(written on August 16th)
I was up later again today. It gets so hot during the day and doesn’t really cool off much at night, so I just don’t want to be in the van until later. I think the overnight low was maybe 80°?
So that’s the coolest it gets. 🥵
Not a fan. 😅
I’m grateful that I have AC now in my van, and I’m grateful that I’ve learned to turn that AC on and run the van for a fair bit before I go to bed to dry out the air inside the van. Doing that makes it so my little battery-operated fan that I have blowing on me all night actually makes it comfortable (without a blanket to start, though 🙃).
I ate the rest of my ice cream for breakfast 😅, and then didn’t eat anything again until late, just before bed.
I gathered up all the donation stuff that was inside the house and loaded it up into my van. Then I gathered up the overflowing garbage from everything we had done yesterday and dumped it in the garbage can at the top of the driveway as I drove away to Haven Hill to work on some stuff there.
My main objects while at Haven Hill were to get see if anyone wanted any of the stuff that was getting donated and to get the rest of the greenhouse wood from the lower field up to by the storage barn to be cut up into burnable pieces.
Then I planned to do a super quick recontouring of the slope between the middle culvert and the ditch on the North side of the road through the property.
After Liz claimed some of the stuff, I hopped on the tractor and drove it down to the lower back pasture. Before gathering up the wood, I was reminded of the mess I made of the dirt on the west side of the old greenhouse last year when I got my van stuck, so I spent a fair bit of time relandscaping that area to make it mowable.
Last summer, I had done my best to dig down with my skid steer in the hopes of getting to dry dirt that I could drive out of, but it was all in vain (as I imagine you remember).
Anyway, so I had a big pile of dirt, and a big sink-hole/low spot/hole, and then ruts here and there to deal with.
It wasn’t easy, but eventually after a lot of work, I was able to get the dirt at least decently smoothed back out, hole and ruts filled. 🙏
Then I was able to load up the last bit of wood (grateful that I hadn’t tried to take it all in one fell swoop last time, as there was a lot more than I had expected). With the wood out of the way, I mowed the part the wood had been covering, and dumped the wood up at the barn where I’ve been doing the cutting.
Wanting to help my mom prepare for the move, I went back down to the lower back field to my storage shed and dug out 17 empty storage bins that had once been full of my stuff, setting them down in the partial shade of the eastish side of the shed, so they wouldn’t get cooked by the Sun.
Though I hadn’t mowed the rocky ramp down to the creek, I braved it anyway, dragging one of the storage bins with me that apparently had been home to a mouse (when I pulled some of my stuff out of the bin, there was a mouse left over that with its incredible leaping ability managed to jump all the way out of the bin. 😲).
But it left behind some smelly liquid leftovers, that I planned to rinse out in the creek while at the same time taking a nice cool soak on a stupidly hot day.
It’s been mostly three-digit highs for a little while now. 🥵
I haven’t taken a dip in the creek in maybe over a year?
Crazy how quickly time passes.
The creek was a lot shallower than it usually is. Part of that, I think, is that I excavated downstream a bit, which lowered the overall level of the water.
Part of it might also be that the flow rate is so low right now.
Felt good to be in the creek, gazillions of minnows hanging around, nibbling at my legs. The crayfish weren’t as friendly, I think trying to figure out what on Earth I was. One of them came over and started squeezing my foot with its claw, I think.
I tried not to let them get close after that, but there were so many of them. 🙃
Anyway, so it’s a cool creek felt really really good on a ridiculously hot day. Gratefully, it’s been dry, so the humidity hasn’t been as awful as it usually is. It’s been more like the dry west than the humid midwes. 🙏 Still, the “real feel” has been I think maybe 7 to 10° hotter than the actual temperature? So around 110 today.
It’s really hot. 🥵
The drier-than-normal air, though nicer for me, has made working with the dirt a lot more challenging. Just like in South Dakota, if I ruffle up the grass, the grass basically just comes out without effort, because the dirt underneath is just powder. There’s no moisture holding everything together.
I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced that in Arkansas before? I imagine the conditions have probably existed at times while I’ve lived here, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them.
Anyway, what that means is that when trying to sculpt the dirt, you’re basically sculpting rock and powder. I ran into that the other day while redoing the speed bump, water diverter, but I was able to mitigate that by taking dirt from the big dirt pile that still had some moist dirt left in it.
Today, there wasn’t much I could do to mitigate the same issue.
But that wasn’t even the biggest problem. 😕
That little plan that I had to fix the contouring by the middle culvert… it was supposed to be like a 10-minute job: scrape just enough of the dirt away so there is a swale sufficient to catch the overflow of water and send it down to the ditch on the north side of the road, so it doesn’t overflow, go on to the road, wash the road out, and bury the lower culvert again).
Well, those 10 minutes ended up turning into maybe 6 hours?
I was really not happy. Really angry, actually. 🤬
Expectations…
Why on Earth did it take so long? Well… because it wasn’t dirt there. I had expected to be able to just scrape away a little bit of dirt, and be on my way, but no, there was the tiniest layer of dirt over pretty much nothing but rock, the dirt held together by the roots of the grasses and what not above.
