Facebook Family

Being a knowledge worker, and especially a research scientist in the field of computer science, I hear a lot about social networks and web 2.0. I've even taken the time to join a few social network ventures over the years, but typically (as evidenced by my stewardship of this blog) my activity in them has been sporadic at best. I've tried Orkut, Multiply, Youtube, LinkedIn, and once, in a moment of weakness, I even created a myspace profile (which I promptly deleted with a deep seated feeling of self loathing). Of all these, the only one that I really tend to at all is LinkedIn. I really enjoy how they organize that network. It's allowed me to regain contact with old roommates, colleagues from previous companies, and students I looked up to while I was in school.

I have absolutely refused to join Facebook. I've always thought of it as the online equivalent of the frat house, and I never really wanted to associate with that crowd in college.

Well, today, a friend of mine posted a video on Facebook that I really wanted to see, so swallowing my pride a bit, I created a Facebook account. Apparantly, several months back, one of my brothers had sent me a Facebook invitation that I pretty much ignored, but Facebook hadn't forgotten. I immediately got a notification that he had invited me to be one of his "friends" on Facebook. I accepted the invitation, only to find out that I am quite literally nearly the last member of my extended family to join Facebook. Even my aunts and uncles have Facebook accounts. I'm not sure whether to be embarrassed, ashamed, appalled, or some combination of all three.

Needless to say, I've spent the last hour sending friend requests to all my family members. I feel so dirty...

Just another brick in the wall

Our housing development sits on the lower slopes of a good size hill, and our house is pretty much at the bottom of the hill. Most of our neighbors just have a significant slope through a portion of their back yard, but due to how far back in our lot our house is situated combined with the layout of the house, sloping the yard would have rendered a large amount of our back yard unusable. At least I think that’s why the original owner put a terrace in the back yard. It really makes things much nicer, we have a decent swing set in the yard and plenty of room for the kids to run around. The problem has been the retaining walls. They’re made out of railroad ties, and over the 5 years that we’ve lived here, they’ve rotted. Last year, the wall between our yard and a neighbors yard collapsed. So we replaced the wall with a manor stone wall. This wasn’t too difficult, since they had already poured a concrete slab, so we just laid the stone right on the slab, and were able to finish the wall in one day. Another wall, in our yard, was also falling apart, but hadn’t completely collapsed, so we hoped against hope that we could put off replacing it for a year. Well, it started to collapse shortly after we replaced the first wall, but we just didn’t have the money to replace it, so we just let it deteriorate.

It’s now been a year since we put up the first wall, and we had been losing dirt out of the second, so we figured it was time for the annual Tenney Terrace Wall Party. We invited a few of our friends over to help us put up the new wall, and bribed them with BBQ. This wall went much slower. I took Friday off so I could remove the old wall and do some prep work. I had intended to get the base trench dug, but first I had to remove 3 bushes that were going to be in the way (2 on the upper terrace, and one super overgrown evergreen bush that was on the lower level) and take out the old wall. The two bushes on the upper terrace weren’t to difficult to remove, at least not with a mattock. I had originally intended just to prune the evergreen bush back, but we’ve wanted to be rid of that beast for some time, so I took out the clippers, and my reciprocating saw and went to work. Finally, I began the demolition work on the old wall. I started with a crowbar, but found the wood was so rotten that the crowbar was completely useless. So, out came the mattock again. It made short work of the wall, but I think we'll be finding rotten wood debris in our yard for many years to come...

Unfortunately, all this prep work meant that I was not nearly as ready as I would have liked when our friends arrived, and most of them had other commitments which kept them from being able to help us the full day. In the end we got the trench dug, and the base material leveled. I laid 2 rows of blocks, then took the rest of the day off to recover. Over the next week, I spent 3-4 hours each night laying blocks for the wall. Tuesday, my good friend Erin returned to help me place some more blocks (despite the pain in her ear! I had no idea she was in pain or I would have told her not to come). This Saturday, I placed the last block in the wall and took some time to admire my handy work.

Here are some before pictures, along with one after picture. Two of the before pics are from Sierra's birthday the year before, so you can imagine that the wall was in even worse shape than shown here.