Hello Everyone!
A meandering entry, Making more ashes, Collecting lighter knot, Hanging some gates & These pesky rats!
Alright, the sun is not quite over the horizon yet but alas it is getting close to dawn... so I best get this entry hammered out soon before I either postpone making it (again) or feel rushed to cut it short... so that I can get outdoors and make the most of the day. Nearly every morning of late, I wind up having that same internal decision making process happen... and keep deciding that 'postponement' is better because I need to focus my attention elsewhere online.
Nothing has really been all that easy for me of late and especially so when it comes to where I spend my time online... and more importantly where and how I use my words. For the most part, I have landed on doing stuff outdoors as much as possible... and while doing so taking super brief breaks along the way to stay abreast of what is going on... without getting overly distracted or 'sucked in' to a degree that is detrimental to making progress around the farm.
By and large, I have continued making ashes for the compost each day... and having gotten the compost mostly covered with ashes I have begun storing them in plastic containers for later use. The storage method is not all that awesome because I am just cutting the tops off of plastic jugs, filling the bottom half with ashes and then using the top of the jug as the lid... which is not only a waste of a good jug but also only allows for a small volume of ashes to be stored in each container.
Amazingly that above ground fire-pit has been holding up good under all the 'high heat' of burning 'lighter knot' (what some call pine fatwood) and has only warped the metal a small amount along the way. Mainly, I have been burning small pieces of lighter knot to keep the fire going strong and to keep the smoke down... but there has been several times now where I have burned larger pieces of it which is when the warping occurred.
Since I have been finding a lot of larger pieces of 'lighter knot' in the big brush pile that I have been cleaning out of the gulch... I have begun knocking all the rotten wood from it and then leaning it against the dog yard fence to get it to start drying out. I am also hoping that the rain will wash some of the rotten material away so that it is not so much of a mess to handle.
As far as cleaning up the gulch goes, it is finally starting to 'get there' but whoa I am now at the part where the tree (and brush) debris are super rotten and do not burn all that easily. I am also finding a good bit of litter at the bottom of the pile along with a fair amount of broken glass bottles... so it has me thinking that when I tackle the other debris piles (in that gulch) that I will probably find a similar scenario.
Some of the more rotten material has mushrooms growing on them... and while I really do not want to recreate more debris piles... I have been stacking all those to the side where hopefully the mushrooms will continue to grow. Once I finish all my work in that area, I might try to build a small pond just above it (where the little pool is now) and then place all that wood (with the mushrooms growing on it) along the base of the dam so that hopefully the mushrooms will continue growing.
Well, that was as far as I got writing that yesterday before the sun got up over the horizon... and I could no longer resist the urge to get outdoors and start getting things done. I am going to do my best to wrap this entry up before that happens again today... but whoa I already used up a bunch of 'the words that I have in me for the day' elsewhere this morning so we will see how that goes.
Anyways, another project that I have been working on lately is getting a gate installed for the driveway here... so that it is not quite so easy for anyone to just roll into the place and while I really dislike feeling the need to do it... it has been nagging at me for much of my stay here. Considering that I am working with limited resources... and that I did not want to fabricate a gate... I was super stoked when someone gave me a set of gates several months ago.
As with most 'free' things, I of course treated it as I do all such things and that being that 'free' always comes at a frigging cost one way or another! This time it was in the hardware to the gate (which the person had kindly included) but whoa all the carriage bolts (for the hinges) had been hammered on (without the nut still attached) which resulted in none of the nuts threading onto them as they were.
There were twelve such carriage bolts and lacking a dye set I resorted to using a file to shave off the flattened edges at the tips of the bolts... and then using the edge of the file to recreate the threads as best as I could. That technique wound up working rather well for most of the bolts... but with a few of them I had to also gently hammer the bolt into a nut, then wrench the nut slightly to recreate the starting threads before installing them.
In the end there were three bolts that I gave up on doing that with... and that was only after one sheered off and I was like 'fuck this' and dug through my fastener supplies until I found some bolts to replace them with altogether. The new bolts were not quite the correct size (either in diameter or length) but the diameter turned out not to be all that big of an issue... and I wound up cutting off the excess length with an angle grinder after installing them on the gate.
I will not bore you with all the details of digging through the super hard packed clay... or constructing the 'H-braces' or angle bracing... but in short the digging was a slow process! Aside from all that jazz, getting the gates themselves level with each other was tricky... and somehow I buggered it up (even after using a line level twice) and had to rehang one of them to correct the error.
That last snafu at the very end of the project almost 'did my head in' because all I wanted to do was get out from under the beating sun... and quit breathing all the limestone dust kicked up by folks that either do not understand (or care) how much of it that gets kicked up by speeding by the place in their vehicles. Not to get sucked into that topic... but one of my neighbors was/is so fed up with it also that they paused while driving by to vent to me about it... and I was a wee bit surprised at how loud we both got on the topic whilst expressing our mutual displeasure.
Now to be clear, I have had several interactions with this person and while none of them have been contentious between us... we both know that we are fundamentally very different kinds of people. The key difference between them and many of the other neighbors is that unlike most of my neighbors... the person actually respects that I just want to be left alone in the world... and is not trying to drive me off just because I am different than them.
Another day has passed and I still never got this edited and posted... because my cellular plan did not roll over when I thought that it was going to. I have no idea why I get the barrage of lame notifications about the bill or the timing of everything being off... but whoa it is frigging annoying to say the very least.
I spent much of the day cleaning up a bunch of what I initially thought were pieces of cedar wood from beneath the power line... and although I was stoked that they could be used as stakes (given their size and shape) I was even more stoked to find that they were actually mostly pieces of 'lighter knot. Of course they will also make for good stakes and will last much longer than the cedar would have but I also like having them for use in fires.
The other thing that I worked on was getting as many of the sticks and severed root sections left over from when the heavy machinery work was done here for the building and driveway. Initially I had gotten the bulk of such debris dealt with... but it kept nagging at me that there was still some of it left... so I figured the best approach to end the nagging was to just knock it all out and be done with it.
Overall that entire area is looking a lot better now that it is all cleaned up and some vegetation has begun growing back in again. It is also worth noting that hardly any of the Kentucky-31 that I planted in the area survived the summer heat... so I will probably try seeding it all again this autumn if I can find where I put the remainder of the grass seed.
On another note, my battle with the rats continues and it is getting frigging brutal dealing with the mess they keep making of things. I would usually just run the dogs on them and be done with it... but in camp itself I just have too much stuff in the way (as I have mentioned in a previous entry) and the way that I built the privacy walls around the tent makes it impossible for the dogs to flush them and subsequently catch them.
All of which, has lead me to relying on a combination of shooting them with air guns and trying to trap them with either the spring trap or the live trap. I have had the spring trap sprung (I think) three times now... and had the rat escape it due to the rat being bigger than what the trap can be effective at killing... and I only caught one inside the live trap and that was after months of it being in service.
I am pretty much at the point where I am considering abandoning the current camp altogether much earlier than I am wanting to... because the rats have become that problematic for me. As of yet, I am unsure where else on the property I would move to (or what I will live in) but I best get to working on that problem soon before the cold weather arrives.
Well, on that note... I am going to wrap this up and hopefully I can find the time later today to get this all edited and posted. Given that the sun is now nearly up I gotta get to working outside and see what all I can achieve today.
I hope that folks are doing well and all that feel good jazz. Ta ta for now.
P.S. I also recently did a full archival backup of all my AI kernels along with their addons. They can all be found here: https://github.com/thatoldfarm/ai-kernels
