Memorial Day Weekend Recap

Hello all and Happy Memorial Day!  I hope many of you are enjoying an extra day off today.  We are blessed to have a super unseasonably cool weekend upon us to actually enjoy.  (Well, for someone like me!)  When you have to wear a jacket on walks, I say it's a victory given how many Memorial Days we've spent drenched in flop sweat.  So I am going to enjoy the cool spell while I can.  We had a ton of rainy, cold days which were good for my soul but my newly planted veggies and flowers weren't necessarily happy about it.  Whoops!  The first hint of sun they got was Friday so I'm sure they were happy to know they could actually get some sun instead of thinking they lived in London.  I have mentioned our a-hole squirrels/chipmunks around here and I saw one sniffin' around the zinnias in the side bed so what did I have to do?

Obviously I can't have them there forever but until they're not as wee, I think they should be helpful.  I had a delightful array of poke marks on my hands from the hardware cloth after cutting and assembling those puppies. 

I spent a lot of time on the patio last week and it sadly didn't take much to really break my body.  You'd think bending while standing or sitting would be fine but when you're not used to it, the lower back and calf strain was brutal.  Also, because I am me, one glaring thing kept gnawing at me.  I absolutely loathe the radon pipe and if I'm losing the amount of space to it that I am, I don't want to be reminded of it on the daily.  A video from the guy who we followed for the tables we built from 2x4's popped up for his privacy screens.  It sent me down a rabbit hole trying to see if there was a ready made solution.  They have those partitions that hide AC units but we don't have that kind of space or money available.  I looked at these decorative panels to think of how to assemble them to somehow work and it was still more than I wanted to spend, longer than I wanted to wait and we'd still have to alter them to hinge them together the way we'd need.  I thought I could scale down the one from the YouTuber and ran it by the Mr to see what he thought.  His face fell, his eyes immediately glazed and he said "let's go because he's not going over the holiday weekend to the madhouse."  I worked through it with measurements and such and figured out what I hoped would be a solution for me.  I say me because he said it doesn't bother him.  Well that's great but I didn't work this hard on getting the patio together to then have an eyesore any time I went out to enjoy morning tea.  It's do it now and be done while it's cool out or wait until heat stroke season and curse our laziness later.

We went to the depot (read dep-o as Grandma would say ❤️) and got 5 fence pickets and 4 pressure treated 2x2's for the frame.  My hope was it would be a quick project that would allow us to use the remaining scrap wood we had and give a solution to something that irked me every time I went outside which was a lot last week.  

I stupidly made the mistake of wearing my barefoot shoes because my other shoes were killing my foot but you're supposed to train for a year before going on walks in them.  Well, I paid dearly later that night when the bend on the front of my ankle cramped like a mother and the Mr had to massage a bit, my massager had to be brought into it and I had to use my tomahawk to dig into muscle all over to get it to that state where it's released but feels like it could seize at any moment.  I was so desperate I popped these leg cramp tablets that cyclists use on long rides for cramps.  I was leery because of the statins but didn't care at that point.  I popped a magnesium before finally getting to sleep at 3am.  I knew that would make for a not fun weekend mobility wise.

Saturday I got a lava hot shower and got mobile after breakfast in bed because why not.  The Mr got on his 'cut list' for the divider project.  When he was done, I painted the 2x2's with leftover black waterproofing stain.  While waiting for that to dry, I picked another bebe harvest of lettuce and arugula.

He fired up the grill and I put the burgers on and got the sides together.  It was the first time putting the table we built to use.

Still loving our bebe vintage bluetooth speaker to play my yacht rock- so take that Daryl Hall!

We enjoyed the cooler temps in the 60's and in our squished but comfy area for a little bit.  I put the last bit of paint on the ends and waited for those to dry while the Mr got the outdoor projector together for shenanigans.  Then it was time to go out and get everything assembled and it didn't take too long once we got going.  I needed to do a little touch up paint and then it was ready to roll.

I cannot tell you the stress that takes off of me visually.  I couldn't look past the mechanics of it and this was the perfect solution for that for cheap.  When things were winding down for the evening, we pulled out the tabletop fire pit and outdoor projector and watched The Goonies outside.  

It was 52 degrees so we had to grab a blanket but it was nice to finally do since we talked about it forever.  

Sunday the Mr had yet another weekend headache so we didn't really get up until it flipped over to PM.  I made chicken brats with grilled onions, the rest of our BBQ chips and baked beans from the previous day and we enjoyed yet another cooler day.  We got two samples of paint we had in our paint database for the patio steps to use on a picket that has disintegrated but it wasn't right.  I had to scour back through emails back to 2020 hoping I kept an old email and I did telling the Mr which paint color to get.  The only problem was because it was exterior, they don't do samples of those.  I don't know when quarts of paint shot over $20 but we have too many spots that were patched with the wrong color and this board that is going to be turning into dust sooner than later.  It was literally bought the day before our anniversary that we spent in 2020 scraping and repainting our fence (which SUCKED) so this had to be it.  I painted another sample piece and waited for it to dry so I could hold it up to the fence and hope for a match.  While it sure as heck didn't match the steps, it matched the fence pickets.

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I broke out the last bit of sealer I had after sanding the extra picket we got a little smoother and painted two coats on because I didn't trust we did anything other than paint it before.  It looked so nice with the sealer alone on it, I really wished we were replacing them because it looked so pretty.  The Mr removed the board so it would at least be ready to go today after I paint it.  I did stop to grab some portulacas for the pot for the small table because nothing seems close to blooming right now and I needed some color other than green, yo.  

That about summed up the weekend so far.  I am going to enjoy the forecasted lower temps the next few days before getting back to seasonal temps this weekend.

How was your weekend?

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