been sick

Hello folks.  I've been sick since Saturday, so I haven't been in the mood to write this week.  I went to the doctor on Monday morning and was diagnosed with pneumonia.  Let me say that this has seriously kicked my @$$ and it put an end to my going to the gym streak.  Obviously, not much has been going on, other than me laying around watching a lot of TV and coughing, and coughing and then coughing some more.  Today (Friday) is the first day I managed to go into work.

In other news, I did want to pass along information about a children's book.  Yeah, I know that is exactly what you expect from me, right?!  The book was illustrated by one of my good college landscape architecture friends and it was written by her sister.  Anyway, I thought I would post the link here, in case any of you are interested:

Here is their blog, which has a book release trailer: http://twosistersmusicaladventures.blogspot.com/

and here it is on amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Hall-Mountain-King-Megan-Endicott/dp/1458207897/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1363188212&sr=8-3&keywords=Megan+Endicott#_

Another attempt at being outside

Continuing last week’s attempt at luring in spring type weather, I ordered a load of mulch to spread in the landscape beds around the house.  When I say a “load” I mean 8 cubic yards of mulch, imagine a 3 foot x 3 foot x 3 foot box full of mulch and then multiply that by 8.  Photos don't do it justice, it is a lot of mulch, which I will be moving and spreading by hand. 

 

The sad thing is, this is only enough to do the beds directly around the house and won’t cover any of the beds along the outside of the sod in our back yard. I spread 40 cubic yards over that area two years ago, so this pile seems small in comparison. Fortunately, my native grass plantings are covering a lot of that area now so that whole area shouldn't need to be mulched again. However, I probably need another 8-10 cubic yards to do a 6 foot wide swath along the edge of the sod so it matches the beds around the house. That will require more money, so for now I will save that for another day.

The weather forecast for Saturday said it was going to be nice outside, and Karen had a morning meeting, so I thought I would get 4 hours of good yard work in.  But then it started raining lightly...  I decided to continue working through the rain, until my wheel barrow broke.  I finally realized that the stars were not going to align for me to be outside!  One of the bolts that attaches the wheel  to the wheel barrow came loose and fell out and that caused the axle to go all wonky and it ended up breaking off the metal tab that was supposed to hold it in place.  I ended up having to make a run to Lowe's and spent over an hour (trip to Lowe's included) fixing the wheel.  By the time I was done, it was time to eat lunch and get ready to go to a wedding.

One of the guys on my curling team got married Saturday afternoon, so we got dressed up and went to the wedding.  Sadly, we didn’t take a single picture of ourselves while we were there, I'm sure you are all disappointed about that.  This was a big wedding, over 280 people by our estimates (counting the number of tables) and the only people that we thought we would know there was the bride and groom and another curling couple.  I’m not a huge fan of going to things when you aren’t going to know many people there, but you do what you’ve got to do.  Surprisingly, we ran into a couple from our neighborhood (they used to live near my friend’s parents) and a couple that I sold a car to when I worked at the dealership. 

It rained all day Sunday, forcing me back inside.  I know that the CFO is probably tired of hearing me complain about 1) being stuck inside every weekend during the wintertime and 2) not having a project car to work on.  If I had a project that I could work on in the garage, spending the winter indoors wouldn’t be so annoying.  I can only sit still for a little while (10-20 minutes!) before I am ready to do something; this mentality does not work well with cold winters.   I wish I could lay around all day reading and napping (her specialties), but I can’t. We definitely didn’t take this into consideration when we decided to move up here!

I did manage to sit still long enough to write plant names on the ID tags that the CFO gave me for my birthday. This will definitely help us remember the specific names for the plants in the yard.

Warm weather + rain + melting snow = a lot of water that has to go somewhere. The swale in the farmer’s field that drains into a drainage channel that runs along one of our property lines was flowing like a small river on Sunday. This is the most water that we have seen running through there in the two years that we have lived here.

