Driveway Renovation III

We're almost done. It's a few days later and I've returned the machine. It has come down to grinding the rest off by hand.

My battery powered DeWalt grinder lasted 30 seconds (I'm done with battery powered grinders and saws - Don't buy them!). We were down to one 4 1/2 inch grinder. I went out and bought a new DeWalt 6 inch grinder with a diamond blade for this job. I used the 4 1/2 inch grinder for the detail work and my buddy used the 6 inch grinder and did twice as much as me with the bigger machine.


By the end of the day my thumb was numb from using the grinder. The tip of my thumb remained numb for two more weeks. I was starting to worry if I had permanently lost feeling there but I recovered fine.


Later, I repainted the façade of the house and we were able to clear the complaint from code enforcement.

Driveway Renovation II

And so we begin by taking the texture off of the driveway. It took two days with a six blade, gas powered chipping machine. Some friends from work helped me out.

First Day - have to use lots of water to cool the grinder and to sweep away the ground up pavement

First day got less than half done

Second Day



Lots of work grinding the cement

I dug up the garden and removed the sprinkler system piping

I also had to remove the rocks and underlayment

Look at all these extra rocks

Another pile of rocks. I like mulch much better because it is too hard to keep a rock garden in Florida

The neighbors didn't like this I'm sure. We left a foot of sludge in the gutter that took a month to wash away. There were streaks all over the road for days from people driving through the wet concrete run-off. We took as much as we could up and dumped it in low spots in the back yard where it was eroding.

This made me mad. We wore through three diamond tipped blades doing the driveway. Now Sunbelt Rentals charged me $100 to replace the blades! Excuse me, but do I have to buy new tires after I rent a car? No!

Driveway Renovation

This happened back in April and I am now getting around to posting.


As you may recall from the "Chores" post, the city cited me for a dirty driveway and then after I cleaned it, they cited me for a weathered driveway and a stained wall on the front of my house. The driveway wasn't worth repairing since they tried doing that when we bought the house. It lasted about a year and then started eroding again. We had to take the texture completely off down to the bare concrete.


Now for the stained wall, our sprinkler system runs off well water so there are a lot of metals in the well water. These metals stain everything the sprinkler water touches. Just look at any building in Florida and you'll notice. We decided to completely remove the front garden and be done with having to water it. There was nothing growing in the "garden" anyway. We'll fill it in with cement and make a front porch with some planters or something later.


So here is the visual journal.

See the missing texture

The concrete is worn and you can tell the original color of the driveway was gray

Missing patches of texture everywhere

See the staining and all of the stuff growing is wild

Always Behind the Times (Music Players)

My mp3 player, a first generation iPod Touch, broke a few weeks ago so that got me thinking. It seems like I have always been behind the times when it came to music technology. My taste in music isn't old, just my technology.


Let's review:

Not my old one but you get the idea

I grew up listening to records and the radio on a vacuum tube record/radio combination. It did have FM which was a plus but it was so heavy, I couldn't move it as a child. This was the mid 1980s and cassettes were plentiful.


My father gave me his busted boombox that he used to use on construction site jobs. It had two cassette decks so I could dub music from one tape to another. We went to the library and I checked out two tapes to copy. One was Pump by Aerosmith and some other one I can't remember. I think my father borrowed Meatloaf to listen to in the car. He gave me some blank tapes and I copied a few more from the library or off the radio stations through the years. This was the late 1980s and CDs were just coming out. I used that boombox until 1999 when I left it at work and someone threw it in the dumpster. I dug it out the first time but was too late the second time. It looked like trash but the radio still worked even with the broken antenna.

I bought a Sony Walkman in the 1990s; cassette player of course. I used this a lot throughout the early 1990s. I went to Thailand for my Midshipman cruise in 1999 and brought my Walkman on the plane for the long trip. I changed planes in Japan so there were a lot of Japanese onboard and they always have the latest technology. The Japanese guy sitting next to me couldn't help himself and had to comment on my Sony Walkman from 1990 since CDs had been out over a decade. He showed me his minidisc player (anyone remember those?). I just wanted something for the plane ride.

