I ended up driving to Harbor Freight in Orem to buy a utility trailer today. I called this morning and they only had one left, so I asked them to hold it for me. It's got a load capacity of 1800 pounds, but it doesn't fold up and also doesn't have the stake pockets needed to build the sides up, but I can just make my own. I hurt my back really bad helping to load it into the Mazda, so I'm not sure that I'll be able to put it together as fast as I'd planned. The box that it came in was 7'x1'x1', so not only did I have the front passenger seat folded all the way forward, but the box stuck out the back window too, which made for a fun drive home with exhaust fumes getting in the cabin (no biggie, it helped dull the back pain). =) Luckily, Motor Vehicles doesn't require registration for trailers under 750 pounds, and this one only weighs about 350 or so.

After I get it put together, we'll have to wait until the weather gets a little nicer before Traci and I can go buy all of the stuff we need to re-do the dining room. That may not be until next weekend anyway, but at least that gives me plenty of time to assemble the trailer without hurting my back further.

Things have been going pretty slow on the the home improvement front lately. I had planned on at least starting work on the dining room by now, but that hasn't happened. The room is nearly empty and ready to go, but I haven't gotten around to buying the materials I need yet. I went to Provo for work yesterday, and while I was up there I stopped at Lowe's and Home Depot. I was surprised at how shitty Home Depot was. Lowe's had everything I needed, and it was all quality stuff. Home Depot had very little of the stuff I needed, and the things they did have were of poor quality. I haven't bothered looking around here yet--if Home Depot in Provo doesn't have everything I need, I certainly can't count on CJ's or Kilfoyle's having it.

The only reason I didn't bring the materials home yesterday was that I have no way of bringing them home. I ordered this utility trailer from Harbor Freight two weeks ago, but it's back-ordered and their customer service has no idea when it'll be back in stock. I went to their Orem store while I was up there yesterday and they actually had some 4'x8' utility trailers in stock, but they were heavier-duty than the one I'd ordered, and they cost $100 more, so I wasn't sure I wanted one. My problem now is that even if I wanted one from the store, I'd have to make two trips up to Orem--one to pick up the trailer, then I'd have to bring it home to assemble it before making the second trip up for the materials. It'd be cheaper to rent a trailer to bring everything home in, but I'd really rather have a utility trailer of my own, since it'd come in handy for a lot of other things as well.

Traci's sister and her boyfriend are getting married in Vegas in a couple weeks, so we'll be heading down there for just one night to be there when they get hitched. As is always the case, Traci's parents are trying to take control and make all the decisions, such as which hotel everybody should stay at and how we should all pay for it, supposedly all in the name of convenience. It doesn't make much sense how letting them book a hotel for me and then later writing a check out to them is a "convenience" to me. That's one reason why I'd prefer not to do things with them, because they always want some modicum of control over their adult children. They'll play the parent role, and they expect everybody else to play the little kid role, including their childrens' spouses.

Anyhow, we're leaving Michael here with my mom on Friday and Saturday, but we'll have to bring Bradley with us. It doesn't sound like we'll have much time to play by ourselves, since Traci's planning on following her mom and sister around the entire time, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do...

Up until this afternoon, there had been a cat stuck in one of the trees in front of my house for four days. Traci finally called the dog catcher this morning to have them come take the poor animal out of the tree before it died up there. Finally, this afternoon somebody from Price Shitty came out with a cherry picker and got the cat down. Instead of returning it to its owners (some horrible family from up the street), the dog catcher took it to the animal shelter as a stray, which basically means that the if the family wants it back, they'll have to pay for the cat to get all its shots and whatnot. I actually thought it would be cool to be the only person on the block with a skeleton in my tree, but Traci saw it differently.

This evening, I had planned on going to both of the geocaches that I'd placed and replacing the plastic Rubbermaid boxes with metal ammo cans. I did the one near Kenilworth first, and didn't really have any problems--I had to park about a half-mile away and hike through the snow, but it wasn't too bad. The one near Carbonville, however, really sucked. I was almost to the cache when I got the Mazda stuck in the mud. I tried for about 25 minutes to dig myself out with my e-tool, but I finally gave up and started walking. Half of the walk back was through some pretty nasty mud, and I must've had five pounds of mud on each boot. There were some houses about a mile away, but I decided to walk another mile beyond them to Grogg's, since it would have sucked waiting at some stranger's house for help to arrive. So I sat and sipped on a Coke while waiting for Traci and my mom to arrive in her 4Runner. When they showed up, I drove to where the Mazda was stuck, then hooked up the tow rope and yanked it out. I had to back the 4Runner down the road for a bit to find a place to turn around, then I went back to the Mazda and backed it up almost to the paved road before finding a place to turn around (and damn, my neck still hurts).

