There isn’t a whole lot to write about today. I didn’t get enough sleep, but I’m not too terribly sleep deprived either. Just a little low.
Spend some time chatting with the Big Guy.
Also spent a fair bit of time this morning going through recovery files, still trying to clean up from that disaster last summer.
Funny, I think I would have been better off had I not tried to recover anything, as it’s taking massive amounts of time just to go back through the “recovered” files, and probably at least 99 of them were duplicate files that needed to be deleted anyway.
But in the “recovery,” it renamed thousands upon thousands of files, so I can’t just compare. I don’t know what’s lost and what’s not lost, so going through something like 40- to 50,000 files…
😶
Anyway, after eating breakfast that my wonderful mother made for us 🙏¹, and after battling with files for a little while, I headed toward Haven Hill to get some mowing and other work done.
Funny, I’ve been here over a week now, and I still haven’t listed any of the other pieces of equipment that I have for sale.
Mostly procrastination out of a fear of having to take massive losses on them and not wanting to, I think.
As I was driving down DeGraff, I saw Joe and Glenda out in their yard working on their little cabin project, so I pulled over and chatted with Joe for a good little while. He’s been dealing with some health issues since I last saw him and has a mountain of things he’s trying to get accomplished.
As do we all, it seems. 🙃
It was great catching up with him. 🙏² Such good neighbors here. Love this place.
If it weren’t for that darn humidity. 😅
After chatting with Joe, I headed over, and with Jim’s help over the phone, I was able to find the can of diesel fuel and got the tractor filled up. I decided to delay fixing the coolant leak to see what might happen with it, and so I just got right to work mowing.
And mowing…
And mowing. 😅
I had talked to Jim and told him that I didn’t know how much mowing I was going to be able to do, so if there were any particular places he wanted me to mow, to let me know, and he mentioned that for him, it was most important too to mow the fields just down the hill from Liz’s house, as the blackberries are starting to take them over.
You probably already know, but when the blackberries come, they can take over in a hurry. Fortunately, as long as you keep mowing them down, they eventually give up. But you’ve got to consistently mow them down, or they’ll just keep coming back.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the driving path that I used to mow from Liz’s property down the hill. That little two-mower-width driving path that I mowed several times over the course of a year or so has exactly zero blackberry vines growing on it.
Whereas much of the rest of the hill has lots of blackberries, and in some places, pretty much nothing but blackberries.
Anyway, I started off mowing the strip from the main driveway all the way back to the storage shed that I put down there.
As I passed the storage shed, I had to dodge some of the greenhouse frame pieces that I had left in the grass last time I was here. 😅
I also managed to run over a piece of rope that started winding around the blades on the mower deck. Took me a little while to get that all entangled and the blades free, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. 🙏³
It’s super slow going mowing the tall grass, and especially the thickets of blackberry vines. Basically, you stick the tractor in low gear, manually set the speed to about 17 or 1800 RPMs, and just let it go.
But I think the speed is probably somewhere around a half a mile an hour or a mile an hour.
It’s brutally slow. 🙃
But you can kind of multitask while you’re mowing. In fact, you can multitask better than I thought. I tried working on journal entries using my swype feature to type out my entry, and after probably 4 hours of adding a few words here and there as I tried not to lose my mowing lines, I finally decided to risk wasting time by dictating, despite the loud tractor noise, and amazingly, my phone picked up my voice just fine.
So much easier to dictate my journal then to try and swype type.
Funny that it took me so long to take the risk of wasting a few seconds. 🙃
Anyway, I had to dodge all sorts of obstacles, mostly sticks and fallen tree limbs and what not. Occasionally, they were super high dirt spots. There was actually a folding chair buried in the grass at one point, tennis balls and other balls.
I mowed probably about half of what I had hoped to mow when I got to the point where I felt like I ought to stop the tractor before it ran low enough on fuel for the engine to cut out.
I didn’t fancy having to bleed the system to get it started again. 😅
I drove the tractor back up to the field across from the storage barn, walked back over to the Big Barn, found some more diesel fuel in the little garden cart that the Hill inherited when we left our little spot, dragged it back over to the tractor, filled it up, and was all set to finish mowing that big section, which would have taken all the rest of the day probably until about sunset, but as I tried to go, the tractor just wouldn’t do what it was supposed to. It kept trying to die, which made me think that maybe it was low on hydraulic fluid.