The fountain begins

I’m trying to use positive thoughts to bring in spring weather, however, the 9”+ of snow that we have received over the last week or so is arguing otherwise.  Undeterred, I started working on our fountain project, thinking about spring the whole time.  Here is what I am envisioning for the finished product: 

Once it is done, all you should see is the pot, sitting in a bed of colorful stone pebbles. The water will fill up the pot and then over flow.  The water will drop down and pass through the stones, down into the basin. A small pump will recirculate the water from the basin back up to the pot. This should hopefully provide a nice splashing sound, while being very low maintenance since the basin will be covered with rocks.  All we should have to do is top off the water in the basin and clean off any leaves that fall on the rocks. (that is my theory, anyways)

The pot already had a drain hole in the bottom of it, so I used that opening for my water supply line.  Of course, that hole was much bigger than the elbow that I am using to feed the water, so I had to block off the rest of the opening to make the pot hold water.  I cut a piece of plastic to cover the hole and attached it to the pot with a couple layers of fiberglass.  For those of you who don’t know, there isn’t much that smells worse than fiberglass.  I would typically do this outside, but the sub-freezing temps forced me to do it inside the garage.  Even with the garage door and window cracked for ventilation, the smell was almost unbearable. 

The cold temps in the garage also seemed to be slowing down the fiberglass curing process, so it took longer than usual to harden.  In addition to attaching the elbow to the bottom of the pot, I also attached 3 small PVC fittings to the bottom of the pot to create “feet” to hold the pot up high enough to make room for the elbow.  Since the inside of the pot wasn’t glazed, I also needed to come up with a way to hide the inside of the pot or paint the inside of it (right now it is just clay colored once you get about 2" below the rim).  I decided against painting it and decided to mount a tray of stones at the about 1.5” below the top of the pot, which should block off the view down into the pot while still allowing the water to flow through.  I mounted a 2” PVC fitting in the bottom of the pot and I will add a section of 2” pipe as a riser to support this tray. 

Now that I have the pot internals figured out (I still need to test it to see if my fiberglass work holds water), I need to turn my attention to where this fountain is going.  My plan is to dig a hole in our backyard near the patio area and insert a liner.  I will place a concrete block (or something similar) into the liner to act as a base for the pot, raising it up to the top of the liner.  I’m planning on using a  grate from a round  charcoal grill (or something similar) between the pot and the concrete block to support the stone that will cover the basin.   I've been watching to see if any neighbors throw out their old grills on trash day, but no luck yet.  I might just have to buy a new grill grate.  As you can see from the “or something similar” comments, this is still a design in progress.

Here is the bottom of the pot after I fiberglassed the 1/2" elbow for the water and the PVC feet to raise the pot up so it doesn't stand on the elbow.  It isn't pretty, but you won't see this part once it is done.

37 and counting

Last week I celebrated my 37^th birthday… according to the CFO, I am officially in my late 30’s.  I argue that I am still in my mid-thirties and will to continue to push that as long as I can.  It is hard to believe that I am getting so close to 40, time to start planning my mid-life crisis.

As usual, we kept things simple.  All I wanted was to go out to eat, open some gifts and enjoy some cake (preferably homemade).  The last item always becomes a point of contention because she would rather just go buy a cake. from a store.  However, I was raised on homemade cakes and there is a definite difference in taste between homemade and store bought.  A homemade cake might not look as nice (depending on who is preparing it), but it always tastes better.  I had recently found a recipe for a cookie cake, so I made it even easier on her by requesting a cookie cake. 

It started snowing about 3pm on my birthday, and by dinner time there was 2-3” inches on the ground and the roads were very slushy.  We decided that it wasn’t bad enough to keep us from going out to eat, so we hopped in the car and headed out.  It is amazing how our attitudes regarding snow have changed since moving here.  If this had happened when we lived in Georgia, we would have battened down the hatches and spent the evening sitting by the fireplace watching the snow fall outside the window.  Now we just adjust our shoe selection to something warm and waterproof and continue on. 

We already had dinner plans at Outback with some friends scheduled for the following night, so I picked a place that we typically don’t go, Buffalo Wild Wings.  I love wings (she doesn’t), so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to go there.  I ordered wings and she ordered a huge nacho plate that had three different types of nachos on it.  I ended up helping her eat the nachos since it was so big.  The wings would reheat well for lunch the following day… nachos, not so much.  The nachos were really good, until we found a long hair in them about 2/3’s of the way through the plate.  Talking about an instant appetite killer.  I’ve worked at restaurants before and I know these things happen, but it is still a bit gross.  They removed the nachos from our bill, packed up my left over wings and we headed home for cookie cake.

