can't believe I just mailed 40 lbs of dirt

We got up kind of late this morning. I was pretty tired after getting home late the night before - I'm working over in Bothell these days and the Friday evening commute back to the world via the ferry is long and hard. (I could tell you about the Friday when the ferry left the dock with hardly any cars on board - they couldn't load it because the railroad crossing gate was stuck closed ...but that's another blog entry.)

We didn't make it to Gwennie's for breakfast until after 9. I got a newspaper and Betty brought her book, but we didn't read. We just talked about what's been going on the last couple of days and what all we need to do this weekend. We also couldn't linger, because Betty had to go to Legacy to help with a training class.

When we got home from breakfast, the floor finishing folks were already here. They were supposed to show up around noon, but I guess after working on this floor for almost 2 weeks, they were tired of explaining to us why they weren't done yet and when they might be if everything went ok.

I had paperwork to do, but before I got into a paperwork catch-up mode, I put my Linux "apartment server" to work updating itself. I really like this Gentoo distribution of Linux. You just type " emerge -uD world" and it downloads and installs updates for everything on the computer. While that was working, I did my bookkeeping, read the newspaper that I bought at Gwennie's and made a crossover ( i.e. PC-to-PC direct) network cable.

Before Betty got back home, I put the v-belt on the Toro. One of the mower belts broke a couple weeks or so ago. We actually ordered a replacement before it went (we saw it coming), but the order got lost. We re-ordered and when it finally came in, it was the other mower belt - not the one that broke. Meanwhile, the grass is really enjoying this warm weather and rain stuff. Before I left for my twice-weekly trip to Bothell last Wednesday, I gave Betty the part number for the v-belt along with a picture and she took it to the Toro place and they got her the correct belt within 24 hours. The rain has let up, so I knew Betty would be wanting to do some mowing.

The floor guys put on the third and last coat of urethane. They said that we would be able to walk on it after 5pm.

So, Betty comes home and gets on the mower. I've got no excuse to hang out in the office and surf the web, so I went out to take care of a little chore - digging up some clay soil and sending it to Kelly...

Kelly has a project that requires some raw clay ("Sequim Gold") from our place. If there's anything that we have a shortage of here, it's not clay soil. I didn't even have to dig for it. As you may have read from previous blog entries, we recently built a house. One of the side-effects of that is large mounds of dirt from excavations. It turns out that there were some great concentrations of clay in the soil from those excavations. All I had to do was go out to the berm with a bucket and look for those distinctly grey clumps of hard clay.

I collected about 40 lbs of it - pulverized most of it in my hands, but left a few of the better clumps whole so Kelly could have a few "nuggets" - maybe put them in a gallery or something.

This stuff wasn't even very wet - even though it's been raining a lot for about a week. Just to make sure it was the real thing, I took some of the pulverized clay, added water and mixed. Yup - pure gold.

I boxed it up into two Amazon boxes and took it to the Staples UPS store. I thought that they might want to look at the contents, so I brought in the boxes unsealed, but they didn't seem to care to see what was inside. Each box was almost 20 lbs. Good thing this stuff wasn't very wet.

I left Staples and went next door to QFC to buy some wine for dinner. I got a bottle of Australian Red Knot Syrah - it was $6 off for QFC members and it was still more than I usually spend, so it should be good. Betty says we're having shishkabobs for dinner.

On the way out of QFC, I tried to buy a lottery ticket, but they were having some kind of problem with the lottery machine - they were on the phone with tech support trying to figure out how to reboot the machine. I overheard them say that everybody was having the same problem and that it would take about a hour to fix - must be one of them lottery viruses that's been going around.

On Monday, the floor should be dry and hard enough for us to move some furniture in. There's not much - dining table, chairs, bed frame (but no mattress), dressers, some odds and ends. Should be easy.

we bought our house yesterday

Yesterday, we went to the bank and paid off our construction loan with a new home loan. It's a big relief to have that done. Now, we have just the usual homeowner things to do - landscaping, fences, garden, etc, etc, etc.

The floor finishing is still in progress. It's taken a lot longer than we expected - it was supposed to be done in about 3 days, but that was obviously a gross underestimation. Hand-scraping the floor is a lot of work. There is one guy working on it today (Saturday) and there will be more working on it tomorrow. I'd give it another week to have it all scraped, sanded and coated. Then, we can move furniture in.

our floor has been located!

Our floor went missing sometime mid-to-late last year. We figured it couldn't have gone very far - what with it being a floor and all. It turns out that it was right there underneath a thin-to-not-so-thin veneer of various substances which would fall under the general classification of "dirt".


All we had to do was hire some guys with a large reservoir of sweat to come and meticulously/painstakingly/time-consumingly scrape off that veneer. Man, this is hard work - I'm glad I didn't try to convince Betty that it was something I could do "when I had some time" (that's husband code for "slim chance I'd ever get around to it").

dirt work is done

Those huge mounds of dirt from the foundation and septic system excavations are gone. In their place, we have ground which is contoured such that water flows away from the house when it rains (not that it ever rains in Sequim). This wasn't particularly easy, since the house sits low on the landscape. We also have a berm which is intended to keep our dogs from seeing and barking at cars which drive along the lane (not that Bear or Sadie ever bark). Also, Mike (who did the dirt work) instinctively implemented pattern #126 "Something Roughly in the Middle" with the large rocks which were dug up during the excavations.



Although it's been contoured, the soil is very poor (i.e. mostly clay). There was some topsoil, but not very much. We'll probably buy some bales of hay from our neighbor and spread it all around so it will seed itself. In time, it will look like the rest of our field (foreground).

Betty is back on the scaffold

We rented a 10-foot scaffold so Betty could finish sanding and oiling the logs before the floor finishing happens. (It's shakier than it looks.)