The Pain

Saturday was a complete waste of a day. We went to the CSU Veterinary School open house, but it was the same as last year. MaxieC was bored out of his skull and annoyed the living hell out of me because of it. It was my job to watch him while The Mrs. took HannahC around to do fun things. Oddly, it became my job to watch HannahC just as she announced, "I feel like I have to throw up."

After that, we hit Jim's Wings for lunch and then went to the pond store to pick up some Koi food. The Koi (and the goldfishies) have been very perky lately, so we figured it wouldn't hurt to grab some food for them. The Mrs., always a sucker for a smooth sales pitch, also ended up with 5 bullfrog tadpoles.

I don't know why.

Then I did my taxes. I had to pay self-employment tax on my AdSense revenue this year. Oddly, there is no longer a cap on your social security tax if you are self-employed. The Tax Cut software led me to believe this was new for 2007. You used to be able to max it out, but now you have to pay some small percentage of all self-employment income even if you're "maxed out". So I had to pay $15 for that.

Today, The Mrs. decided we would tackle the "rock garden" project. This is a project she has been planning ever since we had the deck replaced. We're putting in a rock garden where one of the ponds used to be. Now, maybe it's just me, but I kinda expected that since it has been in the planning phase for almost a year, and because I've been reminding her incessantly to figure out what she wants to do there before we start the work, I kinda expected she'd have an idea what she wanted to do.

Silly me.

Instead I was instructed to remove the cap from the pickup so we could go get dirt. Little did I know, that was about a far as the plans ran.

We spent the greater part of the day moving rocks back and forth. Like bowling ball-sized and larger rocks. Put them here, no that's not right, maybe over there. Hmmm... They looked better in the first spot. You know, I really want you to build me a flagstone bench right here. We'll have to move all these rocks.

We did manage to get one cubic yard of dirt. Our local place was closed (Sunday and all), so we had to drive all the way to the other end of town to a dirt place that I've never been to before. That's now the fourth place here I have been to. I liked it the least. They weighed the truck before and after loading, and despite this being the smallest cubic yard I have ever received, they cleared me on the scale.

I did learn that my truck weighs 5200 lbs. unloaded (but with the family inside), and that even with the smallest cubic yard of dirt I've ever gotten, I managed to exceed my payload capacity by 700 lbs. It's damn near impossible to not exceed your payload capacity on pickups. Even the 2500 series guys only have about a 1700 lbs payload. And a full yard of dirt is heavier than that. I'll be fine, though, as I see folks loading up those little old 4-cylinder Toyotas and Mazdas such that the bumper practically drags. I'm nowhere near that bad.

I'll try to take some pictures of the rock garden. A lot of stuff moved around at the last second.