I will be extra careful

The deck has been finished.

It looks only slightly worse than it did before they started – which is not a bad result for the large amount of money they charged.

At least we now know that I did not do such a bad job last summer – we just have the wrong deck timber and stain.

We have been buying lots of flowers and plants. This is the triumph of hope over experience but I am letting Cate do all the planting so that I will not feel responsible for the plants that pop their clogs.

We have planted lots of flowers around the fountain – in the middle of a grass patch. Logic would dictate that you would kill the grass before planting but that is too easy. I now have to kill the grass without killing the plants – this is much more of a challenge.

I honed my skills by killing the grass – and some hollies – in the front garden. That damn roundup just goes everywhere. I will be extra careful when doing the fountain grass – but there are no promises.

We had our relatives for dinner on Friday and my dinner was awful. I overcooked the chicken – and when I was seasoning the potatoes Bastisi (Not Batasi as I have been calling it) – the lid fell off the seasoning jar and covered the whole lot in a layer of Australian Native Spices.

The potato thingy was barely edible but everyone put on a  brave face and said how delicious it was. I filled them full of wine and after while they forgot about it altogether.

But my goulash soup was OK.

My money would be on Bubba

The man is painting the deck now. From what I can see it will look much as it did before he started – but we will be much poorer.

He moves with the speed of a drunken snail dragging an elephant through a shag-pile carpet covered with molasses.

The lights which Joe put under our big tree work a treat - and I should imagine can seen from space. They go on at dusk and off at dawn. I would not be surprised if we get a ‘cease and desist’ order from NASA.

I am knitting small eye masks for the squirrels so that they can get some sleep at night.

I have ordered my Traeger and have received advice from Lenny about which pellets to use. There are just so many that it is very exciting thinking about the possibilities. I am studying my Myron Mixon book for ideas. He is a world class barbecuist.

Of course they have barbecuing contests here. They have every kind of contest here. On the weekend for the Indy 500 they had a bacon eating contest – which I must admit sounds pretty good.

There are also tractor pulling and hawg rasslin. It would not surprise me if there was a contest to see how far you can drive a squirrel with a Big Bertha. My money would be on Bubba Watson.

Tomorrow we have guests coming for dinner. These are the Australians who live a few blocks away and to whom we are somehow related. This is even too weird for me to come to grips with.

Anyhow I am making Hungarian Goulash soup using paprika I bought in Hungary. I am also making Patates Batasi which is a favorite Turkish dish. These are my go to dishes which are almost impossible to mess up. I said almost.

The woodle get hayut

Yesterday Joe finished installing the fountain. He did this despite intermittent thunderstorms. He had dug channels that did not work- and sort of filled them in – and then channels that did work – and sort of filled them in – so the entire back garden looked like a large pile of gooey mud that had been visited by both Bomber Harris and marauding bands of gophers.

Much of the mud is on the paths – and this is where my handy dandy pressure sprayer will come into its own. I knew I bought it for a reason. Every man should have a pressure sprayer.

The fountain would not turn off and I did not have time to read the instruction manual so I unplugged it. Tomorrow I will set aside a couple of hours to master the fountain whizzer which is the size of an iWatch and has an instruction manual an inch thick.

‘Chapter 176: Using your fountain in zero gravity conditions – WiFi considerations’.

The tree lights are not quite right and Joe will have to come back and fix them. This is inevitable as the instructions are relayed from Cate to me and then me to Joe – and I never really understood them in the first place.

So what I ask for – which seems logical to Joe and I – turns out to be the work of complete mindless cretins when it is executed. And I must admit that when Cate explains to me where Joe and I went wrong it all seems much clearer.

The deck men have been here – off an on – for some time. My initial request was to ‘sand the deck and stain it’ and I accepted their quote for $500.

It seems that in the continental USA there are many meanings for ‘sand’.

My intention was that they sand the deck to remove the existing stain (which I applied so badly) and then stain it with the stuff I am supplying. The sanding also being intended to smooth out the bumps in the deck.

This whole episode has now descended into a Goat Thing of epic proportions worthy of a Harvard Business School study and we may have to sell the house to pay for the deck. 

Men have spent days here pressure spraying the deck with and without chemicals.  I get hourly calls from the supervisor who tells me to whom he has spoken and the very many reasons why what I want to be done cannot be done.

‘Wayell - the woodle get hayut and the stain won’t stick’

(well…the wood will get hot and will lose the efficacy to accept the stain)

Every now and then I go and talk to the pressure sprayer who says things (mournfully) such as ‘slow goin’ ain’t it’.

Yesterday it rained so they did not come to stain. If they do not come tomorrow I am dousing the deck in gasoline and torching it.