![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
because winter is coming
Oct. 14th, 2017 08:14 pm...and I hope that it will be a decent snow year. I woke up today with plenty of energy, so instead of doing an indoor workout I put on several layers of wool (it was +5 C out, and very gently raining), grabbed a shovel and went to do something about the hill. The new hill, behind the earth cellar, where I want to be able to do sledding this winter. However, when David's brother (and his digger) built that hill by dropping a fair bit of mixed rock, dirt, and whatever else used to be behind the sheds this summer it all got dropped very randomly, which meant that the slope on the field side had many sharp pointy rocks sticking out of it. It was also rather peaked.
Therefore I started at the top, and shoveled the very peak a bit to the side to make a wider, more reasonable to stand on platform, and then started working my way down the slope, digging out the rocks that stuck up, using them to build a bit of a curved bank to the side so that sleds won't go the wrong way and do the abrupt drop over the side into the alleyway that leads to the earth cellar entrance. I managed about 1.5 hours of this before my body decided that I really needed more food, and I went back inside.
While eating I played with my Swedish practice on Duolingo on my phone, which meant I had to be connected to the internet, so I was available when Crian asked me to edit something for him, so I went to the computer and did that fairly quickly, and then wished him a good day and went back to the hill, managing to work my way about two-thirds down the slope. In the process there was one largish rock I really wanted to move a bit up hill, into a spot on the side bank that would have been perfect for it, but to do that I would have had to get it over another rock, and it wasn't cooperating, so, instead, I let it roll down hill. I was working on another large rock, that had been sticking out as quite a prominent bump on the slope, trying to get it to slide backwards into the hill, and off the rock it was sitting upon, when I realized that I was hungry enough that what I probably needed to do was go get more food, and then try again.
Pretty much directly after I got inside and washed the mud off of my gloves and set them on the heater to dry David arrived. He had wanted to start work on the trench we need to dig from the road to the house so that fiber optic internet can be installed in the not too distant future (last winter the company had said that it would come in "next summer", but at this point it counts as "next autumn", and I hope that they get it here before the weather starts freezing and the ground becomes difficult to work).
However, David has been working to many hours this week (Tuesday he went to work at 06:00, and then wound up working all night, too, went home for a nap between 06:00 and noon Wednesday, then returned to work on Wednesday afternoon), so he was content to sit on the couch and relax with me as I ate. We wound up resting a good hour and a half, then decided that it would soon be getting dark (it was 15:00, and sun sets right now at 17:00), so if we were going to do anything else outdoors we had better do it.
We started with my hill--he went straight to the hill to have a look at what I had done, and I went to go get the steel rod which makes moving large rocks so much easier. By the time I had arrived he had already picked up the one largish rock I had let roll down the hill, carried it up, and set it into the side bank where I had wanted it. He is that much stronger than I. (...and he doesn't work out at all; is it cheating to use longer muscles and testosterone?) We spent 25 minutes finishing up the re-arranging of the bottom part of the slope, and now all that is left is to bring over a few wheelbarrows full of dirt to cover the nice arrangement of rocks on the bottom of the slope and I will have a decent sledding hill for this winter.
Then we went to start that trench. David didn't want to use a shovel, as he thinks it makes more sense to make it as narrow as possible, and he wondered if we could use the pick-axe more like a plow. So we tried it. We took some webbing from a set of tie-downs and fastened it to the handle of the pick, then he sunk one end of the blade into the ground, I grabbed the other end of the pick blade and attempted to hold it down into the ground while he wrapped the other end of the webbing around his waist and pulled. This approach works, but to do the initial tearing through the grass requires frequent backing up and re-sinking of the pick blade as the point tends to work its way back up to the surface fairly quickly when pulled like that (and I do not have the mass to keep it in the ground myself, though it does come back out less rapidly while I hold it). We also tried a more traditional use of the pick, where he simply holds the handle, sinks the blade into the ground and pulls. It is a faster way to do it, but requires much more energy on his part, and given how little energy he has left after this week at work, he didn't do that long. We only used the pick for the part of the yard between our driveway and the place on the wall where we want the cable to enter the house, and called it good.
