Muchacho Polaco

As we prep for the construction of our wall, I had Gab up for some tree trimming. A lot of crazy neigjbor’s trees overhang over our existing wall, so they needed to be trimmed. He made pretty solid progress yesterday and today.

I had our roll off emptied of the rock so we could fill it with trees. This is maybe 30% of what I have to trim, but we will do the rest another time.

I leave for Kentucky early tomorrow morning, but am hoping the existing wall is 7 feet tall when I get back next week. We have been waiting so long.

Driving home from mesa now and the monsoons have begun.

I had my 2nd of 2 darkroom classes this evening. This was a difficult and long day and I didn’t have time for this sort of disttaction. I’m so glad I went regardless.

Tonight we developed the film we processed last week.

I really don’t take great photos. Even so it’s still fun.

Above is the enlarger I used to make my photos.

Over all the process is very simple. I did this a lot and the eighties when I was a cadet. Although I was mostly self taught then and didn’t do much correctly.

Overall a great experience.

Back in the 80s I was into film photography and developing film in the darlroom. I had negatives of thousands of photos. Sadly those were all thrown away.

Kim recently bought me a film camera, the same one I started with decades back – Pentax K1000. So I thought it would be fun to take up a local class on developing film and enlarging photos. I had my 1st class last Tuesday when I devwloped my first roll. Everything seemed to go well. My next class is this Tuesday where I can make some prints.

This hideous koi pond has plagued us since we’ve moved in. It would have been a small investment for the former owners to have removed and would have significantly increased the price of the house. So I guess in that sense we are grateful.

Last weekend we spent about twelve hours jack hammerung on Saturday. That nearly killed me.

But as a result we have mostly removed everything. We have yet to figure out what we’re going to put in place of what was there.

The tree trunk, roots and everything that was in this corner are now all completely gone. No leaks. We are hopeful to add pavers in the near future to improve upon dirt.

Here’s another 20,000 pounds of rock we got into a rolloff. This is the second load since I started.

Got a good start to my hydroponic system. I am tring the Kratky method now and seeing good growth.

We hope to have our north facing wall raised to 7 feet by the end of the month.

Abe and family visited us last Sunday.

The weekends have become more laborious than the work week. It’s nice we’re getting caught up on some work at home. But it rules out the opportunity for any rest.

We redid the pool deck. This included drilling out the cracks and filling them. This took an extraordinary amount of time. But now we have completed the pool deck and the pool which saved us over $20k in estimated labor.

Then we changed the pool light. Later we found the control box for the new pool light was defective. That’s fun. So I ordered a new one which should arrive tomorrow. And then perhaps we can install the new control box and send the defective one back.

We then did oil changes on all three vehicles. Our fourth vehicle is up in Phoenix hoping to be sold soon. We had someone fly in from Utah this last weekend, but they decided to go with a different vehicle. We are selling it for $4000 more than we bought it 5 years ago. We could lower the price to sell it faster, but we are in no hurry.

On Saturday I picked up a half ton of mortar sand. We will need that while we raise our wall. I still need to pick up eleven bags of mortar cement which will weigh nearly a thousand pounds.

Another tax class this week. Chad joined us.

Jorge and Garrett joined me for a class I did on taxes last night.