Dr Copa

 This past weekend I was happy to finally be able to burn the brush pile that I have been building for months.  There has been a drought in the area, which resulted in a burning moratorium.  We’ve had a few days of rain, and they lifted the moratorium, so I burned the pile.

I was truly in my element, out there, rake in hand, tending the fire.  It burned high and quick.  My wife was nervous about sparks setting the nearby woods on fire, or even our roof, but I had everything under control.  She is such a worrier!

I was surprised, though, that the pile smoldered for four days afterwards!  A little surprise rose out of this, on the third night, I let the dogs out about two o’clock in the morning.  Within minutes, they started barking and growling.  As I stepped out onto the deck to see what the matter was, I saw two large glowing eyes staring at me from the middle of the lawn.  Upon further examination, I noticed that it was two hot spots from the pile of ashes and embers that was driving the dogs crazy.  The next day I hosed the spot down and took care of it.

My kid sister has been giving me some grief lately concerning my current address sign that is older than dirt at this point. She’s been saying that she saw a show on TV which was discussing that our emergency personnel are really having a difficult time finding the right place to respond to – when they are called and needed for assistance – because of the issue of  a growing number of unreadable address signs. You can only imagine  that at night it would be even more of a challenge.

With this being said she is urging me to get off of it and start looking around online and look at the large variety of address plaques and numbers that are on today’s market. She sent me the link to justaddressplaques.com the other day and I’ve spent some time looking around and seeing what is out there that might just float my boat. I never realized how many varieties of house address plaques there are these days.

It only makes sense to get a quality and easy to read address plaque. There are times when I call one of the Chinese Restaurants or the local Domino’s Pizza to be delivered and I do like my food nice and hot. Better chance of getting it hot if they delivery person can read the address plaque.

One thing that my wife and I like about the town we frequently shop in is that there is a Wal-Mart and a Home Depot right across the street from each other. So I can drop my wife off at Wal-Mart to do her shopping, drive over to Home Depot and do my shopping, and then pick her up when I’m done. That makes for really efficient use of our time, and car-pooling like that saves the wear and tear on our vehicles, and saves money on our fuel expenses. A little bit of planning ahead of time tells us whether to drive the pick-up or the sedan.

The only catch is that if we are going to take the truck we have to try to do the errands on a day when it is not going to rain, or bring some tarps along with us to cover up what we put in the back of the pick-up truck. Of course, if we are going to take the sedan, that is not as much of a worry, but then the storage space is a lot more limited. I prefer to drive the truck anyway, but my wife doesn’t like driving the truck at all. So there is always a little bit of a negotiation and compromise going on there too.

Since I’ve been building the garage/shop in the back yard, I find myself making frequent trips to Home Depot to pick up something that I need to finish that up. From the outside the place looks pretty well finished, but there is still a lot to do inside the building. For example, I want to set up electricity in there for several outlets and lights, so I need to run the wiring and install the receptacles. I’d like to put in a couple of ceiling fans, too. Probably should insulate the place so I can work there in relative comfort regardless of what the weather is doing. And I need to dig a trench from the house to the shop and lay some cable in a conduit pipe in the trench so we can run the electricity out there.

With so much work still to do out there, I’ve asked my wife to keep her eyes open for any online coupons or discounts at home depot that we can use to help bring the material costs down. I am well aware that we are already over budget on this project, and I want to minimize the extra expenditures as best as I can.

Last Friday the pest control serviceman came over to the house to check on all of the bug and rodent sticky traps, and to service the house. We set up a contract with his company that they will come out several times a year to do that. We had not been having a lot of trouble with bugs and rodents upstairs, but my sister-in-law, who lives in the downstairs apartment has been telling us that there are a lot of spiders down there, so we went ahead and signed up with the pest control company.

Well, wouldn’t you know, this morning she comes upstairs, carrying her little pug puppy, who had his front right paw firmly stuck inside one of the sticky glue mouse traps. My wife woke me up from my nap to help them hold the puppy still while my wife poured some corn oil into a bowl and the put the puppy’s paw into the oil. She massaged the paw for a couple of minutes, and before you knew what was happening that sticky trap came right off! So the puppy was none the worse for wear, and all is well with the world.

I saw a cool garden hose storage unit that I want to buy for our place.  Actually, I want to buy two of them; one for the front yard, and one for the back yard!  What am I talking about?  A no-crank garden hose reel!  These things wind up a garden hose using water pressure!  So you don’t have to crank it by hand!  How cool is that? You can find more information (and order them) from the website http://no-crank.com.  Especially interesting is that the company is currently offering a No-Crank Rewards Program that you can sign up for.  The rewards program involves having your friends that buy one take enter the serial number of their unit into an account on the internet.  You get points and rewards and discounts as a result.