(written on October 8th from notes taken previously)
Today was a bust-my-butt-on-Haven-Hill work day. 🥵
First, I got up early, grabbed my newly fully-functioning trailer 😁, and headed down to the Rogers recycling center with Jim to get him free wood chips from the yard waste area.
Sadly, we were turned away, as I think they didn’t have anybody to load chips today? 😕
And I noticed that, for whatever reason, Jim’s truck isn’t charging my trailer battery. 🤔
Anyway, after getting back to the Hill, I spent a good little while cutting wood up to try and clean up the piles of construction lumber that have been accumulating (increasing in both size and number) next to the storage/shop barn.
I then spent hours working on redoing the speed bump between Jim’s place and Liz’s place. The recent storms had pretty much completely washed it out, so I started rebuilding it, so the next big rainstorm wouldn’t absolutely destroy the road in front of Liz’s place.
After working on the speed bump for a good long time, I spent more time cutting up wood, and then I hopped on the tractor and started mowing again.
I’m trying to get things to a state where it’ll be easier to maintain again.
🤞
Took a bunch of trash down to the dumpster, and then I kept mowing and mowing and mowing, trying to get the mowing to a point where I could ask Rafe to come and spend a couple hours mowing.
Everything is so overgrown in the lower back fields that it’s hard to know what is where (as far as obstacles are concerned). I know where they are because I’ve spent gazillions of hours down there, dealing with the obstacles, mowing, etc, but I wanted to get to a point where I could just say, “Rafe, just hop on the tractor, and mow round and round and round in this area until you’re done.”
In order to do that, one of the things I needed to do was gather up all of the wood that I got when disassembling the greenhouse in Oklahoma. Way back when. It’s been sitting out in the weather for years now, so it’s basically useless. 😕
It’s been there so long that it’s rotting.
By that point in the day, though, I was absolutely exhausted. Running on sheer willpower.
But I wanted to get done, so I pushed through the exhaustion and started loading the wood up in the tractor bucket, coming up with solutions that would allow me to put lots and lots more wood per load in the tractor bucket than would normally fit.
In the process of doing all that, I ran into a big fat snake that wasn’t too happy about me being there messing with his/her home. 🙃 Fortunately, it was just a black snake and not deadly, but it was a big one, and I wasn’t too keen on getting bitten.
I think it took me three? creatively packed loads before I was able to get all the wood loaded up and dumped by the storage/shop barn.
Ironically, after spending a bunch of time trying to reduce the amount of wood there, bringing all that wood from the lower fields substantially increased the amount of wood up there. 😅
Oh well.
I finished mowing enough to get to a point where I felt like Rafe could jump in and help. 🙏
Stephanie invited me over for dinner, and I gratefully accepted, hanging out and eating for a bit before heading to the neighborhood market, then back to my mom’s place to hang out with her for a bit before crashing for the night.
It’s been like an oven here in Arkansas. Again today it was close to or at 100°. 🥵
It’s been brutal.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
