Weekend Basketball Goal Update

All outdoor work has been suspended this weekend, because trying to do stuff in this heat would just be stupid. The Accu-Weather forecast from this morning:

Glad I got outside and did the watering at about 5:30 a.m. today.

And while I know it is not an accurate measure of the temperature, my truck sure thought it was hot yesterday afternoon around 3 o'clock:

Being inside, though, gave me a good excuse to do preliminary assembly on the basketball goal. I attached the handle and the spring mechanism, that can be used to raise and lower it. Then I started working on the backboard and rim and discovered much to my dismay that a critical part was missing. You know, the kind of part where they say something like this in the assembly instructions: "WARNING: The glass backboard will break if the Rim Impact Spacer [L] is not installed as shown in this step, resulting in injury or property damage."

I could find no Rim Impact Spacer in the wild array of parts. A quick call to the company with 20 minutes left in their customer service hours (thank goodness for Mountain Time) on a Friday afternoon put things in motion for the missing piece to arrive by the middle of next week.

So the dinner and goal-raising planned for tomorrow night will just be dinner for my erstwhile conscripts/volunteers.

In the meantime, I'm pretty pleased with how the base is setting up, and as of tomorrow we'll have reached the five-day "curing" period that was recommended. The hole is all filled in now, although I'll need to add a bit more dirt on top to get it more even, as it settles.