Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Good morning crew,

It took two years of dedicated procrastination, but this weekend past the wife and I finally got around to starting on our landscaping project.

They say the first step is the hardest, and that's partially true, but personally I thought the hardest part was lugging four or five hundred pounds of landscaping bricks, stones and gravel all over town.

The wife seemed to enjoy herself. We got to the garden center at a bright and early 10:30 a.m. and her eyes danced as we perused all of the landscaping options.

"Wouldn't this look gorgeous?" she asked, indicating a textured retaining wall block that scintillated with veins of blue and green granite running through it.

I leaned over and squinted at the price indicated on the rack. "Not at $4.79 a piece it wouldn't," I said.

We debated a little, but finally settled on some plain stone blocks at 98 cents a piece that still met with the wife's stringent aesthetic criteria.

"Look!" she exclaimed. "We can get a 10 cent discount per block if we buy 100 or more."

"Let's buy 15 or 20," I argued, "then we can get an idea of what it's going to look like, and if you don't like it we won't be stuck with 100 10-pound landscaping blocks stacked in the backyard."

Surprisingly, she agreed, but when it came to the stones to go inside the retaining wall she would not compromise. While I was off looking for one of those big, four-wheeled dollys to cart around this small mountain of material we were accumulating, the wife discovered some polished, Mexican beach rocks for about a million pesos a bag.

She got this crazy idea in her head that by combining white rocks and blue rocks, the polished texture would make it look like running water.

Even when I pointed out that it would take about 8 bags of this rock just to fill in behind the 20 blocks we were buying she promised me it would be worth it.

Then, there were a few bags of base sand, a few bags of gravel, a roll of weed barrier, and by the time we were finished I could barely push the dolly.

After we loaded everything into the back of my truck, drove it home and unloaded it all into the backyard it was already past noon and we hadn't even started the hard part.

It took six more manhours to dig up the old, rotting mulch, lay the blocks and fill in the stone, and after we had used all the material we bought we ended up with about five feet of wall.

On the plus side what we bought does look pretty good, so I don't think we'll be pulling it up and replacing it. And to give the wife her credit, the rocks do kind of look like running water, when observed from a great distance.

Now that we got things started and we know what we're doing, we only have about 70 more feet of wall to build. At five feet per weekend that should put us at about, ummm, August.

Laugh it up,

Joe

joe@gophercentral.com

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"A couple from Florida just set a record by taking their 200th Carnival Cruise. The couple said, 'What can we say, we love diarrhea.'" -Conan O'Brien

***
"A new study finds that if you're drunk around sober people, you'll think you're less drunk than if you're around other drunk people. And if you're drunk around sober people, chances are you've got a problem." -Jimmy Fallon

***
"On a bittersweet note, the world's oldest person has died in Italy at the age of 117. It's tragic; she died in a knife fight with the world's second-oldest person. I'm kidding! Do you know how she died? Bungee-jumping." -James Corden

***
There was a teenage boy who worked in the produce section of the local market. A man came in and asked to buy half a head of lettuce. The boy said he would go ask his manager about the matter. So he walked into the back and said, "There's some jerk out there who wants to buy only a half a head of lettuce." As he was finishing saying this he turned around to find the man standing right behind him, so he added, "and this here gentleman wants to buy the other half..."

The manager okayed the deal and the man went on his way.

Later the manager called on the boy and said, "You almost got yourself in a lot of trouble earlier, but I must say I was impressed with the way you got yourself out of it. You think on your feet and we like that around here. Where are you from son?"

The boy replied, "Canada, Sir."

"Oh really? Why did you leave Canada?" asked the manager.

The boy replied, "They're all just up-tight, homely women and hockey players up there."

"Really," replied the manager, "My wife is from Canada!"

The boy replied, "No kidding! What team did she play for?"




*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*
A young city boy visiting a dude ranch wanted to be appear macho, so he went out walking with one of the hired hands.

As they were walking through the barnyard, the visitor tried to begin a conversation, "Say, isn't that fine-looking bunch of cows over there."

The hired hand replied, "Not 'bunch,' it's 'herd.'"

"Heard what?"

"Herd of cows."

"Sure, I've heard of cows!" finished the city boy excitedly, "there's a big bunch of 'em right over there."