Holar 🙃
What’s better than one post today?
Two!
🙃
I’m tired.
The slow day yesterday was joined by a slow morning (phone-call wise), but was followed by a very busy late morning early afternoon. The phone seemed to ring off the hook.
Oddly, as much as it rang, only one job got added for today, while tomorrow built up to a reasonable level to start a day, I think. With the phone ringing as much as it was, I spent a lot of time just on the phone talking to customers, getting info, creating quotes, etc.
Malaki only did two jobs, but gratefully, those two jobs gave a fairly decent day on their own.
Me? I was home all day. I wasn’t feeling so well, mentally or physically, for much of the day, wanting to sleep but not being able to because I need to make sure that Malaki has work enough to take care of his family.
So… I stayed awake, answered the phone, and tried to get people scheduled to make sure Malaki would be busy. sometime around… maybe 4 p.m.? As the phone calls slowed, and as I started feeling a bit better, I went outside to try to be a bit productive in other areas of things.
I put wood chips over the bed I built next to the garage. That’ll keep the weeds out all fall/winter/spring. So effective those wood chips at keeping the weeds down. I might fill the forest with them to kill all the vines out!
What else… I put another coat of flat black paint on my Z4 hood, and it’s starting to look pretty darn good, honestly. 🙂 I’m gonna do one more coat, and then I want to find a matte clear to roll over it. I haven’t found a matte clear yet, but I want something to protect the paint against bird poop and tree resins and whatnot. Without a protective coat, it’ll stain the new paint, so… I’m gonna look for something, but I’m fairly pleased with what I’ve seen so far.
I also put another coat of paint on the generator housing that I ground the rust off and that mom put the rust converter coating stuff on. After doing that, I decided to try to get some exercise in the form of cutting up the tree I downed the other day, pulling vines out of other trees, and chopping down still more trees!
All of which I did.
The previously felled tree is mostly chopped up. The branches that remain on the ground will turn into burn brush, …unless I decide to buy a chipper. 🙃
And now I’m back from a 20-minute FB Marketplace detour for buying more land-clearing/other stuff. 🙃
Anyway, I managed to clear quite a bit of vine out of the woods that had been choking off the trees. Should have done it months ago before the huge drought. That would have reduced the competition for the precious water the trees had to fight through.
I had one cluster of trees that was so covered in vines that I wasn’t even sure if the trees were alive. I could see one that was dead for sure–in fact, I think two of them for sure. There were six altogether–five sassafras and one… something much nicer. The nicer tree was the one on the edge of the woods, and the five sassafras were inset just a few feet further, but together they made up a huge ball of vines.
😬
I started hacking away at all the vines, cutting them and then trying to pull them up by the roots, but after a while, I finally decided, and with my mother’s permission, to just chop down all the sassafras trees, leaving just the nice tree. So I used my ax to take down three of them, and then, when my body ran out of juice, I used the chainsaw, until it ran out of battery. Once out of battery, I again grabbed the ax and finished chopping down the last tree.
Only one of the trees I chopped actually came all the way down to the ground. There were so stinking many vines on the others that even after getting cut at their bases, the trees remained upright–caught in the tangled web of vines that wrapped the trees up almost in a cocoon.
That’ll be an interesting project–getting the trees the rest of the way to the ground.
I’ll be chopping them bit by bit, I imagine. Chop 5 feet off the ground, let the weight of the tree pull it to the earth. Then do that a few more times with each tree, and that should do it.
So. Many. Vines.
Okay, folks, I’m later than I thought I’d be. It’s after midnight now, and it’s time for bed.
Good night!
Love and hugs.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 