My Shit

Palila and I have been working on the house for a couple of days now. In fact, we started taking down the wallpaper on the same day that we closed. We are now doing our part to keep Lowes and Home Depot in business (even though Lowes is further away, I often go there because their stores are nicer, their selection is nicer, and their call center is in the U.S.).

On Wednesday, Lowes dropped off a shipment of lumber at the house. The back yard is nearly enclosed with fence, but not quite. I have to build about 100' of fence to finish it off. Two of my friends came down yesterday to help me dig holes and set the posts (you have to remember the 8-P's of fence building ... proper prior planning prevents piss poor pole placement). We rented the little auger from Home Depot to help us dig. After 3 hours and 4 holes, we gave up on the little auger and went back for the big one. It only took 30min to dig the next 5 holes. By the time we got all of the poles set in concrete we were beat. It was a nice cool 96 degree day. It looks like today will be about 96 again. Luckily, I have to let the poles set for 5 days before I can really do anything else so the concrete has time to cure.

It would be nice to have some cooler days, but I still have plenty of other projects. The next "cool" day will be Saturday at a bone chilling 86F. I need to pull some wire in the attic, but that won't happen until it gets cooler or I will just have to do the job at night. I can't tell you how much I like crawling across rafters, in the dark, with sweat dripping off my face. I also need to pull some wire in the crawl space, which should be much cooler, and also replace some light fixtures. By the time I'm finished with all of that, my poles might be cured and I can go back to building fence and getting that load of lumber out of the car port.

We've also been having fun with Dekalb County Water & Sewer. Instead of transferring the water into our names, they shut it off. Then they played games with us over the past few days rather than turning it back on. Palila had people in the office hang up on her more then once and they hung up on me once too. MFMJ finally went down to the meter and turned the water on himself. Without the water we couldn't flush toilets and couldn't mix concrete. It is a good thing I had friends helping me out rather than paying a construction crew to sit on their thumbs while we waited on Dekalb County Water and Sewer. I am going down to their offices today to make a formal complaint and see if I can get our connection fee removed.

I need to get headed out to the house though. There is so much work to do. I took the morning off to try to let my body recover from what I did to it with that stupid little auger yesterday. I also wanted to watch the U.S. in their World Cup game. I guess watching that was a waste of time.