I'm a guy. A married guy.

That means that, pretty much always, whatever I do is subject to criticism upon review. Wait - that's not exact enough...pretty much always, anything that I do will be criticized after the fact. If I paint something, it's the wrong color, or I dripped somewhere, or I didn't hold the brush right. If I plant something, I didn't add the right soil, or I didn't mulch it correctly. If I sire a child, I gave her the wrong chromosomes - it was the OTHER set of chromosomes that she wanted.

But, this last Wednesday, I had Silas take the sun sails down - the ones that we had just put up.

Last night, we had a windstorm, with gusts measured at 53 MPH in the Valley (we can be sure that it was higher in Circle Mountain) - absolutely everything was affected by the wind. Kia the Labridiot just huddled in the middle of the house, trying to get away from the sound of That Awful Thing Outside.

And Ethel said "Thank God you took those sun sails down!"

In fact, she said it several times.

I mentioned that I'd see a road sign that got knocked over by the winds on Sunday night - here it is:

                    
...That big chunk of brown stuff at the end of the signpost is dirt-covered concrete; it doesn't look like it from here, but the concrete filled a hole about a foot deep (my posts were only 18" deep in concrete, and they were twelve feet tall). This is the image that burned into my brain on Tuesday morning; it's the image that woke me up at 3:00 AM on Wednesday morning, and caused me to tell Ethel (when she got up) "...have Silas take down the sun sails".

Now comes the challenge; to find a way to install those sun sails that won't result in a disaster. Having had the experience of installing them once, I'm much more ready to try it again (I'm one of those programmers who loves to throw away his first version of ANYTHING, because I always learn so much doing it the first time that the second time is much easier and better). This time, I'm going with metal posts, we're going down four feet, I'm going to T the middle post so that the corners of the sails can overlap, and I'm going to drip a couple of boulders into a couple of deep holes for the ground-level anchors, and then concrete 'em in there real nice.

I'm actually looking forward to it.

Especially since Silas is the one who runs the jackhammer :)

jim p.