Family Weekend, July 25-28

We will take a break from describing building projects and instead post up some pictures from last weekend's family gathering chez Simpson. Kelly, Mike, & sons came down from St. Louis, and Hannah flew in from Chicago, and we had a nice weekend together. We even got to enjoy the new backyard patio some while they were here. Marie came over, too, on Saturday, and we had a cookout, the first time we had used the grill since last year. A good time was had by all.

Whenever Dom comes for a visit, the first things he looks for are the harmonica, plastic recorder, and a third musical toy. He loves to walk around the house blowing them. Hannah got some quality time with her nephews, as the picture below shows. Noel crawled up into the loveseat with her and wanted her to read a book to him, which he loves. He doesn't care who you are, so long as you read to him. Saturday Mike & Kelly took Dom to the movies to see "Wall-E," which didn't come on, they said, until after about a dozen previews. It's not right to make children wait that long to see their movie.

Sunday for lunch, we all met at Schlotsky's and had sandwiches and pizzas. Since we had missed a chance for a posed group shot at home, this group shot at the restaurant will have to do. But it is a great shot of a good-looking family, isn't it? Even greater because the photographer wasn't in it.

Mike & Kelly & boys had to leave from the restaurant to go home, so the rest of the day was spent in hanging out at Grandmother Marie's until time to go off to see The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, which Hannah had wanted to see. One-word movie review: overwhelming. A far remove from the Batman TV series of the 60's. Heath Ledger's Joker will go down in film history as one of the most evil maniacal villains of all time. Following the movie, we went to Babe's for a fix for Hannah--grilled cheese sandwich with onion rings and a cherry limeade.

Monday morning Hannah, Leslie, & I decided to have breakfast on the rocks. Though already a bit on the humid side, it was a pleasant way to start the day eating outside. The surface is a bit uneven, so you have to move the chair legs around to find the right setting, but who cares?

Then Hannah & I went on a bike ride. I suggested we go to North Middle School and Columbia, which Kelly & I did last summer. But when we got to north, the custodian was waxing the floors and said we couldn't come in. Rats. So we biked up to Columbia and got in. We were met by a very nice retired marketing/sales man who is now custodian at Columbia and loving it. He gave us the run of the building, once he stopped talking. Hannah enjoyed touring her old elementary school. Then we took off for the trail, biking through downtown, across the Broadway viaduct, to the trail head, across the creek, and up to St. Louis Avenue. Since it was getting late, we turned around and rode home. Total mileage was over 7 miles for the trip, which, including the visits to the schools, took about 2 hours. But it was an improvement over Hannah's first inclination, which was to do the treadmill downstairs for 30 minutes.

Then we went over to Marie's house about 3:00 for Hannah to say goodbye, then took off for Springfield. We got her there in time for boarding her flight and drove home to a strangely quiet, empty house. Such are family weekends, beginning with a bang and ending with a whimper once everyone departs. It reminds us that it is just we two Chez Simpson.

So Much Depends on a Red Wheelbarrow,,,

Here, with apologies to William Carlos Williams, is my adaptation of his famous poem:

So much depends
on a red wheelbarrow
Filled with pea gravel
Behind the red Ranger.

[It really is a Ranger; the tailgate comes from a salvage yard. Mazda trucks and Rangers are built in the same Ford plant.]

Yes, today I made one more--and hopefully last--trip to Seneca to get a load of pea gravel, 1100 pounds of it. It's an 18-mile round trip, and I have been down there 4 times now. Because my old wheelbarrow has rusted through and is all bent up, I went to Home Depot late last week and bought a red wheelbarrow. It has already been used quite a bit.
That's only 8 shovelsful of pea gravel in the wheelbarrow, but it's like having 8 flagstones in it. Below you see the bed of the truck, only about half full but certainly heavy enough.
Once I got home, I loaded the wheelbarrow several times and dumped the gravel on top of the stones, then used the flat side of a rake to spread it and two brooms to sweep it in the cracks. the following two pictures show the results, not finished but at least roughly in place. Click on the photos to enlarge them.
The one above looks toward the pond. The following is a nice view of the fountain area and the rest of the "patio." Tomorrow we will touch up and hopefully complete the project, allowing me to finish painting the garage trim. I will wait till after our company has come and gone before I get back to washing and treating the cedar of the pergola and trellis for painting.
We bought the stones a week ago Saturday. They were delivered and dumped on the street a week ago today, and now, a week later, stones and gravel are in place. It has been a hot, physical week's worth of work. We never knew we could do so much work in such a short amount of time.