Any scraping exposed the fact that there pretty much was no soil, as it brought all the rocks directly to the surface immediately.
I’m not exaggerating at all. Scrape the ground, and all you get is rocks.
Digging out rock is a heck a lot harder than digging out dirt. And you can’t really scrape it. The bigger rocks get in the way, and then you end up scraping along the top because the rocks won’t let you scrape down lower.
So then you’re stuck doing it by hand.
Before I knew it, I was in the middle of a huge mess, and I didn’t want to leave my hill family with a big mess that I’d made. This part of the field is supposed to be mowed. Rocks don’t mow very well, which means that unless you pick up all the rocks, the mower blades slam into rock after rock after rock.
So my little 10-minute good deed to prevent massive erosion in the next huge deluge turned into a several hour saga, and left me, already significantly struggling emotionally and spiritually, livid. 🤬
😕
There’s just… so little left of me. Relapse devastates me… still… even though I know it shouldn’t, and I’m battling the thoughts and feelings and fears that continually pound me as I continue to follow the path that I feel God directed me to follow that I’ve been following for nearly two decades now, a path that seems more delusional/asinine/preposterous than ever before, especially now.
I know asking God why (as in “why is this happening like this when I trusted and sacrificed and continue to sacrifice so much to follow this path?”) isn’t as effective as asking “what would you have me learn from this?”
But I’m so tired, and I just want to know why. 😞
I have so little resilience.
I can’t hold on to the light.
And it certainly doesn’t help that I spend so much time trying to help others to the neglect of the essential mental, emotional, and spiritual self care that’s necessary for healthy and happy living for myself.
I just push and push and push, and pile on more and more trying to lighten others’ loads both because I want to lift and serve, and because the lifting and serving is simpler (generally) than the daily battles I fight in other areas, so it provides a meaningful, productive path that also avoids the harder, heavier things I’m just so tired of facing.
Anyway… 🐿️
After hours and hours of effort, trying to be as productive and efficient as I could in the midst of mess (each load I dug out, either by machine or by hand, was driven up to the portion of the road in front of Jim and Steph’s place that’s washed out, dumped in the ditch, and then on the way back down, I’d mow another strip of the unmowed portion of the super steep upper-pond hill.
After maybe 6 hours of effort, I finally called it for the day. It’s not perfect. It’s not even good. Probably more like “acceptable given the circumstances.”
😕
My sister Heather called, after I mentioned during our text conversation that I was in a pretty crappy space.
Thx, sister. 🤍
We talked while I unloaded some stuff that Stephanie wanted (from the things that are on the donation chopping block) onto their front porch. My patience was completely gone by then, so I got frustrated quickly when I couldn’t find things that I had put in my van.
My poor van is an absolute disaster and has been ever since I left South Dakota loaded down with car parts.
Tired of living in crowded mess, but I’m still trying to sell valuables that I have that are taking up space. I’m making progress, and that’s nice, but good golly I’m ready for some space in here.
I own so little. And I like it that way. I want to own less. 🙃
Now, please. 😅
I could just give it away, instead of waiting for it to actually sell, but… spending all my time helping people , I don’t really make any money, so it would seem prudent to hold out for people to buy stuff instead of just giving it away.
Anyway…
I was supposed to make a commitment today to stop eating junk food, sort of a co-commitment with another person to help us both be accountable for the things we’re wanting to do better at, but I just don’t have it today.
Man, I wish I were who I used to be. 😞
I was quite depleted by the time I got back to my mom’s place, both because of the heat, and probably because I don’t think I’d eaten anything since my little ice cream breakfast, working out in the scorching heat all day. 😅
At least I did somewhat decently well at staying hydrated. 🎊
Not only did I fail to begin cutting the junk food back out of my diet again, I ended up buying probably two or three times more than what I usually do.
That usually seems to be the case. Seems like every time I try to take a meaningful step and forward to make progress in some area of my life, I end up taking more steps backward in that area than steps forward, and almost would have been better to not even have tried to take a step forward because I’ve gone so far backward.
Not rational or logical thinking, but that’s certainly what it feels like given consistency of the experience.
Hung out with my mom for a little while, and she made a really late dinner for me, so I got some real food in me instead of just eating the crap that I just bought from the Neighborhood Market.
Thx, mom. 🙏
…
I’m struggling pretty good.
I’m pretty transparent about most of my life on this blog, but there’s a part of my life that I can’t be transparent about and give proper respect to who/what deserves respect and privacy, so… no details ever really get shared.
And it’s that part of my life that weighs more heavily upon me and takes up more of my mental, emotional, and spiritual bandwidth than anything else… probably more than everything else combined.
I bid good evening to my mom, ran Rover with the AC on for long enough to dry the air out and cool down the van at least a little bit, veged, and called it a night.
I wanted to get back to the light, but I don’t have the strength right now to do it on my own. I just keep running, running, running. Running from fear and pain.
Oh, I forgot to mention I was able to open up the crushed lower culvert a bit (The one I re-landscaped last week). The delivery trucks regularly drive over the culverts smashing them down, because they take the corner to sharply.
Not perfect, but better.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
