Day 33: A Post for the Guys

Posted by: Cris

Warning: There is stuff in this post only males care about (but to keep the rest of you reading, there's stuff about Juneau and Nova at the end)

It's been awhile since I posted a picture from the lanai - so just to remind mommy what she has waiting for her:
Some of you know my very good friend Sean. Besides being a PhD student and literally a world class Karateka (multiple time British and European champion in Karate), I also call him a "semi-pro contractor" - my construction abilities have improved since knowing him. My skills have also improved since he introduced to me to his friend - actual pro contractor Greg. Greg is definitely one of those guys who goes by the creed: "If it's worth building, it's worth overbuilding"...He reminds me of my dad and grandpa in that regard (I liked him immediately).

My grandpa always operated under the notion of "if 3 nails was good enough, then 4 would be better". A quick story as "Exhibit A" - when my parents moved into their first house, my dad and grandpa put up a small 4' tall wire fence around the yard with wood 4x4 corner posts. Many years later, we sold our house to a family in our church and moved to the farm. A couple years after that, the family from our church was moving out of the area and sold the house. The new occupants came in and decided to put up a 6' privacy fence which meant tearing out the old fenceposts. When they were unable to pull the fencepost with a chain hooked to a 4 wheel drive quadrunner, they decided to dig it out - after much digging, they completely uncovered the concrete base into which the post was set which was at least 4 times bigger than what would actually be needed to hold a 4' wood fencepost. - Classic Dennis & Don Stickley.

All of this serves to explain why I didn't get as much done today as I'd hoped:

I stayed home today, got Katy to mind the girls, and set to work on the fence project.

First, I had originally planned on just upping the fence height on the end of the yard right next to the house. Of course, after looking at it further, I decided the best result would be from taking down the whole side of the fence along the gully and upping it. So, I had torn down the whole fence along that side:
The plan then was to connect the new taller posts to these old posts which are bolted into the retaining wall with concrete anchor bolts. However, further inspection revealed that the old posts were about 20 degrees off of plumb since they had been bolted directly to the slope of the retaining wall which is sloped by design (increased strength and to promote run-off, I guess?)

So, the plan changed to beveling each of the new posts so they'd bolt to the old post bases and still be level with the world - this significantly slowed the intended progress today.

What mostly slowed the progress was at the last minute I decided the lag bolts I was using to bolt the first post into the side of the house and the bolts I was using to attach the new posts to the old posts weren't big enough (okay, they probably were in reality) which meant I decided to load up the hardware I'd already bought, drive back to Home Depot and exchange basically everything for the next size up. That cost me quite a bit of time (Hawaii traffic) but was a necessary sacrifice.

As a result, I only got 4 posts instead of 6 installed today. But, they are all exactly level, I'm happy with how they look and if we ever decide to raise Buffaloes in the upper yard, the fence will be strong enough to hold them. I think Grandpa would approve.

For those who haven't given up on this post yet:

The girls are particularly obsessed with chocolate kisses right now. So, this little present that we got from Grandma and Grandpa Stickley that the girls opened yesterday, was a huge hit:

The girls were also thrilled to get a package all the way from Afghanistan from mommy today. They were happy to find inside 3 DVD's to start rebuilding their collection. I hadn't mentioned it previously but one major bad thing happened on our trip from Ohio to Hawaii last month: We had about 20 bags between us, plus the girls and a stroller plus 2 layovers, seats that weren't always together and by the end of it, 2 very tired girls (not to mention tired Mommy and Daddy). As a result, somehow the little black DVD case that had basically EVERY DVD the girls owned, got left in a seat back pocket on the last airplane. It hasn't been that big of a deal since our current van does not have a DVD player in it but still, we were pretty crushed. Luckily I had another copy of the most important DVD in there (Juneau's Adoption Video). So now, mommy is working on finding copies of all their movies for cheap from the Haji shops in Afghanistan.

Here the girls were playing some sort of game where they were pretending they were a choo-choo train. They are both great pretenders and make up the funniest games and scenarios with each other and then have a blast playing them for the longest time.