Category: Uncategorized

Post #1991: My bike made a funny noise the other day …

 

 

Caution:  This post is an aging-related first-person anecdote.

… as I was riding it.

Sort of a creaky-cracky sound.

I assumed it was something amiss in the drive train, as the sound came and went right in time with my pedaling.

Tried to suss out what it was.

Turns out, it was my knees.

Whoa.  That noise, coming out of my knees?  Oh, that’s unambiguously bad.

In my defense, I’d never been in this situation before.  On the plus side, I did eventually figure it out.  And turned around, and headed home, and eased up.

So, I eventually did the mostly-right thing.

It just takes me a while to make up my mind.

Post #1987: Just another bit of Future Shock.

 

Yesterday I tried to buy a garlic press that wasn’t made in China.

Literally, anywhere but.  After looking at Amazon listings for maybe 15 minutes, I could not find one.

And, to be clear, I don’t mean “made in the USA”.  I mean, made in any country other than China. 

But, among 20 Amazon listings examined, of the half that had explicit country-of-origin information, all of those were made in China.

Its not a huge surprise that I failed.

The only thing of interest was the breadth of the failure.  China, Inc. doesn’t just cheaply mass-produce a single, widely-sold model.  As might have been common perception in my youth.  Today, by contrast, on Amazon, as searched below, China produces every make-and-model for which country of origin information is listed.

Source:  Gencraft AI.  The prompt was … Rosie the Riveter holding a garlic press.

Methods:  (As if anyone cares.)  Two searches on Amazon for “garlic press” (less the quotes) are shown below.  Top is “featured”, which is how Amazon presents it to you, by default.  And then sorted by (descending) average customer rating.  (Other sorts were examined, but were uninteresting, e.g. cheapest first).

Aside from the occasional lemon (squeezer, N/A below), I slashed through those products for which China was explicitly listed as the country of origin, on Amazon.  And question-marked the ones where nothing was listed, or only a coy “imported” or similar non-specific phrase was listed.

Featured by Amazon:

 

Sorted by top customer rating:

Of the listings for which explicit country-of-origin information was given, all said “China”.  With red slashes above.  With one exception (U.K.?) which turns to be an error.  That’s actually made in China, but you have to work to ferret that out.

The bigger surprise was the about half the listings don’t show any country-of-origin information.  Once upon a time, I thought there was a legal requirement of some kind, that anything sold retail, and not made in the U.S., must show country-of-origin information.

As with many things, I may mis-recall that.  Or it’s one of the quaint laws from my youth that has been allowed to pass into irrelevance.  Further, that might only strictly apply to the physical package.  And may be unenforceable (see, e.g., Pur canning lids at Ace Hardware, Post (G22-002).

In any case, the device listed with the U.K. as country of origin was wrong.  I finally tracked the same item down on the Williams-Sonoma website, where they plainly say that China is the country of origin.  A letdown, for sure, but at least Williams-Sonoma didn’t dodge the issue.

No coy “imported” from Williams-Sonoma.  They named names.  That’s laudable, if perhaps not profit-maximizing.

Conclusion:  Pardon my Future Shock.

Source:  My back porch.

The results of my search are even more boring than they first look.  Or scary, depending your your viewpoint.  No shock that every (fill-in-the-blank) you can buy on Amazon is made in China.

But, having grown some garlic, I now would like to buy a device to let me use it without peeling it.  (Fresh, I find it like-onto-impossible to peel it.  As if peeling garlic were ever a pleasant chore to start with.)  It appears that my sole option for a garlic press is to buy one manufactured in China.  (Or get an ancient one in a thrift shop.)

Upshot:  I can have any garlic press I want.  As long as it’s made-in-China.

This is just a small contributor to my permanent state of Future Shock.  Which, briefly, is an unsettled feeling due to the rapid rate of change of your own culture, by analogy to “culture shock”, for a displaced person.  It is culture shock, but the culture I am unfamiliar with is my own.

(I think Future Shock is a good part of what drives Trumpism.  But that’s for a different post.  But trends are what they are, no matter how much you yack about them.  U.S. coal industry employment, below:

Partly, I experience a lot of Future Shock just because I’m old.  E.g., I will likely never get used to (e.g.,) electronic restaurant menus, to be read on-the-fly, on a phone.

But partly, it’s just plain weird out.  Here in the U.S.A..  What passes for weather here.  What passes for politics here.  And so on.

Universal mandatory made-in-China is just a tiny part of that.  Not the most disconcerting thing in my world.  Not by a longshot.  But it’s off-putting.  

I’m stubborn enough that I’m going to check my local thrift shop(s) before I spend a dime on a made-in-China garlic press.  Even a well-made-in-China press.  Just because I’m old, I guess.  I’ll see if I can find a functioning antique in my local thrift shop.

The Functioning Antiques. Great name for a rock band, as Dave Barry used to say.

Post #1985: Some comments on decaffeination and weight loss.

 

Ironically, one thing I cannot do, without caffeine, is expository writing.