I had CDs but my only CD player was in my car. The car didn't come with a CD player. I didn't want to keep buying the same album on cassette and my 1988 Toyota Celica factory tape deck started eating more and more tapes. In 1998 I wore out Led Zepplin IV and Master of Puppets on cassette so I upgraded to a CD player for my car. I bought second hand CDs in the record store after that.

So it is now 2000 and I have a new job after graduating college and moving out. I'm finally on the cutting edge of getting music. I have a new laptop and cable internet (thanks to splitting the bill with four other roommates). I'm downloading mp3s on Napster everyday. I have thousands. I buy big speakers for my computer. I've got all the music I ever wanted for free and keep finding more. I bought an mp3 player when they first came out. I bought the extra SD card to hold another 30-40 songs. I've got like 100 songs on this first generation mp3 payer. Then Napster gets shut down. I'm back to CDs.


It's the early to mid 2000s and I'm the guy at the gym rocking a CD player belt while everyone else is using Apple's first iPod. A few years go by and I get satellite radio for work. I buy a portable satellite radio player that won't work in the gym but I can download and replay 12 hours of music daily. So that works.

Finally in 2007, the iPod touch is released. I have no interest because I'm still using my CDs or satellite radio player. Well my friend gets the iPod touch and she gives me her old Microsoft Zune. Now I'm using the Zune for the next seven years until it flat out stops working in 2014. As compensation I get the now used first generation iPod touch purchased in 2007.

Now I'm using my phone to listen to music at the gym

As I said at the beginning of this post, it is 2016 and my iPod touch is now dead. I have started streaming music on my phone at the gym and when I buy a new phone after the new year, I'll buy extra storage to move all of my songs onto the phone. In the meantime, I can't be bothered to even download Pandora and search for music stations.


I'm not an old guy and I seem to keep up with everything else: news, phones, movies; I guess I am just used to being behind when it comes to music technology.

Fantasy Football

Well the new NFL season is about to start. That means a new season of fantasy football.


This is my third season of playing fantasy football. For several years, I had been in a Pick 'em league at work where there were an unlimited number of people in a pool picking the winners of each game every week. In this kind of league, you have to pick the winners of each game and get points for the week and the season based on number of correct predictions. When the payout was at the end of the year, I never got paid. Eventually, we got enough people to have weekly payouts too, but once we went to weekly payouts, I never got paid. So I stopped because I was also in a fantasy football league which was more interactive and also because I never won the Pick 'em. Oh yeah, it was a more expensive buy in too.

So now this is my third year with pretty much the same people. I'm in a 12 team fantasy football league through ESPN (commissioner's choice). The two guys who started the league preferred the ESPN league even though I was used to Yahoo's Pick 'em leagues. I'm pretty satisfied with ESPN's fantasy platform so I don't feel I have to change.


Here is a quick explanation of a standard fantasy football league:
- Even number of teams (usually 10 or 12), one team per person
- Each person selects football players from different positions throughout the NFL
- Each player scores individual points based on how he performs in the NFL game he is playing that day
- All of your player's scores are added up against the person you are playing against that week
- The person with the most points gets a win for that week; points are cumulative and used as tie-breakers for positioning
- The season is 12 weeks long though the NFL season is 17 weeks, which allows five more weeks of NFL football for fantasy football playoffs (remember fantasy players come from all teams so that is why there is no standard fantasy football during the real NFL playoffs, also no fantasy football during the last regular season game when playoff teams are resting players since winning won't affect positioning in playoffs).
- The waiver wire: the pool of unclaimed players used to replace players on your team; these are the unknown breakout stars who emerge every season or are used as an emergency replacement of your injured, suspended, or vacationing player.


The first season I played was in a 10 team league and I placed third. Last season we expanded to a 12 team league and I was in first place almost all of the season. Then I went to the playoffs. I got a first round bye and lost both of my playoff games so I came in fourth and didn't get my money back. The guys who finished the season on a hot streak won first and second place. So this year I am hoping for better luck. It is a 12 team league again so I'm going to have to scour the waiver-wire like usual for any sort of breakout talent to emerge or to replace injured players.