One giant cookie!  Maybe she will decorate it with frosting next year (baby steps)

She did very well for her first attempt at making a cookie cake and I received some nice gifts from her and our families.  One of my gifts is a 30” tall pottery vase that I am going to turn into a bubbling fountain for the back yard.  We have been looking for one for a while and finally found one on sale at a local store.  She also gave me a gas powered weed eater, although I still have to go to a store and pick it out.  She hates buying me tools because she doesn’t know enough about them, but she gave in this time.  I think the real reason she decided to give it to me was that she is tired of hearing me complain about having to string together 4 extension cords in order to reach the back section of our yard with our old electric trimmer.  It worked fine in our tiny yard in GA, but not so good here.  I also received some money, which I will be using to fund the rest of the materials for the fountain project.  (expect more updates as that project progresses)

Birthday gifts (the pot is in the photo too, it just blends in with the background)

This is how dedicated I am to getting back into shape:  I got up at my usual 4:40am time and went to the gym on my birthday!.  On Saturday, I got on the scale at the gym again... I have dropped another pound.  That is good news, considering the fact that I still haven’t really altered my diet..  I seem to be doing pretty well with just adding in exercise, but I have decided that I am going to try to scale back my snacking at work, or bring in healthier snacks to eat, and see if that helps. 

A couple people have asked where I started and where I am targeting so I decided to post it here.  Nothing like telling other people the true numbers to help motivate you (or so I hope).  When we went on our November cruise, I was at my all-time high weight of 178 lbs.  For me, seeing that number was the final shove that I needed to get me motivated to join the local gym.  We don't have a scale at home, so I didn't realize that I had gained that much.  Yes, my stomach seemed a bit bigger, but I could still see my feet so I wasn't too concerned.

Here are the numbers so far, I'll try to update this at least monthly: 

Starting weight (Nov 2012):  178 lbs.
Sometime near the end of December 2012 (can't remember the exact day):  176.6 lbs.
Jan 19, 2013: 176.6 lbs.
Feb 9, 2013:  173.4 lbs.
Feb 23, 2013 172.4 lbs.

I have set my personal target as weighing somewhere in the mid-high 150’s.  If I keep losing a pound per 2 weeks, I’ll hit that target 30 weeks from now.  However, I am hoping that adding in yard work, golf, cycling, etc. (once it warms up outside) will help speed up the process.  I might even start eating a few more carrots and less sweets too, I know that would help the most.  Unfortunately, I have an uncontrollable sweet tooth and sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day at work doesn’t help... the munchies strike hard and often at work.

Jersey Boys

Happy belated Valentine’s Day; that is if you are into that kind of “hallmark” holiday.  Since I am a good husband, I did pick up a gift for the CFO while we were in Hawaii.  (I bought it while she was busy with the conference and then hid it in one of our bags for the trip home)  We didn’t do much for the holiday, because Bunko night fell on V Day and the neighborhood ladies didn't want to reschedule (or spend the evening with their husbands?), so she went out to play with them.  That was fine with me, it gave me time to catch up on a couple TV shows that she doesn’t like but I really enjoy.

On Friday night, we drove west to Peoria to go see the show Jersey Boys.  She saw the ad for the show back in September and I gave her the tickets as a Christmas present.  She wanted to go out for a nice dinner beforehand, but then we found out that a Chick-fil-a had opened up in Peoria.  Hello combo #1 with lemonade for dinner! Nothing says romantic dinner like Chick-fil-a!  At the show, our age bracket was definitely in the minority, there was way more gray hairs (or should be gray if not for a bad dye job) in the audience.  We enjoyed the show, but it left me wondering how accurately the show portrays the life of the group, the Four Seasons?

We had talked about spending the night in Peoria and then driving another 45 minutes north on Saturday morning to go to the huge furniture store in Kewannee, IL.  However, I couldn’t find a decent room that we were willing to pay for… it was either a crappy $69 motel 6 (she has minimum standards that this doesn’t meet) or over $150 for a nice room downtown (which to me, is way too much to spend on a room 45 minutes from home).  We did the math and decided to just head home and decide on Saturday morning if we were going to drive to the furniture store.

