Little bit late on my post from yesterday. Whoops!
Yesterday I’m going to say that we’re going to call it mini x day. It was a super effective day down by the deck, which is where I spent the entire day after morning routine stuff.
At first, I worked on spreading the mulch around on the east side of the deck for a while, and I also dumped all the cinder blocks from up above the creek, down into the creek. It’s a little sketchy trying to figure out how to do that without breaking the cinder blocks because the riverbank isn’t a sloped bank, it’s a straight drop off about 8 ft or 10 ft or so. Maybe taller. So I was trying to figure out ways to get the center blocks down without ruining this inner blocks .
I was able to figure out a way, gratefully, by dropping the cinder blocks on some vines that were sticking out, and then very carefully tossing each of this inner blocks in different places of the creek bed after there were too many cinder blocks in where the vines had been. I figured that if I could toss the center blocks such that the momentum and pressure were in a straight line from top to bottom longwise, then even if I hit a rock with a cinder block, it would be very unlikely to break or damage this inner block. Gratefully, I was correct, and out of like 60 center blocks, I think I only chipped a few of them and broke none of them. Wahoo!
After that, I spent however long it took weeding the entire west side of the deck area, and I’m surprised I was able to do it as quickly as I did. I’m sure it took a couple hours or more, but that’s a heck of a lot better than what the other side took. The other side was an absolute nightmare. Grately the west side seemed to be more an issue with shallower rooted vines and grassy spots instead of Vines tangled up with vines tangled up with vines tangled up with vines.
That felt really good to be able to get that much done. As I was finishing up with that and thinking about spreading the mulch, I was thinking about how my hill brother Jim had told me that he wanted to slope the ramp access to the creek from where I had been weeding down to the ramp. Currently, it was just straight vertical sides. So I went up the hill and grabbed my mini excavator, drove it down, and spent the next few hours or so recontouring the ramp down to the creek. I’m not done yet, as it was a massive undertaking, and it’ll probably take me at least a couple more hours, if not five or six to get it all done and taken care of. But it’s nice to have that much progress.
Part of the job entailed removing a large clump of fairly tall trees that were all sort of grown together at the base. I don’t know the kind of tree that it is, but they have spikes on all their branches, so they’re not very fun trees to have around anyway, so I didn’t feel bad ripping the thing out of the ground. I ended up taking it out with the mini excavator, tearing off trunk by trunk, some of the much harder than others because they were thick trunks, and then digging up the absolutely massive stump that’s probably 10 ft in diameter including the huge roots.
I didn’t expect it to take that much time at all, but I made really good progress, and it should be pretty cool once I’m done to have that the way that it is.
The only reason I stopped was because it got dark, and apparently either I don’t have or the lights on my excavator didn’t work. And moving Earth around without lights is not very effective. 🙂
After that, I just went home, 8 a huge dinner, which I’m amazed didn’t give me any stomach issues, and went to bed. I know there’s got to be something else in there because I finished working at like 5:00 out by the deck, and I didn’t go to bed until like 9:00, but for whatever reason, that chunk of the day is completely missing from my brain. So there you go! That’s my Tuesday. 🙂
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 