Paradise ponders: much ado about something or other edition... So many things all happening at once! Last night, Debbie and I headed down to Salt Lake City to meet up with our friends Dave and Barb, who are up here for an agility competition. We went to Red Iguana (of course!) and had a delicious meal with great company. We really enjoyed that. I'd forgotten to plug the car in to charge, so we headed down there with a marginal battery state, figuring we'd use the Salt Lake City supercharger if we needed to. But when we got to the restaurant, we'd used just under half the charge I had before starting on the trip, so we should have enough to get home. Right? Well, we did, though there sure wasn't much juice left in the battery when we rolled into the garage.
Mark T. showed up at 7am and went to work trenching for sprinklers. He spent the last couple of days fixing some problems on his trenching machine, but now it's working just dandy. At around 8am, Ben (a roofer I engaged to fix our leaking balcony roof) showed up with his helper Vincente, and they got right to work. As I write this they are installing the new flooring (after removing all the old stuff). The floor is full of complicated shapes that must all be waterproofed, and that takes a lot of detail work, careful heat welding, and careful caulking. The last fellow who did this work did an awful job. Ben seems to be offended by such shoddy work, an attitude that I like a lot. :) The work that he and Vincente are doing is beautifully done by comparison. Ben was full of good ideas about how to make the result better, and I accepted all of them, even though that meant some minor modifications to our roof.
Debbie went back down to Farmington to be with Dave and Barb today as they compete. She's texted me that she's having a wonderful time. She saw a couple of new things down there that she's interested in. One was a telephoto lens that fits on an iPhone. Must have, she says. The other is a woman competing on a Segway because her doctors said she can't run. Debbie is thinking about that one, but it's a possibility. I worry a bit about her falling from it. Dave saw the woman on the Segway, too, and he called me and told me to order one for Debbie right now! :)
I did a bunch of relatively small things this morning. First I pressure-washed our deck. It looks much better, but still has a film on it from the winter and spring mud. Looks like sanding will be required to get rid of that.
Then I replaced the screen material on one (of twelve) screens in our sun room. We're putting in heavy-duty "cat-proof" screening that's tough enough that we'd be comfortable leaving the sun room windows open for air when we're not there. I'm also changing the mechanism that holds the screens in, from flimsy plastic pins to serious screws that would withstand a 20 pound cat hanging off it. I did just one so that Debbie can see it, and if she's ok with it I'll be doing the rest of them. I bought a new spline roller tool to do this, the highest rated one on Amazon. There is a stunning difference in quality between it and the Home Depot $5 specials I've gotten before. This one has roller bearings in the wheel, an ergonomic handle, and a well-designed wheel. Instead of being a chore to put the spline in, it's a simple and straightforward operation. I'm really glad I got that.
After that, I fixed one of our 8' wide gates to our fenced dog yard. It had fallen off it's hinges after I hastily lowered a big load on the tractor (because I was tipping over!) and knocked it. Fixing it was just a matter of adjusting the positions of the hinge pins and sockets. All I needed was an adjustable wrench and a little patience. Had it fixed in a half hour or so.
At that point I noticed that some of our bird feeders were depleted, so I filled them. That gave me a chance to talk with Ben and Vincente, who were having a lunch on the lawn. As we were talking, something most unlikely happened: a UPS truck pulled into our driveway. We don't normally have Saturday delivery from UPS here, so I was a bit puzzled. Turns out he was delivering my new laptop (which was supposed to have arrived yesterday)! I'm making this post on that new machine, which I had up and running inside of 15 minutes after the UPS guy left. :)
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