that last stretch finished. This is how the assembly line kinda goes: first, you shovel out the loose pebbles under each square and transfer them to a bucket, like so-

Next, you transfer said stones to the highly sophisticated filtering device we purchased from Ikea /yeahrite-

And finally, Eleanor's part of this today, rinsing the years of accumulated dirt off of those stones so they can be reused (not shown, since she'd gone inside by this point).

When I wasn't doing that, I was filling another of those Brute-sized cans with another accumulation of the burrowing wisteria vines which are all over our back yard- many in that area, one of which was the one which she tripped on last Saturday and needed six stitches and some heavy pain medication for. I was only out there a couple of hours, and it was a sweaty mess of a morning, but I felt accomplished once it was done for the day and very appreciated for the thanks I got for it all. And oddly, the clients and other assorted idiots who did call and text and email while I was out there? Weren't as bad in quantity or quality as I typically get sitting at my desk or driving a stupid distance out of town.

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I ended the day just now taking Pepper to her first visit to her new vet. She fell in love with everyone, as she does, and wasn't nearly as skittish there as most of our other animals have been. She needed one vaccine booster, but the main reason for the trip today was to ward off something nasty I'd read about over the weekend: another dog owner in this area posted about his (much younger) puppy almost dying from something called leptospirosis. It gets passed round mostly in places where many dogs congregate and one can easily pass it to other dogs (and even, in rare cases, to humans) from common drinking sources like water bowls or even creek or lakewater. In reading about it, I found there is a vaccine for it, and she's now gotten her first of two shots she'll need for it. No adverse side effects yet that I've seen, and I'll feel much safer letting her share bowls with other pups now.

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Tomorrow is back to the usual routine, but it was good to get away from it, however briefly.

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