She was born to my sister-in-law and half (only in a family relationship way, certainly not height) brother last Friday. Now the generation span from my oldest son to my youngest niece spans over a quarter century!
People ask me why I’m thinking of leaving the regular payroll when I’m eligible next year: I was thinking the other day that my last summer job in 1976 was at the place where I work now. That’s 30 years by my calculation — longer than I have lived anywhere else and over half my lifetime. I think it’s time to move on. Naturally I would consider contract work there; however, the 37.5+ hours, 5 days a week schtick would not be the norm anymore.
Finnegan, our dog is wearing out our backyard. And we can’t let him out after a rain as he’s worn down the grass to the bare clayey soil. So, I’m partitioning off, with chain link fencing, part of the back yard and the west side yard for a dog run.
Yesterday it took me an afternoon and evening to put in 3 six inch by 27 to 30 inch holes. The middle hole was the “easiest” as there were no large rocks or roots. Just a thunk, scoop, thunk, scoop with the post hole digger. The first hole had several tree roots along the way and several larger stones to extract. Once I cut the forked tree root at the top of the third hole the thunking part wouldn’t work. I needed to use my 3 foot crowbar to “loosen” up an inch or so of clay and then use the post hole digger to extract this. This was all very laborious and time consuming. However, I doubt a power auger would have worked in our heavy clay.
Today I set the three poles in the three holes with quick setting post-hole concrete. I didn’t even need to stake the last pole vertical as the concrete had all ready set enough. For the other two poles I found my heavy pipe clamps laid on the ground were sufficient to hole the fence posts in place.
I sifted the compost yesterday and, since there were no stones, I thought I would run the lumps (sticks, grass roots, pits, etc) that didn’t sift through the chipper / shredder (CS). However it has been raining a lot lately and there was enough sticky clay to gum up the works. Once I stopped the engine I couldn’t restart it. At least I have taken the guard off the CS before so it didn’t take me long to clean out the gunk. And, yes the lumps are smaller now and mixed up with weed and twig bits ready for some more composting action.
Or so I told my younger son, learning to be a print journalist at Humber. His summer job is at a nursery doing gardening type things which he was never interested in before.
You prune out the dead wood or edit the superfluous sentences. You prune the strangely branches and tighten up those run-on sentences.
In other words (pun intended) you maintain the natural shape of the tree or shrub and the end result doesn’t look like you did anything. Similarly a good editor will maintain the ideas and the gist of the article and the reader will be grateful for tighter, better reading prose.
Me, I’ll stick to pruning.
The ticket guy at the Kipling GO station handed me a plastic sleeve along with the 10-ride ticket I bought. A nice gesture since it poured rain for my entire walk home from the GO station at the other end. I had to empty the knapsack and let it dry out.
I was working in the driveway area when I saw two robins chase a red squirrel who ran down the pine tree in our front yard, ran across the driveway, climbed the tree next to my neighbour’s garage. I lost sight of the trio as they went over the roof.
What did the squirrel do? Steal an egg/hatchling? Bother the nesting mother?
I couldn’t ping one of our remote devices today. As I happened to be the “least busy” I rented a car and drove out to Oshawa to see if I could fix the problem. The DSL modem wasn’t connecting. I called one of the Oshawa PUC staff and he brought a phone. We plugged that into the line and managed to call his cell phone. After plugging the phone line back into the DSL modem it began work again. I don’t know the it{root cause} of the problem but at least it’s fixed and we know to bring a regular phone with us next time (or ask the local staff to try it).
And then I had to drive back through Toronto’s Friday rush hour traffic.
Wildlife of the day: Finnegan and I saw a fox tonight.
My son’s server died so he had moved my home directories including this blog over to a different server. However, the set up and permissions for the cgis to run the blog updates weren’t set correctly. I have been just a tad too busy to solve the problems until tonight.