(written today!!!)
Wow! Productive day today! 🙏¹
Every time I looked at the clock on my phone, I was surprised it wasn’t later than it was! 😊
The day started off wonderfully, with my attention focused on those things that bring light to my mind and heart–uplifting music, chatting with the Big Guy, Prayer, listening to talks and scriptures, etc.
It was great. 😊
Not only that, but today was my best dailies day since I was doing so well last summer. 😊
🥳
🙏³
I even got the Elevate app redownloaded and some brain exercises going. 🎉
I took the horsies out for some fresh-grass enjoyment outside their normal area. I much prefer to take River out, as I can mostly leave him alone to forage as he wants along the long grass strip between the paddock and the driveway. That means that though I’m not going to go inside the trailer or go work inside the house or something, at least I can be wandering around accomplishing things instead of being stuck on the leash.
Fiona… she… can’t be off leash 🙃, so I have to hold onto the leash the whole time she forages. 😒
Fortunately, I can multitask a decent bit, working on memorizations, looking stuff up online, etc.
Speaking of online, I was grateful to get a message this morning from one of my JustAnswer customers saying the information I sent them for hooking up their security system worked perfectly.
🥳
That’s kind of a big deal for me, because I failed to properly read the question all the way through, thinking it was going to just be a simple “here are the wires and colors” question, when in reality it was somebody asking for help setting up their aftermarket security system.
I’m not a security system person, so I was way out of my depth. 😅
Amazingly, and gratefully, I was able to upload the wiring image provided by the alarm manufacturer to Gemini AI, and Gemini was able to look at that image and create step-by-step text instructions for how to wire everything up!
Of course, it was incorrect on its first attempt, and I called it out on that, but it was correct on its second attempt. 🥳
Yay!!!
I was totally out of my league, and Gemini saved my butt. 🙏⁴.
🥳
AI is incredible. 😲
I don’t remember the exact order of things today, but relatively early in the day, I spent a fair amount of time walking all around the horse pastures inspecting the electric fence connections. For the last couple of days, the electric fence solar charger hasn’t been doing the shocking noise that it normally does each time it sends the pulse of electricity through the fencing.
So I wandered around inspecting every little connection and finding multiple areas of concern, including the following major areas of concern.
That first picture is of the very first connection from the solar, electric-pulse generator. You can see that over time, the pulse across the connection has eroded away the wires to the point that they’re either only barely touching or no longer physically touching at all. From what I can see, for the electricity to make it through the fencing, it actually has to jump the gap.
So that section of fence will need to be either replaced or adjusted, so there’s a fully intact connection.
Same will need to happen with the portion of the electric fencing in the second picture, as you can see the woven metal threads on the top portion are completely broken.
Hard to pass electric current through broken wires. 🙃
There were a couple other areas of concern as well, but I’m grateful that I was able to find what I found. 🙏⁵ I also tightened several of the connection points that had come loose.
There are still several more connection points to tighten, but I didn’t have a wrench with me and didn’t pause what I was doing long enough to get a wrench. 🙃 I’ll do that another day.
I also spent some time today measuring the squareness of the house, both the first floor and the second floor.
That’s a bit of a challenge to do when you’re by yourself, but I devised a little strategy where I put the tape in one corner of the house, then stood a 2×4 such that its end was resting on top of the end of the measuring tape. I then took another piece of 2×4 and leaned it up against the vertical piece to hold it in place.
Gratefully, the vertical piece was heavy enough to keep the measuring tape in place, so I could stretch out the tape from one corner of the house to the other.
I measured the upstairs multiple times before finally settling on numbers that I felt decent about (multiple times when I measured, the numbers were slightly different, so I kept measuring to try and get solid numbers).
When all was said and done, as best I could tell, the bottom floor was pretty much perfectly square, and the top floor was only an inch out (with a 57-plus-foot hypotenuse.
🥳⁶
Way to go Hans! (He’s the one who set the block for the first floor, getting it perfectly square.
Pretty impressive.
I also put on my to-do list to work on filling the low spots in the leach field. I never finished filling in the low spots last fall, and then over the winter and spring, even more settling has taken place, I think.
So after getting the go ahead from Hans to fire up the tractor, and after dragging the Gorilla Cart over to the dirt pile at the beginning of the driveway, I started working on finishing the job of contouring the leach fields.
I want to make sure there aren’t any low spots on the leech field where water would collect and then seep down, saturating the leach field.
Don’t need that. 🙃
So I worked on that for a good little while. I have to be careful moving dirt around, hence why I grabbed the tractor. Unfortunately, I can’t just drive the tractor over to the low spots and spread it out, as you’re not supposed to drive heavy vehicles over the leach field.
Given how far underground the lines are, it probably doesn’t make any real difference, but better safe than sorry, as the saying goes.