Perhaps the only useful point of this post is that a) I need caffeine and b) it makes me hungrier, some hours later.  Caffeine is no friend when dieting.  That’s my conclusion.  That, despite its direct effect on speeding up your metabolism.  I find that it amps up feelings of hunger, later, relative to how hungry you would have felt, had you not consumed it in the first place.  For me, in the context of dieting, that drawback outweighs any putative effect of speeding up metabolism.

The rest is just detail unlikely to apply to the typical reader.

If I can lose just 15 more pounds, I’ll be overweight.

Source:  The Gummint.  https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmi_tbl2.htm

And that’s good news.  Because it beats being obese, which is where I’ve been for roughly the past four decades.  But that’s water over the dam.  Today, counting from my highest-remembered weight (285?), to yesterday’s gym-dehydrated low (235), I’ve now lost about fifty pounds, in a little over ten months.  BMI-wise (above), I’ve gone from the solid 37 charted above, leftwards on the chart, to be an aspiring 31 BMI.

Just two clicks away from merely being overweight.  Huzzah.

For you, and you alone, I now reveal all my weight-loss secrets.

Alcohol

My weight loss mainly stems from failing to drink a thousand calories of ethanol nightly.  That started in September of last year.

I can therefore recommend giving up heavy drinking, if and as applicable, in favor of abstinence, as a good starting point for weight loss.  For me, weight loss simply ensued.  There was a brief period of rapid “water weight” loss, followed by a slow but steady pace of “real” (i.e., fat etc.) weight loss.

I attribute the sustained, slow weight loss more to improved general health than to the direct effect of foregoing the alcohol calories.  If nothing else, once I quit drinking, I ate more.

TMI.

Long and the short of it is that having one’s liver working well reduces one’s hunger pangs.

And that helps a lot if you’re trying to lose weight.

Who’d have guessed, given the central role of the liver in human metabolism.  /s

Wheat

Wheat’s my frenemy.

(Rant:  Just FYI, I took a dislike to the term only when I spelled it from its pieces (friend and enemy) — so, frienemy — and got the evil red underline of bad on-line spelling.  I don’t grasp why spelling butchery is allowed to accompany creation of the portmanteau word.  Allow stuff like this, and the next thing you know, kids will pronounce Bros. to rhyme with snows, instead of others.).

I used to crave (e.g.) pasta, even as pasta increasingly disagreed with me.  Sometime between last September and this past January, it occurred to me that I should try saying adios to wheat. 

So that’s what I did — mostly.

I guess the issue is how frequently the old me would resort to something like spaghetti or ramen as a meal in itself.  That is, make a quick meal or snack almost purely from carbohydrate.  Call that a starch bomb.

Metabolically, starch-bombing yourself has to knock you somewhat off-kilter.  It may not be as extreme as eating candy bars to quiet a rumbling stomach, but it’s in the same family.  It might be reasonable to expect some blowback down the road, in the form of increased hunger later.

My point being that any resulting weight loss attributable to abstaining from wheat may or may not be due to anything particular to wheat, it could be due simply to easier avoidance of starch-bomb meals.  As, in the past, and for most of my life, my favorite quick meal was real pasta in any of its glorious forms.

While gluten-free pastas exist, they are at best an adequate substitute for real (wheat) pasta.  They are food, but they do not do not exactly whisper “eat me”as I eye the pantry.  They are food in the sense of being a source of calories.  FWIW, my favorite gluten-free pasta is corn-based elbow macaroni from Barilla.  It’s good when freshly cooked but does not refrigerate/reheat well once cooked,   The 12-oz box if it rehydrates to roughly the same volume as the 16-oz package of real pasta, which in turn gives Barilla elbows a light “mouth feel”, which is a plus in a gluten-free pasta.  In any case, it’s a quick meal of sorts, with red sauce and cheese.

At some level, it doesn’t much matter whether wheat has some undefined properties that something-something-something and boom, you’re fat.  Or whether it’s just a case that a ban on wheat greatly reduces my consumption of high-starch meals.  I may eat some wheat, but I won’t buy (e.g.) boxes of real (wheat) pasta, thus ensuring less opportunity and less temptation to go for a quick starch-bomb-type meal.

And that’s good.  I think.  Either way works for me.

That said, it’s a hassle to avoid wheat.  Mostly when eating out.  But I don’t have to avoid every bit of it, as if I had celiac disease.  I just no longer make a meal of it.

 

Caffeine, the world’s favorite drug

Source:  American Chemical Society

Finally, I stopped consuming caffeine somewhere around February of this year.

Caffeine is the joker in the deck.  For me.  YMMV.

It’s the lowest-common-denominator, drug-wise.  It’s everywhere.  For example, the recently-passed revised zoning regulations in the Town of Vienna, VA mandates that any redevelopment of retail space along the Maple Avenue corridor must contain at least one coffee shop for every 20,000 square feet of ground area.

/s (But we do have a lot of coffee shops, in what is nominally a town of population 16K.)

But caffeine, like its big brother speed, has some undesirable metabolic side-effects.  At the very least, it can enable self-abusive behavior by being able to shock you awake chemically, despite being in a state of fatigue or generally poor mental or physical condition.

