Friday, July 9

[gottawonder]

Today I am grateful for:

My sweetie got a lot done on the one side of the house, digging out the path where we will lay bricks. It has to be lower than the surrounding soil to allow for the depth of the bricks, and for the layer of gravel underneath it.

He also installed one window in the basement. It was a "pilot"' window so that he could judge what he would need for materials for the frames of the rest of them.

I cleaned out my little car today. I probably haven't done a really good cleaning since we started the house moving project two full years ago. Sure, I've wiped the dash a bit, shook out the mats, took out the crap, but today I did a deep clean. Vacuumed, wiped, removed trash and all un-needed items. Aside from how nice it is for ME to have a clean vehicle, we are meeting my sweetie's cousin and her fiancee in the city tomorrow hopefully, and we might need to give them a ride. Our vehicles are pretty "farmy", so at least mine is a little less so for now.

I went to see River. It was quite hot again, so again he needed to have an easy day. We did do something fun that could be done at a walk; 5 pylons spaced evenly apart, and five long poles. You try to get the poles into the little hole in the pylon from the back of your horse, like a flag. Challenging because you have to get the horse close to the pylons, the horse has to be okay with you carrying and moving a long pole around from his back, and you can't use both hands to steer. River, being so tired from the heat, did not worry about anything (he likely would have if he were feeling cooler). I could carry all of the poles and didn't need the reins to steer him, and I got a little better at actually getting the poles in the holes by the end. TINY holes, barely big enough.

Then I came home, and we watched "Gladiator", an excellent movie.

Thursday:

Another pretty hot day. So far, this is one of the hottest summers I can remember since we've moved here.

Our goal was to use up the remaining topsoil in the big pile on the driveway so that we could then finish the drive way (by spreading the gravel onto it).

We used some of the topsoil to fill in the trench on each side of the hedges that was likely there from when they dug in the shrubs years ago. It's always been a pain in the butt to mow because of that ditch.

The rest of the topsoil went on another area of the yard that was scraped bare in shaping that part of the yard.

Then my sweetie spread the gravel out on the driveway (this area of it anyhow, it's a parking area by the house).
Just so that it doesn't sound too horrible, we do have a very old tractor that works well enough to get the job done.

I managed to get a coat of paint on the deck at the front of the house. It's a pretty humble deck, the remains of the proper finished deck that used to be part of the trailer we tore down. It's now just the flat part laid in front of the house so that we don't have to walk on mud. I decided to paint it and make it look like a choice rather than the temporary measure (which will still be there for a year or two) that it is.