yard cleanup…
As I write this, a small group of Hispanic guys are chopping away at the weeds in our back yard. We tried to bribe a family member to do the cleanup, but he declined.. and he hadn’t even seen our yard yet. Chances are he probably have laughed in our faces if he’d seen the yard.
The guys back there now are going to also get rid of some boxes we’ve had laying around since the pool was installed this summer, as well as cut down a “weed” tree that sprouted up near our A/C’s drip spout about two years ago… It’s a tree of sorts, but tree nurseries consider it a nuisance and kill it anytiime they see it sprouting in their greenhouses. It’s pretty tall but the branches start near the ground so it’s more bushy, and the leaves are sort of like a juniper evergreen but not as strong. It does not have an evergreen smell to it, so it’s not of relation to evergreens. It’s also very messy when it decides to shed its little leaves or to pollenate. I can’t remember what it’s called anymore, but it is basically a desert shrub.
Whatever it is, it will be gone before the day is done. Along with all the big big weeds. (the baby weeds will be sprayed with weed killer).
Yay! Sure beats doing it ourselves.
witness to an electronic atrocity…
We were driving down the freeway today, and saw something big, flat & opaque fly off of a truck.
When we got closer, we saw what the flying thing had come from.
A big screen T.V. Well, now it’s without a screen, as that was what had flown off.
While terribly sad that a television had to meet its demise like that (or part of it, anyway), at the same time all I could think was, why in the hell didn’t they have that thing secured better? Covered, even??
And then I wondered if they even realized their screen flew away.
Frankly if they’re going to be stupid enough not to secure their big screen t.v. properly to protect its screen, they don’t deserve to own it in the first place.
it’s raining. again.
With lightning and thunder, no less.
And we were thinking about venturing out into the jungle our backyard has become to hack down some weeds this weekend.
Yeah, not anymore. At least not tomorrow, anyway (or the next, depending on how long it rains). Where there aren’t weeds, there’s mud.
It’s getting pretty bad out there. Our backyard still isn’t landscaped, and after the first few rains, weeds started cropping up.
I mean, it’s nice to see green out there, but some of them are starting to compete with our above-ground pool in height, and I swear a few may need a friggin chain-saw to knock down.
I may just call this landscaper whose card was dropped off on our porch and see how much they charge. It’s going to be a huge job and neither of us really feels like breaking our backs to tackle it.
I’m just glad our yard isn’t as big as Josh’s brother’s. I think their yard is almost twice as big as ours (could realistically fit about four of our pools in their backyard, with some room to spare, I’d bet).
change of schedule…
The reason my ailing little green saturn needed to be repaired is because starting next Tuesday, Josh’s schedule has been moved from the one we’re on (wed-Sat, 6a-4p), to M-F, 10a-7p. He’s getting Monday off so he can have some semblance of a weekend since he still had to work today.
And my manager couldn’t be bothered with being nice and letting me move to the same shift so Josh & I could continue to carpool. Hence, the tuneup for my car so I can drive it to & from work again.
The morning commute won’t be so bad, as traffic isn’t usually too heavy at 5am, but the afternoon is going to be rather hellish. Rush hour seems to start at around noon here, and doesn’t let up until about 7pm. As it is, it takes us an hour to get home during the week, and that’s with being able to use the carpool lane on about 70% of the freeways we take. When driving by my or his lonesome, it climbs up to 1.25 - 1.5 hrs. Yuck!
I’m not looking forward to this. It’s about three weeks until the next schedule change (where we hope to be put on the same shift again, and hopefully on a swing shift), but frankly that’s three weeks too long. Bleh.
button button…
I made a button for my begging-for-referrals so I don’t have to make a sticky post. It’s over in the side bar to the right.
And referrals do need to be completed, or they don’t count.
$1 to get a $20 gift card from Lowes or Circuit City..
$9.99 (1st month) for BlockBuster Online (like NetFlix)...
credit card offers…
beauty products…
And whoever helps, I’ll put in for a drawing for either something off your wishlist ($40 value) or a small dragon sculpture… your choice!
/niki begs/
edited to add:
I better clarify something… Of the 10 referrals I need for the mini mac, whoever completes their offers, I will put their names “in a hat” and draw ONE name, and that winner will get either something worth $40 or less off their wishlist, or a small sculpture, their choice. :-D
it burns a hole in the pocket…
What, still no takers on this?
hmm. maybe I need to up the ante a bit. I’ve seen others offer up bribes to get referrals… Something off of your wish list (limit $40)?... a small dragon sculpture?....