For sure, caffeine has direct effects that suggest it should help you lose weight.  Caffeine revs up both your nervous system and your metabolism.  Raises blood pressure.  Lowers reaction times.  Speeds digestion and elimination.  The whole shootin’ match runs faster under the influence of caffeine.  Or, at least, mine does.  Which should (and I think does) mean that you burn more calories.  (Pretty sure all of that is true, but I’m not going to check references.)

So what?  Don’t people say your energy will rebound, a few days to a few weeks after you stop all caffeine?  So, over the longer term, caffeine should make no difference one way or the other, for your metabolism.  Shouldn’t it?

That’s what they say, and it may even be true for some.

Not for me, a 65-year-old man.  Not if you mean “rebound back to your prior, caffeinated level”.  My decaffeinated energy level did not return to my prior, caffeinated level.

Instead, I’m slower at all speeds, once I’m decaffeinated and past the detox period.  Absent caffeine, all my gears, mental and physical, seem to have dropped down a notch.

But this may not be such a bad thing, for losing weight.  Even if the main effect of caffeine is to speed up your metabolism (which should help you to lose weight), let me make the case for de-caffeination helping weight loss.

First, I don’t miss the post-caffeine hunger pangs I used to get.  So all that “speed up your metabolism” jazz sounds great, until you realize that means that you’re just going to get that much hungrier, that much sooner, as your body burns through your short-term reserves faster under the influence of caffeine.

But more importantly, all my reactions are more muted when I’m de-caffeinated, including my reaction to being hungry.  Absent caffeine, I don’t so much react to hunger as recognize it, and realize that I should eat something.   Eventually.

I haven’t lost my appetite.  But my hunger no longer screams at me.  It’s more of a nag now.

I have no idea how long this blessed state will last.  I can’t really say exactly what caused it.  But if I could bottle and sell it, I’d be a billionaire.

In any case, weight loss without undue suffering is news to me, as an adult.   Never experienced it before.  (Without weight loss drugs, I mean.  I have no experience of that.)  I attribute the relative ease of weight loss, in part, to not being routinely strung out on caffeine, due to a general “dampening” of feelings of hunger that comes with being fully de-caffeinated.

Alternative, it might be due to a synergy or threshold effect from the combination of no alcohol and no caffeine.

Maybe the Mormons are onto something?

Or maybe it was Dick Gregory.

So there you have it:  I’m uncomfortably numb.

I’m closing in on 50 pounds of weight loss.  Give it another couple of weeks, and I’ll be there for real, and not just glimpsed at my dehydrated lightest.

So far so good.  I don’t seem to be losing much muscle mass, based on the weight machines at the gym.  And I feel better.  Mostly stuff that one would expect. Think about taking off a 50-pound backpack, and you’ll get the gist of it.

Never drinking caffeine has some major downsides.  I’m just plain dumber without caffeine.  So I cheat.  Or, more specifically, I drink some caffeine, occasionally.  Mostly when I’m trying to write something.  As now.

But the big unexpected upside to going caffeine-free (or nearly) seems to be reduced feelings of hunger.  Turning that around, maybe, in hindsight, a caffeine-driven lifestyle adds to the likelihood of overeating.  For some.

For sure, I do not consider caffeine to be a help to dieting, as is sometimes suggested.  For me, it is a hindrance.

Back on task, if I lose fifteen pounds more, I’ll be classified as overweight, not obese, per my body-mass index (BMI).

But I do lot live and die by the BMI table.  Mostly, that’s because I’d have to lose another 60 pounds to achieve normal weight, per BMI.   Like that’s going to happen, absent widespread famine or terminal illness.  For my height, “normal” BMI is less than I weighted when I graduated from high school.

Hey, I’m big-boned.  I’ll settle for “not obese”.

In any case, the only way I can describe it is that this weight loss has been easy, so far.  (I mean, after I got various addictions under control.  After that, it’s been almost effortless.

I just eat “moderately” and I lose weight slowly.  What a concept.  I sure wish this had happened earlier, and I hope it never goes away.  Weight loss without suffering.  What a concept.

When I reach for explanations of this apparent sea-change in me, one explanation is that, when I gave up alcohol last year, something in my brain broke.  I seem to have lost all sense of “craving”.

Not just craving for alcohol, which is fantastic.  (Truly, if I hadn’t lost that craving, I would not have been able to achieve a prolonged period of abstinence.)

But in a classic case of baby and bath water, I seem to have tossed out any sense of “craving” in general.

This makes for a dull(er) life, but is a real asset when it comes to losing weight.

In any case, I seem to have ended up in a state of being … uncomfortably numb?  I’m not blissed-out all the time.  If nothing else, that would be hugely abnormal for me.  Instead, I (e.g.) get hungry, but most of the time I can’t be bothered to do anything about it.

From a weight-loss perspective, that’s ideal.

While 90% of this change that is mental, surely the other half is physical.  (With apologies to Yogi Berra).My metabolism is on a more even keel.  That starts with a lack of ethanol calories, but proceeds from there to a ban on wheat-centered meals like ramen or pasta, leading to fewer starch-only or starch-heavy meals.

And ends with respecting caffeine for the drug that it is.

