Bennifer

Ben Affleck and Jen < insert last name here >.

I have a secret. I've been combining couple-names for years. These combined nicknames are a code Linda and I use to quickly refer to couples.

Please, take no offense, these are the best combinations I could come up with. See if you can guess these couple nicknames...

To make it a little harder, I altered the spelling to be the actual nick-name word, not the true joining of the names. For example, if the couple was:

Frank and Anne

their combined name could be: "Fanne", but here, I would put down "Fan", because that is how you really spell fan.

Jiz
Barrolin' (or Cryin')
Niche
Lead
Pet him
Erick
Gnat
Chase He (or Am I Tan?)

-Ed

You Load 16 Tons, And What Do You Get?

Four tons of topsoil was delivered to our house at 7am this morning. Topsoil is really a fascinating thing. It looks like dirt. It feels like dirt. In fact, it feels like the dirt we just took to Linda's parents house from the patio. But, somehow, it is not called dirt, it is called top soil.

As near as I can tell, top soil is latin for dirt that you pay money to have delivered.

The retaining wall is done. It has soiled itself which, in this instance, is a good thing.

The patio is *not* done. I forgot something.... the patio needs steps up to the screened-in porch! Not just any steps... Just any steps would be easy. Nonono, we wanted steps composed of leftover concrete pavers. So I went to Lowes and bought 8 six foot long 4x4's and put them into Linda's car.

And that's when I learned something amazing! Do you know what I learned?

When 7 of the 8 4x4s are in the car and you are trying to shove that last one in, and, unbeknownst to you, one of the 4x4s is up against the windshield, if you push REALLY hard you will break the windshield.

It's amazing, really, just how little force is required to put a Cretian maze of cracks in a windshield.

Driving home, 4x4's now securely nestled, I had the following conversation on my cell phone...

L: Hello?
E: Hey honey!
L: Hey Ed, did you get the stuff you needed.
E: You love me, right?
L: What did you do?
E: You love me right?
L: Of course I do.... what happened to my car
E: Because all that is really important is our love.
L: Oh God, howbad is it.
E: And, it's always most important that we have our health.
L: That bad, huh?

All in all, she took it pretty well. We had a short memorial service for the windshield when I got back home. Fortunately, Linda has off tomorrow and was scheduled to take the car in for an oil change anyway. Let's hope the dealer can get a new windshield this weekend!

-Ed

ps. Please, excuse the lack of picts. I was working outside until 9pm again tonight, then Linda and I went out to dinner with her folks (who stopped by to say hi and were drafted into 2 hours of dirt spreading).

What is a Best Buy?

I recently turned 30. By recently, I mean within 365 days of today. We had a big 30th birthday bash, and some friends came over and celebrated. One friend, speaking on some topic, made the announcement that there is "no such thing as a best buy at Best Buy". Now, this is, most probably true. It, however, did not bode well as a public comment as the next 4 gifts that I opened were gift certificates to Best Buy.

So, why am I reminiscing about this now? I used to love Best Buy. You knew the prices were a little bad, but you went in there to shop for ideas, inspiration, and the greedy, self-ego-inflating knowledge that you knew more about networking than the blue-shirted teenager hawking wireless-G. I even went to Best Buy to purchase a purplish i-pod mini for Linda for Christmas:



Then, I discovered the website Best Buy Sucks . Now, granted, *many* major manufacturers have web sites put up by disgruntled customers and employees. What struck me about this site was just how... LARGE it is.

Now, some of it is just piss-poor stuff like "I didn't show up for work and the jerk fired me". But much of it (that I saw) was informational. For example, those reduced rate i-pod warranties that I bought were (verbally) sold as covering the i-pod mini's battery. Posts on the site said that employees were told to say that about the warranty. Customer posts claimed that the warranty does *not* cover the battery.

From: http://www.bestbuysux.org/html/cust3-05.html

These past few days I saw some posts about Best Buy warranties and how the employees sell them by lying about what they cover. I had just bought an iPod from BB in October and bought a Replacement Plan warranty for $40. I'd never bought a warranty before, but the guy at the store sold me on the fact that if the battery died they would replace it free of charge. ... (The guy also said no matter what I did to it I could get it replaced, which from what I see on this site is a commonplace lie.)

