Blog-O-Chibi

The Patriot Act. Sleep soundly, America.

The latest project in our never-ending quest we call the backyard was getting the rest of our concrete "driveway" broken out, which was about a month ago. Using broken concrete as a landscaping material makes good sense. For one, it's free. Two, you don't have to dig stone out of the ground and use energy to transport it to get it to where it's going to go. Some call it Urbanite. I've heard it described as the "local stone of Berkeley". At any rate, we decided to make a bamboo grove at the back edge of our yard to act as a hedge for privacy as well as a windblock. The photo shown here is taken after the concrete was broken. Click through to get to my flickr set where you can see how the project went.

Took this on our backpacking trip we went on earlier this month. You can of course click through to see all the photos at flickr. Enjoy!

Current Status For Chibi:
Physical: Fair (recovering from cold)
Mental: Slightly dulled from the Robitussen & Sudafed
Emotional: Slightly elevated stress level--Mrs. Chibi was in the hospital last week for some relatively minor surgury (she's doing fine) and I was sick so it was rough. This week is better.
TV: Daily Show, Colbert Report, NHL hockey, other crap (TV is friend to the sick)
Music: John Vanderslice, New Pornographers, Sufjan Stevens
DVD: Bend It Like Beckham (good), My Life As A Dog (very good)
Web: haven't found anything too exciting lately
Other: Getting some bamboo installed in the back yard next friday and need to get the broken concrete bed complete in time. Have been harvesting a few radishes from our garden (our first home-grown veggies!).

A worthy entertainment choice.

Sure, their stuff is cheap and all. And you can't help but recognize their stuff when you see it in someone's house because it's got that signature Cheap Scandanavian Modern look and feel. So what? I still love IKEA.

This could come in handy. I may even read it myself.

Sometimes, something comes along that I just can't pass by. Something so awful that I just have to share. With all two of my loyal readers who seem to keep coming by according to my sitemeter. For you, my good friends, I give you...

PRUNO!

Hopefully this give me the kick in the ass that I seem to need to write something. If Pruno can't do it, my cause is surely lost.

I really did have every intention of getting back into the blogging habit, but a whole lot of stuff kept getting in the way. After Hawaii, we've been busy in the back yard doing some landscaping projects (some pictures will come up someday in the not too distant future I hope). When we replaced our fence a few years back, we kept the old redwood boards, and now we have put them to good use. We built an herb spiral and several planters. Mrs. Chibi has become quite the afficianado of power tools. This past weekend I rented a jackhammer to bust up some concrete (which will be used to make a large raised terrace for our future bamboo grove) with my buddy Mr. Anderson. We were crusing along. The slab that was where the old garage stood before it collapsed was old and thin. We just used a big digging bar and a sledgehammer to break those pieces up. Easy. The next section to tackle was two strips of concrete that was supposed to be a driveway. It was a bit thicker and had reinforcing wire throughout. Much tougher. For each strip we first had to jackhammer out a small section so that we could start prying up big pieces and then using the jackhammer on them. When concrete lays on the ground, the ground ends up absorbing a lot of the energy of the hammer blows and so what ends up happening is a hole in the concrete. But if you lift it up first as you make the hole, a chunk will crack right off. So while the driveway was more difficult, we still made pretty good time busting it up. Next was a big slab that we discovered was reinforced concrete on top of old concrete. Two layers! Now things got more difficult. It was next to impossible to get the pry bar in between the layers and just jackhammering the slab only made holes. At that point, we were pretty beat and gave up for the day. Some tough work lies ahead...

No guard rails here, folks. Just a nice ocean breeze and spectacular views.

Here's how you get up to where I took the panorama shot. Kinda steep. I am taking photos from on top of the heap on the left side of the shot looking out to the coast, also to the left.

OK, so after licking my wounds and figuring out what the point of life is when it all seems so terribly absurd, I am making my comeback to blogging. Like Elvis in '68, only much better, only not so much hype. I decided that after getting my shit together, I was ready for a break. So off to Kauai with Mrs. Chibi. One of the best things I've done in a while.