Happiness is a Warm Saw

I finally got plenty of work done over the weekend.

Too bad it wasn't on MY house.

My dad asked me to come up to his place and help him remove some trees. This is the second time this summer we've removed trees from his backyard and you STILL can't tell it was ever done!

There are so many trees in his small back yard that even with a dozen of 'em removed it still is fully under canopy. We've got one more cutting planned for fall, and then a couple of sessions for next spring/summer.

The biggest trees we took down over the weekend were about 7" thick at the base, so I took my small saw:



This little Homelite was my grandpa's saw a few decades ago, and it made it's way into my possession. A year ago I tried starting it for the first time in probably 10-15 years and it was a no-go. The seals were shot and it needed the attention of a professional.

Lucky for me, old saws were made to last and are usually repairable. A guy I work with does tree removal on the side, and also repairs old saws. He said he had this one running in about 20 minutes, and that with proper care it should last a lifetime. After adding gas/oil mix and bar oil I can have it started from cold in 15 seconds.

He strongly advised using more oil in the gas:oil mix on both of my gas chainsaws as well as the gas weed-eater. The way he looks at it, the worst thing I'll do is foul the plugs, but I won't have to worry about trashing the engine due to lack of lubricant. The saws and weed eater all call for 40:1, but I'm running closer to 30 or 35:1.

I do have a small problem with the small saw wanting to die instead of idle, but as long as it's being revved to cut all is well. Plus, it starts with one easy pull so it's not like I'm creating a lot of extra work for myself.

This brings me to my tip-o'-the-day: don't store your chainsaws with gas or oil in 'em. Drain the fluids and run the engine to get rid of any remaining in the lines. Old gas makes small engines run like crap, and if you let it sit long enough it won't work at all. Also, the bar oil tanks leak a ton of oil all over the place if you don't empty the tanks. At least all 3 of my saw's leak oil from the oiling system (that includes the one electric chainsaw).

(I was going to put a picture of my other gas saw, a McCullough Eager Beaver on this post, but I didn't have a picture of it and when I tried doing a Google image search for Eager Beaver I got really distracted....)

A Rant

It's off the topic of homes and renovations, but I don't care. It's my blog and I'll write what I want.

My rant is with the Green Bay Packer organization, specifically anybody within the management team that let (forced?) Favre to leave the team.

16 years, two Super Bowl trips, record after record after record and you donkeys think that Aaron Rodgers is the "future" of the team?

Please....

I've got nothing against Rodgers, and hope he does well. But I'm not betting on it. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the Jets (who had a dismal record last year) end up this season with a better record than the Packers (who lost in the NFC Championship Game).

All due to one player.

I've got nothing against the Jets, and now find myself rooting for a team for which, until today, I couldn't name a single current player.

I've ordered my new Jets jersey and will wear it happily, possibly to a game or two at Lambeau this year.

I won't abandon my home team, and I certainly won't stop being a fan of the one guy who did more to make Green Bay a powerhouse than just about anybody in team history.

I don't doubt that Favre and his agent could have handled things a lot better with regards to his retiring, not retiring, retiring again, etc., but let's face it: even after 16 years he's a far better quarterback than ANY other player on the Packer roster. Keep him on the team until you have someone better - don't push him aside and then blow smoke up my ass about it being "best for the team".

When that jackass Thompson has done 1/100th of what Favre has done for the team and city of Green Bay I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. At this pace I've got a few hundred years to wait.

Back to Work!

I've been slacking on the work around the house for a while now. The weather has been nice and I didn't feel like busting tail when I could be enjoying the weather.

For a while now I've been wanting to get some of the landscaping taken care of in the back yard. There were two large overgrown bushes that needed to be removed.

Removing the visible part of the bush is easy, and gave me a good excuse to break out one of the chainsaws. Removing the roots, on the other hand, sucks.

In this case, as I dug down I found that the roots weren't too large so I wrapped a chain around the roots about 8" below ground level and attached it to the lawn mower. I had my wife drive forward and I chopped at the root system until it broke free.




The root system on the other bush is a LOT heavier, so I'm planning to just dig out as much of it as I can and will then take the chainsaw to it to cut it off. As long as it's well underground I won't have to worry about ever seeing it again.