Anyway, so I used the tractor to fill up the dump cart, so I didn’t have to do a lot of shoveling, and then the next challenge was to drag a super heavy dump cart full of dirt over to the leach fields without putting undo strain on my back.
With my spine issues the way they are, I can’t just stand up and pull, nor can I lean away from the dump cart as I’m pulling, as that would compress my spine.
What I ended up doing was basically bowing to the dump cart and pulling as if I were doing a horizontal pull-up. Dragging the dump cart that way was awkward and challenging, but it seemed more like I was decompressing my spine in those efforts instead of compressing it.
🤞
So I spent a fair bit of time doing the dirt work. Unfortunately, the dirt is a mix of red clay and brown clay and a bit of topsoil, so it’s not the nicest stuff to be putting out there, but I don’t want to take dirt from the huge topsoil dirt pile on the northwest corner of the house, as I want to make sure that’s saved for later for finish landscaping.
I’ve learned to not get rid of anything until the job is complete, as there’s a decent chance you might need extras later or more of a certain component or material, etc.
Periodically, I would throw the ball for Zora and let the horses out, one by one, to enjoy the fresh green grass outside their paddock.
The grass in their grazing fields is struggling to fill in from over grazing last year. Hopefully, it’ll fill in fairly well here soon. 🤞
There are a handful of days in the forecast calling for the possibility of rain, so we’re crossing our fingers and hoping we get it.
I think I caused a little bit of contention between the horses as I took out Fiona without Rivers permission, so to speak. He wasn’t happy about that. 🙃
And she wasn’t happy that he was unhappy about it, so they bickered the rest of the day, bearing their teeth at each other here and there and backing up to each other but first. 😅
Fiona generally knows better, I think. He’s the leader of the little two-horse heard, so he gives the permission, and Fiona generally makes sure she gets it first (If she’s not within sight of River, and I go to put the bridle on her, she won’t let me put it on until we’re both within sight of River. Then if he doesn’t take issue with it, she’ll let me put it on, and we’ll go out and get grass. Generally, if I haven’t taken him first, however, he’s not in a very sharing mood.
He’s rather skittish, though, so if I’m wearing my face covering hat, sometimes he doesn’t feel comfortable letting me put the bridle on him, so if he’s in that space, then I just take Fiona out, because she doesn’t seem to care whether or not she can see my face.
River just doesn’t like hats in general, and apparently even worse when he can’t see my face. 🙃
Anyway, I went back to dirt working, finding Zora’s water dish and filling it up with cool water, and taking her over to it multiple times because it was a hot day, and she was wanting to follow me around (there’s no shade over by the dirt pile, so she overeats, but she wants to be where I am).
I finally stopped working on filling in the low spots when the rain drops started, but I was able to get a decent amount done. 🙏⁷
Despite the rain, I grabbed the four-wheeler and did some poo dragging. If I can stay on top of that, it helps to keep the flies down, as the poo dries out a heck of a lot faster when broken up into little bitty pieces and dries out a lot quicker.
Did some dishes. Did a little bit of work online, but only a little bit. I’ve made enough to at least cover my Identifix monthly payment that I restarted. So from here on out for the rest of the month, I’ll actually get to keep the money that I’m making. 🙃
When Hans got home from work, I asked him to help me double check my measuring from earlier, and it looks like I did pretty well: The readings we got doing the measuring together were pretty much the same as what I got on my own. 🙏⁸
I did a little bit more working online, was bummed to find that Starship flight 12 aborted because of automated precautionary resets of the countdown clock (which happens if the system detects potential issues). Because of the kind of propellant that they use, if the issues can’t be resolved within five minutes, then the whole flight has to be scrubbed for that day (as the propellant heats up, the increased heat increases the potential for problems, and the propellant can’t be easily cooled back down very quickly).
Hans made us dinner, and I spent a good little while working on my electronic file organization project. I pretty much did that the rest of the night, aside from laughing and joking with Heather and Hans, playing Atari video games via dos and Atari emulators online.
I haven’t actually spent much time playing video games since I was a young teenager and owned a Sega Genesis. 😆
But at least a couple of times over the years I’ve played around online with the emulators and briefly goofed around with a game or two. Today, with my sister, we found emulators for several games that we used to play as little kids at our grandparents’ house.
Fun. 😊
My sister had gone shopping in Rapid City after a medical appointment, and she very generously bought me the food I had on my shopping list. 🙏⁹ So come about midnight when I finally scampered off to bed, I dragged the rest of the food that she bought for me to my van, put it away, and now here I am, 1:39 in the morning, listening to the rain pitter patter on Rover’s roof, determined to not go to bed until I finish this journal entry.
And I made it. 😁
🙏¹⁰
G’night, y’all. 🤍
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 