I’m sitting in McCarran airport. It’s 102 degrees outside; probably 80 degrees inside. Plane is 1.5 hours late. Airport is crowded. I’m tired. People are cranky. What a way to end a long day.
I flew in this morning for a quick technical conference (why is it so popular these days to start conferences and seminars on a Sunday?) and am flying out the same day (hopefully).
One good thing about Vegas is the great people-watching it provides. There really is “one of each jellybean” as the popster would say. The outfits that people choose to wear on their Vegas trips really crack me up. In the last half hours I’ve seen a lady in what appears to be a bikini strolling through the airport and a lady wearing a winter coat in the heat. I think she must have been a drug smuggler. Who wears a winter coat in 102 degree weather?
Overall, I don’t mind coming to Vegas. It’s trashy and dirty but it’s definitely entertaining… as least for the first two hours. After that I’m ready to leave.
With the backflow valve fixed, we were able to turn on the stream. We had to do a little cleaning of the stream bed because some of our evil mulch had blown in during the spring but it wasn’t too bad. Hopefully by the end of this year we’ll have all of our evil mulch collected and tilled into the garden where it will torment us no longer.
I had pumped most of the water out of the sump before the heavy winter hit but there is always residual water in the pump and housing and I was concerned that the pump might not have survived the winter intact. When we plugged in the stream we could hear some gurgling and could see the water level in the sump start to drop which was a good sign. After a minute the water came gushing out of the waterfall and I heaved a sigh of relief.
While cleaning out the stream bed we took the opportunity to make it a little more “meandering”. I think it turned out pretty good.
This year our goal is to plant more ground cover around the stream and some bushes and grasses around it to give it a more natural look.
Today’s Saturday Project was to replace our backflow prevention valve. Our old home didn’t have a backflow valve (or it was underground and I didn’t know about it) so we were used to leaving our irrigation system turned on until late November without any freezing problems. South Jordan requires backflow valves to be installed above ground. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize how easily an above-ground valve can freeze and last last November Nancy called me at work to tell me that she had discovered water squirting out of the valve and onto the house. Nancy shut off the water at the street and left it for me to fix when I got home. Of course, I decided to procrastinate fixing the valve until spring. Why do something when you can procrastinate it for 5 months?
The casing of the valve had frozen and burst. The water pressure spraying onto the house had also knocked a chunk of stucco off the foundation. Fortunately, we had the foresight to tell our landscapers to put the valve in the back yard behind the fence where nobody could see it (many of our neighbors have the valve right in the middle of their front flower beds) so I really wasn’t too worried about the stucco on the foundation.
The broken valve – you can see the crack in the middle of the casing
As spring rolled around I kept procrastinating the valve issue until the sudden hot weather forced me to finally fix it so we could start watering the garden and lawn and also turn on the stream. The hardest part of replacing the valve was getting the broken valve out of the line. I had to buy a huge pipe wrench and it took several coats of WD-40 to loosen the joints before I was finally able to undo the coupling.
Unfortunately, Home Depot didn’t have a valve the same size as my old valve and I didn’t want to do any extra plumbing work to change the spacing in the lines so I decided to order a valve over the internet. For the curious among you, it is an Apollo 40-205-T2 1″ Reduced Pressure Backflow Preventer manufactured by Conbraco. You can buy it for $211 with free shipping from SprinklerWarehouse.com
The new valve – you can see where the water knocked the stucco off the foundation
I slapped some Teflon tape on the threads, used a “cheater bar” to screw the elbow joints in tightly, recoupled the valve assembly to the line, and crossed my fingers while Nancy went out to the street to turn on the water. Whaddayaknow – it worked! No leaks or clogs. Not bad for an amateur. Now we just have to be careful and remember to turn the main water off before it freezes this fall.
Today was Diana’s annual Spring Program at Challenger School. They held it at 9:00 a.m. so I just went with Nancy to the program before heading to the office.
Having five kids in Challenger School has made us pretty familiar with the contents of the program – the format doesn’t change much from year to year. Still, it’s fun to see the performance each year even if it is fairly routine for an audience member.
We managed to forget the video camera even after we had charged it up. Fortunately, our handy little HP camera can take videos and they turned out pretty decent for such a small little still camera.
One good thing about Diana’s rendition is that she seems to sing and do the actions a bit more energetically than some of our other kids have in the past. I seem to recall one year one of the kids spent the entire time doing big yawns and one year one of them was grumpy and didn’t sing or dance or do anything.
Diana did such a good job that after the program Nancy took her out to get a treat while I headed to work.
