A bit quiet on TFOUI… We took last Friday off to make the weekend 4 day to try to get some visible progress done on our greenhouse/pool project. Man was it hot! I have never been a ‘veritable whirlwind of activity’, but this weekend I was slow by my standards and it took a while to figure it out. I have to recover my summer-time heat adaptation, lost these many mild (or cold as hell) months. I did learn by Monday that by simply spending a few minutes in the shade made a huge difference to my ability to work and I think my over-all productivity picked up a bit. Doggedly insisting on working through the sluggishness didn’t seem to have any payoff.
So, we removed a bit of rock and concrete from a couple of the footers so that the drain pipe on the outside of the pool will drain to the sump we installed last fall. I was intending to wrap the pipe with the filter fabric and bury it in gravel until I realized that doing so would make it difficult or impossible to put the posts in, so we switched to post installing mode. We got all the 8 ft intermediate posts done (I was able to do most of them by myself since they were light enough for me to maneuver) and all the 16 ft posts along the pool (still four more outside of the pool), but need help putting in the 20 ft posts and Wade, the guy who has been very handy for this project, wasn’t available this weekend. Next weekend we plan on beginning the beam building process and I figure there is a decent chance that we will have the roof sheathed by the end of June. That will give me some more shade to work in.
My wife has developed an interest in archery fairly recently. We got a real cheap Wall Mart version a year or so ago and she made enough use of it that its limitations became clear, so we got her a new bow over the weekend. All told we wound up spending over $600 (though we did get the boy a new cheapy bow as well since the initial one had a very ineffective way of holding the arrow), hopefully she will make regular use of it. She looks great pulling the bow back (but of course I think she looks fabulous at any time, but that particular pose is quite sexy), though she is all worried that her shoulders will get big. The draw weight of the bow can be adjusted and is currently pretty low (27 lbs, I think), but I can adjust it up to 70 on this particular model.
We (or rather I should say my wife’s cousin Carlos) planted the garden last weekend and it was immensely gratifying to see that practically everything had sprouted over the intervening week. Last year I think we planted too early and the ground was too cold to promote germination properly and we got very spotty results. This year we could probably have planted a few weeks earlier (though we were pretty much spot on based on the calendar), quite a few locals had done so (in some places the corn is already 1-2 ft high). We still need rain, though. We are more than 4 inches short on the year, though we have had just enough to keep the young trees and shrubs (well, all but one, a scarlet maple I planted last fall up and died on me) going. It is so hot now, though, that without rain soon they will start to get seriously stressed and will stop growing. I would water, but it would take most of the weekend just to do so, though one of our goals with the construction is to have a bigger pipe from the well so we can fill our water tank faster, so we would have a practical option (with an electric pump attached to the tank to expedite the watering of the plants) to water if we like.
I hope all my reader(s) had a great holiday weekend!