March 2010

Well it's been another busy month. I keep finding more and more work to do around the house. With vacation coming up it was crunch time to get stuff done, not only because it needed to be done before vacation, but because it's gonna hot when I get back. I've been working on my butterfly garden, my veggie garden, making new veggie gardens, planting more fruit trees (4 more papayas and a Nam Doc Mai mango), fixed my rusted out sprinkler timer, fixed my pool filter and replaced the cartridge (saves me hours of cartridge cleaning time every month), etc... I have been removing sprinklers that are getting the house wet and putting in bubblers so my house doesn't get discolored. I have my vacation to SoCal coming up and I didn't want to leave without my veggies getting enough water so I installed drip systems. This will also save me time during the week. I'm getting sick of spot watering where the sprinklers are doing their job so I went through and fixed a lot of the problems with my irrigation. Then one day I was pulling weeds by the pool deck and found out I had a drain in the back yard that runs to the canal.

A couple months ago I was thinking of putting in a drain there, right under the downspout so I don't get flooding. I never got around to it though. But when I saw this drain I thought I would see if it works. It didn't. I found the problem half way down the line. The idiot that patched the pipe didn't glue it and the pipes came apart and had mud in them. So I decided instead of patching it I was going to pull out all the 2 inch pipe and do it right with 3 inch pipe. The 2 inch probably was enough to do the job but it's better to go overkill because we live in a place that can get up to six inches of rain in a single hour. Might as well go big and hope we never need it rather than do the minimal and have problems when a nasty storm comes in. I figured it would be easier to dig since it's already been dug out before. I had no idea what I was getting myself into though.

Some of the stuff I've planted this month
My butterfly garden. I still have some work to do on this. Eventually I'm going to tear out all the grass around it up the the circular drive way and make the whole area covered in flowers.


I tore out the ugly, thorny, bush here and redid the sprinklers. I got rid of the sprinkler and added two bubblers so my brick won't turn black and my driveway won't get sprayed. From left to right, Blue Spike (I broke the spike planting it, it's suppose to be one spike running straight up), Nemesia, Delphiniums.


My lavender flowers

My new purple African Daisies. I'm trying to make a small flower hedge along the brick.

Delphiniums

Nemesia


Before accomplishing this task though we had to spend a Saturday getting a new car. Natalie's Civic was becoming a death trap, no joke. Her master cylinder was shot(brakes), power steering was whack, windows didn't roll down, air conditioner didn't work, alignment and balance kept getting thrown off, windshield wipers didn't work correctly, etc. Needless to say, there was no fixing this car. So we took in that clunker and got a nice new 2011 Camry. This car is fast, drives smooth, has lots of safety features, good gas mileage, it's just an all around great car. It's green but it's not one solid color so depending on the lighting it could have a gold or black look to it.





So after getting the new car out of the way it was time to focus on the house again. Nothing goes as smooth as I expect it to either.

First off the Home Depot here is a joke. They sell catch basins but not the pipe to go with it. I had to go to Lowe's, 15 minutes away, to get the right sewer pipe for the catch basin. And even there it was hard finding someone that knew what they were talking about. So I started the digging last week. I didn't want to dig the whole trench, 99 feet, all in one day so I started doing bits and pieces after work. Then on Friday night I went all out but got slowed down by a couple problems. A couple feet from the pool deck I ran across an electrical pipe. It's not a Florida Power & Electric pipe, that runs on the side of my house, so I have no idea what it's doing there but it was in the way. I had to dig two feet on both sides of my trench so I could push the electrical pipe down far enough so that my drain would run downhill over it instead of uphill, which would have made it useless.I would have done more that night but Suegrita came over to drop off Cuñada to spend the weekend with us. I woke up early Saturday morning and thought I would finish it. Yeah right. It was hot and muggy and on top of that this is when I noticed all the problems with the drain and what I really got myself into. These people were so lazy that they didn't do the job right the first time. The pipe, which was gravity fed, had no downhill pitch because they didn't want to put in the energy to do it right and dig through the limestone. They were actually so lazy that they left the pipe level all the way to the canal, went over all four sprinkler lines, and then put all the drop in the last couple feet of the run. Complete morons! So once I got the pipe out this is when the digging got tough. I had to pick my way through limestone, cut sprinkler pipes, run pipe under them then patch them, etc...After 3 hours of it I had enough. I was drenched, tired, and hot.

