Building A Mystery

I know, I know, I said I was going to start posting more often. The problem is, when one has more to post, one generally has less time to post. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to quit my job and devote all my time to writing about the stuff I’m doing. Yeah, that’ll generate the hits… :-)

The biggest news is also the latest news — meet Abby, the newest member of our family. We met Abby on Saturday, while we were having a garage sale. Since she didn’t find anything in our sale that she liked, I brought her some ham, and Angela brought her some dog food. She immediately made herself at home, walking into our garage and plopping down in the middle of it. We discussed what to do with her — keep her, take her to a shelter, or let her continue on her way. She didn’t have a collar, so it was doubtful she had a home. Before we could decide, though, she left. We left out some food in case she decided to come back.

The next day, while we were working outside, she came around again. We gave her more food and water, and we decided we would keep her. But, without knowing anything about her, we decided we couldn’t put her in the backyard with Bernie until she had been checked out by a vet. So, we kept her in the garage. She apparently wasn’t quite ready to be rescued, though. When we took her out to use the bathroom, she took off. We kept an eye out for her all night, but she didn’t come back.

Then, this morning, when Angela went running, she saw Abby again. She was able to coax the dog back home. Angela took her to the vet this afternoon, and Abby checked out fine. To celebrate, we took both Abby and Bernie to the dog park for their formal introduction. They loved it, and so far everyone is getting along well. These are two very different dogs — Abby is older, and more calm than Bernie. Abby is quite comfortable with strangers, and loves the water, while Bernie is the exact opposite. Hopefully, Bernie will learn a thing or two from Abby. And hopefully Abby will like her new home. We took a few more pictures, as you can see.

We’ve been pretty busy outdoors this past week. Last weekend, we built a path around the side of our house. We used concrete moulds for making stepping stones. For those who are not aware, concrete, in any form, is heavy. Thirteen 80lb. bags of concrete, however, go beyond heavy — that gets close to altering-the-rotation-of-the-Earth heavy. :-)

To aid us in this project, we bought a concrete-mixing bucket. This is a bucket with internal fins and a lid that seals, so you can roll it on the ground to mix the concrete. Easy, right? No, I’m afraid you’re horribly, horribly wrong. Putting it in a bucket does not change the fact that concrete, in any form, is heavy. Actually, I probably would have been very satisfied with the bucket, if my first experience with it had not gone so badly. After putting in all the ingredients, following (or so I thought) the directions for rolling the bucket, I couldn’t open the thing. And what does one do with a bucket full of concrete that can’t be opened? You can’t take it back to the store (well, maybe to Wal-Mart). You can’t wait and try again tomorrow. We spent about 15 minutes trying to get the thing open. What finally worked was tapping it with a hammer and screwdriver. Needless to say, some other concrete-mixing method will need to be found before our next concrete project

And this weekend we cut down a tree. The tree was a big polluter of our pool, and its roots were starting to push up on our fence. Now, here’s another interesting fact — trees, cut into any number of parts, are heavy. Trees are also hard to cut up. It took borrowing 3 chainsaws from our neiborhood (and also borrowing the neighbor) to get the job done.

Perhaps we can get a couple of more dogs and train them to be a sled team for pulling some of this heavy stuff around… :-)