Well, the posts I saw here had some folks saying that's a load of ****. I went to the warranty pamphlet they give you AFTER you buy it and sure enough it said it doesn't cover replacing batteries.

Batteries are a big deal if you own an i-pod.

You might want to take a gander, I'm glad I did.

-Ed

Life, the Patio, and Everything

The patio, she is finished. While I was happily whacking away at the remaining patio pavers Linda went to Home Depot and picked up 25 more retaining wall bricks. God bless her.

This morning, 4 tons of topsoil were dumped next to our driveway. It will be used to fill in the area behind the retaining wall and provide some good soil (i.e. not rock and clay) for our gardens.

I almost lost my pinky in an odd rubber-mallet-torpedo-level accident. Don't ask... I have pictures. Why aren't they posted here? Because I'm tired as hell.

Tonight we will put the last row on the retaining wall, and then give it some dirt to retain. We will sand out the patio, and install the remaining little plastic edging things to keep everything in place. We will start cleaning the house for Friday's poker night, and, just maybe, begin painting the screened-in porch.

Mother's Day is fast approaching! Let's see, for the past 3 weeks I have been so busy I have not talked to my family, in preparation for Mother's Day. At least a week after Mother's Day I will be recuperating and will not want to speek to anyone. So it's Happy Mother's Day mom! To prepare for this one day, I won't speak to you for a month! 8)

-Ed

My Wife is a Whoopie Cushion

At the baby shower this past weekend, I made the observation that Linda was enjoying her second blue whale.

Now Linda doesn't drink very often and will only drink in 1 of 3 houses, with drinks she likes and people she knows and feels comfortable with. Yes, anyone that really knows Linda will have no trouble believing she really has a system for this.

The house where the baby shower occurred is particularly famous for getting Linda loopy. The tap water there runs hot and cold cabo-wabo, and it is first in the "1 of 3" houses. Of course, it helps that it is in the same neighborhood as our house.

I was sharing this observation with a friend at the baby shower, and almost immediately got the response:

"Oh, she doesn't just drink at this house. We remember Halloween!"

Now, yes, Halloween was 6 months ago, and it was at our house (house number 3 on the list of houses she allows herself to drink at). Y'all can try and figure out house #2.

I found it funny that it would be such an instant reference. So I dug up some pictures from Halloween and reminded myself that, oh yes, that was a hard time to forget.

You see, Linda came to our Halloween costume party as a whoopie cushion...



Of course, we ran out of some mix-drink-materials so a few of us left, mid party, to find some more mixers. Don't worry, the driver was quite dry.



And around 2am, my little whoopie cushion could take no more.


Join me for my next blog entry "How to smooth over a pissed off wife".

-Ed

Why Lebanon Matters?

I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't put political posts in my blogs. Plenty of people do that, and why my personal diary would need politics is beyond me.

But on a political blog that I do read from time to time, I saw this picture and it made me curious:



It had the text above it:

"Lebanon may be the only place in the world where you can buy a necklace with a Christian cross and a Muslim crescent moon fused together as one. What other country would even think of making something like this? I've never seen one before. But now I own two."

Regardless of religious affiliation, I believe it is the desire to not only wish for religious peace, but to actively promote it (especially in areas of the world where promoting it could mean your life) that has caught me on this.

Good luck, Beirut.

The material above has come from Spirit of America . I don't read the site, and I don't know its affiliations, but I thought that particular article was interesting.

-Ed

ps. My father used to tell a joke about politics. I always thought it was funny as hell. Most people don't get it. It goes something like this:

Two wives were talking over the fence one day about about their husbands.

W1: My husband never lets me make any important decisions at home.

W2: (shocked) That's terrible! What decisions *does* he let you make??

W1: He lets me decide what we eat, when we go out, how to handle the money, what kind of cars we buy, and where we go on vacation. Stuff like that.

W2: But, I don't understand, what other important decisions does he hold just for himself?

W1: Oh, you know, the important ones: Where the US should (or should not) go to war, who should be president, how the roads should be constructed, how to reform the church...

I am an alcoholic

I had escaped the tar pit for a while!

Finishing up the retaining wall and patio has been a challenge. I don't get home from work until 6pm, and we lose light around 8:00-8:30pm. The constant drizzle in the evenings has made it difficult to get meaningful work on the patio in. It is hard to smack pavers into the sand when the sand more closely resembles quicksand.

Why am I an alcoholic?

Let's see... I got home from work at 6pm, immediately changed clothes and went to work on the patio until we lost light (and then some) at 8:45pm. I ate a 15 minute dinner of microwaved pizza at 8:45pm, and then did some spacecraft testing from 9pm-10:30pm (gotta love those little work "fires") and snuggled into bed at 10:30pm to read my newest edition of The Family handyman .

Why does that make me an alcoholic? Dehydrated and not wanting to make a powdered drink, I opened a can of Coors Lite and took it to bed with me. So I was sitting in bed, drinking a Coors Lite, reading a handyman book, and generally feeling like something out of a Jeff Foxworthy skit.

Then my sister called to tell me she was going to buy a sink.

-Ed

ps. Speaking of my impending alcoholism, I just remembered an exchange that happened this past weekend, and some funny pictures to go with it. More to come.

Digital Timecapsules

I recently rediscovered my first attempt at a homepage. It was something I made several years ago, 1999 maybe, when I was home sick... something to pass the time between coughing and sleeping.

I rediscovered it the way families rediscover photos in dusty boxes in attics - an attempt to clean something turned into a humorous romp through the past turned into some quiet reflection turned into a cherished possession. It was a series of pictures and thoughts that took me back to a time, and a person, who seemed so very alien to me.

Within two years of writing that homepage I had left my parent's house, lost my father, did some serious personal reflection-transformation, changed jobs twice, dropped about 80lbs, changed cars, bought a townhome, discovered and developed my work ethic, and met the girl I would marry.

It was hard to make a personal connection with the person on that homepage. That person is, now, closer to a nephew, or an acquaintence, than my former self. Tom Wolfe was right, you can never go home again.

Part of me wants to write to that person on that homepage and warn them "sharp learning curve ahead, bucko! You are about to merge onto life's highway whether you want to or not, so hit the gas a little." But youth *is* wasted on the young, and I was very young for a very long time. Of course a 24 year old Ed looks young to a 30 year old Ed. Just as I will be young when a 36 year old Ed looks back on this blog. I just hope, when he does, he says something closer to "good job, old bean".

At least one sentiment on that dusty homepage still rings a true chord with me, albeit at the time I could only express it through someone else's words:

From my creative interests page:

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, Law, Business, Engineering... These are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life, but poetry, beauty, romance, love,...these are what we stay alive for!

To quote from Whitman 'Oh me, Oh life, Oh the questions of these recurring of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish. What good amid these, oh me, oh life? Answer...

That you are here. That life exists. And identity. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.' That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse!"
--Mr. Keating, Dead Poet's Society

I imagine much of what you need to know about life is embedded there, if only in its most generalized form.

-Ed

Poker Night

I've hosted a poker night*** for the past 3 years, one Friday a month. I try to make the e-mails announcing poker night a little more entertaining, and thought I would share the latest one with you non-poker-night people. If you would like to be invited to poker night, please, let me know.

-Ed

Subject: [POKER NIGHT] This Friday! April 29th! 8pm! Yay!

Many things in life are gambles.

Going to a new restaurant can be a gamble. Trying to play a friend in "Hot Shots Golf FORE!" can be a gamble. Painting a room in your house a random color just to see what happens can be a gamble. Trying to build a patio and a retaining wall in 3 weeks can be a gamble. Wearing a bikini to the office can be a gamble. It's an even bigger gamble when you are male. Trying to juggle sharp knives can be a gamble. Scheduling a publicity leap over the grand canyon can, most certainly, be a gamble. Making the heavy decision to date Liz Taylor can be a gamble. Being able to say, in front of a group, "I don't know what's on this DVD, but let's watch it" is a gamble.

And yet, these gambles are ones we have *all* taken in the past. Many of us more than once. Quite a few of us after receiving stern warnings to the contrary.

What keeps this spirit of gambling alive? That ethereal ability to ask the question "what worth would my life have had it not been risked in the pursuit of standing on a van going 30mph in the Harbor Tunnel?" is something that sets us apart from the rest of the world. More formally, this is called Darwinism.

How do we celebrate this distinctive sense of adventure? What offering can we make to the Gambling Gods who fuel our imaginations and make us persue probabalistic paradise? The offering of poker night. I tell you, the smell of pizza and beer and the clinking of clay chips on a wooden table is their sweetest incense. It is time. It is poker time.

-Ed

***The link above on Poker Night is something I just stumbled upon. It looked cute, but I can't say for sure if it is work safe or not, as I haven't looked at any of the movies. Click at your own risk. 8)

Any Port In The Storm

My love affair with port wine started approximately 10 years ago when I would take small sips of Ruby port from a bottle in my parent's basement. Burning all the way down, there wasa very warm and filling feeling to the drink (much unlike other things such as.. horseradish).

Ruby port is also excellent with cooked meats, not just as a drink but as a marinade. Steaks and even hamburgers get a distinctive "shot in the arm" with a little ruby port added to it. Sometimes, I put a little of the ol' ruby into my pasta sauce (depending, of course, on the kind of sauce). If the sauce would benefit from brown sugar, a little port would help out too.

Somewhere along the line, I decided to try something called Tawny port. It's like ruby port, but it's brown and tastes different. And costs more. Ok, maybe it is nothing like ruby port.

A good, aged, 20-year tawny port has a hint of caramel and brown sugar in it, with a good, smooth tummy-warming quality that smacks of sophisticated social lubricant. A good bottle of 20-year aged tawny is not cheap, but a little goes a long way and it is best saved for just the right occaision. Or not, as I just helped drink a bottle of it last night...

-Ed

ps. I learned the other day that "20 year tawny port" does not mean the port is 20 years old. Port is often made by mixing many years worth of wines and it can be called "20 year" port when it tastes like 20 year port.

pps. And yes, I know I should say porto.

Babies R Us

Today we had a baby shower for a couple we are very close friends with. We also learned another couple in our group of friends is pregnant, and last week learned that yet another couple in a different group of friends is pregnant.

The baby boom has begun. How completely exciting and terrifying. Linda and I are ready to talk about having our own family. I know I'll be a good dad, and I know she'll be a good mom. But, that's all we want to say about it. You know how private and secretive we like to be about these sorts of things.

I made 10 t-shirts for the baby. Each one had a picture of a different friend and the saying "Today I want to Spit Up ...". I thought it was cute. Here's mine:



Now I just need to find a way to market these and make a million dollars. Please, if you know of a way to, let me know. 8)

-Ed

Contract, the finale

Remember the contractor that couldn't put pavers on a blue tarp, or remember when they would deliver the pavers? Remember how happy I was that they even showed up?

Turns out we were about 40 bricks short of the special "half-bricks". I calculated I needed about 90. We asked for 90. They gave us about 50.

They don't read, and they don't do `rithmetic. Perhaps they could change their name to "One R Contracting" and their motto could be "We `rite Good".

Patio is more than 50% in. Why no pictures? Linda wants the finished patio to be a family surprise and family reads this blog.

-Ed

EDIT - well, maybe 1 picture of the extra bricks we needed to buy.

Always Spread Your Condiments

I went to a Bull Roast tonight. There is no greater pleasure at a Bull Roast than to get a great heaping mound of roast beast with onions, slather it with barbecue sauce and horseradish and mustard and scrunch the whole thing together between slices of rye bread in a gooey contraption worthy of John Montagu himself.

But there is a hidden danger in such a concoction -- like the Japanese Fugu (blowfish) which is deadly if not prepared correctly. For your own sake always spread your condiments. Don't assume that your grand heaping dollop of horseradish will somehow, magically, spread itself across the rye bread, as if in a sandwich centrifuge.

How did I learn this lesson? As hard as it is to believe, this universal truth was not part of my instinctual repertoire. That's right,I had to learn this the hard way.

Sitting at the Bull Roast, half surrounded by friends, half surrounded by strangers, I began gnawing through my sandwich. At the half-way point I felt a small piece of meat begin to fall to my plate. Without thinking, I inhaled trying to use pure suction to fight gravity's pull on my hard-won roast beef.

