Sat.

Well back to work today. Went in at 5:15 and left about 12:30. Came home and .. you guessed it.. worked on the deck. I got the last of the decking onto the lower deck today. Man it feels good to get something completed. Tomorrow I have to work so same deal. I hope to get the stairs put in to the upper deck.
I had originally put in for this vacation time right after my birthday in June. As it turns out the weather was perfect then. It was in the upper 70's and we did not even run the A/C most of the month. But I got denied. So had to wait until the hottest damn time in history to do this. I put in for 3 weeks knowing that I would have to work this weekend. So when I left 2 weeks ago I was off for the 2 weeks posted. Today I went in and noticed that I have to work Monday as well.
Crap.
So after the stairs go in I am hoping to get enough of the upper decking on to be able to set the door.
Right now I am just tired. Good night.

Monday

Man it was hot today, but I got a lot done on the deck.

-The story goes that this video was made by a MS employee who was fired as soon as they found out it was on the web. Funny though.

Sunday..

How many of these 80's commercials do you remember?

Saturday

Well it rained most of the day so there was not much progress on the deck monster. The good part was that since it was raining, I sat inside watching Carrie's team win the state championship.
After it cleared out I got the tops of the posts notched out and the rest of the ledgerboard onto the house. We are extending the old deck also. The new 2x8' joists are fatter then the old ones that they extend off of so I had to notch them out on the bottoms where they sit on the beams to match up. That sucked, but it is done.

Sports stuff..

A big CONGRATULATIONS (!) to Carrie (formerly Harbach) Wieland. She took over as coach of the Highland softball team a few years back and Sat. at noon they play for the state championship. Good for her. I bet she is a great coach. Well.. duh. They are in the finals.




If you have never seen Travis Pastrana ride, then you are missing out on some amazing stuff. Here is one of his rides. And, yes he landed the jump in the photo above.

Jake Brown had one of the worst crashes ever on a skateboard at the X games. The top of this silly ramp is 27 feet tall and he was almost 20 feet above that when he lost it and fell onto the flats. Amazingly he walked away with some help, but he is in the hospital with liver and lung injuries and a fractured wrist. They say he will make a full recovery. Man..

day... hell i don't know.

I was going to post a picture from the end of each day. But the end of day 3 looked like the end of day 1 from pictures, so I have not bothered.
We ran into all kinds of problems but are starting to make progress. The first problem was the retaining wall. I needed to sink a post by the wall and was going to do that but then I wondered if they counted the 42" from the top elevation or the bottom. Turns out they count the bottom, so we would have had to dig a hole about six feet deep. Yea... right. So we worked around that by moving out the wall. I was going to change it so that the wall was farther away from the hole and it would not effect the frost line of it. But as I was digging I found the foundation tile from the house right where I needed to dig. Hell. Bu then I got to thinking that I could run a post up from the od deck to the new deck to support that corner. SCORE! But that was another trip to the building permit place.
Anyhow, today we got some done. The posts are all set and I hope that it will start to look like we are doing something.

this made me smile.

What would you do if you had 2 big ass tesla coils? Well naturally you would program them to play the Mario Theme. Too funny.