So - after my post last week, I went home to find that some guys had, indeed, dropped off four billion tonnes (approximately) of supplies onto the driveway and lawn. You ever sat in class and had a professor describe expectations for an assignment, all "20-25 pages", "at least 40 academic sources", "outline by next Monday", only to have it slowly sink in to you how much work you have ahead? Yeah...it was kind of like that walking home. I was heading down the street and I first saw our pallette and a half of patio slabs, all 192 square feet of it, and then our 60-odd square feet of pavers. And I was all, eh, that's not too bad. Then I saw, behind it, our cubic yard (27 cubic feet) of river rock and a yard and a half of screening sand. And I inhaled kind of sharply, but kept going until it sunk in that behind all those things was a pile of 5.5 cubic yards of gravel and then I curled into the fetal position and cried for mommy.
But, goddammit - we got it done! The walkway was pretty fun, mostly because the materials were lighter and close by - ie, we shovelled directly from the pile on the driveway into the hole next to the driveway. However, because we live in a row house, everything for the patio had to be loaded into wheelbarrows and taken down to houses and through gates in their backyards. I think it was around trip eight of carrying patio slabs that I began intermittently losing my ability to grip the wheelbarrow handles - I was all, lalalala, wheeling my wheelbarrow...and then my hands would be like, "1-2-3 let go!". Not that I'm whining...okay, not now I'm not. But before - anyway, that's another story.
It was also a very social event - it's funny how our neighbours we didn't really know would stop and talk and admire and whatnot - it was nice to meet them! Except for the one lady who lives across the street who came out Thursday night all "blahblahblah stop shovelling it's too late I can't sleep I have a newborn baby I have no air conditioning my windows are open stop shovelling" and we did only to find out it was 10:30pm and we could have been working for another 30 minutes and needless to say that particular lady, though we saw her over the weekend, did not come over to admire our handiwork.
We also managed to make just one trip to the dump, with the old stairs from the back, because I used the freecycle Ottawa site and found some guy who came and picked up all the old gravel and patio stones and dirt we dug up. Which ROCKED.
So yeah - we have a patio, and we're planning on adding, like, some stairs and maybe, you know, a table and we hope some friends who will come by and enjoy BBQed foodstuffs. Consider yourself invited. Just don't show up after 10:30pm, or you will get told.
Also - this weekend was a rare opportunity for me to reconnect with the "music" of today's youth. We had the radio on basically 14 hours a day and realized that there appears to be a shortage of artists in the Top 40 genre, as the local station only had about two dozen records to choose from. The darkest hour was the one wherein I heard three different Shawn Desmond songs. THREE!
IN A COMPLETELY UNRELATED STORY I finally got my library card. I can't believe I didn't do this before. When I was still in school, I had two good excuses: 1) I already had library privileges at the university and 2) "I read for pleasure" was a cruel joke that Arts students told each other between chapters of Chomsky. Two years later, I'm all, gee, I don't have any books to read. I should go buy some! Wait! Wait a minute...something's coming back to me...there's a...a magical place filled with thousands of books and...and you can look through them and BORROW them and then return them and get more...sigh. Paradise lost, and found again.
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