Now I'm exhausted, and I'm pissed off because that took up a huge chunk of my day that I'd planned on using for more constructive things. And tomorrow, I'm going to take my mom's 4Runner to the car wash to get all the mud off of it (more mud that it's ever seen, probably), and I may wash the Mazda if I have time, but I doubt I'll have time to do all the things I had planned for today. At least now Traci's agreed that we need to replace the shitty automatic hubs on the Mazda with new manual hubs, so I won't have to worry about walking home ever again (hopefully).

Wow, more than a week since my last update. Not much has been going on around here--just the normal daily grind. Michael's third birthday was Monday, and the day turned out pretty good. I can't believe I've been a father for three years now. In some respects it seems like it's only been months, but in other ways it seems like this is the way things have always been, probably because I can't imagine how things were without kids.

A work crew started early this morning on paving over the gaping hole in the street out front, but unfortunately it wasn't the boys from Nelco--it was Price Shitty. They did their usual half-assed job, moving and compressing a lot of asphalt with their fucking boots or the backhoe rather than the fucking steam roller that they brought along. The asphalt they used was cold, so cold that when they tried dumping it out of the dump truck, it wouldn't flow out of the dump bed, and they had to use the backhoe to remove it in chunks and then break it up so it could be spread out. Nelco used a saw to cut the torn-up asphalt on a straight edge so the re-paving job would last longer, but the clowns from Price Shitty ended up tearing the straight lines up with their backhoe before paving. They also didn't bother cleaning up a lot of the gravel left on the road from the filled-in trench, which means most of the new asphalt won't stick very well to the existing stuff. I have no doubt that within a couple of months, the seam where old meets new will be ripped to shreds, since this is one of the most heavily-travelled streets in town. And I'll be the first one to complain to the city about it, since I indirectly paid for that job through my homeowner's insurance.

I got a shitload of money back after filing my taxes, and instead of spending it on stuff that I really need, Traci and I decided that we'd do a little home improvement (arr arr arr!). We're going to start off by remodeling our dining room with some beadboard on the walls, a chair rail and new baseboard all around, a window seat, and a lot of other improvements to the room. After that I'm going to put up a fence and a gate in the driveway, forward of the back door, so we can let the kids out the back door without worrying about them playing in traffic in front of the house. We're also going to get a playset for the kids, a new roof for the garage, and we'll re-do the upstairs bathroom as well.

It looks like we'll be getting roughly the same tax refund back each year from now on, and I'm not inclined to change my withholding allowances, since a forced savings isn't necessarily a bad thing for us. Although, if the same happens next year, I'm buying some guns. A lot of guns.

What the F? The Utah DMV approved a license plate that says FSHITUP. How this made it past their Schutzstaffel scrutiny is baffling. I couldn't believe that "shit" would make it past their human review, let alone their computer review, but currently, anything with "shit" in it will even make it past the filters on their website. As of this morning, "UDINK" would even work, but I emailed Lynette Byrd at the DMV to see if they had relaxed their rules, and she informed me that "We have not relaxed our rules since we last met." It's too bad that I can't have my last name on a license plate, all the while somebody is driving around Utah County with "FSHITUP" on his truck. Congratulations to the guy for pulling one over on the DMV, though. =)

Utah is one step closer to having laws requiring you to brush your teeth regularly, eat your broccoli, and exercise daily.

Traci and I went to the store yesterday, and it was the first time we'd gone anywhere since the front yard was torn up. I guess we had sort of forgotten about the whole mess while we were gone, because when we pulled back into the driveway, we both just laughed at the mess that the property has turned into. It is so damned ugly.

While I was on my lunch break yesterday, I noticed a Price City employee just sort of milling around the front yard and taking notes in a small notebook. I went outside to see what he was doing, and he said he was with the "trees and parkway" department or some such thing, and that he was just surveying any possible damage to the tree roots that could cause the trees to die. I thought that was pretty funny, seeing as how we've called the city on a few occasions to get them to trim dead branches off the trees, and they haven't even done it once. In fact, when the tree in my back yard caused the power line to short out and caught fire to some weeds two years ago, they said they'd send somebody out to trim the tree. Well, they finally sent somebody to trim it just a couple of months ago--luckily for me, they just cut the damned thing down.

