The entire van was filled with yard waste… it was a pretty impressive haul.

Afterwards I kind of liked how butch Penny looked and I wish they had AWD vans because I would offroad that thing all the time just to look cool at the school pickups.

The kids have started school and since then productivity around the house has taken a huge hit.

There’s been lots of shuttling of people around and the retrieval of supplies to keep everyone fed, happy, and ready to complete the next assignment.

The end of summer gave me a little sucker punch this week – just to let me know that the big hits was coming soon.

I panicked a bit and made sure that we try and cram a little more learning and fun in before school starts and all that is off the table.

Today me and the smaller two went to the science center and built some cardboard contraptions. Both were crank driven cat-toys. There was hot glue and fun.

Dex and I installed an open sprinkler irrigation controller.

It is choice! The only slight mis-steps are A) We had 9 stations which meant we had to upgrade to 20 stations because the standard 8 wasn’t going to cut it and B) I didn’t get a right proper water proof enclosure so we had to hack the old one up to fit the new guts.

There were quite a few new talents to take care of here. One most important was testing for live 120V AC wires – with my kid watching. No one was shocked.

We managed to get it all done before Mariel got home and we surprised her with some automated, 10 seconds per zone, water works. It felt like fireworks 🙂

We needed a good place for the cat box. There’s three cats these days so there’s a lot of input/output.

It’s got to be accessible for cleaning, but hopefully out of the way. We decided to sacrifice the pantry (or at least the bottom fifth). I had a wild idea of cutting a hole giving access to the crawl space under the stairs with a cleaning access door in the garage. BUT in a moment of uncharacteristic caution I thought that I might compromise the firewall aspect of the whole “garage thing”. Scraped that idea and put a cat door in the pantry.

I have a vent for getting some those fumes out, but I’m unsure of where (what) to do that.

Chase helped out and learned how to: 1) Take a door off it’s hinges 2) use a T-square and tape measure 3) use a drill 4) use a scroll saw

There was a lot going on and he was appropriately pissed off that he was forced to help dad – but by the end he was happy to have made some loud noise, destroyed a bit of the house on purpose and work on a project that he can take credit for each time he sees it every day.

One of our (many) irrigation zones has a pump that won’t start AND a profuse leak at the elbow for the back flow valve.  I ran that manually for a bit while trying to plan out how I would go about fixing it. And while no ideas came to mind I wandered upon a massive gusher out side the outer perimeter. Something had chewed threw the irrigation hose because of “nature spite”.  Once I patched that up the back-flow valve leak settled down and barely made a weep.

I’m calling that a win for today.

The kids also helped map out an unconventional furniture idea we had for the grand room. It looks like it may work out.

Mariel is a clown when done with commute.

 

The updates are a bit weak for this post. Firstly, I just cut a piece of crappy irrigation pipe that someone else tried to fix and had “less of a clue than I”.

Then I had to snip our fruit picker because it was not designed with “Citrus Maximus” in mind and we couldn’t get the biggest of our pomelos off the tree.

Last but not least; since we are kind of in a furniture limbo (waiting for our loan to solidify before making any big purchases) we made a mock up, with cardboard, of one the pieces we are considering for the big room.

It turned out to be a fruitful exercise because more than once Dex and I said “Wait, what? It can’t be that big!”