A footnote to the trips to Seneca: The May tornado that swept through north of Seneca and killed 8 people destroyed several homes and businesses and ripped up trees on both sides of Highway 43. Those homes and businesses are being rebuilt now. We drove past that area each time on the way down to and back from Seneca. You should see all the uprooted trees piled up in fields. It must have been a massive storm.

Puzzle Complete, and Great Movie

Following are two pictures of today's work. We made our third trip to Seneca , to M&M Stone, and loaded one pallet of mossy flagstone into the bed of our truck ourselves, then unloaded and laid the stones at home. This was the 5th pallet, the first 4 of which were delivered on Tuesday. We spent the rest of the week laying stones, Leslie in the early morning and after supper, me during the day. I will need to make one more trip to M&M for pea gravel, unless some place in Joplin sells it in the size we want. It will fill all the spaces and be swept and sprayed with water to settle it, and then we will be done...we hope. The picture above is from the north end, by the retaining walls. The picture below is from the garage looking to the back steps.
What a week! What a backyard project, including painting the trim, and soon the lattice & pergola. We might be ready for a backyard cookout by week's end.

Forgot to mention in yesterday's post: last night Leslie & I rented and watched Lars and the Real Girl, a wonderful, quirky movie that we will never forget. Everyone reading this post needs to see it.

Jigsaw Stone Work

Today I (Dale) took over the stone-laying project after Leslie went to work. She has been getting up at 5:30 each morning this week, eating an early breakfast, then going outside at 6:00 and working two hours laying stones. Because she's not strong enough to handle the largest stones, she has been laying only those she could carry. It's hard work. So today I said I would tote the largest ones and put them in place where they were needed. In doing so I completed the area surrounding the fountain. By "completed" I mean only laying the stone; I will need to find the smaller stones to fill in the larger gaps. Here are a couple of photos of the area:

Click within the pictures to enlarge them.

There is another area equally as large as the fountain area that now needs to be laid. I will be hauling the stones up to the area this afternoon. To do so requires a wheelbarrow and good legs to make it up the sloped driveway. It's sort of like working the blocking sled in football practice, you have to use your legs so much. But it's all good exercise.

I hope to have pictures of the completed area by day's end tomorrow.

We're too old for this!

[Note: We'll have enough of the flat stones that I can use them to construct a nicer retaining wall around the terrace.]

Here's some of what we've been doing this week. Yesterday we had about 3 1/2 tons of stone delivered. Last night after dinner (while Dale was at a meeting), I laid stones until 9:15. Today I got up at 5:30, laid stones for 2 hours, then cleaned up and rode my bicycle to work. Dale considers this my project--he's busy painting the garage. (Notice the lattice panel laid out on the ground so he can paint the wall behind it.) He did lay the stones in the lower area outside the garage doors, as shown in the bottom photo. But he had the hardest job--loading stones into the wheelbarrow and pushing them up the driveway to where they needed to be. The dump truck just dumped them in the street on the north side of our house, so moving them to where I can use them is back-breaking work. We're both very tired and sore, especially Dale, who put in a 12-hour hard-labor day (minus a couple of breaks). But we're determined to get this done quickly. Hannah is coming home the weekend of the 25th--we want to have all the stones laid so she can admire our handiwork!

