Our Olde House: July 2024
The sod in the backyard looks nice, but it does require regular watering at this point; hopefully after it takes hold it will be much more drought tolerant. I got six sprinklers, six hoses and six valves that connect to my faucet so I can schedule watering times and dates in between the rain storms. I have all of the sprinklers come on in sequence twice a week, but on some particularly hot days I have run some of the sprinklers manually to keep the grass green. I do not want to water too often or the sod roots will not go deep seeking water, and I do not want to water not often enough and kill the sod.
I set the cut height on my riding mower up to the maximum to keep the hot sun from overheating the roots of the grass, and I set the mowing height on my little mower to match. The grass seems to be growing very well and I cut it every week; the riding mower is fun but mowing the trim with the little mower is not. The grass is still uneven to walk on, but it seems to be leveling out with mowing, foot traffic, watering and gravity.
There was another oops with the sod installation, thankfully a small one; the giant bobcat thing backed into my post with an electrical outlet on it, and pushed it slightly. It was not run over or destroyed, but the tap was hard enough to break the connection to the receptacle. I finally got around to fixing it which I laughingly assumed would be a simple fix; the fix did turn out to be simple, but the process was not. I turned off the breaker and saw that the ground wire had become disconnected, so an easy fix.
But by ignoring the age-old rule of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ I made a federal project out of it by trying to make it pretty. After several trips to the hardware store on consecutive mornings to procure ‘pretty’ parts, none of which fit with what I already had, I decided to skip the lipstick and just go back to making it work, which I did. It isn’t pretty up close, but when I stand in my air conditioned kitchen and look out the window toward it, it is beautiful.
My little brick dam in the front of the house is not working as well as I hoped, since it leaks like a sieve when it rains hard. For my next trick I got a plastic garden edge thing, and pounded it in the ground between two rows of bricks. It has not rained hard since I did this, but I think it will work, at least I certainly hope so.
Since I retired from my day job last June I have not had any time to ponder ‘what fun stuff’ I will do with my retirement, or even had any time to become bored and regret quitting my day job; that will never happen. After the chaos of the ‘tree fell on the house’ blah blah blah, the current goal for my retirement is to ‘stop being in a hurry’ to do anything. Trips to the grocery store will be laid back and unhurried, I will get my hair cut when it needs it, and I will take time to enjoy my hobbies more frequently than once per year. That’s my goal anyway.
During the tree issue last year, Miss Sherry and I did find something to distract us from the chaos and keep what was left of our sanity; we wrote a screenplay. We had a lot of fun writing a story with a ‘happily ever after’ ending, which was definitely something we were hoping for with the tree. We made some minor changes to the script and wrote a book, keeping the screenplay format.
Our screenplay/book is titled ‘Velma and Lucille’ and is the story of what happened to Thelma & Louise after they drove their car off that cliff. If you are not familiar with the movie Thelma & Louise, our screenplay will be more entertaining if you see that movie first. No one in Hollywood believes they could have survived the jump, but we do, obviously because otherwise our story would be very short and not happy.
Neither Miss Sherry nor I were content with the movie ending with the apparent suicide of the main characters; we thought they were two more casualties of the justice system that too often favors criminals over their victims. So we fixed that; we changed some of the ‘bad things that happen to good people’ to more accurately separate the victim and villain, with a large dose of ‘justifiable self-defense’. We also included epitaphs of the villains explaining how they did not get away with their crimes, and instead were introduced to the basic concept of right and wrong, and that what is wrong is punished.
The screenplay was our entertainment for a few months, actually the screenplay was our only entertainment. We decided to publish our book now because we think that others will enjoy some genuine entertainment as a distraction from the less appealing aspects of all of our everyday lives. The victims in our story end up living happily ever after, the villains get what they deserve, and the world is a better place to live in for two hours.
