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Built Like a Brick
Apr. 17th, 2025 07:13 amFriday, I am going to the lab to get blood drawn while Fox goes to his acupuncture appointment. That means this weekend I can go back to lifting and running! I have to be sedentary before these tests because exercise spikes my liver enzymes, and I'm tired of my GP pushing for a liver biopsy. I don't want one - they're expensive, invasive, and we already ran a battery of other tests that were either "negative," or "unremarkable." But it's a twice yearly reminder of how much I actually love to run, despite how much I gripe about it. I'm convinced part of the joy of running is sometimes griping about running.
Fox and I have got ourselves into one of our surprise projects. We needed to replace the frames for the raised garden beds, so we went and bought some pressure treated boards and stuff. One thing that didn't help the old beds was grass growing up around the outsides, so we thought, why not use those old bricks to pave around the beds and keep grass down? We have about 200 or so bricks Fox's parents had used to pave part of their backyard, and when they pulled them up, they gave them to us. So we got some leveling sand and laid a couple of paths down. Cool.
Then we realized we didn't have enough to go all the way around and needed more bricks. We pulled the trailer out and started getting it ready to go buy bricks at Home Depot and realized the trailer was in rough shape - some of the boards were rotting out, and the braking system was shot. New project - fix the trailer. A week later, that's all done and we go to buy a pallet of bricks only to find they're on sale for like ... twenty five cents a brick. We bought a pallet and then the next day unloaded it so we could go buy another. It was a manual job - turns out the tractor's lifting capacity is a little under what that pallet weighed and it didn't seem worth possibly blowing a hydraulic line.
So, second pallet acquired and finally unloaded. Take the pallets back to HD for our deposit back. Then we saw this article on UF's website about building raised beds out of concrete blocks. You can guess where this is going.
It's coming along really well, and it'll look great when it's done. We're hoping to finish up by the middle of next week. All that brick will create a heat island, but I'm thinking of dousing the concrete blocks with water twice daily - once with morning plant watering, and again later in the afternoon. Plus nothing much grows in summer's worst heat. I've missed all the spring planting times and won't be setting anything out until September at this point, but the garden will be absolutely top notch. I've also bought and planted a couple of salmon-pink azaleas, because I've wanted new ones for a couple of years. And I didn't want a "standard" fuschia one.
Man I can't wait to go for a run Saturday.
Fox and I have got ourselves into one of our surprise projects. We needed to replace the frames for the raised garden beds, so we went and bought some pressure treated boards and stuff. One thing that didn't help the old beds was grass growing up around the outsides, so we thought, why not use those old bricks to pave around the beds and keep grass down? We have about 200 or so bricks Fox's parents had used to pave part of their backyard, and when they pulled them up, they gave them to us. So we got some leveling sand and laid a couple of paths down. Cool.
Then we realized we didn't have enough to go all the way around and needed more bricks. We pulled the trailer out and started getting it ready to go buy bricks at Home Depot and realized the trailer was in rough shape - some of the boards were rotting out, and the braking system was shot. New project - fix the trailer. A week later, that's all done and we go to buy a pallet of bricks only to find they're on sale for like ... twenty five cents a brick. We bought a pallet and then the next day unloaded it so we could go buy another. It was a manual job - turns out the tractor's lifting capacity is a little under what that pallet weighed and it didn't seem worth possibly blowing a hydraulic line.
So, second pallet acquired and finally unloaded. Take the pallets back to HD for our deposit back. Then we saw this article on UF's website about building raised beds out of concrete blocks. You can guess where this is going.
It's coming along really well, and it'll look great when it's done. We're hoping to finish up by the middle of next week. All that brick will create a heat island, but I'm thinking of dousing the concrete blocks with water twice daily - once with morning plant watering, and again later in the afternoon. Plus nothing much grows in summer's worst heat. I've missed all the spring planting times and won't be setting anything out until September at this point, but the garden will be absolutely top notch. I've also bought and planted a couple of salmon-pink azaleas, because I've wanted new ones for a couple of years. And I didn't want a "standard" fuschia one.
Man I can't wait to go for a run Saturday.
