You're not invited

This is about as clean as our patio has ever been. Kent moved the table and chairs right up by the house and swept both levels thoroughly to get rid of all the seed the birds have scattered. Plus he put away the bird feeder and the twirly decoration which also hung from the deck above us. The yellow worm-like tube you see at the bottom is one of the Hydra-Barriers. All four are filled and in place except for that one. We'll put it up against the back door later tonight.

I've been tracking the hurricane since I got up at 5 AM; Ben lives in Smithfield, VA and lost power around 8 AM. As you can see in the picture, it's just now beginning to rain in Boston at about 2PM. I know Irene has slowed down a lot and also thankfully weakened. She can weaken right down to a light mist as far as I'm concerned.

We are having a Cocktails and Portraits party this evening. Kent's planned and organized the whole thing. He's invited our friends to bring appetizers, and we'll have those plus wine and he'll take lots of head shots of everyone. As it turns out, this is now a Cocktails, Portraits and Party-Crashing Irene get-together. Stay tuned for details when it's all over, plus some great pictures.

The Duke of Earl

We've been following the 5-day forecast of Hurricane Earl as it moves up the eastern seaboard. Between the National Weather Service web site and Weather Underground, a weather junkie can get lots of information. I'd really hoped Earl would move out to the Atlantic before getting this far north but it looks as though that's not the case.

Since we're on tap to get heavy rain tomorrow, Kent arranged to have the gravel for the parking spots delivered yesterday. We're fortunate to have a good friend, Scott, who is a civil engineer. He gave us lots of good advice on how to address our water issue so Kent ordered 4 1/2 cubic yards of gravel.


In the first picture, you can see the boards Kent added to the bottom of our fence. Those boards act as braces for the gravel and should also help the water stay out of our patio. Also notice how bare the ground is--what little gravel was there before got washed away last October when that water main broke.

The second picture shows the gate with that brace board. We have about a four inch step down now with all the gravel in the parking spots. Notice too our lovely Hydra Barriers! I don't care what color they are, those things definitely help. 

You can see what five tons of gravel looks like in the third picture. We don't have any normal-sized yard tools anymore; we have a couple of tools that collapse down because there's just no need for the real deal. Unless you are spreading five tons of gravel.

And it's all spread out in that last picture.








By design, we did not buy enough gravel to cover the entire lot. We got enough to cover the fence along our property line and you can see where the gravel ends--that's the end of our property. We did offer to have more gravel brought in for the other garden unit if he wanted to do the same (and pay for his share) but he said no.

Normally the condo association would pay for something like this but due to other, ongoing issues, we knew that wasn't going to happen for a long time. Frankly we didn't think waiting another year would do anything other than stress us out. We've spent under $500 (gravel: $240; Hydra Barriers: $75; and wood for those braces: $30), which is plenty but as the MasterCard commercial says, the ultimate result (less stress) is priceless.

Tonight we'll cut open contractor-grade trash bags, duct tape them together to form a large flat drop cloth and lay them on the patio bricks near the exterior walls. Hopefully that will reduce the water seepage in through our still-unrepaired foundation.