So it’s Sunday night — where did the weekend go?

I kept myself pretty well occupied in various ways throughout the weekend. Amongst other things, I managed to get a lot of stuff around the house cleaned up. In particular, in and around my desk is now cleaned up (for a while). It’s a necessary evil, and my desk ends up being the storage and sorting point of regular [postal] mail and pretty much anything else I’m working on. So it’s a bit of a task to say the least. It usually takes an hour or better to sort it all out, and this time was no different.

I tested out a new toy last night — a new sprinkler. It’s a Nelson Raintrain traveling sprinkler. My folks had one of these when I was small — I very vividly remember it. It’s self-propelled by water and moves over an area, following the hose path. With as dry as it’s been the last month or so, I wanted to try to keep the “high traffic” areas of the lawn at least growing (so the traffic won’t kill it off for good, which would require reseeding).

So we bought one of these on Friday. And I tested it out yesterday afternoon, then set it for a real trial run overnight last night. There’s an auto-shut off block you put on the hose to stop the sprinkler where you want it, so I wanted to try that out as well.

It worked quite well, actually better than I’d expected. I started the sprinkler around 10 last night, and I suppose it ran until sometime around 3-4AM. I had it on the low gear setting (that’s somewhere around 21 feet per hour of movement) with a 150′ section of hose, not all of which was used. By the time we got home from church, you could actually see where portions of the lawn had been watered. Things actually started greening up just from one overnight watering. It was amazing.

Of course, the real place I wanted it to green up was pretty much unaffected, but it’s also the place in the worst shape. So I set it out to run again tonight (it’s running right now) on a similar path. I’m hoping to run it several nights in a row and see if it helps.

I’m not usually a fan of watering when it’s really hot and dry out, but it’s getting to the point of ‘how can I do the least amount of damage to the lawn’ — and in this case (since we can’t stay off of it to get in and out of the house) trying to keep it alive is going to be the better option (than trying to reseed a high-traffic area). It should be putting down somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2″ of water each trip, so I’m hoping that after two or three days I can stop with the front yard and focus on the backyard area for a few days.

Since the sprinkler pretty much runs itself (and more importantly shuts itself off), it’s pretty convenient for me. So here’s to hopefully getting a lawn in greener order.

I also took some time today to reorganize my ‘start page’ — my browser’s homepage that I keep stored on the intranet here at home. It’s my pseudo-calendar and frequent link page that’s inaccessible from ‘the outside’ and allows me quick access to all of the stuff I normally do during a given day. Well, I’d really not changed the link layout (or links) for probably on the order of three years. So I took some time and went through it. It’s much more concise and not wasted anymore. And it has stuff on it that I’d been using a traditional bookmark for (like Flickr and the link to the blog here).

And of course I worked a bit on the web design as well. Most of what I’d accomplished today in that regard was in cleaning up the CSS in preparation for creating the master template. It’s not done yet, and most of what I’ve been working on is related to navigation, but I’m really itching to get to the content portion of the site…so I need to get this done. But since I’m not really modifying the layout anymore, it’s just a matter of making it all look prettier (and easier to manage later).

And that’s pretty much how things go. Beth’s folks were down for a night, and that went pretty well. At least it wasn’t so blasted hot for them to hang out in their motorhome in our yard for a night. 🙂

Tomorrow’s another day at the mill; so with that in mind, until next time…

“The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.”
– Gloria Leonard

–MZ