this little life of mine

View from the Pierside restaurant in Pismo Beach (enchanced with the lomo app at dumpr.net) Enjoy the view while you can, because an extention of the boardwalk is being built right in front of the patio dining area and pretty soon all you'll be able to see is the boardwalk and people walking on it. Pity, really.

ocean 3, originally uploaded by LapisBlue.

California's Central Coast.
Cambria, CA 2007

I never did get around to writing about our adventures last weekend, and there's really no point in going on about it now, so here's a quick summary:

After six straight days of rain, mom and I ventured out to dig up the backyard to find the end of the drain which was installed shortly after I moved in, what? 11, 12 years ago? Something like that. Anyway, we hadn't had any significant rain fall since then so we were totally unprepared for it and the backyard flooded something fierce! le sigh!

After doing some digging, we discovered the drain didn't end in the middle of the yard as we originally expected, but makes a sharp curve and just ... ends. The rest of the "drain" is comprised of gravel that runs along the side of the planing area by the house. Which is exactly where the flooding problem is. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Our best guess is they simply ran out of pipe, and rather than going out to buy more, just stopped and filled in with the gravel. We suspected this after seeing two sections of pipe put together with duct tape.

Anyway, we went ahead and dug a trench all along the planter area in the hopes that the water will run down to the mouth of the drain and LEAVE OUR BACKYARD!!

Lastly, we filled in the space by our patio with some pea gravel to soak up some of the water we discovered standing there after the downpour. We sloped it so it would also run down to the drain.

It's a good thing we're planning to redo the backyard anyway, since it's pretty much destroyed now. Also, luckily (I guess) the new cars that were on my short list for purchase this summer (Toyota Corolla and Honda Fit) are now having troubles, being recalled, etc., so we're not too disappointed that we can't buy a new car this year and instead have to spend our "car money" on the backyard. Okay, maybe we're a little disappointed.

Oh, and speaking of cars, after all the work we did in the back yard, we were SO ready to head inside, clean up and have a nice, relaxing lunch and rest of the day only to discover one of the tires on my car was TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY FLAT!

ARGH!

So, we drove around looking for a tire store that was open on Saturday (and I'm totally cutting this whole horrible experience in halfbecause it was long and horrible and took HOURS) and luckily found Tire Pros. They were SO nice and set me up with a brand new set of four tires for under $500.00! SCORE!

So, yeah, last weekend was pretty horrible, but both mom and I survived, I got new tires, we figured we were ready for the next storm coming and I got a fun new pair of boots:

Gotta look on the bright side, right?

Mike's shiny red pants:

Black and white Holga funky statue:

Pencil sketch self-portrait:

Lomo'd fall foliage: