Oh so busy

The complaints have been pouring in here at headquarters that I haven't blahrged lately. Well, I'll tell ya', I been heap busy. See, it's springtime here in Fort TomCollins, and with springtime comes a whole host of new and exciting tasks, a lot of which require me to be outside while streaming bar-rockin' country music over the deck speakers.

With sprintime also comes the revelation that the weather is going to change rapidly and dramatically from day-to-day, so it also means planning ahead is difficult, and you've just gotta get done what you can when the weather holds.

Oh, and I suppose there were some high Holy Days over the last week.

We had a little snow and a little rain over the last week, so I decided to knock off a task that started with "dig a 20 foot trench" on Saturday. It was very exciting because it involved something I'd never done before - run electrical conduit and then pull a line through it. This meant I got to buy a new tool - a 75' steel fish tape. Oh joy of joys, I loves when I get to get a new tool. Plus, while I was there in the electrical department, I found that they sold those infrared thermometers with the laser pointer built in that let you measure the temperature of anything within about 15 feet, so I picked me up one of those for no reason at all. Happy Easter to me.

The back pond now has an electrical outlet at the east end (on a different circuit from the west end), so I can stop running the pump and heater at that end off an extension cord. It only took about six hours of work to do that, but I did it with just one trip to the store for supplies.

I also managed to get the cap off the pickup (in anticiaption of getting mulch and compost next weekend) and to do a routine drain/clean/fill on the hot tub. Things I did not get done included dethatching the lawn, taking the blower off the lawn tractor and installing the mowing deck, and fertilizing the lawn. It's supposed to snow again this week, so maybe that would have been premature. But a bunch of the neighbors have started up their sprinklers already, and my 35000 sq ft of brown isn't looking so good in comparison to their lush green. And, naturally, I have deeply ingrained in my DNA the need to compete with the neighbors on lawn quality. It's just one of those things. You can ask my dad about where that gene came from, if you get the chance.

I believe that this year I am going to spring for a tonneau cover for the pickup bed. I'd like some way to throw my fishing stuff in the bed and not worry about it being stolen, and I always remove the cap in the summer so I can get mulch and compost and the like dumped in the back. There was one on craigslist a while back very reasonably priced and the right color, but I didn't buy it.

Yesterday, our fambly and another went to Fort Fun to play laser tag. It was fun. I came in second in the first game (which I think I would have won had I not backed into a wall in a hurry, which somehow managed to shut down my vest and gun for the remaining 2.5 minutes of the game, and I only lost by ~50 points out of ~1200), but I won the second most triumphantly. I was the only person over the age of 10 in the second game, though, so it wasn't much of a triumph.

Today I finally broke down and signed up for facebook. I did this because I needed to get some information for the Tax Day Tea Party Protest downtown, and they put it on an individual facebook account. If they'd done a business account, you wouldn't have needed to be a facebook member to see the info. But Tea Party protests are individually organized, not part of a business, so whatever. When I created the account, it told me that my sister had invited me to be her friend, so I clicked on allowing that. Then it found all the millions of the rest of you out there who it thought I might want to be friend with, but I skipped over that on account of I really don't plan to ever use it. Don't get all offended.