On Saturday morning, I woke up to the question of, “are you ready to go couch shopping?”  That meant that we were turning around and heading back to where we came from the night before.  However, for me, the more important morning question was “what are we doing for breakfast?”  I was thinking getting some donuts on our way out of town, but she sweetened the idea of a return trip to Peoria by offering up a return trip to Chick-fil-a  for breakfast.  How could I pass that up???  Furniture shopping here we come.

Nothing says love like a heart shaped biscuit

We’ve been to this particular furniture store once before, and I might have written about it then.  This is no ordinary furniture store, it is a destination.  It is in a historic downtown area and the store fills several blocks worth of multi-story buildings.  It even has a “skywalk” over Main Street so that you can walk to the buildings on the other side of the street without going outside and it also has a restaurant in the basement.   The place is huge and it is very easy to get turned around and lost in it.

We walked around for over 2.5 hours with a sales person (YES, that long!), took a break for lunch, walked around some more on our own and then paged the sales person to finalize things.  We got there a little after 10am and left just before 4pm.  Crazy. The good news is that we found a couch that we could both agree on.  The bad news is that we wanted it in a different material/color, so we will have to wait 6-12 weeks to get it.   To finish off the trip, we swung back by Chick-fil-a for a chocolate shake… Yes, we visited Chick-fil-a 3 times in less than 24 hours.  Delicious.

The CFO wanted a couch that would "pop" in the room.  How about green with star fish accent pillows?  It is hard to tell how these things will turn out when you are making decisions based on small swatches of fabric...Our fingers are crossed.  You'd think we were decorating a house with a view of the ocean, not a corn field. 

 

Sunday was pretty quiet; we went to church and then out to run some errands.  We were just wrapping up our grocery shopping at Kroger when we heard an announcement on the P.A. system, “Ladies and Gentlemen, there is an odor of gas in the store so we need to evacuate the building immediately.”  Seriously?  We just finished filling our cart and we are ready to check out!  We parked our car near the registers, along with 10-15 other people’s carts, and walked outside.  It didn’t look like the situation would be resolved anytime soon, so we decided not to wait and walked to our car.  Evidently we weren’t the only ones who didn’t think it was worth waiting, there was a mini-traffic jam exiting the parking lot.  I kind of feel bad for whoever had to put away all those carts of un-purchased groceries... at least nothing in our cart was perrishable.

Neither of us felt like repeating the shopping process at another store, so we grabbed some lunch and went back to the house.  We will make due with what ever food is in the pantry and freezer this week.  It was sunny, clear and a balmy 30 degrees outside, so I decided to go out and cut back all of my native grasses with the weed eater.  I was only out there for about an hour, but it was so nice to be outside, even though it was a little cold.  I can’t wait until spring; I am tired of being inside all the time!

Super bowl catch up

I was so focused on finishing the Hawaii update that I forgot to mention the Superbowl party a couple weekends ago.  This was the third time that we have hosted the party and I think this was the largest crowd yet.  The CFO said that the final count was 21 people, which is a lot of people to add to our quiet house.  Included in that count were 7 kids, ranging from under 2 to 15 years old… not good since I wouldn't exactly call our house "kid friendly." If the crowd for future super bowl parties gets any bigger, I'm going to have to get a bigger TV, OR set up a projector and screen in the basement and start building a home theatre down there.  Hmm... I really like the sound of that idea!

I have been trying to do different food “themes” each year and this year it was “taco bar.”  This turned out to be a good, relatively easy self-serve meal; I prepared traditional ground beef and chicken for meats and we had a counter covered with possible toppings.  We seriously overestimated the amount of tacos that people would consume after they finished grazing through a table full of appetizers and finger foods that our guests brought with them. I am sure that no one left the house hungry and those who wanted to take some left overs home were able to.  Even after sending food home with people, we still ate tacos for a few days afterwards, but I guess it is better to have too much than not enough.    Sadly, I forgot to take pictures of the event, I guess I was too busy making sure there were warm shells and tortillas for our guests.  That is the one problem with hosting the super bowl party, you don’t get to sit and watch the whole game.

