This past weekend we started tackling a project that’s been getting kicked around for over a year now since we bought a couple of used slides for forty bucks. We decided to put a playset in the backyard. We got the wood we needed for the basic structure, we have the swings and hardware. We had the slides. We were reasonably ready to go.
Then the weather decided to go nuclear on us and turn the weekend into a 90+ degree march through misery. Everything took longer. Everything was more tiring. We got through what we could, which was getting four corner posts up and frames built around them. But that’s as far as we got on Saturday.
Sunday came around, it was even hotter, and I was pretty burned out from the day before. None of us wanted to spend a lot of time out in the sun, so we busied ourselves around the house before venturing out for ice cream and to go to Target. We needed to look for shoes anyway, our son had started complaining about his shoes feeling a little tight.
It turned out that his shoes were 2 1/2 sizes too small. Yeah, I guess that would be a little tight.
We struck out at Target, partly because their version of a sale is have that stupid cartwheel thing and we lost our password for that long ago. We then tried Kohl’s, and didn’t have any luck. The Wife lamented KMart closing and I said I thought there was still one a few towns over, 30 minutes more or less. And so I had set the agenda for the following day.
Which was still far too hot. The good news is that KMart came through. They had a bogo sale, we got a bunch of shoes for $60, and saved ourselves some money. The bad news is that our favorite donut shop was closed for the holiday and by the time we got home it was time for supper, and the Wife and Boy went to the local animal shelter to walk dogs. So, nothing got done again on the playset.
Another problem with the playset popped up. The Wife changed the design slightly halfway through working on it Saturday, and now we’re going to have to get more lumber, screws, etc. I had been trying to bare bones it as much as possible, and now I’m going to have to get a bit more involved with it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, we had been planning to build off it over time and enlarge it a bit, but it does mean more money will be dumped into it now, which…ugh.
So, I now have a half-finished swing set in the backyard, a bit of a sun burn, and I’m already tired of the heat. And July and August are still in the wings, waiting for their time to take the stage.