!Por Fin!

We finally finished the "redeployment" of our patio today. It's been nearly a month-long process but we're done! It was hard, hard work - we had to pull up aprox. 500 8"x15" cement pavers, knock off any existing grout, level, and re-lay them in the new pattern.

I started out de-grouting the blocks with a cold chisel, but found out quickly that this wasn't what Snoop Dogg meant by "Cold-Chizillin'". After cleaning off aprox 2/3rds of the pavers I rented a wet saw to make some custom cuts for corners & odd angles, and found that it was much better than smacking the grout off with a chisel. It only took me 4 hours to do what it had taken me over two weeks to do earlier!

We rented the "Wacker-Packer" again today - it's an industrial-grade plate-compactor. We used it to pack the gravel base a few weeks ago; today we used it to settle the pavers into the sand between them and the gravel. After packing we swept more sand into the crevices between the pavers and called it good.

We celebrated with a pitcher of Margaritas and a feast from the smoker: bacon-wrapped corn & chile pepper (N.Y.) steak. Mrs. Fishpimp found a couple recipes that sounded awesome, so we gave them a whirl. I don't mean to be controversial, knowing that generally speaking bacon improves any dish that it is added to, but the bacon-wrapped smoked ear of corn was nothing special. It was good, but I couldn’t taste the bacon at all. The steak, on the other hand, was fantastic! Even though chipotles are so ubiquitous now a days that they may have jumped the shark, the recipe is a definite keeper.