Saturday laziness...

[elfs]

Omaha and I had our monthly work party at Kouryou-chan's school, and the weather turned out wet and miserable but we all survived. Omaha assured me that I wouldn't have to do gutters this time, since some other parent had already been doing them through the week, getting the school ready for the rainy season.

Well, they weren't done. Either that, or whoever had done them did a lousy job. There's one place at the school where a cement stoop slopes at just the wrong angle, and if water from the gutters overflows it hits the stoop, flows toward the door, and floods the dining room. The last time that happened we had to replace the floor. That whole side was completely blocked up. The landlord insists on using strain covers over the downspouts, which just makes the problem much worse than it ought to be. I filled a ten-gallon bucket with leaves and detritus out of those gutters.

Including a dead fish. Damn seagulls.

The rest of the day was unremarkable. I wasted an hour watching a presentation from Google Video on how Django could be improved to handle massive projects. Interesting to know if I ever make something Flickr-sized, but otherwise not useful to me. Kouryou-chan and I played some video games together, when she wasn't outside in the cold and wet playing with her friends. I had made some bread last week, and left half the dough in the refridgerator. I mixed a new batch of dough, and blended last weeks' dough into the batch I made last night.

If there's one thing that'll ruin my intended diet, it's home-made bread. Also made a batch of pasta sauce, and tried to revise that frappucino recipe. Huh, I seem to have spent a lot of time in the kitchen.

Comments

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

huh. Hadn't heard of screens over the downspout. I get plastic screen in rolls and put it over the gutters. (It is a bit wider than the gutter, so one puts a curve in it and it supports itself pretty well.) Doesn't keep everything out, and one still has to get up there and clean, but in my experience it keeps them acting like gutters and not like eave extensions longer. I have similar but much less drastic consequences if my gutters get clogged. Good luck.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

The strain covers are more like a cage, shaped vaguely like an ordinary light-bulb, that goes over and into the drainspout. The idea is to prevent large leaves from clogging the drainspout, which is a lot harder to clear than the gutters themselves. But pine needles are just the right side to butt up against the mesh of the cage, get stuck, and start a backup.