What follows is sometimes called a God Smack. True punishment against my hubristic desire to conquer gravity.

Instead of inhaling the falling piece of roast beef I inhaled the entire load of horse radish that had been dolloped into the center of my sandwich. At least 3 heaping tablespoons of white pain was in my mouth before I knew what was happening. Without thinking, I swallowed. This action is sometimes called a "major mistake".

The pain was just incredible. I thought I was having an allergic reaction. I couldn't breath, my throat swelled shut, and in shock, I stood up so quickly that my chair fell backwards. Then the coughing began much to the startled stares of everyone at the table. When the coughing began I knew I could breathe again (whew). My eyes teared up and it took me a full 5 minutes to regain something even remotely resembling composure.

Even as I type this, hours past the event, Jabba The Horseradish Dollop sits in my belly. I fear he is not done with me yet. On the odd chance I had expired due to horeradish poisoning, I would have enjoyed my high ranking in the Darwin awards. Perhaps a grim limerick could have graced my tombstone:

Here lies Ed,
Too much horseradish was he fed.

or, perhaps,

Here lies Ed,
The only thing holier was his stomach

The moral of this story? Don't eat horseradish out of the jar and always spread your condiments.

Marring the Grandeur of the Seas

This summer Linda and I will be taking a cruise on the Grandeur of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean cruise ship:

Yup, we've become staunch cruise people. Our love of these vessels is, no doubt, helped by the reality of free food and 24 hour room service. Few things are as nice as popping a bottle of Riesling on a private balcony, ordering the fruit and cheese platter, and staring out over pitch black oblivion and a clear starry night.

So we were more than a little surprised to hear that our cruise ship had struck a pier yesterday that put a 43 foot wide by 5 foot high gash in her bow.

They will fix the damage in port and the April 23rd cruise will be delayed by 2 days. Fortunately, we are not on the April 23rd cruise. Those poor people are only being refunded $300 per stateroom for losing 2 days off a 7 day vacation! That's not really the correct amount of compensation and many are having fits about it. Staterooms ain't cheap!

-Ed "Don't Rock The Boat"

Driving Theory I

I drive about 40 miles to work each day on 95. It's a bit like being in the movie Days of Thunder, except the cars don’t have ads on them. There is no question in my mind that over my commuting career I will be involved in an accident on I-95. I drive (and am killing with mileage) a very safe car to help me out whenever that accident happens. Maybe that's the way we should all drive: every morning when I get in the car I think to myself "someone is going to try and run into me". Most days it's true.

After driving past my FOURTH accident this morning (and one man being arrested with 4 police cars behind him) I had a thought… I would imagine that a leading cause of motor vehicle accidents is lane changes. Not necessarily speed, and not necessarily distractions (like cell phones) but unsafe lane changes. Now, clearly, if you change lanes at a great speed, or while distracted, or while drunk, the chance of you making an unsafe lane change goes up dramatically. But it is the unsafe lane change that, in my opinion, causes most accidents.

Next time you are on the highway try and span the entire highway portion of the trip without changing lanes (beyond the obligatory merge-on/merge-off). It can be frustrating, but you don't worry nearly so much about being in an accident.

When do I see the most lane changes? When someone decides to resist the flow of traffic. Sometimes someone wants to go faster than the flow of traffic, and thus they aggressively weave in and out of slower moving cars. Alternatively, and far more often on 95, someone decides to go 10-15 mph below the flow of traffic and, like a boulder in a river, they "force" cars to flow around them.

From http://www.smartmotorist.com/acc/acc.htm

NYS Police characterize aggressive driving by the following traffic violations:

• Excessive speed
• Frequent or unsafe lane changes
• Failure to signal
• Tailgating
• Failure to yield the right of way
• Disregarding traffic controls
• Impaired driving

The question then becomes: what causes aggressive behaviour? I'd bet it is people in a hurry. If you increase the flow of traffic on highways you might decrease the number of people wanting to exceed the flow of traffic and, thus, decrease the number of people in a hurry and, possibly, decrease the number of aggressive drivers on the roads. There is certainly no shortage of people looking at this problem, but it does beg the question:

Can increased speed be seperated from, and actually help reduce, aggressive driving? Either way I usually get in the left lane, park my butt 2 car lengths behind the guy in front of me and let others do the passing. I've seen too many accidents to want to weave around in the morning anymore.

