No excitement weekend.

No earth shattering news from this end for the weekend. I "worked" (see last entry) last Sunday, so I got a three day weekend....and no babysitting duty either! (thanks Christyn)

Friday I waited around until it got over 60 and hit the road for a long ride. It was a little cool riding the ridge of Pine Mountain, but still a nice day for a ride. That evening we were invited to dinner with some old friends to Ben's Chop House where I discovered Tiramisu a couple years ago. Like every other place around here the price goes up, but food and service don't. I was ok, but not great...the company was though, so I'll not complain about it.

Saturday I sent Deb off to work and headed for the gym. We missed our normal Friday evening so I wanted to catch up. It's not nearly as fun by yourself. Then I spent a few hours cleaning up the yard. We had sweet gum balls everywhere from dropping the tree a couple weeks ago. By the time I finished that it was pushing 70 so I hit the road again. I didn't stray to far this time, basically riding all over Columbus.

Today...well...we didn't accomplish a damn thing. Had brunch at IHOP then went to a couple Dodge dealers looking for the latest SRT's. Don't need one, just wanted to check out the new colors. We topped off a wasted Sunday with a stop at Ranger Joe's coffee shop. 

Yeah, I worked harder typing this than I did at anything all weekend, other than the gym. Deb has us signed up for another car club get together in Atlanta in a couple weeks, so there's something to look forward too...more car pictures!

Car club meet and greet.

What a nice weekend we had. (Although waiting for you mother to post an update when she's traveling the world is a bit troubling)

Our main car club, Georgia LX Car Club, had a meet and greet in Columbus for a change. Usually we end up having to drive to Atlanta. This meant I could finally have a truely clean car without brake dust and bugs. I sent Deb to work Saturday in her moms old car so I could spend the day getting the car cleaned up and doing a couple of modifications. The biggest job was installing the tail light "halo's" seen here:

That was no small task, but they look great in person. We met at the local Mellow Mushroom because one of the club guys runs the place. The parking lot is being redone, so we did fight dust because of folks rolling through checking out all the Chargers (and one lone Magnum). After we ate we hit the road for a cruise around town and also to find a place to take some pictures. Only six of us went cruising because the folks from out of town wanted to get home before it got to late. One fella drove all the way from South Carolina! Debbies brother Donnie recently bought a Charger and showed up too. He's the second car in the picture below.

We followed it up with a BBQ at Celeste's house. That was a nice change of pace because we usually do that sort of thing over here.

Tags: GALXC, Charger, Magnum, 300, Georgia, MOPAR, car club

Big project Sunday.

Damn, I forgot I was going to do a "new van" entry. I guess it will have to wait, because we had a rather large project to take care of today...

Sweet Gum trees are a pain in the foot due to the prickly "balls" they leave in the yard. To make matters worse, the rather large one we had in the back yard had been struck by lightning years ago taking the top out of it. So, it was rotting from the top down, dropping rather large limbs.

You'll notice we are pretty far into this project when the pictures start. I didn't think about the camera, and Deb didn't want to see the scary part.

I had the help of son-in-law Tim. One very large limb was handing over the shed, so we tied it off over another limb. He had a harness on in the tree, cut the limb, then I lowered it. The rest were just dropped straight down. The tree was tall enough to reach the house, so I had to notch it about 20' up to section it down some. I cut the notch from the ladder, then had Tim stand on the shed with the pole saw to make the back cut. We also roped the tree to Tim's truck to provide some directional assistance. I fell right where I wanted it, which is good because neither of us is an arborist by any stretch of the imagination.

Now the yard is cleaned up, I've got quite a pile of brush for the city to pick up Friday, and the stump has a pile of charcoal smoldering on top of it. Debbie is really happy to have this project done, not because she wanted the tree gone, but because there was no damage to people or property.

Thanks to Tim, for the help, and the extra saw.