Backyard – Final Phase, Complete!

Well, its finally done and none too soon as I start school next Monday!
The sod was delivered and the concrete came, all on time. Our two flatwork foremen came out with a few people from each of their crews, i think there were a total of 7 guys out here helping me pour the patio. My uncle came out to make sure everything was going well, which it was. I turned the Mexican music up and we were all having a good time, made me feel like i was working back in the field again. Those guys out there working on the concrete everyday are good people and hardworkers. !Muchas gracias mi amigos buenos! Eres muy bien trabajdores.
I BBQ’ed some chicken and hotlinks for the guys and bought a 12 and 24 pack of corona(Which was all gone before the job was finished!).

So here are all the pictures of the different steps in improving my yard (I can’t believe it, it looks like a real backyard now!!!):

Concrete stamp closeup.

Here is a close up of the stamp, and you can see in the background where we are going to have our fruit trees & Garden.

Pic of finished backyard!

Finished!

Climate change sceptics bet $10,000 on cooler world

This would be interesting to see the outcome of the bet, unfortunatley we have to wait a decade…
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Climate change sceptics bet $10,000 on cooler world

John G. Roberts Jr.: In His Own Words

John G. Roberts Jr.: In His Own Words: “Roberts vehemently opposed the creation of a temporary court between the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, an idea that was being floated by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger to reduce the Supreme Court’s workload. In a memo to Fielding on Feb. 10, 1983, Roberts urged instead that the court decline, for example, to hear so many death penalty appeals:
‘My own view is that creation of a new tier of judicial review is a terrible idea. . . . The fault lies with the Justices . . ., who unnecessarily take too many cases and issue opinions so confusing that they often do not even resolve the question presented. If the Justices truly think they are overworked, the cure lies close at hand . . . . So long as the court views itself as ultimately responsible for governing all aspects of our society, it will, . . . be overworked. A new court will not solve this problem.’”

Our backyard project update.

Well, We now have a sprinkler system installed… Talk about a lot of work! We trenched where our new outdoor faucet is to go, so we now have one on both sides of the house. Later I borowed a rototiller from work and till’ed up my yard, then Christi and I trenched where our sprinkler lines are supposed to go (Thanks go out to Greg, my company’s landscape division head, for telling us where to lay it out!). We layed out and set up the sprinkler system, made sure it worked and then burried it back up, and today I just finised grading our future patio so it’s now ready to be poured. Hopefully it will get poured by this Friday so I can get the sod in this weekend too.
Also, thanks to my Uncle Frank for helping me set the forms for my future patio!

This is hopefully what our patio will look like:

Here are some pictures of our last two weekends:

Here is a picture of me adjusting one of the form boards and you can see the trench of where our new faucet is.

Here’s Christi helping dig the trench for our center sprinkler.

If you look closely you can see an old pipe we uncovered, it wasn’t made of steal but some type of morter or brick material.

After finally getting everything up and running I finally get to adjust the sprinkler heads so they shoot in the right direction.

Christi posing for a picture of our completed sprinkler system. Notice the wet dirt, that is where our lawn is going to be!

Google Calculator

Check out the google calculator… very useful!
Google Help : Search Features

My stand on abortion.

While surfing the net in my spare time at work I came across a site: Catholics for Choice.

I read through their Q&A portion of their website and couldn’t find any compelling argument to agree with their position. Instead of discussing logical reasoning for promoting their position they instead have a slew of survey/poll results on what different people in different parts of the world think. I doubt you can convert someone who has logical or philosophical reasoning to be pro-choice by saying “Everyone else thinks its OK.”

While I attribute my being pro life to me being Catholic and accepting the Church’s teaching on the issue, I also need to prove the position to myself on a logical level. In that respect:
I believe that life begins at the moment of conception simply because, scientifically speaking, that that complete strand of DNA is the basis of a new human life that has never existed and never again will exist. It is a unique strand of human DNA, its not the mothers DNA and therefore not a part of the woman’s body.
I think in this modern era people have less humility. By that I mean that they have less respect for who we truly are and our place in this universe. Everyone has desires and urges, but more importantly responsibility to ourselves and our fellow men. We have to acknowledge that we are both animalistic and spiritual beings. I think that old ways of living had a lot of merit but were followed due to tradition instead of really understanding the reasoning behind them. Now as we as a people are becoming more ‘educated’ we need to understand something before we commit to it(Thanks Adam & Eve!).
I have a feeling, or maybe its just hope, that eventually a lot of old traditions will come back but we will more fully understand the reason for practicing them.
I can also foresee that if we continue to base all of our decisions on our animal urges but use our knowledge to forgo any concenquences we would end up as a frankenstine society. One aspect would be we will end up having a ‘baby factory’, where people will wish to have their reproductive organs removed so we can ‘enjoy our bodies fully.’ If this sounds like the society you’d like then you should also enjoy reading Karl Marx’s work. He believes that government should be the ones to raise kids only because families are inherently evil.

Well, I gotta get back to work. Sorry if my ramblings seem a little disorienting, no proof reading was put in to this blog.

Interested in Scientology?

Xenu – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Xenu was about to be deposed from power, so he devised a plot to eliminate the excess population from his dominions. With the assistance of ‘renegades’, he defeated the populace and the ‘Loyal Officers’, a force for good that was opposed to Xenu. Then, with the assistance of psychiatrists, he summoned billions of people to paralyse them with injections of alcohol and glycol, under the pretense that they were being called for ‘income tax inspections’. The kidnapped populace was loaded into space planes for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). The space planes were exact copies of Douglas DC-8s, ‘except the DC-8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn’t.’ DC-8s have jet engines, not propellers, although Hubbard may have meant the turbine fans.”

Science says so, so it must be true!

This link is for all the men who are constantly getting in trouble for not listening to their women…

Men do have trouble hearing women, scientists find – Yahoo! News