In Which Jer And Connor Have A Daddy Day, And I Work On The Deck

I had an awesomely productive day today.

It was mostly Jeremy and Connor free, though, because the guys went on a field trip together!  Connor doesn't get to go out with just his daddy very often, so he was pretty excited about it.  They spent the whole day together; they were gone from ten in the morning until five in the evening!  They started out at the Glass Museum (where they watched the artists make snakes out of glass!), wandered around downtown Tacoma for a while and found some lunch, and then drove back to Puyallup and saw Toy Story 3.  Or about two-thirds of Toy Story 3, anyway; apparently Connor got bored towards the end and started making way more noise than was movie-appropriate, so they ducked out early.  Oh well.  Then they finished up the day with some ice cream!  I'm so happy that the two of them got to spend some quality time out and about together, and Connor had a blast.

I spent most of the day either cleaning the house or working on the deck; Jake was here today and we mixed and poured the concrete for the front ramp landing.  Jake gave it a brush finish, which looks fantastic.  I'd never worked with concrete on this scale before, and after having now done one measly 8 foot by 4 foot ramp landing, I'm relatively sure I never, ever want to hand mix concrete for any larger projects.  The twenty-some-odd bags we had to mix for this were more than enough to make me sure I will have very sore shoulders tomorrow.  We'll be pouring the landing and sidewalk for the ramp that runs down the side of the house in a few weeks, and I'm pretty sure we'll be bringing in a truck for that, because there's no way my shoulders and back would be happy mixing up that amount of concrete.

We also planned out how high the benches on the deck will be set, and I spent some time this evening designing our paver patio that will go in next to the deck and calculating out costs and the number of pavers we'd need for the pattern I drew.  I believe the patio will be the next project after the deck is completely finished; we're just kind of working out way out into the yard.  I don't think the patio will be quite as intensive a project, though, because we'll be sand-setting the pavers instead of using concrete.  Most of the work will be digging out the area to lay the gravel, sand and pavers.  Which is more than enough work, believe me.

This thing is going to be so cool when it's finished.

~Jess