I had to go to Toyota to finalize some stuff so we decided to take a break in the afternoon and go to a park about 5 miles +/- from our house afterwords. It's a nature center with miles of trails. So we get to this park and we go to the picnic area to sit down and this raccoon comes right up to my feet and starts sniffing. I tried to scare him off but he wouldn't go. I had to set down my food and wave my arms to scare him off. I notified the park workers and they said they are aware and they are going to have to remove it because stupid people have been feeding it and it no longer has fear of people. It was hard convincing Natalie to sit down and eat after but she finally did and then the raccoon went over and harassed someone else.

After eating we decided to hit a couple trails. They have over a mile of elevated boardwalks along with several trails that branch off and go through dense forest and a prairie. It's a nice scenic walk and there's a pretty nice scent of flowers throughout the trails. There were a lot of butterflies flying around but other than that we didn't see a whole lot of wildlife.

Pictures from Fern Forest









A Ruddy Daggerwing Butterfly







Zebra Longwing Butterfly

Slash Pine. I have 7 Slash Pine sapplings in my backyard. Maybe in 25 years they'll look like this.



If it wasn't for the high voltage power lines running across the prairie you wouldn't even know you're in the middle of the city. It actually looks like Africa.

Cypress Creek




Anyways after our trip to the park it was back to work in the yard. I didn't think I was going to finish because of the heat so I called up Tio Jose to come over and help out Sunday afternoon. I actually got a lot farther Saturday night than I was expecting. I got all of the hard work done. I had installed the catch basin, 70 feet of pipe, and dug 94 feet of trench. I was pretty sore though, the digging took a toll on my body. I had bad blisters, even though I wore gloves, and my right shoulder was so sore I couldn't sleep that night.

Sunday after I got home from church Tio Jose came over and we finished up the job. The digging part was easy this day, the weather was cloudy and much cooler, and things went better. Even though I had already done all the hard stuff the day before I don't think I would have finished that day if Tio Jose didn't come over because I was too tired and sore from Saturday. Five hours later we were done. We had finished laying the remaining 30 feet of pipe, covered the trench, watered it up good to compact it under the pipe, and we even got another project done. I wanted to add bubblers to my banana plants. They weren't getting enough water from the sprinklers. Bananas need 100 inches of water per year and we only get around 60-65 here. So I need to supplement 35-40% of the water. So we tapped into the sprinkler in the same trench and ran the pipe to my bananas and put in three bubblers. I still need to do the same for two more banana trees on the other side of the yard but that can wait until another day. Those plants are still small and the rainy season is coming soon so I'm not in a hurry.

After another hard day of work, and dinner, Tio Jose and I decided to take a swim. No one else would get in the pool so we did a double cannon ball to splash them all. :)

My handywork
The old pipe(left) and new pipe(right).


The ditch I dug to the canal to lay pipe for my new drain. This is at the original depth. I dug it much deeper, over 3 feet deep by my bananas.


Old drain(left), new catch basin(right)


My drain got tested the day after I finished it. Monday morning we got hit with a nasty storm, very rare for something with this kind of intensity in March. The non stop thunder woke me up at four and I finally got out of bed at five and decided that we need to go into work early so our new car doesn't get pelted with hail. We left just in time and missed the worst of the storm by just 15 minutes. Two tornados touched down less than 10 miles away and we got 3 inches of rain dumped on us in just a couple hours. My pool is actually full to the rim. My drain did it's job though and I'm proud of my work.

Other noteworthy items to discuss from this month.

I invented Joe's Famous Teriayki Burger. I take sliced pineapples and cover them with brown sugar and cinnamon. I bbq them just long enough to warm them up and melt the brown sugar. I cook my burgers with Teriayki glaze, not sauce, but a thick glaze. Then put the pineapple, lechuga (lettuce), tomatoe, and onions on it. Killer!

We took Suegrita Segunda, aka, Tia Fior or as I often call her Tia Frijole, to Flamingo Gardens and got her an annual pass so she can take Adriana. We happened to go on a day when all the citrus where in bloom and you could smell the citrus before we even entered the park. Brought back memories of going up to Grandpa's.

I got a "merit raise" for $1,237, which puts me right up at 70K.

And that was my month..... Now it's time to clean up the inside of the house, pack my bags, and prepare for vacation.