September passed at a blazing speed. Our Sonora Pass camping trip came shortly
after the Canada trip and I was overdue for catching up with family. Over the weekend of the September 15-16 Hanna
and I went to Los Banos to visit my sister Jen, Joe and Derek. My mom came down to join us for the weekend
and we celebrated Derek’s first birthday and also had a chance to see
Jen and Joe’s new home that just closed escrow after a year of waiting. The house is fairly new and basically just
needs the typical sheetrock repair and painting. The lot is 1/3 acre and has a nicely arranged
yard with a pool. All of the landscaping
is...well, no longer alive, due to the length of time the home was vacant, but I saw nothing but
fun opportunities to re-establish the lawn areas and put fun plants in the nice
raised beds spread around the yard. I
really wish they would start a home ownership blog…there will be no project
quite so immediate and rewarding as ripping out dead landscaping and putting in
new stuff; and what better place to showcase your efforts than a blog (hint
hint).
I
had set aside the weekend of the 22nd and 23rd to do some
long over-due work on the 4Runner. I
installed the supercharger nearly a full year ago and still had not made the
time to install the rest of the fuel system. This involved
dropping the kit's additional fuel injector into an unused port of the supercharger and
tapping into the fuel supply line to provide the additional fuel that the stock
system is incapable of handling.
Installation was straight-forward.
There is also a piggy-back computer that taps into the factory ECU
computer to determine when to add fuel and how much. Not only does this system keep the engine
safe, a properly tuned setup can provide significantly improved fuel economy
and power. Others with the same setup
have seen gains of 30 hp and a couple of miles per gallon by optimizing this
system.
By
the last weekend in September it had cooled off enough outside to do some
landscaping work. Let me rephrase that…it
*should* have been cool enough; however temps hit the mid-90s during the day,
making for a sweaty day of yard work. We
moved a few things around in the yard—a few things we planted could have used
more sun and two other plants were getting too big for where we had them
planted. Call me a landscaping novice. The planting beds in front of the dining room
(and where the willow tree was removed) had never been landscaped to my liking,
so I dug up a bunch of volunteer bushes and I removed landscaping I never liked
in the first place. The area where the
willow tree used to live was choked with roots I had to dig out and the soil
was pretty hard from the clay content; I did my best to break up the soil, add
gypsum to help dissolve the clay and add planting mix to the native soil. We moved a Mexican sage and it seems pretty
happy, the big lantana we dug up, surprisingly, does not look like it will make
it. The white lantana we moved is doing
fine. We also added a trailing yellow
lantana, a really pretty orange and red crocosmia, two fun euphorbias, a dahlia,
a black mondo grass and two other natives whose names completely escape me.
The
first weekend in April I went with Dean and Connie, Geoff, Matt and Bill up to
Calaveras Dome on a camping trip.
Calaveras Dome is something like 40 miles of dirt roads between Highway
88 and Highway 4 and we picked up the Mattley Ridge and Corral Hollow 4WD
trails on our way back to the highway.
We stopped at Salt Springs Reservoir on the way in and I found out later
that my dad had stayed at the PG&E camp there in 1971 to help with some
modifications to the spillway. From the
top of Calaveras Dome where we camped,
you are looking straight down more than 2,000 feet to the reservoir and
the Tiger Creek water diversion canal that meanders 18 miles along the hillside
between the Salt Springs Dam and Tiger Creek Regulating Reservoir. I am currently packing for another camping trip and will report back soon; it's going to be cold at 10,000 ft in elevation this late in the season.
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