peck peck peck

I have an eNORmous red-headed woodpecker out my back window, flitting from tree to tree looking for sustenance. I love watching him slam his little face into the tree.

dfilove and I went to see a stamped concrete installation by the people we want to have redo the Ugliest Patio Ever. The house is over in another golf-course/lake community -- we'd driven through it before, and decided we liked ours better. I'm pretty sure the house we saw is the largest one there -- I swear I expected Carmela Soprano to come out. Enormous gates at the driveway, full-time gardener, pool, pool house, dock with pavilion, huge huge huge. And two very sweet Weimaraners and three kitties, one of whom was kind enough to let me scoop up and pour some love onto. Oh, and really really spectacular concrete (next to some less-than-spectacular work done by other companies before she found these guys).

But I think we've definitely found our concrete people -- after we see what the builder is going to do. We had an offer from them to refund the money that we'd spent, which covered most of the cost of having most of the patio jackhammered out and replaced -- the part they weren't removing would be covered by more concrete, giving us a two-layer effect. We got a letter from the president of builder, who wants to make us happy (and have the less-than-happy web coverage go away), and he suggested that they would replace the patio themselves, only they're afraid we wouldn't be satisfied. I suppose at this point we see if they'll use our concrete guys as subs, since we've seen what their sub is capable of.