This weekend we almost put in sprinklers in the back yard. Everything is in except for the actual sprinklers, due to a slight problem with the risers (ie, they were the wrong size). The lawn looks like it was attacked by a gopher with some serious OCD.
In any case, a few things were learned on Sunday.
- Never leave the four year old child alone on the computer. The lure of the icons exploding in a puff of dust as they are dragged off the dock means that you will have no applications to choose from at the end of the day.
- If x is the difficulty of the home improvement project, and y is the number of beers consumed, z = x + (y * 2) is the number of trips to Home Depot that will be required in order to finish the project.
- If z is the number of trips to Home Depot that will be required, z-1 is the number that will occur before dark and the end of work for the day, once again leaving the job 98% finished.
- Make sure you know which side of the closed valve you are on before you start cutting the existing PVC.
- The four year old child hollering “Itsy bitsy spider” while holding the cat toy will entertain one of the cats for quite some time. However, there is a good chance that at least one of the other cats will pee on the guest bed within 24 hours. This is possibly related.
- Purple primer will eventually wash or wear off, but it’s still probably not a good thing to use around the naked four year old.
17 comments:
I'm still amazed one of your cats wasn't smart enough to run under the bed when the four-year-old showed up.
Some other thoughts:
-He's not four yet.
-The one who's trying to get into grad schools, let's call her Ksis, should probably be trying to get into a MBA program. She artfully dodged much of the real digging and pleaded 'weak hands' to some of the other work.
-The beer formula is crap, I'm not sure anyone else was drinking during the digging. (But I do appreciate the beer.)
-Living roofs are quite ecological. Prepare for higher PG&E bills.
Oh yeah,
-Let's say you don't have 'weak hands' but instead, get winded 'cleaning your white board'. The odd of not showing up, for whatever reason, exponentially increase at the mention of physical labor.
A little clarification:
- Ksis' real rapper name is K-poo.
- It is truly impressive how K-poo managed to avoid getting her hands dirty, but in her defense, I was the one who suggested she make the second Home Depot run.
- By "beer" I meant "alcohol". K-poo drank at least one beer and I had the lime margarita mix. That gets added in to the formula somehow.
- While I agree that the timing was awfully convenient, I doubt Eric would spend $500 to fix his car when he could just have said he overslept and we would have believed him. But if he misses the next one...
K-poo Weak Hands is confident that her corner will hold under pressure.
She is also confident that the 4" sprinkler heads protrude 1-2" above the lawn.
oh, if only you could have seen my hands at the zenith of my piano career...
Zenith, nadir... was there a difference?
Crap, 1-2"? Really? You might have to get your hands dirty digging for real this time.
- Theresa
PS Zenith, hm? Sounds like a GRE vocabulary word to me...
Protrude? No way. You see, you're supposed to use your weak hands to cut the risers to the correct height. This isn't some kind of mechanical 'true position' problem where you can blame it on the shop that made the parts and then sit around arguing which restaurant to go to.
just sayin'
Typically you don't buy the risers that can be cut to size, since they're quite a bit more expensive. You buy the fixed size risers and bury the pipe at a known depth.
Just sayin'.
And yeah, I have a thousand excuses in my excuse quiver that don't require a cash outlay. Remember I'm even better than Karen at avoiding manual work, and I really did want to participate in what was supposed to be the main event - the breaking-in of a brand-new takoyaki pan.
Even though, it must be said, the lack of actual tako would have taken some of the zing (xng?) out of it.
The cuttable risers are only 28 cents each. I realize that being parsimonious will help you save enough money in your checking account to go over the FDIC limit, but I only needed 8 risers for the entire lawn...
Theresa
PS - K-poo, that's another potential GRE word.
eric, alias "big 'un", is surely set up for political office:
Reporter: "Senator, how much is a gallon of vodka?"
Eric: "5 dollars?" [ed. note: quote from yesterday.]
Reporter: "How much is a 4 inch riser?"
Eric: "Fixed or variable?"
Reporter: "How much diet soda do you drink a day?"
Eric: "$20?".
PS: k-poo: good luck tomorrow.
Jeff, Wednesday September 24th:
PS: k-poo: good luck tomorrow.
Reporter: Senator, what day is it?
Jeff: Thursday?
Can't we just start squabbling like normal families? There must be some sort of family heirloom we can argue about... Do we have any family heirlooms? Maybe the antique clothes hamper at the end of the hallway? (Is that still there?)
Wasn't it blue w/ a padded lid? That was awesome.
Theresa, we all know you have the family hope chest. Start fighting over that. Think of all the starch-based food items that could be stored in in. Hmmm.....
K-poo knock 'em out tomorrow, except for the experimental part of the test where the answers don't matter. Kind of like the weekly status meetings at work.
Note to group: that last comment wasn't Christina, the computer just automatically thought it was her. She's much nicer than that.
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