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…it’s almost time to party on the patio. oh i know, how lame can you get–excitment over a patio. it’s lame, but man, it’s the trooft–i’m excited.

so after 3 years of hemming and hawing, investgating different materials, different layouts, different techniques, we finally have (almost) the super patio. as you know, i oft contemplated putting teh fucker in myself. after watching 2 guys, that have done this before, try to do it here, i’m pretty fucking grateful that i didn’t. the digging alone would have taken 2 weeks.

ex coworker don hooked me up wiht one of his buddies, that does this sorta shit on the side. after something like 50 conversations about the plans, he and another guy showed up at our house around 8:30 saturday night with a huge ass flatbed tow truck full of pavers, these pavers in fact. now, it’s important to note that it fucking poured most of saturday, and was raining saturday night when they arrived. perhaps more importatnly they brought along a dingo which might be the coolest thing in the world. we then proceeded to load the pavers into the dingo and drive them up into the yard, which effectively, destroyed said yard. oh well it’s not like i’ve obsessed over it for 2 years or anything. oh well.

about an hour into it, a coupla cop crusiers came down the alley, and flashed their lights and shit, apparently someone reported that people were in the alley dumping trash. the cops seemed pretty relaxed about the whole thing and just left after the saw what we were doing. so i was about this time i pictured myself, with my wheelbarrow, look at 3 skids of pavers in teh alley, dropped off by some paver supplier, and realized how much it would have sucked to have to move them myself, alone. granted i would have gotten huge like arnie in conan at the salt mines or whatever that was, but really it would have s u c k ed

the boys left, i dried off, and got up really early the next day to be ready to let them in. naturally they didnt’ show up till noon. yay, that ruled. they’re reasoning was that they’d give the yard some time to dry out. and while perfectly valid, i would have liked to have known and not gotten up at 6. oh well. they got to digging the hole for the patio…and as a side effect i got to have them put dirt along the fenceline between ourhouse and the craines (maestro’s old house)…this was the original rat bastard zone…as well as the area where henry dug up the mama rat and all the baby rats…it’s now (fairly) level and i didnt’ have to buy any dirt. I also filled in some low spots in the lawn. pretty cool. again i pictured myself with a pick axe and a shovel, trying to dig this shit out–fucking crazy

yesterday they rolled in around 10 or 11, and got to laying the 6×6 edging for the border/plant beds. there was a fair amount of discussion as to how to line up the timbers, as the house is not square to the road, the fence is not square to the house, the sidewalk is not square to the road, house, fence or venus. so in the end i made an arbitrary decision and the put in the timbers. for some reason that took the rest of the day, we got to this point wehre i think they could have started putting in the pavers, but they didn’t want to stay an extra couple of hrs–but didnt’ feel right just leaving, so they just fucked around with shit and redoing stuff. sort of like when the barber really finishes cutting your hair in 5 mins…but then realizes that it only took 5 mins, so spends 16 more mins just sort of moving you shit around and changing guards on the clippers and shit. err, anyway.

so as they were packing up, i got to drive the dingo out to the truck in the back, i was giddy as well a nerd that got to move a piece of semi heavy equipment. i need to get a trailer hitch on the subie, b/c i need to start renting this sort of shit. so anyway, we’re about 80% done, and they’re predicting rain this afternoon so it looks like i’m stuck liek this until wednesday…so the first martini patio side will have to be thrusday i guess. the suspense is killing me.

anyway. pics here

and just an fyi–the captain hasn’t pooped since last wednesday, so we get to implement emergency measures, which includes pear juice, and err, if that doesn’t work. well something involving a q-tip and vasaline that i’d rather not think about. cross your fingers the pear juice works.