Questar was out here yesterday as well, to repair the unmarked gas line that the backhoe struck on Tuesday. When they first showed up, I thought they were worried about the place where the gas main got nicked, but there was actually damage to the line running from the main to my neighbor's house that they had to repair. It was a little unnerving, since they were working only 20 feet away from my house, and the guy down in the hole was wearing a fire-proof suit, an oxygen mask, and he had a tether attached to his harness so he could be yanked out of the hole by one of the other workers in case something happened. On top of all that, he was welding the new line together, and I don't believe they shut the gas main off, because my furnace was still running the entire time. There must have been a shut-off valve between the main and the section of pipe they were replacing, but I didn't see one when the line was exposed the other day.

In the street where they buried the trench, they filled it in mostly with 2-inch rock, and the last foot or two was filled in with road-base gravel, whereas it was all dirt before they dug the trench. Now, whenever a car drives over the filled-in trench, it shakes the entire house. It's way worse when a large truck or school bus drives over it--the windows and doors shake, and the tremor can be felt anywhere in the house. I hope they pave it back over pretty soon, because I'm getting worried that all this shaking is going to damage the house's foundation, or even worse, damage the new sewer line (which is currently the envy of the neighborhood :).

It's amazing how much you can take for granted something like flushing a toilet. Our house finally has indoor plumbing that works! The guys from Nelco finished plumbing in the new line around 2:00 this afternoon, and before 5:00 they had cleaned up and left. My front yard is a disaster, and it'll have to stay that way for a few months until it's warm enough to plant grass. I added some new pictures to the ones I did yesterday. I'm relieved that this is all over with--I even received the check from my insurance company today. There are still going to be some payment issues to work out with the insurance company, since the city's sewer line marking was way off, and they failed to mark one of their water lines, and there was a gas line that Questar failed to mark. All that made for a lot more digging by hand, and it also made it so they had to tear up the sprinkler system (but luckily it won't affect the amount I have to pay). Ok, I'm going to go enjoy a long hot shower, something I haven't been able to do in my own house for four weeks.

There is a huge freaking hole in my front yard. The guys from Nelco got here around 8:30 this morning and started digging a trench beginning right at the base of the front porch and working towards the street. About an hour after that, a trackhoe as big as my house arrived, and they parked it right in my front yard (presumably for when they rip up the street tomorrow). I've already uploaded some pictures, and I'm sure I'll be adding more later in the day.

Yesterday, somebody from Nelco distributed fliers throughout the neighborhood informing everybody of the road closure tomorrow. When I talked to the foreman this morning, he said they received a lot of calls from my neighbors who thought they were replacing the sewer main, rather than just my lateral line. They had to disappoint a lot of people by telling them that it was just my line being replaced, but apparently they heard a lot of stories from other people who've had problems with the sewer on this street. I'd like to think that if enough people got together and complained to Price City about the problems, that they'd do something about it--but then again, with my years-long lawsuit against the city for the sewer backup that happened a few years ago, I know from experience that they'll just laugh in everybody's faces.

Update - 7:28 pm: That whole "boring under the sidewalk" idea didn't work so well. They tried running this huge torpedo-looking thing, which was hooked up to a huge compressor via a huge air hose, under the sidewalk through the existing sewer line, but there was apparently too much muck down there for it to really work. The thing was so damned loud, and pretty powerful--I was sitting at the computer working when I felt it start running. Anyway, they're going to end up just tearing the sidewalk out since they can't run under it, but that's no biggie. The one thing that's not surprising is that every single underground utility that Price City marked was marked incorrectly. After the sewer line leaves my house, it almost immediately starts angling southward, so by the time it meets up with the main, it'll be about 30 feet from where Price City had it marked. And when they marked the water lines, all they really did was mark where the water meter is on the parkway. There ended up being other water lines running under there that weren't marked, but luckily they didn't break any of them. They did have to do a lot of digging by hand though, which really slowed things down. They're supposed to be back here around 7:30 tomorrow morning, and I'm taking the day off work since it was too distracting trying to work with all that activity going on, so I'm sure I'll be woken up by construction equipment.