Posts Tagged ‘metal scrap’
Declutter Day
It was quick. It was easy. So quick and easy, in fact, that I almost forgot it was part of my day yesterday. There is another likely reason it slipped my mind: it happened at the crack of dawn. A recent acquaintance volunteered to come first thing in the morning to take my collection of accumulated metal scrap. As a thank you to him for doing so, I offered him my old Craftsman riding mower as well.
That became a 2-for-1 decluttering success for me. That mower has been sitting untouched in the shop garage for at least two years. The battery was dead, so I couldn’t start it for him, but we pushed it out of the garage and onto his trailer in a wonderful exclamation point of decluttering.
Taking advantage of finding myself in the decluttering mode, I also finally took action on an inconvenient piece of trash that has been sitting around for years, collecting pigeon shit in the hay shed.
This plastic bucket had a broken bottom but was too big to fit easily in our trash bin. It needed to be busted up into smaller pieces. That’s something that I never found myself wanting to do, so it just got moved around in the shed each time it was in the way of whatever we were doing.
After the scrap metal was easily dispatched, I used that momentum to snap 
that bucket into little pieces that fit into a garbage bag.
There is no valid reason why that couldn’t have happened the very day the bottom of that bucket broke in the first place.
The sun had just barely come up, and I had accomplished a day’s worth of rewarding feats. Then I completed manure management chores and headed to the house for breakfast. I watched the thrilling finish of Stage 16 of the Tour de France on Mont Ventoux, followed by raking, mowing, trimming, and more mowing.
Add in a little jaunt to Minneapolis for dinner with Rich and Gary, where we plotted a September bike adventure in South Dakota, and I found my mind had lost track of how my day had started.
The only thing missing was a nap that I would have enjoyed having somewhere in the middle of the afternoon.
Maybe I can make up for that today…
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More Bales
With all those fat windrows laying in our fields, there was more than enough for us to take a wagon load of bales for ourselves. It took a little creative arranging to fit them in the shed, with our recently purchased bales already stacked to the ceiling, but we found a way to make them fit.
Jody successfully completed baling the last of the windrows, leaving our fields with the clean look of being freshly cut.
Cyndie climbed the mountain of bales in the wagon and heaved them out for me to stack.
We won’t need to go to a gym to get a workout, that’s for sure.
There’s nothing like putting in a full day of work and then following that up with an intense effort of throwing more than a hundred bales in the July heat.
Since we wanted to keep bales from our back pasture, I had some time to kill while Jody finished filling one wagon with bales from the hay-field. I took advantage of the time to turn and rearrange our composting manure piles.
While I was nearing completion of that task, Cyndie called me to meet a neighbor who volunteered to take our miscellaneous metal scrap that was slowly accumulating. That was a wonderful happenstance, allowing me to clean out a pile of ugly metal trash that we’d piled up over the five years we’ve been here.
It was a rewarding three-for-one night of accomplishments that left little time for much else.
Dinner didn’t happen until 8:30 p.m., and bedtime was a little later than usual, but we were buoyed by the satisfying accomplishments we’d achieved.
Once again, we are feeling happy to be done with stacking bales for a while. This time, that joy should last for a much longer span of weeks.
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Relative Something 