-Ed

The Retaining Wall, Part Deux

Good news: Everything seems level, and we've got 90% of the wall up.

Bad news: 10% isn't up because I under-boughtby about 40 bricks. It's off to Home Depot this weekend for some brick shopping!

We'll see if the rain allows for any patio-finishing tomorrow. Hopefully the storms will continue to elude our weather-people. In the past 36 hours we have had something like 6 different projections for the weekend.

Sometimes I think people believe in the largely random Farmer's Almanac because even pure random is sometimes far more accurate than weather forecasters in Maryland.

-Ed

What do I Do All Day?

I work at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. Most recently I've been hobnobbing around the Space Department writing flight software code for the New Horizons mission to Pluto which, if lucky, will be lobbed towards our beloved chunk-o-rock sometime in early 2006. Information about the spacecraft and the mission in general can be found at The JHU/APL New Horizons Mission webpage.

Bonus points if you can pick me out of the team photo:


The Team

There are about 5-8 Command and Data Handling software engineers. This is the picture of the whole team: testers, hardware people, software people, managers, schedulers, scientists, etc…

Writing flight software has been an interesting challenge. Radiation hardened processors and "new-fangled technology" don't hang out in the same bar, and I've been writing C code with compilers that have been compiling longer than I have. Maybe one day we will see Linux in Space. Although I'd be happy to get real-time C++ flight software. We'll have to see. Right now I might just be talking crazy -- it's so hard to tell sometimes.

-Ed

RAIN

Well, I guess the retaining wall and patio will not be done before the rain!  On the bright side -- it's freezing out and will thunderstorm all weekend.

-Ed

Ps. This e-mail update is actually quite handy.  Granted, it is a bit like e-mailing yourself, but I've never had an issue with that.

Why The Red Tar Pit

Why on earth is my blog called The Red Tar Pit? Now, that's a good question.

I know it's a good question because I don't have any sensible answer.

I originally wanted to call my blog "The Tar Pit" because I could see it slowly sapping time and energy to keep its content fresh. But, someone else already has a blog called The Tar Pit. Of course, looking at the tar pit blog one can't help but notice that it hasn't been updated since July of 2003 and the last update had the grammatical correctness of typing with your forehead.

So, sitting at my computer saying "tar pit" over and over (yeah that's right: tar pit tar pit tar pit tar pit) I was struck by just how much it sounded like "carpet". Hey, if it's one thing our brains do well it's pattern match. So I wanted to roll out the red carpet to people. Come one in! read my stuff! Be my guest, be my guest, put my service to the test!

Of course, there is already a blog called The Red Carpet. It was last used in October of 2002, apparently by an intoxicated e.e. cummings.

In the grand spirit of compromise, I came up with "The Red Tar Pit", a place where we roll out the red carpet and ask that you slowly get stuck in it. It is clearly not the greatest mental image and, perhaps, is indicative of why I am not in advertising. Well, the name is stuck (no pun intended) until a better one is thought up. Suggestions, of course, are welcome.

-Ed

Joke of the Day

What do you get when you mix a MythTV box, an obsessive compulsive, and a guy too busy to ever watch television?

250Gb of the twilight zone, American Chopper, and Monk, which cannot be deleted because they haven't been burned to DVD yet for archival and viewing purposes.

-Ed

The blocks have arrived

Contractor: "Where would you like the blocks placed?"
Everyone-In-The-Entire-Birrane-Household-That-Has-Ever-Spoken-To-These-People: "On the blue tarp next to the driveway"

Today I come home from work and there are 3 pallets of blocks sitting in our driveway, next to the blue tarp we laid out. Not ON the blue tarp. No. That would make sense and, worse, it would be helpful. But in the driveway. So we are parked in the street, the garage is blocked.

When this is done I would write the Contractor a nasty letter but, based on the note: "Leave pallets on Blue Tarp Next To Driveway" written on our receipt, I'm not sure they read. I just thank the lord that they arrived and are the right color.