I also decided that this was the year to introduce some low stakes wagering on the game, so we did a cheap game of super bowl squares.  I say "cheap" because we only charging 25 cents per square, for a total pot of $25.  I did a low buy in so that we were certain that we would sell all of the squares... I think I will at least double the buy in for next year. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the football squares game, you set up a 10x10 grid and people write their names in the squares that they purchase.  After the grid is full, you randomly draw the numbers 0-9 for across the top and then again along one side.  One set of numbers is for one team and the other set is for the other team.  At the end of each quarter, you take the last digit of each team's score and whoever has the square at the intersection of those two numbers wins.  Since our pot was small, the payouts were low ($3 for the first quarter, $6 for half time, $4 for the third and $12 for the final score), but it added some interest to the evening.  Of course, the hosts did not win anything… one couple won the first and second quarters, and other people won the third and fourth quarters.  It seems like everyone enjoyed this addition to the party, so I am sure it will return next year.

I took this photo outside our house after a light, early morning rain.  I was taken by how the sun was reflecting off the rain, creating a ring around the sun.

Last weekend was quiet and, after hosting the big party, we enjoyed the quietness.  I hit the gym 6 times last week and the CFO managed to roll out of bed to go 5 times.  I hopped on the scale last Saturday and was happy to finally see a little bit of progress.  I have dropped almost 5 pounds since setting my all-time high weight when we were on our cruise over thanksgiving.  I only have about another 10-15 more pounds to lose to be back down to where I want to be.  The CFO did not get on the scale, so I don’t know how her progress is going… and I’m not sure that she would want me to write about it anyway.  So far, the Mon. spin, Tues. weights (upper body), Weds. spin, Thurs. weights (upper body), Fri. spin, and Sat. weights (legs) schedule seems to be working well for me and I’m not getting bored with the routine yet.  Getting up when the alarm goes off at 4:40am to go to the gym has gotten a lot easier for me too…  Seriously, it isn't that bad.  The only negative side effect of it is that I am now nodding off at 9:45-10pm while watching TV.  No more late night TV for me.

Aloha! Part 2

We also made a trip down to the southeast side of the island to visit the volcano.  Every piece of advertising literature that you see for the island has a picture of molten lava bubbling up out of a volcano or sheets of red lava flowing into the sea. I really wanted to see some lava.

 

You don't typically see road signs with distances to a Volcano on them.  Also note the lava rock wall behind it.  There are a lot of walls like this around the island.

Before I delve further into the volcano trip, let me talk about the beaches, or lack thereof.  This was yet another of my pre-visit images that didn’t quite pan out. Because of the young volcanic nature of the big island, a lot of the shoreline isn't the soft white/yellow sand beaches that I am used to from growing up on the east coast.  Instead, a lot of the shore line is just volcanic rock right up to the ocean.  However, dispersed around the island were small pockets of beaches that were closer to what I am used to. We found a pebble beach covered with small, smooth pebbles and we also spent a few hours sitting on a more typical plain sand beach. When I was reviewing our route to the volcano, and I saw locations for black sand and green sand beaches along the way, so I decided that we would stop at each of those along the way.

The pebble beach

The map showed that the green sand beach was near the southern most point in the USA, so we decided to check that out too. I was expecting some sort of bronze marker or monument, but there wasn’t any that we could see.  We improvised and just made a SWAG (Scientific Wild A$$ Guess) about where it looked like it was the most southern point. Not very precise, but neat to say that we were there. We then drove over to the nearby parking lot for the green sand beach, only to find out that it was an additional 3 miles of hiking or 4x4 driving to get to the beach. The econo-can chevy sonic that we rented wasn’t going to handle the off road driving and I, of course, had scheduled a lot of stuff to see into that day's itinerary, so we decided that there wasn't time for a 6 mile round trip hike. We passed on the hike and got back into the car to continue on towards our other points of interest, the black sand beach and the volcano. You’d think that they would tell you in the travel books that it wasn’t that easy to get to the green sand beach, but I digress…

The southern most point in the USofA

After passing the “southern most” bar and the “southern most” post office in the USA, we decided to stop at the “southern most” bakery in the USA for lunch. After lunch we continued on towards the black sand beach.