I do admit, however, that a potential alternative explanation for sustained, seemingly effortless weight loss would be some form of cancerous tumor.  As opposed to my change in lifestyle.

But if so, hey, at least I’ll die thin.

Ba-da-bing.

It has been a bit weird, losing this much weight.  I’ve changed clothing sizes, but that’s to be expected.

I didn’t expect to resize items that I would never have associated with being fat or thin.  Things like my bicycle seat (the butt-to-pedal distance has changed?).  The strap on my bike helmet (my head/chin now has a smaller circumference?)   I’ve had to shorten my watch band.  I didn’t even know I had wrist fat.  Let alone lose enough of it to matter.  But the steel watch strap does not lie.

And yet, this amount of weight loss has been surprisingly far from a life-changer.  Some things are easier.  Again, imagine taking off a 50-pound backpack.  But on the whole, it’s been less of an improvement that you might think.

The biggest disappointment is my skin.  I need to devote an entire post discussing the various snake oil treatments available for stretch marks.

/s. I think.

I feel lighter, yes.  Younger, no.  Guess I’ll have to settle for that.

I gotta go eat something.

Post #1983: Commentary on the recent Presidential debate.

 

Post #1894: Commentary on the NY Times/Siena College poll results.

From my November 2023 post, shown above, regarding a Siena University poll:

Here’s my take on the main message:

Biden’s too old.  

And other stuff, sure.

Weirdly, the main writeups seem to skirt this issue.  But to my eye, this is something that everybody agreed on.

Separately, smears work, disinformation wins. 

...

But if my only alternative to Biden is Trump, then “too old” doesn’t exist.  If Biden’s breathing, I’m voting for him.

Nine months since that Siena U. poll, and I’d say that pretty much nothing has changed.

Luckily, this Presidential race is very much a case of needing to outrun the bear.  You don’t have to be fast, to outrun that bear.  You just have to be faster than the person you’re running against.

And so, thankfully, Biden doesn’t have to be a great candidate for President.  He just has to be a better alternative than Trump.

And I’d say he has that knocked.  For me, if forced to choose between an old guy who struggles to keep his head on straight, but hires the best and brightest, and understands America’s place as leader of the free world, versus a dictator-smooching adulterous shameless liar who hires his relatives for key jobs and seems dead-set on destroying the American system of free and fair elections … I’ll take the old(er) guy any day.

Not much of a defense of the Democratic candidate, but given his opponent, it’s all that’s necessary.

Post #1982: Will the real political donation limit please stand up?

 

 

It has reached the point where half of my incoming emails are spam from the Biden campaign. 

These emails are all solicitations for donations.  Given that this is all coming from the same source, you’d think they could figure out a way to limit it to one-a-day, or some such.  With this volume, they have crossed the line between persistent reminders and simply being annoying.

In any case, today it finally dawned on me that I could unsubscribe.  This is an odd thing to do, given that I never subscribed to anything in the first place.  But, semantics aside, as long as it gets them to stop, that’ll do.

The point of this is that I am baffled by Federal campaign finance limits.  Every time I hear about the latest multi-million-dollar fund raiser by either candidate, I keep coming back to what I thought the law said, regarding contribution limits:  $3,300 per person, per candidate, per election.  Like so:

Source:  FEC.

Normally, I’d just chalk that up to the norm for modern America, which is that there are no binding rules for the rich, only for the little people.  So, of course candidates can hold $100K/plate fund-raising dinners, for their campaigns.  At the same time that hoi polloi are limited, by law, to $3,300, if donated to to a candidate’s campaign.

I would do that, except that among my emails from the Biden campaign is a request to donate $5K. Like so, from my in-box:

How on earth can the Biden campaign solicit a donation for $5K, from a mere commoner like myself, when the legal limit on donations to a political campaign, for an election, is $3,300?

I realize there are no binding limits on what the wealthy can spend to try to influence politics.  But if there are no real limits to what the average Joe or Jane can spend, I sure wish they’d revise the law to make that clear.  The current situation — a $3,300 limit which just about everyone seems to be able to avoid, one way or the other — turns Federal campaign spending limits into more of a joke than they already are.

 

Post #1981: Have you ever wondered why fat guys hang their gut over their belt?

 

It is not from being too cheap to buy a new belt.  In most cases.

In reality, a guy with a beer gut has no choice.  Belts seek the geodesic, that is, the path of least distance.  In this case, the path is around your midsection at the belt line.  If you have big gut, and buckle your belt at your navel, it’ll sag.  Maybe not immediately, but soon.

 

Left to its own devices, your belt ends up below your gut, at your personal geodesic. Continue reading Post #1981: Have you ever wondered why fat guys hang their gut over their belt?

Post #1977: Updated: Twenty bags, and done. What I have learned about QPR asphalt cold patch.

With the final patches in place:

Edit 10/6/2024:  Below is the final surface, after using some tar-based crack filler and Latex-ite 10-year seal coating.  See Post #2029.  The seal coat did more-or-less nothing to hide the patch.  That said, while it ain’t pretty, it’s a lot better than it was.

