Alexander the photographer

Alexander really enjoys taking pictures. Here's one of his that I really like. (Pretty good for a 5 year old.)

Flagstone patio progress

I have slowly been making progress on that flagstone pation I'm building. It took a very long time to lay every flagstone. Leveling each one is tedious and difficult. Some of the stones are quit heavy. I'm sure an experienced person could do it faster, but I understand why it's so expensive to pay someone to do this. There is a lot of labor involved.

I didn't actually make more than a couple cuts, as I wasn't trying to make the joints too tight. (Going for that rustic look.) The hardest part was getting the slope right, becuase I had one part where it slopes up to landing outside a side door. This throws off the whole project, and it took a while to get satifactory results. Even so, I can see that water is going pool up a little in the middle. Not a really big problem, as thats where the drainage pipe runs.

After putting all the stones down, I started sweeping in about a dozen bags of gold granite fines. It takes many passes to do this. I empty a bag, sweep it over the patio, and try and compact the joints with whatever I can use. (Shoes, sticks, etc.) I then flood the area with water to help the compaction. A day later, I sweep, add more fines, sweep again. Eventually, the joints begin to look a bit solid. Now I have a very dirty patio. I need to wait for everything to dry before I sweep off the loose fines on top, then I have to clean the stones. Not sure what I'm going to do about that yet, I'll try with just a simple cleaning solution, but I may need to resort to acid.

When joints dry, they should, hopefully, be rock hard. I need to wait and see.

I have one progress photo. You can see a couple of the large planters I intend to put in after the patio is finished.

Nothing like good weather

It has been so wet and cold this fall and winter that I've forgotten what good weather felt like. Its been ages since I've seen my kids wearing less than 2 layers of clothing. And finally, we have a weekend where the weather was just glorious. We are going to have one of the best wildflower shows this year in living memory.

Alexander had a couple milestones this weekend. First, on Saturday we rented a motor-boat out on our local lake. As we cruised around with no destination in particular, I repeatedly asked him if he wanted to drive, to which he replied, "No, I'm scared." Finally, out of the blue, he said, "Can I drive, Dad?" I said, "Sure", and handed him the stearing wheel. Well, after a few out of control turns, he got the hang of it. I could see the pride and confidence growing on his face as he took control of the boat and made it go where he wanted. I just sat back holding Sarah and let him go where he wanted. Pretty good for a 5 year old.

The next day, we concentrated on learning to ride his bike without training wheels. Now, as I recall, I never used training wheels when I was a kid. I have clear memories of being pushed on a bike in a local parking lot, surrounded by family members. I was very out of control and did not understand how to use the brakes. I recall running into someone. (I think it was my grandfather.)

As for Alexander, we got out on the street in front of our house. (There is virtually no traffic on that street.) I pushed and held onto his bike as I ran along side him, letting go when I thought he had control. At first, he was too scared to do anything. When Alexander is scared, he just talks and talks and talks and won't let you do anything. "Daddy, I want to tell you something. First you push me, and then you don't let go, okay? We will do it one more time okay, then that's it."

Well, after much cajoling, I finally was able to let go of the bike for a significant amount of time. By the end of the day, he managed to go a couple blocks without stopping. He only crashed once, which set him back for a while. What really helped was when we came across a neighborhood friend of his that was also riding his bike. Nothing like a little peer pressure to cool the nerves.

Sarah is healthy and happy. She spent a lot of time in the park riding the slide and the swing. She's learning new words everyday, and charming everyone around her.

Sophia keeps getting bigger. Pretty soon she'll be crawling, then walking. I can't wait.

Hospital Daze

A rather virulent virus has been going around, and my daughter caught the brunt of it. She has always had lung problems. Being a premie may have something to do with that. At any rate, she had real diffuculty breathing and was running high fevers. So last Saturday we saw a doctor who immediately put us in the hospital. I say us because of her attachment to me. She would not put up with anyone else for very long. So I left her side only briefly during her 4 day stay.

And so they poked and proded and x-rayed her. Everything turned up negative, but the x-rays showed a bit of pnemonia. Sarah was lethargic and slept most of the time. Sometimes she just coughed and cried or got really upset. She spent two days not even cracking a smile.



Today, thankfully was different. She smiled at me. She played and laughed. She's still sick, but well enough to leave the hospital. Hopefully, she'll recover pretty quickly at home. She certainly was excited when we came home.

I must say, that despite the excellent staff and reasonably good food of the hospital, it is the most awful thing to get stuck in there for more than a day or two. The mind and body just go slack with numb boredom. There is simply nothing to do. I wonder how much better people would do in hospitals if patients were made to keep busy as much as their condition allowed?

Building a Flagstone Patio

In an effort to save some money, and actually do some of my own landscaping, I took on the task of building a patio in the courtyard area of our new house. The house came with no landcaping in the courtyard, save for a covering of bark. It was both useless and unattractive. I considered many options for the courtyard. Should we pave over the whole thing? Should we put cement, pavers or flagstone? In the end, I liked the look of the flagstone the best. Using the rosa variety of Arizona flagstone fit well with the color and style of the house.