 

We found the black sand beach and went for a quick stroll… the CFO proclaimed that it looked “dirty” and I could tell that she wasn’t impressed.  I thought it was pretty cool, but raised another question for me:  I don’t quite understand how the regular sand all ends up on one beach, all the pebbles on another, the black on another and the green on yet another location?You’d think they would all just get mixed up together, into a mish-mash of baby poop colored sand, but somehow nature has managed to segregate them all. I find that very fascinating, but maybe that’s just me. I didn’t realize there was such racism in beaches… can’t the sands all just get along?

 

The black sand beach

 

We loaded back into the car and continued on towards the volcano… I was starting to get excited, I could almost smell the lava.  Then, as we started climbing up in elevation from sea level, the skies started to darken.  Then it started to mist and, by the time we had climbed up to about 3,500 feet above sea level, it was raining, foggy and cold. According to the car's display, the outside temperature had dropped from 76 degrees to 55 degrees. This was not looking good for our volcano visit…

We went ahead and paid the $10 to get into the national park and drove up to the visitor’s center. We ran through the rain into the building and talked with one of the rangers. She confirmed that it didn’t look like the weather was going to lift, so hiking the lava fields was out. Bummer. She suggested that we at least go up to the museum that was perched on the rim of the crater, so we got back into the car and drove up to that building.

That is when the disappointment really started to set in, as the clouds and fog pretty much fully obscured the entire view into the crater. I was totally bummed because we had travelled all this way (about 2.5 hour drive), and forgone the hike to the green sand beach so that we could get there, and all we could see was clouds, fog and rain. The CFO opted to stay inside the building while I ventured out into the rain and onto the overlook, just to see if I could see anything of interest. I caught a couple of short, 2-3 second breaks in the passing clouds where I could see some steam rising up, but not much else.    I walked back into the building and was greeted by the CFO giggling.  Yes, she was laughing at the situation and my visible disappointment.  This kind crap (freak weather, bad timing, etc.) always to happens to me when I really want to see or do something and she seems to find that amusing. Isn't she sweet?

Who ordered up the rain and clouds?!?!   Where is the crater?

We had seen a lot of photos of lava flowing into the ocean, so we looked at some maps and informational signage at the visitors center to see where we needed to go to see that.  We knew that it wasn't raining at the lower elevations, so there was still a chance to salvage the day and see some lava.  OR NOT.  It turns out that the closest that you can get to that spectacle is about 1 mile away, so all you really see is a red glow over the horizon. SERIOUSLY??? I see all of these advertising photos of molten rock oozing into the sea and the closest that I can actually get to it about 1 mile away??? If I didn't know that the National Parks System was so dramatically underfunded, I would have asked for freakin money back!   I'll just consider it a charitable donation, because I definitely didn't get my moneys worth out of it.  They seriously need to revamp their advertising, because it is totally false.  I really do understand the safety issues in letting people get too close to 2000 degree liquid earth, but 1 mile seems a little excessive. We made one last stop at a nearby “steam vent” where you could stand in the warm steam that was coming out of an opening in the rock. That was neat to experience, but it sure wasn’t the molten lava flow that I was hoping for. At this point, she was cold and I was disappointed, so we headed back to our hotel.

Steam venting out of the earth (they built an ugly railing around it)

We bought a few souvenirs along the way, including our traditional Christmas ornament souvenir. At the rate that we are going, our tree will eventually be decorated entirely with souvenir ornaments from all of our trips.  I will admit that it is fun to reminisce about our travels every time we decorate the tree.  We also purchased a glass piece that was made by a local artist. She makes molds of interesting lava flows and then casts colorful glass into the molds. The face of the end product takes on the texture of the lava and looks/feels interesting. 

Even though the volcano excursion was a bust, and even though the island didn’t match up with some of my preconceived ideas, we had a really nice trip. I would like to go back to the big island again, just to try to see the volcano on a clear day and to go star gazing at the observatory on top of the mountain.  Unfortunately for me, our next planned vacation isn't until November... I'm not sure I can go that long without another trip!