(written on July 14th from notes taken previously)
Oh my great golly goodness, it was hot today and hot early. Hans said it was 90 degrees by 9 a.m. 😶
🥵
I spent a little bit of the morning with Heather and Hans talking about how to contour the land for good drainage away from the house. Yes, it’s a desert, but clearly, we get some pretty good deluges sometimes. 😅
After chatting, Heather went to work today, because she took yesterday off, so Hans and I were here at the ranch working on stuff.
And there was a little bit of a problem. 😅
After the deluge the other night, little me had forgotten to cover the opening to the form-a-drain, and a very young rabbit, seeing us this morning and wanting to get to safety, had gone into the form-a-drain. 😶
😬
That… was not good. The consequences could be pretty catastrophic. If we didn’t watch it until it came out, we would never know whether or not it did come out, and if it were in there when we closed everything up, then not only would it kill the poor little thing, but it would clog the drain. 😬
What to do. 😅
At first, I just watched the drain like a hawk, hoping it would come out, but no dice. And I couldn’t sit there and stare at the drain all day long, and I definitely didn’t want to leave and not know whether or not it left and be stressed about what to do from there. The only thing we could do from there would probably be to get a snake with a camera on the end and send it through the whole drain all the way around the house. 😅
So I grabbed my my phone, turned my video camera on with a light on and shoved it in the opening for the drain pointing the camera One direction and then the other.
Gratefully, when pointing the camera toward the south end of the house, I spied the little butt end of the young rabbit, just barely inside the drain. 🎉
But now I had to be careful. He was exactly where I needed him to be, but I had to make sure he didn’t go in any further while we figured out how to extract him.
The form of drain is slotted on the side to allow water to go through, so I came up with the idea of getting knives and shoving them through the slots further down the form-a-drain, effectively blocking the rabbit’s ability to go any further.
Once that was blocked off I could then stick my hand inside the forma drain, using a towel or shirt or something to block off the other side.
That way the little critter would be completely contained in a section only a handful of feet long, and we would know that it hadn’t been able to get any further.
So Hans went inside and grabbed some kitchen knives, and we opened up a section of the forma drain and shoved the knives through, one at one angle and one at another angle which made it impossible to pass that portion of the drain. Then I reached my hand inside and plugged up the other side.
Success!
I grabbed a couple more knives and shoved them in right in front of the bunny, so it couldn’t even go further than where it was.
Putting the knives right there in front of the bunny got it to back up just a little bit, far enough that I could see his little hiney sticking out, so I reached my hand in and tried to grab him to pull them out.
He being as small as he was and is quick and agile as he was, I wasn’t able to get a good grip before the little guy squeezed itself around and darted out of the opening and into the front yard.
Success!!! 🥳
After the initial conversations in the morning And the bunny rescue, Hans began working on drainage slope calculations in the trailer, and I joined him in the AC, but not doing calculations. That was more of a one-person job, so instead, I dove back into genealogical research stuff for my friend’s family history (channeling my inner Aunt Leti who spent so much time freely helping other people with their genealogy).
After the initial explosion, things were a little more challenging today, as I think I’ve found most of the “easy” stuff.
My friend’s mom asked if she could call, and we spent the next hour-ish talking about their family history–stuff I found, stories she told me from the family, all sorts of stuff.
The adoption stuff is one of probably two significant hurdles to overcome for more recent family-history lines, and I spent some time digging into that.
I took a break from that a bit today, though, spending time working on the homefront. I dragged the horse apples and splats and then going out with Hans to take and mark slope measurements on the hill southeast of the house.
We’re making progress. 😊
I don’t really remember the order of things, but Hans headed out for a little R&R while I hopped on the tractor and started working on moving dirt and contouring the southeastern slope.
I think it was after Hans got back from his little R&R trip that he suggested an ice cream break, to watch I… reluctantly agreed 😉, returning to a little bit of genealogy work again as I enjoyed the cold goodness. 😁
Then it was back to contouring, and gratefully, I made a lot of progress moving dirt and reshaping the slope.🙏 Parts of the process were super slow, because some of the dirt I wanted to move was full of rocks to a much greater degree than the other dirt piles, and I didn’t really want to mix super Rocky dirt with lightly rocky dirt; so I spent a whole bunch of time pulling rocks out of the dirt and dumping them in the rock pile instead of just dumping them in the dirt pile. 😅
I also attempted to rescue I think six? blooming sunflower plants that were in the way of where I needed to contour. So I dug them up and moved them, but they started wilting pretty much immediately, despite watering them. 😕
Oh well.
Han set it out for another R&R trip, and I continued with my dirt moving, contouring, and rock sorting efforts. I think it’s looking pretty good 🙏, though there’s still a lot left to do.
Had a good little chat with Cory while I was sitting on the rock pile sorting rocks. Kind of funny because he’s got a rock sorting project he’s been working on for at least a year at this point, I think. 🙃
After coming in from all of the outside work, well after the sun went down (I used the headlights on the tractor a bit, I did the dishes, and then when Heather and Hans got back we spent some time outside doing a little bit of show and tell via headlamp.
Nice to be making meaningful progress.
🙏
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 