Bill Roper's Journal

Ruby made another escape through the wretched section of the fence today, but happily trotted right into the minivan when Gretchen opened up the door. This all has made getting the fence fixed rather more urgent, so I have selected the vendor that I liked better and he is coming to get the contract signed and collect a deposit tomorrow morning.

We are replacing a large section of fence and repairing the rest. All of the new posts will be steel posts that are designed to be clad with extra boards to cover them up. Supposedly, this will reduce the number of dead posts in the future, which will make future me very happy.

None of this is anything resembling cheap, but I inherited some money from my father's trust last year and this is a really good use for some of it.

The sooner the yard is properly fenced again, the happier I will be.

We crawled through a bunch of stuff at work today and I think that things will be working much better when we come back to them on Monday. I stayed late to finish up a list of changes, but testing will wait until then.

Gretchen and I have pulled together the setlist for the Festival of the Living Rooms concert that we have tomorrow and I have updated the tablets to make sure all of the music is there. Gretchen will get a printed copy. :)

Fence? We don't talk about fencing.

The turnaround on debugging at work is being really slow right now, but we continue to make progress. I hope we get the current problem sorted out by tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I got a bunch of Windycon stuff sorted out.

And I still need to get something done about the fence...

I got downstairs this morning to be informed that one of the sections of fence that we'd bodged back together had fallen again. I was somewhat past annoyed. The stake had literally bent and then ripped out of the ground where -- admittedly! -- I hadn't been able to pound it all the way in, but I don't consider that to be a surprising situation.

I went out through the garage, grabbed a shovel, and went into the neighbors' yard to dig out around the base of the dead post in the hope of being able to do a better job of putting this back together. After removing a bunch of dead concrete and digging out around the stub, I answered Gretchen's text and she got the kids to come out and help.

Once we got the fence upright again, I removed the stake and quickly realized that there was no way that I could unbend it right then -- or perhaps ever. But I had one stake left. I went in and assembled the two pieces together, carefully tightening all of the screws and nuts, before taking it out to install. We lifted the fence sections and the post up into the right position and then set out to hammer the stake into place.

By the time we got it in nearly as far as it was going to go, the vibration had loosened all of the screws and nuts to the point where one of the nuts literally fell off. K retrieved it and tightened things up again by hand. Then I put in the screws to fasten the stake to the post and we bungeed the fence sections back together for a temporary fix.

I need to get someone here soon to do major repairs. I realized today that this particular post was one of the originals (you can tell, because I never put caps on replacement posts), so I guess it was due to give up the ghost.

But these stakes are pretty awful, I conclude. There was a repair stake that I liked that I bought at Home Depot around a decade ago, but I can't seem to find another one of those.

Ah, well.

In better news, I did laundry today and the new dryer performed quite well.

So *something* is working around here.

I woke up this morning to a text message from Gretchen telling me that part of the fence had blown out in the high winds and that Ruby the Dog had escaped. In an upset, she did not run away, but came trotting back to the garage, which meant that a trip around the neighborhood to fetch her wasn't necessary.

So when I got dressed, I went out to look at the section of the fence that had fallen. Except the section of fence that had reportedly fallen hadn't. It was still the kludged repair job that I had done a few months back, but it was still standing. Huh.

I walked around to the other side of the house and discovered that the gate was standing open. Well, that explained how the dog had gotten out. The gate needs to be adjusted, as it's being quite difficult to latch correctly now. Apparently, the lawn service had been in earlier in the week and had pulled it closed without actually latching it. And then the wind blew the gate open.

The gate is now properly latched.

Still need to fix the fence, but it can wait for better weather.

I hope.