I thought it would be fun for all the kids to be in spring soccer this year. Last year the four older kids all played and Diana got left out. This year it was her turn to be able to play too. One bad thing that happened was that Emily and Anne’s age group didn’t have enough girls sign up from our area so the County Rec-Center people moved them way down south and west to play with the girls out there. The only problem with that is we would have had five kids playing soccer and trying to go north and south would be impossible as well as expensive gaswise. BYUFan and I decided to pull them out and try to get our money back, by the way I am still waiting to hear back from them.
We are now three weeks in and the kids are loving it. Diana loves to stand by her coach and talk her ears off and occasionally she will chase the ball with the other kids. One time she and another teammate kept chasing and kicking the ball even though it was totally out of bounds. The coaches had to chase them down so the game could continue.
Texas loves to run around and be a part of the team, but she tends to be timid when the ball actually gets to her. She will kick it when it comes to her but sometimes it does go right through her legs.
Sam is the kid who just runs around in the crowd and doesn’t even get close to the ball. His favorite thing to do is to sit on the blanket with all his other teammates and play until it is his turn to go in again.
My project for today was to clean up the stone walkway on the north side of the house.
The lightweight mulch was a mistake
One regret about our landscape was our choice of chopped mulch. The mulch blows and swirls in the wind and gets in the grass, the walkways, the stream, and everywhere else. We’ve been gradually scraping the mulch off and dumping it in the garden (it works great to loosen up our crappy clay soil) but we still needed to address the messy stone walkways.
What a mess
I’ve looked at a number of different kinds of edging but they’re either too flimsy or too expensive per foot. We finally found this black edging stuff at Home Depot that is sturdy and inexpensive. The only problem with it is that Nancy doesn’t think it looks very good.
Putting the edging together
Nancy and I spent most of the afternoon digging a trench, putting together the edging, backfilling the flowerbed, raking things smooth, and sweeping the walkway.
Ready for planting moss and creeping thyme
I don’t mind the way it looks. It certainly looks better than no edging at all; however, Nancy is determined to get something different for the front yard so I’m only allowed to put it in the back yard. We’ll eventually plant some moss among the stones on this north walkway where it stays wet and cool
longer.
Overall I’m very pleased with the way it turned out. I hope it will help keep mulch out of the walkways and perhaps kids out of the mulch (I wish). Now I’ve just got to do the south side of the house but that project will have to wait until our backflow prevention valve gets replaced (it froze this winter).
Sam got a little poster from school for his birthday that had a place for his picture and a picture of his family. I got the camera out today and snapped a quick family photo. It’s virtually impossible to get all five kids to smile at the same time so we usually end up with various stages of frowns, smiles, grins, and other weird looks on the kids’ faces. This photo is no exception.
Because Sam got a friend party for his birthday this year we decided to hold the party a few days early so we could do it on the weekend. Sam invited 5 or 6 friends over – neighbor boys and friends from school. Sam wanted a pirate-themed party and his special request was to do a treasure hunt with an “X marks the spot”.
Waiting for the guests
The plan was to play games like “pin the beard on the pirate”, bingo, and duck duck goose for a half hour before the treasure hunt. Of course, things don’t always go as planned when dealing with a pack of little boys. They spent about 2 minutes playing bingo, 3 minutes playing pin the beard on the pirate, and 2 minutes playing duck duck goose before they were ready for the treasure hunt.
Pin the beard on the pirate – Anne drew the pirate
The treasure hunt involved several picture clues and took them from one side of the yard to the other. The X marking the spot was out behind the rocks along on the back fence. The treasure was a sack of party favors for each boy and what turned out to be the hit of the party – squirtguns!.
Having a blast
After a quick bite of cake and ice cream, Nancy filled the squirtguns and sent the boys out in the back yard to have at it. They spent the last 40 minutes of the party squirting each other and running back inside to get their squirtguns refilled. We should have known that no organized game could possibly be as much fun for six year old boys as simply as running around with squirtguns. Happy Birthday Sam.
Texas has been excited the past week or so because her second grade class has been getting ready to perform the play about the Ugly Duckling. She is constanty reminding me of the day and time that it is to be so I won’t forget. I have tried to get her to sing some of the songs she has learned, but she says that I just have to wait until I go and see her play. I guess she wants to heighten my curiosity so she can be sure I will be there. Of course I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
So on Wednesday April 9th I arrived at the school about fifteen minutes or so before the play was to begin. Diana and I got pretty good seats and we sat and waited. All the kids came walking in and took their places and luckily Texas, who was playing a pig in the farmyard, was on the side where I could take her picture without any other parent in the way. The bad news was that the kids who sat in front of her blocked a good view of her instead. Luckily when she had to say her lines she got to go up in the middle by the microphone so I could see her well. She remembered all her lines and she sang all the songs very well. I was really proud of her.
Next time any of you family members see Texas, make sure you ask her to sing the song the mean farmyard animals sang to the ugly duckling before she turned into a swan. I wish I remembered the title.