-Ed

Trying e-mail updates

I just wanted to try update this blog from e-mail. Because, well,
you know, I might need to blog something and have access to only e-mail
over the internet instead of the blogger webpage.... or something...

The Contract Comes Through?

We got a call from the contractor. Our patio pavers will arrive tomorrow!

Good news: We may get the patio done before it rains!

Bad news: Oh crap, we gotta finish the retaining wall!

-Ed

The Retaining Wall

What happens when you have a half-finished patio and your contractor won't tell you when the pavers will be delivered? You build a retaining wall!

Linda and I went to Home Depot and picked out the stones we would use. We needed 110. They cost $2.95 each. No problem. Upon getting home, our neighbor was loading retaining wall stones outof her car. They looked like the ones we just bought. We commented on how similar they looked. She said "yeah! K-Mart had them on sale for less than a dollar each". Did I previously say I liked Home Depot?

So, first we mark the line of the wall:


Then, find the deepest point, and make it level and start laying out the blocks!


After a while, it starts to look like a wall.


Butworking on this slope is slippery.


-Ed

I Hate Contractors, 2

Contractor: "***** Contractors, how may I help you?"
Linda: "Hi, yes, we need toknow when our pavers will be delivered.
Contractor: "We will call you 24 hours before delivery."
Linda: "Yes. And when will that be?"
Contractor: "We will call you 24 hours before delivery."

4 hours later

Contractor: "***** Contractors, how may I help you?"
Ed: "When will you deliver my pavers?"
Contractor: "We spoke with your wife earlier today and told her when we will deliver them".
Ed: "When will you deliver my pavers?"
Contractor: "We will call you 24 hours before delivery."

I have never seen a company whose phone support would be so vastly improved by outsourcing to India.

-Ed

The Patio, Weekend 2

Well, the 6 tons of rock came during the week and Linda and I spread it 4" thick in the patio area. Of course, it has to be pretty level, and sloped evenly away from the house. We stuck stakes every 4 feet, leveled string, and filled as best we could. The next step was tamping. God how we love tamping!

John Zaczek and I went to Home Depot to rent their gas powered mega-tamper because it would make short work of the project. The only problem was, Home Depot wanted $98 for 3 hours rental. This just wouldn't do so, venturing into Home Depot we found a manual tamper. What is a manual tamper? A chunk of iron on a stick that costs $20. I bought two.

So, thefirst thing we did was tamp down the rock (yes, that's drainage rock with powdered rock in between).


Next, you cover the area in black landscape fabric and get ready to dump the sand (or in our case more powdered rock) 2" thick into the patio area. You need to lay 2" thick pipes down and "screed" the sand:


This makes sure everything is level:


Of course, after a little work I realized that I had bought 2" thick INNER DIAMETER pipe instead of 2" thick outer diameter pipe. This is a big (.5") no-no. So we started over, after a trip to Lowes to buy the right pipes. But after a while, we got in a groove.




Screeding done, we just need the patio pavers and... some way to get rid of the rest of this dirt!


-Ed

I Hate Contractors

No doubt about it. Lowes and Home Depot sometimes get a bad reputation as being pricey, but they only charge $60 to deliver something, and if that something is really heavy, it's worth it!

Lowes was out of the patio pavers we wanted. In fact, they had already taken order for 4,600 pavers more than they had in stock. So we went to a contractor near us that sold the same pavers. It was a little MORE expensive than Lowes (about $40 more grand total) but they said they could have the stuff out on Tuesday or Wednesday. Kind of a bummer, but we can use the rest.

Building a Patio, Weekend 1

Linda's brother Brian lives in our house. Brian is just moving up from North Carolina and is staying in our basement until he gets things settled and can start to look for a house in MD. Why our basement? We have a big basement with its own kitchen, so he can chill in a pretty nice "underground apartment".

Why do I talk about Brian when the post is titled patio? For Christmas, to show his appreciation for his pending move into our house, Brian bought us a really nice outdoor fire pit. Linda said it would look great on the deck. I said we can't put a fire pit on a wooden deck. Thus was born the patio, a herculean effort whose blame I place squarely on Brian's back, as my back, currently, hurts quite a bit.

