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George Carlin passed away today …. thought I’d post a link to a you tube video of him: click here

Well… yesterday we redid our walkway that we paid Landscape Remedies to do, that we were unhappy with.  We returned all of the flagstone rock to Stone Plus and swapped it out for bigger pieces.  Sore as hell today.

Went to balance my checkbook this morning and noticed an unapproved charge from Landscape Remedies for an additional $230 that I did not agree to on our final conversation… so we’ll be calling them tomorrow to see what that is about, and why it was charged to our card w/out notification to us.

Well… today we went to Stone Plus in Orange Park, and explained to them that we had some flagstone in our walkway which was installed by a landscaper, which we were unhappy with. They let us know that we could exchange the flagstone out for larger pieces and pay the difference in the weight.

It pretty much sucks that we have to redo work that we paid for, because it was done incorrectly, but at least in the end, we’ll hopefully end up with something we are happy with. Stone Plus has great customer services… wish I could say the same for the landscaper we used!

It has been over 95 degrees and muggy for more than a week.  It rained so much here that my grass grew about one foot in five days… yet we couldn’t bring ourselves to mow it until tonight when the sun started going down, because every time you step out the door you feel like you are going to melt.

If the housing market wasn’t in the toilet…. I think we’d both love to put the house on the market and move to Asheville or somewhere where it doesn’t resemble a sauna every time you walk out the door!

My bad experience with Landscape Remedies in Orange Park, FL:

We needed to have a walkway put in our front yard ( for curb appeal ), from our front door to our driveway, and decided to go with natural stone. We went to the Stone Plus in Orange Park for ideas, and got several recommendations from them on landscapers to use. Unfortunately, two of the landscapers were out of business, and we could not get the other two to return our calls…. so we then decided to call around and get several quotes.

Our most reasonable quote was from Landscape Remedies in Orange Park, so we decided to use them. ( Mistake #1, don’t ever pick a landscape company without going back to the ’stone place’ and asking about them, or asking around about them. ) Landscape Remedies came out and did the work last Friday and on a scale of 1 to 10 ( 10 being the best ) … I give them a 6.

While the woman I dealt with from Landscape Remedies was very nice, I am just not sure she was very concerned about what we really wanted done in the long run. I described everything to her, and even offered several times to meet her at the stone place to show her exactly what we wanted, at which time she insisted that she knew what I wanted, and that was unnecessary ( Mistake #2, always insist on going to show the landcaper the stone you want ). At this point, I was under the impression that she’d be going to the ’stone place’ to order our stone, and pick out the stone herself. I later found out, that she simply called and told them what kind of rock we wanted, and just assumed they would send out the right stuff.

When the Stone Plus delivery truck arrived with our stone last Friday, all the stress began. We ordered four different types of stone, flagstone to step on, rounded creek rock ( grapefruit to cantaloupe size ) for the border of the walkway, fill stone to go in between the flagstone, and two big boulders to go in our back yard. The creek rock we received were all about the size of a watermelon or larger ( not suitable for a border ) and I immediately told the guy that he must have the wrong stuff, and called the Landscape Remedies to let them know I thought they had ordered the wrong stone. The landscaper told me there were supposed to be smaller rocks mixed in with these for us to pick out ( on three palettes we found about 10 useable rocks ).

I also noticed that I didn’t see the boulders we ordered ( now when I say a boulder, I held my hands out about 3 feet wide to show how big I wanted it ) … the stone guy said they were mixed in w/ the watermelon size pieces, and when I did finally find them, they were about a foot wide, so I told him he could take those back… that I’d just keep two of the bigger creek ‘border’ rock for my boulders … since they were all so huge.

Anyways, at this point I was pretty stressed out, and I probably should have just sent everything back and postponed the job until they agreed to meet me up there to select the rock, but I didn’t, because I don’t like confrontation, and try to be easy going ( Mistake #3 .. don’t be easy going.. you’re paying for this stuff! )

The landscaper insured me that she’d be bringing out a palette of smaller creek rock with her, and they’d use that for the border, which they did. Landscape Remedies arrived to do the work at about 1:30pm. They tore out the grass, laid out weed block, put the creek rock down ( at this point there wasn’t enough of these rocks to do the walkway exactly the way I wanted, which was to fan out at the end where it met the driveway…. which I’m not too happy about ) … I didn’t realize until two days later that the walkway is about a foot wider at the door than it is at the driveway … so I’m going to have to go out there and fix it.