Since I've never done this before, I decided to do the flagstone on top of a sand base, rather than a cement one. After extensive research on the internet, I figured that this would be sufficient for my purposes, and its something I could take my time doing. Mortaring the flagstone on cement might yield a stronger patio, but its really hard for a beginner to do. Sand is much more forgiving.

Step 1: Rerouting pipes.

The courtyard was sloped towards its center with a drain pipe in the middle. This pipe also was connected to two downspouts from the roof gutters. I had make a new drain at the front of the patio, and remove the old drain, all the while keeping the connections to the down spout. This wasn't terribly difficult, but I had to dig down pretty deep.

Step 2: Demolition

The step at the door had to go. I started with a chisel and sledgehammer. When that proved too slow, I borrowed a breaking bar. This made rubble of the concrete in short order.

Step 3: Excavation

My plan is to slope the patio from the original top of the step to level with the driveway. This gives me a gradual slope away from the house. I staked a line from the doorway to the driveway, and began to excavate no less than 7 inches from the top of the line. This picture shows the excavation beginning:



Excavation took several days of back breaking diggings. The clay soil did not yield easily, and required using a pick-axe. For now, I disposed of the dirt in the back yard.

Step 4: Purchasing

All in all, I have about 320 square feet to cover. I went to my local landscape supplier and bought enough (or so I thought) sub-base and sand to bring be up to about 2 inches of my guideline. Because flagstone varies so much in thickness, I couldn't be sure exactly how much I needed. As it turned out, we were a bit enthusiastic on the excavation and dug a few inches too deep in places. I've had to go back repeatedly for more sand.

I settled on tumbled flagstone, which are more expensive than regular patio flags, but are nice and rounded at all the corners. I spent a considerable amount of time individually picking out a variety of different stones, some large, and some small. (I didn't want to make any cuts.) In the end, I bought only half as much as I really needed. This was mainly because I didn't know how much I needed. It all depends on how you lay it out. I wanted to make sure I didn't buy more than necessary.

Everything was delivered to my driveway.

Step 5: Laying down the base

My brother-in-law Weldy and I spent a day putting down the gravel sub-base and the sand. Pictures of this follow:




We used a hand tamper to tamp every load of gravel that was dumped. This was difficult, but it saved the cost and hassle of renting a compactor.

We then added a layer of weed block, and then the sand.



The pipe sticking out may eventually hold a power cord for fountain. It runs from the center of the patio to the socket on the wall. I threaded it with a fishing line so I could pull something else through later.

Finally, we began to lay the flagstone. This process continues still. Each flag needs to be individually leveled and set right so it is not tippy. This is incredibly time consuming. The cost of this patio professionally is certainly in the labor.



Not done yet. I'll continue this when I've made more progress.

I broke a nail!

So I broke a nail the other day. Big deal? Well, this break involved pealing away a healthy portion of skin, and resulted in no small amount of blood. How did this happen? That's a bit of a story.

For many years now I've been casually playing a sport called Ultimate. I haven't really had time since college to play at a tournament level, but I love my lunch time game. Lately, however, I've been taking a hiatus from it. This arose due to a couple changes in my circumstances. For one thing, I moved significantly farther away from my office, resulting in a much longer commute. I found that I had much less motivation to get back in my car at lunch and drive to the game. Plus, work has been getting busier lately, and I don't like to prolong my hours by playing games in the middle of the day. (3 kids at home, y'know.)

Anyway, the last game of Ultimate that I played happend at the end of Summer, and ended badly with one player attempting to make up his own rules, and another picking up the cones and coldly stalking away from the game.

It has never ceased to amaze me that a game such as Ultimate, which embodies a spirit of sportsmanship in its most basic rules, still attracts a select few that behave in a fashion I would expect of my 5 year old at home. Fortunately, such behavior is generally limited to specific individuals, it really tends to through a pall on the lunchtime games when some personalities get out of hand. For god's sake, its a lunch game. I don't go out at lunch to train for tournaments, I go to play, have fun, and get some exercise. But I digress.

Because of the additional effort it takes for me to get to the game, and the less than stellar behavior that was appearing on the field, I stopped going to the games. However, a recent period of really good weather called me back to the field.

Unfortunately, playing Ultimate conflicts with another, more recent passion of playing classical guitar. When playing classical, one must use the fingernails and not a pick. So I carefully grew my nails out, and I fuss over them all the time.

Most ultimate players keep their nails very short, as the frisbee has a tendency, if improperly caught, to rip ones nail off. I've been playing for a while, so this generally doesn't happen. After just two games back, the disc managed to rip the nail off my thumb.

So now I can't play Ultimate. I also can't play guitar. (At least for another week.)

So now I'm left contemplating which is more important to me. I don't know how I'll answer that one.

First Blog

This is the first entry, and is just a test.