Here is the original X-ray from the urgent care.  I cropped the image and added the yellow arrows to help you spot the fracture.  You can click on it to get a full rez image.  Its possible that if I had asked to see the film that day at the urgent care I might have seen the fracture and asked what it was.  Just keep that in mind the next time you visit any health care pro, any mechanic, anybody that comes into do work on your home.  Ask lots of questions.

My material list:

We will have a ‘kitchen garden’ just off the back patio where we intend to grow herbs.  Its a perfect spot where the sun hits it about 8 hours a day and the rocks keep the soil warm.  Its also 10 or 12 steps from the kitchen sink.

We will have a ‘produce garden’ a little ways up the hill.  Still visible from the patio, but a little more than 10 or 12 steps from the patio.  Its a much larger area that was cut into the slope once upon a time.  Its 3 tiers.  The top is the smallest and the bottom the largest as it fans out radially from a center point just behind the top tier.  We’ll put in peppers, tomatoes, and about 16 other staples we enjoy.  We’ll put 4 or 5 varieties of fruit near this garden as well.

We’ll have an ‘orchard’.  The North-most part of our property is on an awkwardly steep hill.  I can climb up and down it but its really too steep to do anything with.  So we’re going to plan fruit trees on it.  There is room to comfortably put 8 trees there, 10 if we really want it.  We’ll shoot for the dwarf variety so we don’t get overwhelmed with any one crop.  Also means more room for variety.

Finally we’ll have a ‘super sun’ garden.  This area probably has the longest daily exposure to the sun and is very visible from the street…its in the front yard!  Our house faces South, the solar exposure means there is no better location for a vegetable garden.  I’d like to discover some showy edibles for this space.  Anything that produces nice color will be some of my first picks for this area.  We’ll finish off the front yard with a citrus tree.

Big ambition.  I may fail at a good amount of it but I expect to learn something in the process.  Hopefully when my kids are old enough to help prepare food they will know right where to get the freshes ingredients and will be able to run out and grab them.

This isn’t an issue of good or bad customer service.  This is an issue of those creating the content and those distributing the content becoming the same players.  When this happens it is tempting to throttle access to the competitor.  The implications are large.  News content being filtered through company policy and evaluated for how it will effect company profits before it is approved to be released to the customers and the citizenry.

This and other battles for net neutrality will not play out on your television.  Though it is in YOUR best interest to watch these debates, it is NOT in the best interest of your data provider.

Meantime, with services like Hulu, Netflix and Slacker I am certainly thinking about canceling my cable.

I found this article at Planetsave.com while doing a search about the amount of water used to irrigate residential lawns.  I don’t  know anything about them but they site predictions from two researchers at UCSD that Lake Mead has a 50/50 shot of drying up in the next 12 years.  I don’t know who these two researchers are either.  They do have some interesting figures on residential water use in the Southwest.  Their figures put potable residential water use for irrigating a yard at 57%.  This much is reasonably accurate from what I have read from other, confirmed sources.

So what?  I know many complain about the rising price of water in my area lately.  All the while they are irrigating a lawn area equal in size to as much double the area of their home.  Even more in some cases.  According to EMWD’s figures given in a testimony at a Senate subcommittee on local water resources they have gotten dependance on non-local water such as Colorado River and California Delta down to 56%.  Still a pretty big number but its down from 80% prior to a 34% population increase.

It occurred to me, our residential outdoor water use (read lawns and shrubs) percentage is about equal to our dependence on non-local water resources.  I don’t have all the other figures necessary to do a proper comparison but I suspect we could do a lot to make our community water independent in our own yards.  Water independence might become a pretty significant word in the coming years.  I urge everyone to keep that in mind the next time we are mowing our lawns.

In light of this, I have two pieces of advice that will NEVER let you down:

1. Don’t piss off the electrons, they bite.
2. Always double check your GROUNDS, then check them one more time.  Your stuff will do the most peculiar things if the ground is loose or not connected.  In fact, there are way too many odd things that can happen with electricity if the ground is bad to list here.  So, if you are working with something electrical in your house or car and something spooky or unexplainable is happening…check those grounds.

