2022-07-18 — Damming… My Default

Hola, folks!

Much more positive day today, though I don’t really take any credit for it.

Today I returned to my lifelong default activity–dam the moving water. 🙃

But I’ll get to that…

Last night, I stayed the night again at the Provo Canyon diversion dam parking lot. No police this time, so that was nice. 🙃

I was able to get myself to be a bit productive today. I cleared out my emails from the last however long. I got in touch with some people who applied to work for me as mobile mechanics (applicants who are actually qualified!!!). One is a woman who just finished tech school in May, and I guess is looking for her first job. I am going to try her out this week, I think. I might have her do some jobs for my friend Miguel first and see how that goes. The other gentleman is a military guy, but I haven’t communicated with him as much yet. I will do that tomorrow.

I’m also going to help a friend of mine with some business planning that she is working on for her business. Hopefully, I will be able to help her out in a way that will help her move forward more effectively and efficiently and in the timeline needed to is some pretty significant stressors.

After all that, and noticing that somehow some of my clothes started to mildew from being wet (not sure how that happened, as I thought all of my clothes had dried out really quickly in the hot dry air, but I guess I must have had some tucked down out of the way while they were still damp).

Anyway, having been here for nearly 2 weeks with my only bathing being going for a swim in the Provo River multiple times (which honestly isn’t really that bad, considering I don’t use antiperspirant, so sweat and dirt and whatnot just wash off in the river pretty much. The greasy hair is another story. 🙃 Since I only really need to shower once every few days normally, my hair doesn’t get greasy very quickly (the more often you wash your hair, the more prolific your scalp is it creating oils, if you weren’t already aware. So if you avoid washing your hair every time you bathe, your hair will be healthier, and your scalp will be happier as well, and it will slow down the amount of oil it produces).

Anyway, I brought my biodegradable environmentally friendly soap with me on the trip, so I decided to have a little hike up slide Canyon and take a bath while I was at it. 😁

It’s so refreshing to bathe in a cold mountain stream on a beautiful sunshiny day. 😁 I certainly wouldn’t trade it for a regular shower in a house. And don’t worry, I was wearing a swimming suit, so I wasn’t giving a free show to the wildlife, nor to any potential hikers who might have come by that way.

The shower I built up that Canyon years ago is defunct, as at some point in time the water stopped making it all the way down the canyon and now disappears into the rock somewhere, so my shower dried up.

After taking a quick bath in the stream in a pool that someone had damned up a little bit, I decided to… improve/expand the pool. 🙃

Forgot to take pictures, though. 😕

At first, I spent a good while just building up the existing walls to make it a little deeper. I was quite successful in the effort, but the pool was so small that I had a hankering to make it bigger. Accordingly, I hatched a plan to probably double or triple the size of the pool.

The Damned up part was in a place where behind you were too huge boulders, and in front of you was one huge Boulder that dropped off about four or five feet. The boulder only took up half of the creek bed, though, so the previous dam builder had just damned it up in the middle of the creek so that the pool was contained on just the one side of the creek.

In order to dam up the whole creek, one would need to fill in the entire 5-ft depth below the big boulder. Otherwise, there would be no realistic way of damming it up, as it would just collapse and slide down to the next level four or five feet below.

So… I started pulling logs and sticks that were wedged in the creek bed along maybe a 30 ft stretch of the creek, and I chucked them below the big boulder. I put so many logs and sticks there, that they made kind of a thicket in the creek below and to the side of the big boulder that was the main front for the pool.

Having placed so many large and small logs and sticks, respectively, I was then able to throw larger rocks into the thicket and have them wedge themselves among the sticks and logs. At that point, I was able to just start shoving rocks all over the thicket, and they would wedge themselves in in various places and start to seal up the dam.

Needless to say, I spent several hours in the effort, moving rocks and sticks, digging out the bottom of the pool, including a couple of very large boulders that probably weighed a couple hundred pounds or so by themselves. I used those boulders to help reinforce one side of the dam.

I worked so long digging and pulling up stones and scooping up handfuls of rock and gravel, that I nearly wore away all of the layers of skin down to the bleeding. Gratefully, I think I have maybe a layer of skin left on most of my fingers, with only a few of them feeling raw. 🙃

Right about the time my fingers were worn down to bleeding in one place on my thumb and a couple of places on my palm where I had already had previous injury, it started to rain, and then thunderstorm, which was my cue to get my little rear down the canyon.

I spent probably 20 minutes waiting, hoping it was just a quick drizzle, but it didn’t stop, and the lightning continued, and I finally decided to drop on down, putting my wet clothes in my backpack (my cheapy Costa Rica backpack 😁).

After that, I got my business spreadsheet all set up for having a contract worker again, so they can fill it out as they do their work for the day. I’m crossing my fingers hoping that maybe I’ve got a good contract worker. I guess we shall see.

My oldest brother also gave me an idea for the name for my non-profit/organizion that I like. It’s part of a name I’ve considered before, but I never considered using just one word of that name, at least not in the latin. I’d considered the English for sure, but it was easily already taken.

Unfortunately, a very large Fortune 500 company uses the name and has bought up the vast majority of domain extensions with that word. I doubt they’re going to be willing to sell me the .org, which is what I would like, but I might be able to find an extension that works or adjust the URL while keeping the name just the one word.

We’ll see!

I think I’m getting off of top dead center a little bit. There certainly lots of circumstances that bring painful feelings, but today I was nearly free of those thoughts, which was nice. I love my mountains. I love my cold streams.

Well, it’s after 12:30, so I best get to bed. I’m looking at flying back to Utah and possibly leaving my car here. It would be nice to have a car that hangs out here that others who live here can use in a pinch if needed, and that I can use or other family members can use when traveling to utah. Plane tickets right now from Arkansas to Utah are pretty darn cheap. I can get to Utah cheaper by plane then I can buy car right now. 🙃

So I’m going to see how my aunt is doing tomorrow morning, and then I’ll make my decision about what I’m going to do. I might fly back to get things going with contract workers, though it’s going to be absolutely beastly hot. And then I might fly back to Utah to be there with my aunt for her final days.

We’ll see. Playing it by ear at the moment.

Hope y’all enjoyed and/or were grateful for your day today.

Love and hugs.

Lift the World

~ stephen