So I'm writing this today because the draft (where each person selects their players) was last night. My draft went better than the previous two. My first time was all auto-draft (computer automatically selects the highest rated player based on ESPN's analysis). My second time drafting last year had me screaming at my computer. My computer battery died in the third round (of 15). No, it was plugged in. My battery was completely dead and I had to buy a new one. The computer auto-draft ended up drafting three running backs from the New Orleans Saints for my team. The computer apparently has no logarithm for diversification. This year was probably my best draft. At least the previous years of bad drafting taught me how important it was to check the weekly waiver wire.

Me working the draft. I had to use the work table to fit two laptops to use different logins simultaneously.

Pet Monkeys

I needed some material for August so I'll upload some recent photos of the famous monkeys at work.


We don't actually have pet monkeys at work, rather wild monkeys that hang out in our parking lot and the wooded area around our building. People also feed them peanuts sometimes and visitors to the building from out of town like the show. Actually there isn't a show they just walk around and climb the fence. They are much better than the raccoons who live in the same place. Those raccoons dig up the trash and make a mess.

Walking around

Looking for something to eat

Look at the rest on top of the fence. I didn't even notice them until I was looking at the picture on my computer.

See the tails hanging over the fence

There are more babies. This one is old enough to walk. Others cling to their mother's stomach.

Not worried about me passing by

Every work building seems to have some sort of wildlife around. My station in California had wild cats. After someone stole a bunch of tires from our garage, I blamed it on the cats for not being vigilant guards.

Coffee

Well I never intended for this blog to be just about vacations, house projects, or other events. This was also intended to be commentary on my life or what I would talk about on the phone. Well, there isn’t much I have done worth blogging about in the last few weeks but I still want to post something. Talking on the phone yesterday, I think I found something worth mentioning. Not something I have done, rather something I have not done in a while.

 

I have stopped drinking coffee. For over a month now, I have not been drinking coffee on a regular basis. I think that I have had two cups since my vacation. Vacation was a good time to stop drinking coffee because I normally drink coffee at work. I would bring a thermos of coffee from home every morning and sip on it throughout the day.

 

I’ve been drinking coffee for years at all times of the day. Doing the type of work I have done, many people drink lots of coffee because of the irregular hours. Working nights, rotating shifts, weekends, holidays or before sunrise, many people end up drinking coffee to stay awake or to wake up. Eventually I was drinking coffee as more of a ritual than for anything else. For a while in California when I was working the late shift, I would start drinking coffee at 6:00 pm in the hottest part of the desert and finish the shift with a full 32 oz can of Monster at 3:00 am. The Monster kept me awake for the desolate hour-long drive home. All of that caffeine made me restless in bed all morning long and I wasn’t getting good sleep. I eventually cut back and was able to change positions at work so that I only needed a Monster once in a while. Now I’m only drinking Monster on double shifts or when I get abruptly called in to work. It is mainly so that I don’t crash my car on the drive home.

 

What made me want to stop drinking coffee? I had been getting really bad headaches over the past year. I tried to change many different variables in my life: drinking more water after working out, lowering the brightness of computer screens, eating more after working out, and walking around the office more instead of sitting for so long. The headaches would normally come after a morning workout and were alleviated after taking sinus medication and extra sleep. I thought that they came from lack of rest but I was trying everything.

 

I have had some headaches since I have stopped drinking coffee but they are less frequent and the longer I have gone without coffee, the longer it has been since the headaches.

 

So now I am drinking tea to replace coffee as my work drink ritual. I haven’t found a favorite tea yet but I know what I don’t like. I don’t like strong flavors in tea and really don’t want anything with rose pedals. I can’t take drinking teas that smell like potpourri. There were some fruit-flavored teas we use for iced tea so I am trying some of those hot.

 

I still enjoy coffee, but I think that I will stick to drinking coffee as a treat at breakfast in a restaurant.