/enters beg mode/
Please help me get a free Mac Mini!
Anyway…
We’re paying off at least one credit card with our tax refunds. Some of the rest of it has gone toward miscellaneous car needs. Tires (for both the truck & the car), and my little green car was ailing recently. I had thought it was the clutch, as the dealership had told me over a year ago (I think) that the clutch was in need of being replaced.
So, when the car started acting up when accelerating (all gears), I figured the clutch was finally gasping its last breath. Knowing that the dealership was wanting
around $1200 to replace the clutch, I figured we’d take it to Aamco instead (after calling and getting an estimate of $600-$850).
So we dropped it off last night, and I got a call this morning from the customer service manager at Aamco.
They said the clutch doesn’t need to be replaced. They said the engine needs a tuneup (spark plugs, fuel filter*, etc). I thought about it and recalled at either my last oil change at Saturn or the one before that, that they had told me it was due for that next.. but I put it off due to the inordinate amount of $$ for them to do it that I wasn’t ready to fork over (I think that Saturn’s estimate was more than $600 to do the entire tuneup).
* which would probably explain why I started getting such shit-tay gas mileage as of late
I gave Aamco the OK to do it since they’re charging less and the car is there anyway, plus I told them about a supposed leak Saturn claims they saw on the transmission, so they’re checking for that, too.
It’s cool that they don’t believe the clutch needs to be replaced yet, considering it has 142,000 miles on it!! And yes, it’s the original clutch. :cheese:
I need 10 people…
I want to see if this works… Lots of ppl have claimed they’re getting this “free stuff” when all the offers & referrals are completed, so I figured, what the heck.
I’m interested in a minimac, and it takes 10 referrals. I know that’s asking a lot since I probably don’t have many readers (at least very many that make themselves known).
Help a gal out, pretty please?
A couple of pointers.. if you haven’t already signed up with this place, make sure you confirm your account with Gratis FIRST before you “complete an offer”. I don’t know for sure yet, but I think it may delay credit giving if you sign up for an offer before you confirm your account with Gratis.. A lot of the offers you can sign up for and cancel in a few weeks if you’re not really interested in their offerings, some cost only a buck, some $10, some are credit card offers.
I’ll be ever so happy if you can help!
what’s this??
So, Josh and I come home from seeing Constantine, and notice this white stuff in the rocks in our front yard. Hmm.
We open the door to the back yard to check the pool, knowing it had rained pretty hard while we were gone. And we see this:
It looks suspiciously like snow, but it’s a close relative. Hail! About pea size, and quite a bit of it, from the looks. It hailed back in December (or maybe it was January?), which we were able to witness, but we missed it this time, except for its aftermath.
And if anyone from the east or midwest reads this post and thinks I’m a bit odd for posting a picture of hail in our backyard, remember that I live in Phoenix, where about 70% of the year we’re sitting under a blistering sun. So this kind of stuff (particularly the large amount of rain we’ve gotten this year) is out of the ordinary for us. Besides, this is about the closest thing to snow that we’ll ever see here. At least the type that sticks around for longer than five minutes!
Rain-palooza…
Last night at about 11:30p, it started raining. Hard.
Two things came to mind as I looked out the front door…
1) If this keeps up, we’re going to wish we had sand-bagged around the house.
2) If this keeps up, our pool is going to overflow.
I took pictures of the water coming off the roof of the house and draining into a patch of rocks in front of the porch:
The water pooling in the rocks was starting to flood over the sidewalk because so much water was coming off the roof, it couldn’t drain into the yard fast enough!
When it rains this usually looks like a small piddle stream.. Last night we had a grand waterfall.
The red lines mark where the sidewalk meets the street. The yellow lines show where the water line is, IN the street.
The hard rain lasted all of five or ten minutes. I kind of wish we had a rain gauge so we could have determined just how much rain fell in that short span of time. There is no doubt it would have been like stepping into a shower if we had needed to go out without an umbrella for some reason.
We still need to backwash the pool in case it rains again. This will mark the fourth time we’ll have had to do that this season. It’s no wonder our parched lakes are finally getting up to 50% or more of capacity, which is a really good thing.
just a matter of time…
Kind of figured not enabling captchas on Josh’s blog would come back to bite me in the ass… The comment spammers finally found him.
So I just added a bunch of IPs to the ban list, and in the field where it lets you select where to redirect blocked IP visitors, I am sending them to yahoo instead. Ha!
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