Edit early 2025:  So far, so good.  Halfway through the first winter, and there’s no evidence of any freeze-thaw damage at all.  The upshot is that QPR seems to work just fine as a “surface-laid” patch, placed on top of the existing deteriorated asphalt.  In fact, a couple of smaller patches that I didn’t top-coat or otherwise seal are also doing just fine.  It’s plausible that QPR doesn’t even need sealing or top-coating to be able to stand up to a Mid-Atlantic winter.

This post summarizes what I learned using QPR cold patch (from Lowe’s) on a badly deteriorated section of asphalt driveway.   A prior post (Post #1974) explains the situation, and go back to Post #1971 for an assessment of options for patching asphalt.  Edit:  Post #2029 describes the final steps of crack-fill and seal-coating.  One heads up:  A squeegee does not work for spreading seal coating on an uneven surface like this.

Above, that may not look so hot to you, but I guarantee you it looks a lot better than it did.  Once I seal-coat this, in the fall, I think it’ll be … acceptable.  Given how torn up the driveway is.  I have no idea yet whether these surface-laid patches will survive the winter, but will update this next spring.

First, it took between 3 and 7 weeks for this to cure fully, in the heat of early summer in Virginia.  The reason I’m a little vague is that the patches seemed to be cured after one week.  At three weeks, a heat wave (near 100F temperatures) re-activated them, and the surfaces were once again sticky in spots, shedding little tarry bits.  At seven weeks, another heat wave (several days at 100F) did nothing.  By seven weeks, they were as solid and tar-free as the asphalt they were laid on, despite the heat.

Second, this stuff varies from batch-to-batch.  As you can see above, I laid mine down as a series of separate patches.  I bought and laid the bags of QPR a few at a time, because that’s all I could handle.  From one batch to the next, the QPR material differed in how “liquid-y/tarry” it was, in the final color once set, and to some degree, in the surface finish once set.  I’m going to seal-coat this in the fall, so the color variations don’t much matter.  But if you doing a big area, and are particular about how this looks, you might want to buy all you need, all at once, from a single batch or lot number. 

But arguing against buying a whole lot at once, see the note below on how hard it may be to estimate what you need, if your driveway surface is as un-level and messed-up as this one was.

Big batch-to-batch variation could also explain part of the strong differences of opinion among on-line reviewers of QPR.  In my case, if I’d stopped with my first first batch, I’d have said “QPR is a dandy product”, period.  With the later batches, that has a huge qualification, that the “walk on it anywhere, any time” cure time is unknown.  And all the hassle that can bring, during a hot spell.

Third, foot traffic across these patches makes a mess, due to the tiny little tarry stones that get tracked everywhere.  It’s tough to state just how much of a pain those are.  The get everywhere.  The surface sheds those rocks for the first few days (again, Virginia, early summer), and then starts shedding again if it gets hot, for some weeks thereafter.   So if this is going to be laid in place where people walk, either lay it in patches so that people can walk around the newest patches, or maybe lay plastic over it.

Fourth, the manufacturer says you can drive across these patches immediately.  And … yeah, technically that’s true.  If this were out in the middle of the street, and looks didn’t matter, I’d have no problem with that statement.

But I’d say that’s mistake, if you can avoid it, if you are picky about how the final product looks.  In my experience, there’s a risk of marking the pavement surface slightly for the first couple of days, no matter how carefully you drive (i.e., don’t turn the wheels when stopped).  And there’s a near-surety of picking up some of the tarry surface stones on your tires for the first few days.  Better to stay off these patches as much as possible until they’ve had a few days to cure.

That said, laying down plastic, then thin ply, and driving over that, did seem to compact the surface finish better than I could do with just a tamper.  So, drive over the plastic-and-ply protected surface to get the best flat-level surface on the patch.  But don’t drive over the unprotected patch for a few days, if you can help it.  If you have to, the patch will survive, but you’ll likely ding up the very top surface a bit.

QPR asphalt cold patch.

1:  Why QPR.

QPR was a relatively cheap patching material that could be applied overtop the existing asphalt surface.  I cannot over-emphasize how much labor that saves, relative to digging up all the alligatored asphalt that was deeply embedded in the clay soil of my driveway.  And then applying a much thicker patch of some alternative material.  If those patches will just stay stuck down, and don’t get popped up by freeze-thaw this winter, that labor savings alone will make it worthwhile to use QPR over other locally-available materials.

Of the cheap, asphalt-based patching compounds I could buy locally, one (Sackrete, at Home Depot) was for filling deep holes only.  It should not be laid atop existing asphalt, per manufacturer’s directions.  Using that would have meant digging up all that alligatored asphalt.  All of which is firmly embedded in the underlying clay soil, because this broken-up section of driveway had originally been laid directly onto the dirt.

But QPR (Lowes), by contrast, can be laid directly over an existing asphalt surface.  At least, that’s my takeaway from the manufacturer’s minimal instructions, and comments on the Lowes website and elsewhere.  Obviously, that won’t work if the underlying asphalt itself is subject to movement.   But as long as it’s firmly stuck in place, it should fine.