So how do you build a 300 sq. ft. patio?

Step 1: Lay everything out to make sure it fits.



Step 2: Dig


Step 3: invite inlaws over to perform manual labor.


Step 4: Smooth out the dirt.


We've got 6 tons of gravel and 4 tons of powdered rock and 900 patio pavers en route next week.

Mother's Day

linda and I host two major family events at our house: Mother's Day and Christmas Eve. We love to entertain, especially family. Earlier this year, Linda's maternal grandmother passed away, thus beginning the "year of firsts" for Linda's mother and her 8 siblings. Suddenly, Mother's Day at our house became a little bigger than usual. I think we've got 30 people coming.

No problemo.

Except we have people who have never seen the house before! So upstairs and downstairs must be well cleaned out. Of course, Linda and I also have a bunch of construction tasks we want to get done in the summer. Do we put those tasks off until after Mother's Day? nonono. We work best against a deadline.

More to follow.

Michael Blackmon

Ed's younger brother, Mike, was killed today riding a motorcycle home from work. Mike was a bit of a hell raiser andone heck of a funny guy. He was probably the biggest, strongest guy I know (of course, I work in computers so that doesn't say much), and I have clear memories of him from Ocean City to the Maryland Reneissance Festival.

He was obeying the speed limit, and did nothing wrong, but some car turned right into him without looking and Mike passed away at the scene of the accident. No helmets or thick leather jackets would have made a difference.

There are no fender benders on a motorcycle.

His obituary ran in the baltimore sun. He was 31. Click on the title of this post to go to his guest book on the Baltimore Sun homepage.

Rest in Peace, Mike.

---

">BLACKMON, Michael L. ">Suddenly on April 9, 2005, MICHAEL L. BLACKMON, beloved son of Catherine T. (nee Scott) and the late Edward L. Blackmon Sr.; dear brother of Deborah A. Pasto and her husband James, Edward L. Blackmon Jr. and his wife Lynn; dear uncle of Lindsay and Jessica Blackmon; dear godson of Stanley and Margaret Telakowicz; dear grandson of Ann Blackmon; nephew of Mary L. Bielas, Joe and Ann Smith, Donald and Bonnie Blackmon; also survived by numerous cousins and friends. Funeral Service will be held at the family owned Duda-Ruck Funeral Home of Dundalk Inc., 7922 Wise Avenue, on Friday at 10 A.M. Interment Oak Lawn Cemetery. Friends may call Wednesday and Thursday 3 to 5 and 7 to 9 P.M.
Published in the Baltimore Sun from 4/12/2005 - 4/13/2005.

Why Do I Have A Blog?

I have a confession to make: I used to watch Doogie Howser as a child. The plots, of course, were crap, but I didn't know it at the time. What I really loved were the endings when, with Aesopian glee, Doogie would boot up the ol' laptop and make a note of the day's moral.

The image of Doogie's face, dimly lit from his monitor screen has inspired several "start-ups" of a diary. A few in High School. One or two in college. Even one a few years ago. All of these attempts to maintain a personal reflection space have failed miserably. Why? For years I lived under the false perception that a diary, personal as it is, must be hand-written to preserve its integrity and, simply put, even I cannot read my own handwriting.

So here is my on-line diary. Call me Doogie. This is a place I can record, and reflect, for free (thank you blogspot) and keep little searchable records to my obsessive-compulsive heart's content. With any luck, this little slice of ether will keep me sane, or at least provide an entertaining chronicle of the alternative.

Publishing things in a public forum (however unlikely it is that this forum is being read) helps me stay humbled and open, two things I often struggle with. I am under absolutely no delusion that what I type here is of any interest to anyone other than myself. But having cast something out for display requires either a great honesty or an ability to self-censor, and I will happily cultivate either.

So, hopefully, that answers the question "why blog".

Far more interesting, perhaps, is the question "Why are you reading?"

Edit: The answer to "Why are you reading" is (most probably) that I sent you an e-mail saying "go check out my blog". 8)

-Ed

First Post!

How odd that I needed to create my own blog just to, finally, get first post. More to come, I hope.

-Ed