Two days before leaving town, we were able to get a delivery of gravel as a new driveway covering and it sure looks a lot better than it did! We’ll have to keep up with it once we get back with Round Up, but there is nothing that looks better than a fresh layer of driveway gravel, especially the first day it’s down.
In time, the weeds will have their way with it, but I love the way it looks now. Thinking back to how it looked before, this is quite an improvement. The guys who dropped off the gravel did a great job of tailgating it, where they could lift the bed of the dump truck and drop it pretty close to where it needed to be. My trusty shovel and I finished the job in just a few minutes.
Having this finished feels really great, however, as we seem to finish one project, more of them pop up just as quickly. It poured down rain last night, and when it did, the water made its way onto our basement floor! Not from around the windows we filled in by projects past, but around the windows on the west side of the house. We accidentally filled back-fill dirt too high around the wells around the basement windows, causing water to flow back into the basement window well, and thus, past the window to the floor. Yuck! My last day before being gone for four months, and I have to deal with this. 
The tidal wave of projects never ceases. Some, I just plain can’t figure out. For example: The light above our front porch. We have it on a timer so that it comes on at dusk and off in the morning. Because we are going to be in Hong Kong, I want the light on for security reasons. Because it will be on for long periods of time, I wanted to use the new, efficient, florescent, curly-cue bulbs. Not because I’m a tree-hugger, but because I want to save money. The bulb I bought was the wrong color temperature, made for the “daylight” spectrum, instead of the soft white color. After spending more money on a soft white bulb, I plugged it in, but it won’t stay off when the timer switch is off! It flickers on and off, a few times a second. I had a florescent bulb do this to me before, and it burned out a few days later . . . I plugged the daylight bulb back in, and of course, it works fine. Unfortunately, the daylight bulb at night has an ominous green, 1920’s insane asylum hallway light, type of color. The soft white looks great, but they flicker . . . Exasperating.
I’m beginning to think that the best part of leaving for Hong Kong will be the vacation from all these projects!
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