Have fun and don’t get electrocuted!

I AM a home owner with big ideas and little funds
I AM a persistent guy with little fear of failure
I AM willing to tear it all down and try again

Check with your local building codes before you begin, make sure there are no restrictions regarding the construction of retaining walls or free standing walls.  Also, be realistic and safe about what you are about to do.

If you are reading a news feed from Facebook or Google Reader, click through to the actual blog post.

There are a few pictures and resources on the internet about building a dry stack, round field stone wall.  My intent is to add to the volume of information on this process by including pictures of my build-up as well as put in links to some of the more useful websites I found when trying to figure out how to do this.  More detail concerning my key steps are in the captions of my pictures, so I’ll let them speak for themselves.    Here are a few things you should know before you get started.

1. Don’t neglect site prep.  I live in Southern California and on some pretty hard dirt.  Freezing dirt and frost thrust and all that jazz is just fairytale to me.  But if you live somewhere that freezes, its worth it to dig down nice and deep and put a gravel base in.
2. Natural field stone doesn’t have to be expensive, in fact, it doesn’t have to cost more than a little fuel to go pick it up and lunch for your friends who help you move it.  Any BLM managed land has stone free for the taking as long as you can pick them up by hand and put them in your non-commercial vehicle.  If you aren’t building anything too big, this might be a good option.  If you are building something bigger, take more time and visit more locations.  With a little hunting you can find all the stone material you need.  Don’t be shy about asking around to see if anyone has some stone that was illegally dumped on their property.  Some of these folks are happy to have you come and remove some of the trash that has been left on their property, just ask first.
3. Lay out all of your material ahead of time so you have a good view of it all.  As you are building, remember you are putting together a puzzle with all kinds of pieces that may or may not fit.  Remember that biggest on the bottom, smallest on the top.  Use really small stuff to fill in gaps.
4. Have a lot of DG or soil around that you can shovel in as you go.  You are not using mortar, so you need something to create some friction and to take your stones captive.
5. Don’t be concerned about ‘perfect’.  If you are doing this project, perfect actually doesn’t look right.  You want something more natural looking and a few small gaps here and there are ok as long as there is some soil in the gaps.  Its a great opportunity to plant some cool rock rose or some other small, rock-loving plant.

Click on the pictures below to get a better view of what I have done, there is a description with each picture.  Remember, I am not a professional so this shouldn’t be considered professional advise.  Think of me as your neighbor who did this last year and is willing to offer some pointers from his experience.  I successfully built a wall that is stable and has survived rain and a dog running around on it.  It fits in nicely to a rustic setting and as long as you stay within some simple guidelines, your wall will be successful as well.

I found these websites helpful when I was figuring this out:

DIY Network’s Rock Solid: Corny hosts, but they seem to know their craft.  They handle this topic a lot.
Drystack Retaining Walls (Moss/Field/Stone): PDF uploaded by Cornerstone Marketing Group.  Handy write up on site prep.  I don’t know anything about the authors.
eHow-How to Bulid a Dry Stack Stone Wall: This was handy little taste of building a wall.  No pictures and brief summaries of what do to.  Add it to the knowledge mass.
Google: Yea, its a sarcastic link to add.  But search for dry stack fieldstone retaining walls, maybe its how you found this post.  Keep searching.  There is lots of good stuff out there.

Remember that being persistent and embracing failure as a learning experience will get any project done well.  Since you’re doing a dry stacking wall – taking it down and changing it up is easy stuff.  When you are done you will have a beautiful fixture in your landscape and it will likely remain for years and years.  And guys, your wife will be really impressed!

Have fun!

I always think, “Someone should put up an article with better pictures or more detailed explanation.”  Well, I am going to start putting up my own how to’s or DIY articles that revolve around projects I have done or want to do.  I don’t think I can do a better DIY article than the other sites, but I think I can help others fill in the gaps that are left by the DIY television shows and free articles online.

I’ll start with a dry field stone wall or planter.  Stay tuned.

But, this morning…I have a new idea.

Keep an eye out, I’ll post something up this evening.