Grueling but gratifying

We overdid it again, but things are really taking shape. We got an early start, getting up soon after 6 a.m. to try to work before it got too hot. Yesterday Dale went to Yard Shack south of town and got a load of finely crushed limestone and spread it out. We needed another load, so we went back to Yard Shack this morning. But first we headed on down to Seneca to M&M Stone, picked out our paving stone & paid for it. We got 4 pallets of mossy ledge stone. They'll deliver it on Tuesday. Then we went back to Yard Shack for another load of the powdered limestone. We spent the rest of the day working extremely hard, as you can see by the pictures below.

This is part of what I did. I laid down a layer of the limestone, then moved all the concrete pavers around the oval iris bed I created. I put more of the limestone in the gaps between the pavers. Looks pretty cool, if I do say so myself.

Dale concentrated his efforts on the depression outside the garage door. He had to dig down several inches because of the sweep of the garage door. He knew that by the time we added the crushed stone base and the depth of the stones, the doors wouldn't open over it. So once again he had the back-breaking task of digging out roots and rocks and leveling the area. As a result, we'll have a slight. terraced effect. In the background, you can see another job I worked on today--creating a little stone retaining wall around the built-up area. Then we spread the rest of the crushed stone. We have a few days to recover before we start the massive jigsaw puzzle of laying all those big stones. I made Dale wear a back brace today--I wore one, too. I think that helped a lot. We're exhausted, but not in agony like we would be without the protection.

Blueberries!

This is worthy of a blog entry--today we picked blueberries for the first time in two years. Leslie switched her hours so that we could pick in the morning. We drove south of Diamond to the blueberry farm owned by friends of ours and picked for about 2 1/2 hours. Everything worked out perfectly. We finished by noon, which is their morning closing time. And we finished just as it started raining. And it was cloudy (but humid) most of the morning.

We picked three buckets, or 13+ quart freezer bags. Ten of them are in the freezer downstairs, but three of them are upstairs in the refrigerator. Leslie plans to make a blueberry-rhubarb pie tonight or tomorrow. And then you got your blueberries on cereal, blueberry pie, blueberry buckle, blueberry muffins, fresh blueberries on ice cream, blueberry sauce, handsful of blueberries--you name it, we'll have it.

Here's an interesting fact. Leslie found out that you can freeze grapes and eat them. We bought some green grapes a couple of weeks ago, and we ate one bagful as usual and she put the other bag in the freezer. While writing this blog, I just had a small bowlful of grapes. After being frozen, they pick off the vine easier, and you get an icy burst of grape flavor when you bite into one. Try that sometime!

Fabric Laid

Today I finished the lawn fabric laying. The whole backyard area to be covered by sand and flagstones is now ready. Below is one angle in the late afternoon sun.

Next is a view from one end looking toward Glenview.

The rows of lawn fabric are secured by anchor pins, such as you see below. You hammer them through the fabric into the ground. (I used a mallet.) The one on the left is an unused pin; the one on the right is a pin that went in fine on one side and hit a stone or a brick or a tree root on the other side. I ruined 6-7 of these, one reason why I had to buy some more to finish the project.

We will be in St. Louis for the July 4th weekend, to visit with Kelly, Mike, and the boys. If we were here, we would be ordering a load of sand and flagstone!

Archaeological site

Here's what Dale dug up in the backyard yesterday. Very cool. I've been looking in a book at the Post Library, "Indian Artifacts of the Midwest," to see if I could identify it. It appears that the arrowhead is made of chert, which would make sense since the world's largest chert glades are down by Shoal Creek. Also, it's well-documented that Indians camped out by Shoal Creek. The shape of this one looks like some shown in the book that are from the Archaic Period, 8000-1000 B.C.

Sidewalk Project

Yesterday, feeling better, I (Dale) started on a project that I had been wanting to do since before I got bronchitis. Today I finished it--putting brick edging around the new sidewalk out front. I bought 100 narrow bricks and used 92 of them on this project. I also used 3 full-sized bricks down front, where the steps are. They are loose, with a bed of sand and sand fill as a "mulch" on the outside of the bricks. The two pictures below show both the step area and a view from the porch.
It's nice to feel well enough to work in the yard. (I also mowed yesterday.) Mowing is easier these days, because we have only the front yard to mow.

The pictures enlarge, if you so desire.