A completely different product, Aquaphalt, is a competitor to QPR that can also be laid directly over an existing asphalt surface.  That’s a water-cured patching material that looks like asphalt, but isn’t.  And while Aquaphalt appears to be a superior product in almost every way — particularly with a 15-minute cure time — it’s also between three and four times as expensive as QPR, per cubic foot.  It also comes in plastic buckets, which then must be disposed of.   (I used one bucket of Aquaphalt, on one particularly ugly stretch of pavement.  I explain that below.)

2:  I used a half-ton of material for this ~105 square foot patch.

Each bag of QPR weighs 50 pounds and costs about $20.  Therefore, my 20 bags of QPR weighed half a ton, and cost a little under $400. 

On net, for the area I patched, I got about five square feet of surface covered, per bag.  But that’s clearly a function of how deep my patch is, on average.

I brought the 50-pound bags of QPR home six to eight at a time, in my hatchback, after lining the back with a plastic sheet.

And it’s a good thing I bought just a few at a time, because I waaaaay over-estimated the amount needed, when I first looked over this section of driveway.  Raising the entire sunken driveway surface back to its original level would have taken about 60 bags of the stuff.  So instead of raising it to be fully level, I just filled in the low spots (the puddles), and raised it as little as I could, beyond that.

I’d have had a mess on my hands if I’d stockpiled the full 60 bags that I thought I’d need, before I started.

3:  Applied in manageable pieces

I put this down over several sessions, over the course of a week and a half.

Each session being maybe three or four bags’ worth of material, applied to one defined section of the driveway.

From start to finish, you:

  • sweep the area to be patched,
  • haul in a bag of QPR patch,
  • Slit the bag bottom, dump the QPR.
  • Rake it out/shape it at the edges.
  • Haul/slit additional bags as needed.
  • Tamp it.
  • Tamp it some more.
  • Run over it with your car, after covering in plastic and thin plywood.

Some days I went through that two or three times.  Most days on which I worked on the driveway, I only did that once.

One full cycle, from sweeping to running it over, seemed to take me about two hours.  But that includes some time pondering the situation, wondering what I should do next.  Mostly, pondering whether I was maintaining enough slope for water to flow, with the help of a 4-foot level.

In my “puddles first” strategy, the goal was to cover the entire area and not end up with standing water anywhere, after a rain.  With that as the goal, it was helpful to have some rain halfway through the patching, so that I could see what puddles remained after I’d filled in the biggest ones.

4: It makes a mess if there’s foot traffic.

At least it did, in my climate (Virginia, typical day in the mid-70s, sunny).

The freshly-laid patch has a tarry surface.  It will be stickier or less sticky depending on temperature and age.  Fresher and hotter mean tarrier.  As long as the patch is still tarry — either because it’s fresh, or it’s a few days old and in the hot sunshine — if you walk on it, you will pick up and track around tiny little tar-covered rock chips.  Which then stick to everything.

And that’s a pain in the ass.

5:  The tarry top surface of my patches temporarily went away over the course of a week. 

(I have now rewritten the intro to reflect what actually happened over the course of seven weeks.)

After a week, in my climate, I could walk cleanly across the patch and not pick up anything.

Before that point, though, in addition to shedding rock chips, the surface of the patch tends to pick up any stray organic matter (e.g., leaves, pine needles, wood chips) that will stick to the tar.  I believe this stuff will mostly move along once the surface is no longer tarry.  At any rate, the week-old patches were mostly clear of debris.

In principal, these were “ready for car traffic” almost immediately after they’d been fully tamped.  But only in the sense that the car tire would not squish the patch, much.  But you’d still be well-advised to wait until the next day before driving over these.  I think my car treads lifted some surface stones off the patch, when I drove over the patch on the first day.

The upshot is that, as the manufacturer advertises, you can drive right over the patches on Day 1.  Don’t stop and turn your wheels.   But my take on it is that you shouldn’t drive on the fresh patches if you can avoid it.  Your tire treads are going to pull some tarry stones off the top of the patch when you do that.  Better to minimize that until the top surface of the patch has had a few days to cure.

The other interesting aspect of aging of the patch is the surface gets smoother over time.  I guess it continues to flow a bit.  But, for sure, the fresh patch (dark) has a much rougher surface texture than the week-old patch, despite being laid and tamped the same.

6:  Pros and cons of doing this piecemeal.

Doing this piecemeal, as I did, has several advantages.  First, I don’t think I could have done 20 bags of QPR in one day.  Second, I would walk on the older (cured) patches, as I put in the newer (fresh) patches.  And I could walk on them as a way to walk around that freshly-laid patching material. Third, the only way I could figure to end up with a reasonably level final product was to fill in the low spots — the puddles — first.

Arguing against this approach are the looks and the time.  I believe that the entire patches surface will cure to roughly the same dry and densely-packed finish.  But the joins between the individual “batches” of patching will probably remain visible no matter what.  But in addition, each fresh patch extends the time during which you’re at risk for tracking tarred stone chips around.  For example, I started this more than a week ago, and it’ll be a week from now before the most recent patching material will have a cured, non-tarry surface.

Conclusion

I’m not sure I’d do this again.  And I’m not sure I wouldn’t, either.

