2002-11-18 - 10:39 a.m.

So it came to pass that Saturday wasn't quite as rainy as we had figured it would be for the morning at least, so out went the three of us (we had company for the weekend, a friend of ours from NC who had just gotten laid off of her job, so wasn't in the mood to be antisocial, so she came to our place...hey, whatever works :) )

Anyhow, we went off and acquired a posthole digger. A hand one...you know...two sticks attached to large spoons and a hinge.

And it worked like a charm.

The 4 1/2 inches of rain over the last week and a bit probably didn't hurt any, but the posthole digger went in, brought up large clumps of damp clay, and in about 90 minutes, we had four more holes.

Contrast this with the two and 1/2 hours it took us to make eight holes with the power auger, and the fact that the power auger was heavy and icky, and I hurt at the end of it, whereas the posthole digger left me a bit tired, but nowhere near as exhausted as I had been wrenching the mechanical beast out of the mire.

Sometimes handtools are good.

So now we're 12 holes into the mission, with 7 to go...not bad, not bad at all. Five nights to dig seven holes...I can do this. That's only like 2 holes a night with two nights off. No sweat...it's too cold to sweat.

Should help with the arm strength a bit too...and heck, if we have any leftover quickrete, I may just redig the pell hole and set the pell holder in concrete as well.

Then on Sunday we went out and got the rest of the fence stuff. So now poverty sets in...all told, this simple little backyard fence, fencing in all of 2400 square feet, is costing us around $700.

The *really* crappy part of this is that we had to buy 200 linear feet of fence fabric, when we only need 155, because Home Depot sells it in rolls of 50 feet. So we're going to have 45 feet of fencing material we don't need, don't want, and have no use for.

Anybody know what to do with 45 extra feet of 48" fence material? Leave suggestions in the guestbook.

I'm hoping that we may get lucky and be able to stretch the other three rolls enough to cover the five extra feet we need (the instructions say you stretch the fence by about 10%...so...*if* that stretch isn't already figured in to the measurements we may just be able to), in which case we should be able to return the extra roll and get back $40.

We'll see...no way to know yet.

All I know is one short week from now it will all be over and the dogs will have a nice yard to run and jump and play in. That'll be worth it.

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