I also took care of the drain line from the sump pump. When we bought the place it was just a plastic/pvc line laid on the ground. The problem I ended up with was that the water would freeze in winter leading to the whole line getting blocked with ice. Since the sump pump runs all year long, this isn't a good option.

I re-used the line as it comes through the wall, but then immediately turned the line up so that it could gradually slope down towards the end. It's not pretty, but the line will be hidden by the planting we are going to do next spring.




Here you can see the slope along the back of the house. I'm hoping that when it's running that it acts like a siphon and pulls extra water out of the crock. In the past, anything left in the line would run back down into the crock - a couple of gallons total. Either way, the water is finally going to have a good way to get away from the house. On the ground are the remains of the old pipes used to try and get water out.

It's been so dry recently that the crock was only about 1/3 full, but it was enough to test the system to verify that it works. Tomorrow we're expecting rain, so maybe I'll know for sure.




And now for something completely different. Bacon Salt! So many things cooked these days get some salt added, from steaks on the grill to potatoes in the oven. Since bacon makes EVERYTHING better, I got these and have tried them a few times. I think I'll probably only use them on steaks and burgers. The bacon flavor comes through faintly and isn't overpowering.

Trip Pictures

If I don't do this now I'll probably forget to do it, so here are some of the highpoints of the road-trip.

The first major site we hit was Mount Rushmore, the weekend after July 4. The rid on top of Roosevelt's head was for the removal of the fireworks hardware which was used for the celebration. It'd have been cool if they could have made showers of sparks shoot out of Jefferson's eyes, but that probably would be dignified.




Next up was a drive through Custer National Park, a very scenic and cool drive. The animals roam free, and these two buffalo came in for a nice close-up. This one was inches from my door as I passed him - I could have easily touched him as we went past.




We went through Deadwood, which was a disappointment for me since I'm not a gambler. I was hoping for more of a historic city. We went up to the cemetery where Wild Bill Hickock is buried and saw the grave sites of a number of notable Deadwood's past citizens.




The main focus of the trip was going to Yellowstone for 3 nights. I knew it was a big place before we went, but if you've never been there it's hard to fathom just how massive the park is. I drove around 300 miles within the park and seldom drove on the same road twice.

How do you sum up Yellowstone in a couple of pictures? You can't.

This is the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. There was a late thaw so there was still snow on the ground in places. The water was flowing much more heavily than normal for this time of year, so the falls were more spectacular than normal (from what I was told).




Instead of putting up a picture of Old Faithful (I have about 50) I'm going with a thermal pool. The colors are actually different types of algae which live in the different water temperatures. This pool used to be blue in the middle, but crap throw in by vandals over the decades changed the temp of the water causing it to reflect green instead of blue.




We took two days to drive from Yellowstone to Milwaukee, but didn't skip a small side-trip to Devil's Tower in Wyoming. Anybody who's seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind has seen it. I'm not a rock climber so I didn't get to go to the top.




The weather was about perfect - 70's and 80's for the entire trip, with cooler temps in the mountains. There was no rain for about 2,500 miles of driving meaning the Jeep got to bring back a few thousand souvenirs for me.

A Case of Slacker-itis

Alright, alright. It's been a while since my last post.

In my defense, I've been doing other things. Working. Sleeping. Eating. Blah, blah blah.

Really though, most of my time recently has been spent preparing for and going on a road-trip with the family to Yellowstone. Since we drove, there was a lot of preparation for the vehicle, packing. etc.

I got some very nice pictures that I'll post in the future, covering stops in Yellowstone and the Black Hills (Custer National Park, Deadwood, Mount Rushmore). In fact, I took just over 1,200 pictures over the 10 day trip. Now I need to spend a lot of time weeding through to get the best pictures - who wants to look at 90 pictures of the same waterfall??

We also had some very cool close-encounters (good description, as we also went to Devil's Tower) with some buffalo. Close enough that I could have reached out the window and slapped one, possibly earning some major scarring to the Jeep in the process.

Nature is pretty cool, even if you have to drive over 3,000 miles round-trip to see it!

Flood Pictures

Today we had another pretty heavy storm roll through. Luckily it was much shorter in duration than the one 12 hours before. The rain ended a few hours ago, and I decided to get out of the house to see what the flooded areas look like today.

Closest to my house is a somewhat low-lying area which is a tree nursery. Down the center of this picture is normally a small creek with maybe 1' of water in it. It's usually only about 4' wide with slow moving water.