So I drove it all the way back up to the field where I filled it up again with fuel, checked the hydraulic fluid, and yep, super duper low.
I did see that one of the cylinders that raises and lowers the bucket was leaking, but it seemed to be leaking pretty slowly. Of course, I haven’t been on the hill for 8 months, or so, so a slow leak will add up over time.
I didn’t see any hydraulic fluid right off the bat, so I went ahead and parked the tractor for the night.
I’ll figure out hydraulic fluid tomorrow or something.
I did pop into my shed briefly, finding that mice had chewed through several rolls of shop towels that I had in there.
That’s one of those things about leaving stuff places just sitting. Weather and creatures usually take their toll. 😅
But at least I have a path down to the shed now. 🙃
I started adding some destinations to the map today for that trip, Valley Forge, Gettysburg, etc.
Family history, church history, American history.
Going to be a pretty sweet little trip. 😁
🙏⁴
I swung by Stevie’s place, bringing some shells and what not that I brought back from New Zealand for him to choose one. With all of his aquariums, I thought he might enjoy having a shell from New Zealand to stick in one of the aquariums. 😊
After that, I gifted my portable corded fan to Liz, as she said she can always use a backup fan, and it’s just taking up space in Rover.
And I want more space. 🙃
I’m spoiled having probably double or triple the amount of space that I had in the Golden Kiwi back in New Zealand, and it’s so much more comfortable with my mattress, but I’d still love to have room to stretch out on solid ground.
I also want to get everything organized and ready to go, so we’re comfortable and ready for our Great Eastern Road Trip this fall.
From there, I swung by Dan’s place to see if he thought it was realistic to try and weld my exhaust. He’s a pretty darn good welder, and he’d know whether or not it was worth even trying. Unfortunately, though his vehicles were all there at his place, he wasn’t in his shop, nor was he in his house. I think he was using the excavator that he bought from me, as it wasn’t at the other Barn where it’s been the last couple days, and I thought I could hear it working in the distance.
Oh well, I’ll try and catch him tomorrow maybe.
I may or may not have stopped off at the Walmart Neighborhood Market and bought myself another 48 Oz tub of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
And they may or may not have eaten it all in one sitting.
Again.
😅
Funny, after stuffing my face with ice cream 2 days in a row, I got back on the scale after taking a shower tonight, and I’m down 4 lbs from the last time I weighed myself. 😆
Guess I had better eat more ice cream. 😁
I should probably lose another 10 lb or so. 5 or 10. Probably 10. But I’m not really all that concerned about it. If you couldn’t tell. 😆
I’ll slowly whittle it back down to where I should be (about 175 if not working out and about 185 if well built). I’m about 185 now, but definitely not well built. 🙃
Back at mama’s place, I spent a good little while chatting with Heather about stair-building efforts for when I get back to South Dakota. That’s gonna be a challenge, but we’ll figure it out.
I finished up the night spending a whole bunch of time in file cleanup efforts. I’ve been hoping to get everything off all external drives but one, so that I can then have those other external drives be my backups.
This last Drive is the one that has all the recovery files on it, so it’s taking forever. After deleting thousands upon thousands upon thousands of files that were corrupted and couldn’t be opened, despite having been “recovered,” I finally just moved the last maybe 9500 files? Over to my main sorting drive.
Of course, there were three files that have apparently ghosted themselves onto the drive. If I try and delete them, the message pops up saying the files are no longer there. If I try and rename them, I get the same message. If I try and move them, I get the same message.
No matter what I do, I can’t get rid of them. 😒
Oh well.
Driving around mowing tall fields for something like 6 hours today left me a bit melon head from allergies. I don’t have super bad allergies, but when the air is so full of plant dust and pollen that you can see it constantly in the air all around you… 😅
Gratefully, my mom offered to let me take a shower, which was great, as my eyes were itching a fair bit. So now I’m clean, and that feels nice, especially after a long day.
I also stayed up to write this journal entry, and though I’m guessing it’s a little disjointed, I did it.
It’s after midnight, almost 12:30 in fact, but I did it.
Let’s hope I can build on today’s success.
Loves.
🤍🩵🤍
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 