Relatively decent night’s sleep last night, gratefully. The main thing that keeps me sleeping a little lighter than perhaps I otherwise could is just concerns about ticks That might have hitched a ride last second and come in with me. 🙃
Living down in the field, that’s quite possible, and I think it’s happened at least once already.
Heck, just walking out the van door to my other car this morning when I got up, I already had a tick crawling up my leg, and that’s in mowed grass.😶
I thought I was safe in the mowed grass, but having seen the ticks be smarter than I thought they were, specifically crawling up my totes because they see me moving the totes and know that I’m going to come back to the totes. I’ve killed I think four ticks that were hanging out on top of my storage totes just waiting for me to come by and pick them up again.
😶
I think I’m ready, if I wasn’t before, to agree with neighbor Dan that this is the worst tick season he’s ever seen. That’s saying a lot since he’s lived here I think his whole life and he’s in his ’50s.
Anyway, I ate a little bit of breakfast, comfort food cinnamon rolls. 😅
I’m disappointed in myself, but I just don’t have the bandwidth right now to do better than what I’m doing. I’m doing well just to function, so I’m going to give myself a pass, at least to The degree that I’m capable of giving myself a pass. I’m pretty hard on myself, so I can’t give myself a full pass.
I’m grateful that I woke up to a lack of forest fire through the night. The burn barrel was smoking steadily when I went to bed, but no flames, and gratefully, no flames erupted overnight.
I’m also grateful that I set the tarp out, as it did storm last night. I don’t think it rained a whole lot, but it definitely rained a bit, and the wind definitely blew because there was a nice covering of Dusty wetness all over stuff.
Somebody came by in the morning to buy the decorative table and mirror combo. So at least I got two of the things sold before we started giving stuff away. Most of the other things weren’t really getting hits anyway, despite the low prices. Maybe a nibble here and there, but to give an example, the one that I sold this morning probably had 30 or 40 inquiries before somebody actually bought it. And with the other stuff, I think I got one or two inquiries if anything.
But you can generally count on people coming to get it if you post it as something that’s free, joe after I sold the stuff in the morning, I sent a text message out to family here letting them know what all we were giving away and letting them have first dibs.
Hunter and Mieko claimed the love seat and the curio cabinet. Nobody claimed anything else, So I deleted the old Facebook ads and relisted everything as being free.
I headed to my mom’s new place to bring over all of the bin lids. I went through all of the bins That I had and made sure they all had lids, and then I took everything over To her this morning.
There wasn’t much over there at her place that didn’t have a lid, but we did get some lids and bins paired up. Most of them are going right back over to Jenna anyway, but at least we got the stuff paired up.
I helped mom get her refrigerator put back together. Something happened, and the door wouldn’t close properly with everything put together. Odd little design, but I was able to get it all back in place by putting a little more Force on it than was comfortable with, but after putting that force on it, it all clicked into place. 🎉
Helped mom with some other stuff, chatted for a bit, and then headed out.
The next thing on my list was To deal with all the dirt and rock that I had piled up. It was wearing a little bit on one of my hill family members to have it all sitting there, and I said I would have it done by the end of the day today. So I headed over there with my mini excavator to start the process of building a new speed bump– although for our purposes it has nothing to do with speed and everything to do with water diversion.
On the way there, of course, I had to pass the huge walnut tree that had split in half and fallen across the road back to where I… live. 🙃
I loaded up the chainsaw, along with a shovel and metal rake, the chainsaw to at least start working on that tree that fell down, but then I got to thinking, I’m driving a mini excavator. I can just tear the tree apart with the bucket and arm. 😁
So instead of getting out of the excavator and using the chainsaw to chop up the tree, I just started pulling the tree apart limb by limb with the excavator.
😁
Once I got it all torn apart and pushed out of the way, then I headed up toward the part of the road where I was going to build the speed bump/ water diversion bump, But on the way there, I got sidetracked with another project. As I was was slowly crawling up the hill in the excavator, I passed the stump of A cedar tree that I had cut down a few months before. The stump was about 6 or 8 ft tall, I think, so I had a decent amount of leverage by pulling it from the top, so I figured I’d give it a try with the excavator.
😎
It worked. 😁 I was able to pull the cedar tree stump all the way down and out of the ground with only minimal effort and some strategery. 🥳
I left the stump there to be dealt with on the way back, and headed up to start working on the water diversion bump.
I scraped away the existing rock and gravel that was on the top, then I spread the Tate bucket full by bucketful and then using the dozer blade until I made a nice speed bump with just the clay.
Once I had a decent speed bump with the clay, then I went back and started adding gravel to the top to compress into the clay to reduce the erosion from hard rain.
That’s the way I built the speed bump at the very top of our, I guess I can’t say hour anymore, the driveway of the house we used to live in. That’s been the best speed bump I’ve ever made, and so I’m hoping this one will be similar.
In the middle of working on that, a lady came to get some of the stuff I’d posted for free, so I headed over on the skid steer over to our old house, using the skid steer to even up some work that Jim had done yesterday that had left A big running pile of gravel in the middle of the driveway. I scooped it all up and flattened it all out on my ride up and down the driveway before and after helping the lady load up the glass coffee table and glass and tables.
As I started heading back up the driveway, I came to the point in the ditch where The rain had washed so hard that it built up a big pile of Arkansas Red Rock, So I scooped that up, taking a couple loads over to Stevie’s house because he uses that kind of rock as borders around his trees, so I brought him a couple scoops.
I finished making the speed bump. It’s not fabulous, but I think it’ll work. I wish it were better, but I just ran out of motivation to keep working on it.
Coming up on 11:30, and I’m looking forward to what I hope will be a nice night’s sleep.
Feeling a little bit better today. Still nowhere near good, but better today than yesterday.
~ stephen
Lift the World 