The lists of things that I did over the weekend ended up being pretty long. I pulled weeds on Saturday and Sunday (and still have more to go, not sure where they are all coming from!), planted a new tree and some bargain find knock out roses. Our lowes keeps a clearance section full of plants that they have seen better days. A majority of them usually look pretty rough, but sometimes you can find some diamonds in the rough. These plants can usually be had for 75% (or more) off of their regular price, so, if you can find some that look halfway decent, it is a worthwhile attempt to save them. These roses were priced at just $3 each and the only problem with them is that they had stopped blooming. With a little encouragement with the hand pruners, I think they will bloom all summer, so I grabbed 5 of them.
During my first golf lesson last week, the instructor challenged me to be able to hit 7 out of 10 good shots next time we meet (today). Considering the fact that I’m a very inconsistent beginning golfer, that seemed like quite the challenge. I managed to hit the driving range on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday and got some good practice in. Thankfully, I won a bunch of range ball tokens, so all this practice isn’t costing me much money. I showed up today for my lunch time lesson and was greeted with, “what are you doing here?” Followed by, “I thought you texted me and rescheduled for tomorrow?” After some discussion, it turns out that he has more than one student named Scott and he mixed us up. He had already scheduled another person for my time slot, so I’m now scheduled for a lesson on Saturday instead. The good news is that this gives me more time to practice. He also felt bad about the mix up, so he gave me a bucket of balls to hit so my trip to the course wasn’t totally wasted. Free bucket of balls? That works for me (I’m easy, what can I say?).
I was also able to get a couple of bike rides in on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday’s ride was a leisurely ride on the paved bike trail with a couple of the curling guys. At the one hour mark in the ride, the skies darkened up and we decided it would be wise to head back. As we headed back, it started getting darker and darker and then we started to feel drops. The guys turned off the trail at different places to head towards their homes and I hammered back towards my car that was parked at the trailhead. I made it back to my car as it started to really rain and was just able to attach the bike to the bike rack and slide into the driver’s seat before the bottom truly fell out of it. On Sunday, I wasn’t feeling super motivated to ride, but I knew that I needed the exercise, so I rode to the RedBox DVD rental kiosk to return a movie. It is only a 5.5 mile ride each way, but that’s better than no exercise. It also gave me a chance to try out an iPhone app that was suggested to me called Endomondo. The app tracks your exercise (walking/running, cycling, golf, etc) and shows you a summary of the session. It worked pretty well and gave me a summary of the ride (speed, route, time, calories burned, etc) at the end. I'd recommend playing with it if you want to track your activities (it's a free app![my favorite kind]).
Speaking of movies, one of the ones that I rented this weekend was Contagion. If you are the least bit paranoid about germs, illness or anything along those lines, do not watch this movie. It will make you second guess touching anything in public ever again. In my mind, door handles, gas pumps and shopping carts all seem to have giant bio hazard signs on them after watching the movie. I have also become super aware of how often I touch my face during the day… that is a big no-no when a killer plague is on the loose, consider yourself warned.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, I also finished a small rehab project that I had been plotting for a couple months. The wife and I were out walking the neighborhood one Monday evening (the night before garbage pickup) and we noticed a neighbor at the other end of the hood had put an outdoor table and chair set out with their garbage. The table had seen better days, and so had the chairs… however I still saw possibility in the chairs. We discussed it on the walk back home and decided to make a covert run under the cover of darkness to pick up the chairs. After the sun went down, she drove us across the neighborhood and I quickly collected the stack of chairs, threw them in the trunk and we headed back home. While we weren’t humming the mission impossible soundtrack (or wearing all black) while we were doing it, we were still added our own sense of adventure to the trip. That definitely made it seem like more fun than just raiding someone else’s trash pile.
As you can see, the chairs have a metal frame with a tightly woven back and seat. The woven material is a multicolored plastic band about 1/4" wide. The fronts of the seats on all of the chairs had worn down from legs rubbing against them or a pet chewing on them, I'm not sure which. My idea was to remove the bottoms, attach some cedar slats to the frame for the seat and then put the chairs down by the fire pit. I waited for the cedar to go on sale at Menards and then stock piled the materials for a rainy day. Since the rain chased me home after the bike ride, it was the perfect time to spend some time working on the chairs. I made good progress and was able to wrap them up on Sunday evening.
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