Walkin the dog & fixin the porch

Monday, July 4th, 2016 — 26˚C / 79˚F @ 1:31 pm – The sun is shining and it was pleasantly cool earlier — Today is our friends, Matt Kantrowitz’s and Nora Z’s Birthday —

“Before” – At around twenty minutes after 4 pm yesterday.

— At around 4:20 pm yesterday, Cathi thought she would have liked to have leveled the wooden deck while she’d been on vacation this last week, when it rained nearly every day – and was much too hot to contemplate major exertion when it wasn’t raining. The deck is outside what she calls the front door and what I tink of as the enclosed porch on the west side of the house. The door is on the north side of the porch and you can probably see how slanted it had become. I think it was fairly level when we moved in almost three years ago.

— We gritted our teeth and went out with a couple prybars and fulcrums and discovered that it wasn’t as hard to move the deck as we had feared. It was no snap, but it wasn’t that bad.

— We did manage to move the deck out beyond where it had been sinking into the sandy soil against the house. Then we tossed a bunch of gravel and moved two of those cement paving squares you can see at the edge of the porch – moved them up and against the house to support the deck’s eastern edge. (which would be on the left side of what you can see above- )

“After” — 5:15 pm.

— And, by 5:15 – { it felt like it took us a lot longer than that – } The deck was a lot more level { “Good enough for government work-” my friends in the USA used to say. } Our muscles were a little sore – but we had this sense of accomplishment, like we’d accomplished at least one impossible task before supper time. 🙂 –

“Walking the dog” –

Jassper, with his aggravated arthritis and pulled ligament in one hind leg, lives for his walks up the street, where he gets to sniff everything and possibly catch up on who’s (“who” being the 4 legged citizens of this neighbourhood- ) been where, and what they’ve been eating or drinking lately?  He only gets so far before the pain gets to him and he pulls back on his leash or just plops on the ground and nearly yanks us off our feet.

This photo was taken, probably about ten yards or meters from the photo above it. Jassper only got that far up here at the ‘top’ of the street, where there is a circle for cars to turn around.

Trees Bowing over the path through the woods.

—  Trees on both sides of the trail are bending over/reaching over the trail – that we’ve heard goes from the end of our street here up and around and ends at the ‘Smart Centre’ with its Walmart (Booo – Hiss – ) Canadian Tire ( if they allow their mechanics to cheat their customers I have no use for Canadian Tire Stores. [ a kind of big box hardware store with a bigger automotive department than any Walmart I’ve ever heard of ] ) And a Kent building supply place ( sort of a Canadian grown Home Despot 😉 store ). A couple other smaller retail outlets, like a dollar store and maybe a GNC nutrition place have ‘grown’ there since 2013 when we moved to this city.

— At 8 pm-ish, the shadows were too deep and on the wrong side of what I was trying to photograph here, I’ll have to try again under different natural lighting conditions to get this right.

— So, um, we accomplished two impossible tasks this late afternoon and evening. We leveled the porch/deck, and we walked Jassper all the way up and around the end of the street and all the way back home – which has only happened twice since we were told he has a prescription for exercising at least twenty minutes to half an hour every day. He loves his walks, it just hurts too much –  but he is showing improvement – whether it’s the medication or the exercise or the fish oil ‘sandwiches’ he gets once a day.

— Yay? –,

~~~~~ Jim