The next big problem came when they opened the flagstone palette… all of the pieces were small.. when I saw them start laying these down, I went to talk to the landscaper, and was happy that she told me right away they were sending these back for bigger ones ( but this wouldn’t have happened if they would have went to see the rock the night before to verify it was acceptable ). At this point they were going to break for lunch, and I was informed more flagstone would come after lunch, but that the woman I had been dealing with all day would not be back.. just the workers.

The workers came back after lunch with flagstone that wasn’t really much bigger than the first set, and put it down. At this point it was about 5:30 pm on a Friday .. and had been one of my most stressful days in a long while.. I just wanted this over with… I thought maybe I could explain some of the problems when I spoke to the woman on the phone ( in the end, they never even asked me if I was happy with the job ) … so I told the poor guys that had been sweating their butts off in 95 degree heat that it was fine … so they then put the fill rock in ( the only rock that was actually right to begin with )

I would definitely not recommend using this company… and if you are going to use any type of service company.. I also suggest having someone deal with them that isn’t a really nice person that likes to avoid confrontation.. like myself.

I have an iPhone … Lori has a Blackberry ( her employer just gave this to her a few months ago )

iPhone: take it out of the box, sign up through iTunes, good to go in about 30 min. Simple to figure out how to take photos, download music etc in just a few minutes each…although I’m a bit disappointed in the ringer selection.  Setup my email in 10 minutes to pull down my Gmail account.  Everything is extremely user friendly.

BlackBerry: 45 minute software installation, only to find out you can’t import iTunes music. Cannot figure out how to download photos to it, can’t get email to work. Did get google talk working which was nice…. but this thing is not user friendly whatsoever…. they need to take some lessons from the iPhone interface!  So far everything we’ve tried to do with this thing results in a call to customer service.

I visited Panther Creek Golf Club in Jacksonville, FL yesterday.

The Course

I am only a beginner in golf. I’ve been golfing for four months now. This golf course is not for beginners… in fact… I’d venture to say it isn’t for the ‘occasional’ golfer at all. After playing nine holes here, I was ready to sell my golf clubs, and decided to watch the others in my party for the other nine holes.

The fairways on this course are very narrow. If you have a bad slice, or if you are a beginner, bring an extra box of balls. If you hit it off of the fairway, on most holes, your either in water, woods, or thick briar patches… so not much chance of getting your ball back. Right now there is a pretty bad fire ant problem on the entire course…. so watch out for the ant hills!

The Amenities

Pros:

The cart girl came around about 6 times while we were here. This is the most I’ve ever seen a cart girl at any course I was on. Also, we were plesently surprised that there were bathrooms available half way through each set of 9 holes, which are accessible from several of the holes easily.

Cons:

The parking lot is currently unpaved, and we had to park in the mud.

The club house had poor customer service. My group stopped in after our first nine…. and my playing partner and I ordered a Hot Dog lunch combo and Ham Sandwich lunch combo ( combo comes with a drink and fries ) .. the girl behind the counter said it would be a few minutes. Thirty minutes later, someone went up and ordered a Hot Dog, and received it within 2 minutes. After about 50 minutes total, we received our hot dog and ham sandwich, no fries. I told the woman behind the counter we should have gotten fries, and was completely ignored. I went to the pro shop ( which is pretty empty at the moment ) and mentioned our bad service, at which point the manager said he’d come out on the course to speak to us in about 20 minutes. Never saw him at all.

Overall

Panther Creek gets a 2 out of 5 from me. We won’t be returning to this course until they improve the customer service in the club house and some of the amenities, and until we’re a bit more seasoned in the game. For now, we’ll stick to Fleming Island, Eagle Harbor, Eagle Landing and Magnolia Point.

We went to Savannah last weekend… have never been before. Apparently January is off-season and most of the shops on Tybee Island are closed. That was a bit disappointing. I found that the seafood there was much better than that we’ve been having in Jax lately. The oysters were excellent. All of the old buildings were really interesting, but the city really needs to do something about their parking situation. I haven’t spent so much time looking for a parking space since my college days at UCF!

We picked up a painting of dogs by Ron Burns at a shop on the River… at the time I didn’t think much about the $80 price tag, until I got home and saw his paintings are selling for $2k. I’m wondering if it was mismarked, as a print ( they had his prints there as well..but we opted for the framed painting instead),… unless there is something about paintings I don’t know about… where this is a different kind that is cheaper??