For me, it boiled down to QPR being the easy and cheap solution.  You can drive down to your local hardware store, pick it up by the bag, and (after some significant surface prep) spread over a badly damaged asphalt surface.

This, as opposed to (say) trying to get three bids from pros, to come out, tear that up, and re-lay that section of the driveway correctly.  If I could get a pro around here interested in something that small.

The physical labor wasn’t that big a deal as long as you can lift the 50-pound bags.  I worked up a sweat tamping it, but I’m not even sore from doing that.  (OTOH, I lift weights regularly.)

Sure, it sticks to your tools.  And to your shoes.  And anything else it comes in contact with.  And it stinks faintly of asphalt, for some days afterward.  All depending on the temperature.  But, given that it basically is asphalt, none of that should be a huge surprise.

I have no idea how well it will last.  For now, it all appears to be physically solid and well-attached.  This, despite doing my best to apply it as thinly as I could, in some areas.  And without the best surface prep in the world.

The individual pieces of the patch give it a little bit of a redneck look.  But that should mostly go away as all the patches cure to the same shade and surface finish.

In any case, I have to leave it alone for a couple of months as it cures fully.  So I get to look at that patch until August or so.  At which point I’ll apply some modern miracle crack filler to any remaining cracks, then top coat the entire pavement.

That’s the plan, anyway.

Addendum:  Plus one bucket of Aquaphalt.

I actually started by purchasing a bucket of Aquaphalt 4.0 (smaller stones).  That, before I realized how much of this stuff I needed.  And how much Aquaphalt would cost to do the entire job.

I ended up using the Aquaphalt on one section of pavement that had been heavily colonized by grasses.  Unlike QPR and similar products, Aquaphalt cures by addition of water, and it cures fast (15 minutes) and hard.  No tarry mess.  I figured that if the grass should try to grow back (despite my heavily salting the area per Post #1973), Aquaphalt would stand a much better chance of keeping the buried grass roots from growing through the pavement than would the slow-to-cure QPR.

Edit 7/19/2024;  And, so far, so good.  Going on eight weeks later, and nothing is poking up through my asphalt patches.  I’m guessing that spraying the alligatored asphalt with a strong salt-water solution, prior to patching, killed the roots of all the vegetation that was there, as intended (Post #1973).

As far as I can tell, other than the high price and the waste stream of plastic buckets, Aquaphalt is a superior product.  It spreads and shapes almost as easily as QPR, and seems to stick to the pavement just as well.  It cures in 15 minutes, as advertised.  The surface finish of the Aquaphalt 4.0 is much finer than that of the QPR, owing mostly to the smaller average gravel size in the Aquaphalt 4.0.  The sole downside I noted to Aquaphalt is that it didn’t flow/rake to the edges of the patch as easily as QPR, and I don’t think I was able to lay quite as thin a patch with Aquaphalt as I was with QPR.

Edit 6/5/2024:  That’s not quite right.  Aquaphalt’s main downside is that it “flows” less well than QPR, at least once you’re at the water-and-compact stage.  I ended up leaving marks in the Aquaphalt in areas where the tamper did not hit squarely onto the surface of the Aquaphalt.  At the time, I thought I had fixed that by tamping these areas flat.  But, in fact, the Aquaphalt’s surface had so little “flow” at that point that it didn’t fill in the little low spots my mis-tamping had created.

But worse, the finer surface finish of Aquaphalt is much less forgiving than the coarser surface finish of QPR.  Little imperfections that are lost in the background roughness of the QPR surface finish stand out in the Aquaphalt surface finish. 

The moral of the story being that if you are not the best at leaving a smooth surface finish on materials like this, Aquaphalt may not be the better choice, relative to a tarry patch such as QPR.  For the reasons described just above.

That’s a lesson that my driveway and I learned the hard way. 

Looking on the bright side, the little dings in the Aquaphalt section get lost in the overall unevenness of the patch. 

I guess that’s a bright side.

We’ll see how it looks with a seal coat.

Otherwise, if I didn’t care about the expense or the waste stream of big plastic buckets, think I’d do the whole thing in Aquaphalt.  It’s as versatile as QPR (in that you can lay it over existing pavement), but lacking all the factors that make QPR a bit of a mess.  You also avoid QPR’s months-long wait prior to seal-coating over the patch and roadway.

Edit 6/5/2024:  But on a raggedy, roller-coaster asphalt surface such as my driveway, you aren’t going to end up with a beautiful finished surface of Aquaphalt as-seen-on-TV.  If nothing else, there’s no flat reference surface to screed to.  Unsurprisingly, the finished surface of my driveway — after QPR top coating — is not flat.  Plus, making it flat (level) with the remaining sound driveway surface would have required laying down three times as much material as I actually used with a “puddles first” patch-application strategy.  I’m pretty sure I’d have done Aquaphalt the same way — in a series of discrete patches — if only because it’s 50 pounds a bucket, and don’t think I could move 1.5 tons of that material in a day.  Let alone get it laid, watered, and tamped.

Post #1974: Nine bags down, five to go. What I have learned about QPR cold patch.

