Driveway Mountain and Hometown Ride

It’s been dry for so long that its jarring to have it rain for nearly twenty-four hours but at least it isn’t hovering around the 100 degree mark anymore. I’m really glad about the temperature drop for a couple reasons but the biggest one is the time has come to fill in the new garden terrace I created at the top of our back yard hill (what was I thinking?!). It turned out carrying the bricks up the hill was the easy part of the job. Yesterday morning I had four yards of screened compost dropped at the bottom of the driveway. All of which now had to be transferred to the top of the aforementioned hill. The hill, being what it is, meant I couldn’t just drive the wheelbarrow up and then dump it, as I did with the neighbor’s recent wall.

Wife Took This Picture as I was Finishing for the Day

I decided to get creative and mustered all the of the various buckets I had in the garage into a version of the time-honored bucket brigade technique. My initial plan was to fill all the buckets I had with dirt and then transfer them to the hill in the wheelbarrow and then lug them up the hill for dumping. That worked fine for the first sixty or so buckets and then the rain came. It wasn’t a deluge or anything but one of my hard and fast, post-military retirement, personal rules is, “No outside work in the rain”. As with any good infantrymen who had to live by the credo, “If it isn’t raining, it ain’t training”, I spent hundreds of days over the years soaking wet and working. Once I became a bona fide civilian I quickly installed the rule about work and rain, kind of like why I’m such a picky eater after being forced to eat disgusting things (like brussel sprouts) when I was growing up, but I digress.

The Starting Point

The rain slackened up a bit after lunch so I figured I could bend the rule a little bit but I definitely had to modify my technique since I didn’t want the buckets of dirt sitting there absorbing rain. I started filling just the two buckets that would fit into the wheelbarrow and then moving that around to the hill. This turned out to be a good technique as, after carrying the buckets up, I would then carry the wheelbarrow itself up to dump the spillage, which amounted to almost another bucket of dirt. My Favorite Panamanian came out at one point and said she was going to help. I laughed and told her to try to pick up one of the buckets of dirt. She immediately understood and became my personal gunga din, water girl; which was needed because while the temps were down the humidity was still through the roof.

Start of Ride, Driveway to my Old Home on Left

I had reached the 80% fill point on the terrace when the rains picked up enough to invoke my post-Army rule. It was probably a good thing because the buckets were getting heavier and I was finding it harder and harder to avoid stepping on the plants in my wife’s lower garden. That would have been a big issue and probably halted my water supply. It looks like it will be Sunday before I get the rest of the pile of dirt moved because that’s when the rain is supposed to stop. I’ve started exploring some of the options with my new exercise bike. It has some cool features. I took a series of rides through Bermuda which brought back memories of the cruise we took there following my Favorite Son and ABFA’s wedding. It also has a feature that allowed me to create my own route. The first one I set up was back in my hometown. It uses Google Street View to set up what you see as you ride. It was fun to see all the familiar sites pass by from the hometown I’ve truly come to appreciate in the years since I left. The photo above shows the start which is right in front of the house I grew up in. The trees on the left were just three feet tall when I was in high school. Man, I’m getting old.

We were back in the movie theater this week to see F9. As the expression “jumping the shark” ages we’re probably going to have to come up with a new phrase to express when a movie or TV series runs out of gas and just goes too far. F9 might serve as a target rich environment for that effort. I mean, sending street car racers into space! Then there is repeated issue of no one ever being permanently dead. This is the problem when you’re expected to up your game each time from previous movies. The Fast and Furious series has always delivered awesome car chases and incredible, increasingly unbelievable car stunts. This latest is no exception and when they focus on the action it’s great. Unfortunately, they decided to take themselves more seriously than called for. We don’t need to see them emote, especially in the caser of John Cena, who proves incapable of doing that. There was too much time creating additional mythology for the Dominic Toretto clan which meant we had to endure repeated scenes of Vin Diesel staring off into the mists of his past. Knock it off and get back behind the wheel. The only ones who seemed to not mail this in were Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris who were too funny and engaging. This isn’t high art, it’s a Fast and Furious movie, which Diesel and whoever edited this, seems to have forgotten the edge that made this series of movies so successful. All this being said, the action scenes are worth sitting through the cringe worthy attempts to emote.

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RECURRING CHARACTERS                                           

BR3 – granddaughter #3, BRS - Blog Reader the Sequel - second granddaughter; FBR - First Blog Reader - first granddaughter, ABFA – Amazing Best Family Athlete = my daughter in law; Wingman – my son in law; Keene Friends 1 & 2 – friends since high school from my home town of Keene, NH; Soxfather - my brother in law; Great Aunt - my elder sister; Cantankerous Friend – friend since grade school who likes to argue about everything, poses as radical leftist to attract women; Kindergarten Friend – friend since kindergarten whom I reunited with after many years; Pittsburgh College Roommate – high school friend, also a “Minor Celebrity” in Pittsburgh; Deckzilla – our backyard deck which grew to monstrous dimensions once my wife got involved in planning; Maine and Virginia Musqueteras – two close friends of my wife – her US sisters, my wife is the 3^rd musquetera (musketeer); Riggins - also known as the Grandpuppy, son's dog; PanaGals – female relatives /friends of my wife from Panama; Panamanian/Latin Mafia – inevitable group of Latino friends my wife accumulates wherever we have lived & their spouses; Neighborhood Mafioso - wife's close friend and Panamanian mafia member, Favorite Panamanian - the wife (of course); First Friday – celebrations to mark the First Friday of the Week; Curbside Girls – close friends of my daughter acquired during her single days in Brooklyn