Now it's reached the top (about 20' across), but yesterday all the ground in this picture was under at least a foot of running water. From the tree-line on the left and swamping the small trees/shrubs on the right.




Farther up-stream is a new bridge over the same creek. At this time last year there was about 75% of the flow capacity that is there now. Currently the water is flowing about 2' below maximum height. Last night it was about 2" from overflowing onto the road when I drove by. It could have maxed out and flowed onto the road at some point.




The water flows under the road and appears to flow directly into this house, about 50 yards up the side-road. Anybody want to guess what the guy in the picture is thinking right about now?




In reality, it's the office for the same tree nursery shown in an earlier picture and the water flows under it. It must have been built here on the assumption that the water will never be high enough to hit the building. I've seen it within a foot before after some heavy storms, but last night the water was at capacity under the building and was therefore forced to flow around it. They're lucky it didn't tear the place down. I'm assuming they had plenty of wet carpet in there today.

If you're wondering about erosion making the place fall, the whole creek leading up to the building is cement and rock, as are the creek walls under the place. That's not to say that it'll prevent water from destroying the house though, because Mother Nature can be nasty when she wants to be. Erosion has destroyed far better designs than this.




Right about where the 3rd car is (the dark one driving away in this picture) is where there was about 6" of water over the road last night. Today it's dry, but the ditches on either side of the road are still very active.




Too bad this home/business doesn't have one of those "active" ditches. As of today the people who live here are still pretty screwed. I don't care how good their sump pump is, they can't have a dry basement today. Last night the water was up against the business (the block building - yes, I know it's ugly as hell) and there was a car in the driveway right in front of the door which was up to it's rims in water.

As of an hour ago, the city came by to place a pump in the water to try and get the level down somewhat. The houses next to these guys were almost as bad off, although they did have power after the storm was done so at least they had lighting to work by.




This was the first time I really took notice as to how far my house is above the water. On my drive back home I noticed that I go up a couple of very small hills - enough to put me about 10-15' above this water level. While 10-15' may not sound like much, it'd take a LOT bigger storm than this to raise the water level to the point where I'm underwater. I hope...

...A Three Hour Tour... (Sing Along)

We had a pretty major storm roll through today.

This was the hardest rain I've seen since we moved in, and the most rain in such a short time (3-4 hours) my neighbor has seen in his 26 years in this neighborhood.

I expected that I would get some water in the basement, as it's happened before when we got some major storms. But this storm was just a little heavier than usual.

While I was in the basement moving some stuff out of the way of the water so it had a clean path from the wall to the floor drain I heard what sounded like a hose running. Inside the house. Not a good sound to hear.

I noticed some water dripping down the dryer's exhaust vent and I figured that was what was making the sound. Only there wasn't enough visible water to justify the sound.

So I pulled the dryer away from the wall and pulled the vent off the back and was greeted with a flood of water coming down through the vent. It was about equal to what you'd get by sticking a garden hose in the vent.

As of this morning, the dryer worked well. I'm hoping that it was designed with the electronics up high enough in the box to avoid water damage, otherwise I'll be buying a new dryer in a few days. I'm going to give this one a few days to dry out just to be safe.

Other than the possible dryer, there was no damage done other than a few empty cardboard boxes getting soaked. I'd say that there were easily over 500 gallons of water that flowed through the basement today, and I know I'm luckier than some others in the neighborhood.

I took a drive with my neighbor after the storm stopped, and we were amazed at how much water was flowing in the ditches and creeks. At one point I estimate we were driving through at least 6" of water.

What really surprises me is how stupid people can be about driving in water like this. Granted, I probably shouldn't have been out there either, but I'm driving slowly through the water in a Jeep with plenty of ground clearance. I wasn't worried about flooding the engine as long as I stayed on the road. That much can't be said for the idiots charging through the water in minivans and cars. I'm very surprised that none of them flooded their cars while I was there.

A couple of houses along that road had water right up to the foundations. They did have power, so I hope their sump pumps were able to keep the basements reasonably dry. I'm guessing that over the next week there will be a lot of flood damaged property sitting by the curb for pickup.

With all that said, I'm pretty confident now that the next major project for my house will be a new patio. For something different, I'm going to have this one slope AWAY from the house. If I had that kind of slope right now I'd only have had minimal water in the basement, and not a steady stream.