 

I’m learning a few more things about patching my badly deteriorated driveway using QPR cold patch.  See just prior posts for background.

See also:

Post #1977: Updated: Twenty bags, and done. What I have learned about QPR asphalt cold patch.

Lesson 1:  Day 2, Still tarry when hot

On Day 1, yesterday, these patches were “walk-able”.  Nice and firm.  I could stand on the edges, as above.

More importantly, I could walk right across them without picking up little tarry stone flakes. (Which would then get carried into the house on my shoes, and make a mess.)

I thought that was the way QPR worked.  Ready for traffic immediately, so the manufacturer says.

I was wrong.  And the manufacturer meant auto traffic.

Turns out, yesterday was a relatively cool day.  Maybe low 70’s F.

By contrast, today, Day 2, is hot and sunny.  And the surface of those patches is now tarry, and they are no longer cleanly “walk-able”.  I picked up little stray bits of tar as I walk on them.  It took me a while to notice that.  With everything that implies.

Lesson learned?  Don’t walk on the patches yet.

It’s still a matter of faith that these will eventually cure to the point where they are clean to walk on regardless of the temperature.  And I can always toss sand or mortar over them if that fails to happen.  (But that permanently alters the appearance of the top of the patch, so I’m hoping I don’t have to resort to that.)

The bottom line is that in a warm climate, and in warm sunshine particularly, you can’t count on having a cleanly walkable surface on QPR cold patch for at least a few days.

Lesson 2:  Plan your patches accordingly

So, obviously, you need to plan your patches so that you don’t need to walk on them for a while.  At least in my climate — USDA Zone 7 in Virginia.

But I didn’t do that.  I’m able to walk around on my driveway now purely as a matter of luck.

My patching strategy defaulted to filling in the biggest puddles first.  Each patch in the first picture above corresponds to an area of the driveway that formed a puddle when it rained.

Just by chance, the resulting isolated patches give me plenty of old pavement to move around on.  I would like to claim that I though of that ahead of time.  But I didn’t.  It’s purely luck, that filling puddles gave me places to walk on the old asphalt.

Lesson 3:  Use in whole-bag increments.

The recommended strategy for getting QPR onto the road surface is to slit the bottom of the bag, pull up on the top (using the handles built into the bag), and let the contents slide out of the bag.

But the contents are a) heavy and b) semi-liquid.

The result is that everything in the bag spills out, and fast.  One moment, you have a bag of cold patch sitting on nice clean asphalt.  Three seconds later, you have a pile of cold patch on the asphalt, and an empty bag.

As a result, you have to patch in whole-bag increments.  Once you open the bag as the manufacturer directs, there’s no going back.  Move it around with a shovel, maybe.  But one way or the other, you’re placing a whole bag of it somewhere.

Lesson 4:  Estimating the quantity needed is harder than you’d think.

It’s not just that the holes to be patched are irregular in shape and depth.

It’s that, with a surface-laid patch, on an irregular (not-flat) driveway surface, you have some leeway on the depth of the resulting patch.

In particular, I’m trying to shape these so that water will drain off my driveway.  I want to avoid puddles.

But the driveway slope itself is so low, and varies so much from place-to-place owning to the uneven surface, that shaping the finished patch to do that involves a lot of guesswork.  Or, at least, it did for me.

In my case, I ended up using vastly less patching material, so far, than I originally estimated.  And that’s because I’m not filling the driveway up to some theoretical original surface level.  I’m just filling the puddles enough to get water to flow across it.

I hope.  I won’t really know if I’ve succeeded so far until the next hard rain.

Lesson 5:  Patch size may be limited by plywood size (4′ width).

Common advice is to do the final tamping of asphalt cold patch by laying down a sheet of plastic, then a piece of thin plywood, then driving over it.  I can vouch that this works with QPR.  I hand-tamped mine as firmly as I could, then ran it over.  Running over it, covered by thin plywood, definitely appears to make the patch surface more compact, and to make the patch more firmly compressed.

If you rely on this method, then the largest patch you can make well is one that can be covered by a sheet of plywood.  And that you can conveniently drive your car over.

You can, I guess, finagle it, by sliding the plywood around and only driving on a part of the patch at a time.  But that’s asking for the plywood edge to leave an imprint in the patch.

Conclusion

At this point in my driveway rehab, I have filled in the biggest puddles and coincidentally covered up the largest places where pavement was outright missing.

There’s still a lot of badly-alligatored pavement, with chunks of pavement missing, that I don’t quite know what to do with.

Right now, the patches look fine, but are tacky due to the heat and sunshine.  Will they cure?  Will water flow off the driveway without puddling?  Will these patches last?

Making an isolated patch, like the ones above, is easy.  The QPR material flows easily at my ambient temperature (say, 75F).  And it’s not even tiring, as long as you have the strength to lift the 50 pound bags.  Move a bag to a hole, slit it, rake the patch material out flat. pound it flatter.  Repeat.

Whether the final patched driveway is going to function well, or look right, I have no clue.

It’s going to be rain and threat of rain for the next few days, so at this point, I’ll let it be until we get some sunnier weather.