I always cringe when I’m watching or listening to sports news, and some athlete is listed at 80%. What exactly does that mean? You can run at 80% your normal speed? You will get a hit 80% of the time that you normally would?
Well, never before have percentages meant so much to me, in both directions.
Our patio is probably 95% complete. Of course, the last 5% might take until 2012 for me to complete, and Jen will just have to deal with it. But for the most part, you can tell it’s a patio, and if you stand on it you will not die. These are the goals of a registered Structural Engineer? (Did I ever tell you guys I passed last October’s exam? I remember whining about studying but don’t know if I ever shared the good news. But I digress…)
Simply put: yes – those are my goals and I’m damn proud of them.
My ego doesn’t permit me to believe any of you show up on the first Sunday of the month to read my blogs, and don’t make any other appearances on Jen’s site. But just in case that’s the case, let me sum up the case for you.
Last Christmas, when I went to hang lights along the roof, the exterior brick veneer decided I was too husky for its liking, and shifted about 2 inches. 4700 threatening phone calls later (Jen can be MEAN!) we finally got the builder out here to repair the wall. As some sort of olive branch, he left us the excess bricks for our use.
I figured with $1500 worth of free bricks, I was probably $1000 away from a sweet patio in my backyard. Well, the quotes from the pros came back more to the tune of $3500, and to channel my inner Damon Wayans, homey don’t play dat.

After some sort of mind meld, hocus pocus or other some such, I was magically convinced that I could undertake this project myself (I told you Jen was mean). As one of my wife’s friends so cleverly put it, “it only takes them 30 minutes on HGTV. What’s the big deal?” (I’ll take care of her later.)
Well, needless to say I almost quit about 17 different times. My hands look like I ran them through a meat grinder and I’ve pretty much had a permanent charley horse for 3 weeks. But it’s all worth it to save a few bucks, right? Right!!?

I’ve still got work to do as I mentioned before. Unfortunately that “some” work can also be referred to as cleaning/spreading/removing 3 tons of dirt and rock. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go convince Jen that my back is at 40% right now… anything higher and I’ll be carting rocks till sundown.
Td