Posts Tagged ‘hand shoveling’
Bucket Loads
Today is Asher’s and my last full day managing the ranch on our own. The house has been cleaned by professionals whom Cyndie hired before she left. This girl thinks ahead and knows my ability to endure dust and dog hair is different than hers. Tomorrow, I drive to the airport to pick up the pair of travelers and all the Norwegian souvenirs they collected.
I suspect that Cyndie will be excited to see the changes that have occurred at home since she left. In case you ever wondered why we call our front field the “hay field,” this image serves as a clear example:
They started raking the grass into windrows in the early afternoon, and when I came out of the house after a late lunch, there were already four large round bales parked in the field. That round baler machine sure makes short work of the task.
Conversely, I was making long work of the job of moving loads of lime screenings up to the barn overhang. I opted to use a wheelbarrow to move 15 shovel-fulls at a time, because I was working with the horses surrounding me the whole time.
It will go much quicker when I can use the loader on the big tractor, but I need a helper to manage horses and gates, and be my eyes on the perimeter of the bucket I can’t see from behind the steering wheel.
I got most of the north side of the overhang covered yesterday.
They didn’t wait for me to finish before christening it with the first dump of manure. I’m not sure if that was a message relaying an opinion or simply a show of acceptance for the update.
I would love to get more done today, but we are about to get hit with a thunderstorm that has put any agenda I had for the day on hold. I should probably be thinking about how I’m going to keep the floors clean for a whole nother day for Cyndie. Wet weather usually translates to dirty paw prints.
Not that I tend to notice, though.
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Helping Ourselves
We asked for help in finishing the landscaping along the steep edges of our new driveway. I’m taking the lack of response from our excavator to indicate they are either too busy or simply not interested. They must not need our money.
It is a peeve of mine when contractors choose to “ghost” potential customers after initial contact. I generally follow the idiom of squeaky wheels getting the grease but after multiple unsuccessful attempts to communicate our genuine interest in paying for help with our landscaping, we have fallen back on doing what we can with our limited resources.
Up by the shop/garage, I have been feathering the edge with composted manure. Yesterday, we mined a ten-year-old pile of dirt down by our southern border drainage ditch to use at the bottom of the driveway by the road, filling the trailer behind the ATV with hand shovels. We made six trips back and forth and covered a humblingly short length of both sides.
Cyndie suggested we rent a skid steer tractor. She’s not wrong that it would be a more impressive machine for addressing this size of a job. My first hesitation with that plan is that I would be the person to operate it and I’ve never driven one before. The subsequent issues include our lack of truck or trailer to transport the machine, the small amount of available dirt a machine like that could move, and the abuse my novice use would do to the surrounding terrain.
We don’t make a lot of efficient progress with our shovel-fulls at a time, but I have the skills to operate a shovel and can do the work with minimal collateral damage.
The only real challenge beyond not being able to finish the job quickly is coping with my self-conscious embarrassment about the neighbors’ opinions over our using hand tools to tackle work that deserves machines. Working down at the road leaves our methods glaringly obvious to local traffic passing by.
My slow and primitive methods are less obvious up on the other end of the driveway. I’m not certain our efforts will ultimately produce the desired results but Cyndie and I agree what we can do ourselves will be better than nothing. Time will tell.
Having successfully made that small bit of progress near the road yesterday, I’d like to keep going while the weather allows until we use up the rest of the old pile. It’s a good exercise in coping with my apprehension over the impressions my methods give to local observers.
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Relative Something 