I will try to make time this week to take the little hand shovel gardening tool to empty the lose dirt out of that trench, and we will wait on the part that goes across the driveway and down the hill to the road until later, when we know when they are doing the actual installation. He is wondering if, perhaps, we can try still using the pick, but instead tie it to the tractor, and let the tractor do the heavy pulling...
Tomorrow is the Frostheim annual meeting during the day (even after seven years in Sweden it still boggles my mind that we have one meeting a year, instead of monthly) so I will make some progress on embroidery for the hood for the Norrskensbågskytt Northern Light's Archer. With luck I will have the energy to go from there to Folk music before dance in the evening. If so, then I will get even more embroidery done.
Therefore I started at the top, and shoveled the very peak a bit to the side to make a wider, more reasonable to stand on platform, and then started working my way down the slope, digging out the rocks that stuck up, using them to build a bit of a curved bank to the side so that sleds won't go the wrong way and do the abrupt drop over the side into the alleyway that leads to the earth cellar entrance. I managed about 1.5 hours of this before my body decided that I really needed more food, and I went back inside.
While eating I played with my Swedish practice on Duolingo on my phone, which meant I had to be connected to the internet, so I was available when Crian asked me to edit something for him, so I went to the computer and did that fairly quickly, and then wished him a good day and went back to the hill, managing to work my way about two-thirds down the slope. In the process there was one largish rock I really wanted to move a bit up hill, into a spot on the side bank that would have been perfect for it, but to do that I would have had to get it over another rock, and it wasn't cooperating, so, instead, I let it roll down hill. I was working on another large rock, that had been sticking out as quite a prominent bump on the slope, trying to get it to slide backwards into the hill, and off the rock it was sitting upon, when I realized that I was hungry enough that what I probably needed to do was go get more food, and then try again.
Pretty much directly after I got inside and washed the mud off of my gloves and set them on the heater to dry David arrived. He had wanted to start work on the trench we need to dig from the road to the house so that fiber optic internet can be installed in the not too distant future (last winter the company had said that it would come in "next summer", but at this point it counts as "next autumn", and I hope that they get it here before the weather starts freezing and the ground becomes difficult to work).
However, David has been working to many hours this week (Tuesday he went to work at 06:00, and then wound up working all night, too, went home for a nap between 06:00 and noon Wednesday, then returned to work on Wednesday afternoon), so he was content to sit on the couch and relax with me as I ate. We wound up resting a good hour and a half, then decided that it would soon be getting dark (it was 15:00, and sun sets right now at 17:00), so if we were going to do anything else outdoors we had better do it.
We started with my hill--he went straight to the hill to have a look at what I had done, and I went to go get the steel rod which makes moving large rocks so much easier. By the time I had arrived he had already picked up the one largish rock I had let roll down the hill, carried it up, and set it into the side bank where I had wanted it. He is that much stronger than I. (...and he doesn't work out at all; is it cheating to use longer muscles and testosterone?) We spent 25 minutes finishing up the re-arranging of the bottom part of the slope, and now all that is left is to bring over a few wheelbarrows full of dirt to cover the nice arrangement of rocks on the bottom of the slope and I will have a decent sledding hill for this winter.
Then we went to start that trench. David didn't want to use a shovel, as he thinks it makes more sense to make it as narrow as possible, and he wondered if we could use the pick-axe more like a plow. So we tried it. We took some webbing from a set of tie-downs and fastened it to the handle of the pick, then he sunk one end of the blade into the ground, I grabbed the other end of the pick blade and attempted to hold it down into the ground while he wrapped the other end of the webbing around his waist and pulled. This approach works, but to do the initial tearing through the grass requires frequent backing up and re-sinking of the pick blade as the point tends to work its way back up to the surface fairly quickly when pulled like that (and I do not have the mass to keep it in the ground myself, though it does come back out less rapidly while I hold it). We also tried a more traditional use of the pick, where he simply holds the handle, sinks the blade into the ground and pulls. It is a faster way to do it, but requires much more energy on his part, and given how little energy he has left after this week at work, he didn't do that long. We only used the pick for the part of the yard between our driveway and the place on the wall where we want the cable to enter the house, and called it good.
I will try to make time this week to take the little hand shovel gardening tool to empty the lose dirt out of that trench, and we will wait on the part that goes across the driveway and down the hill to the road until later, when we know when they are doing the actual installation. He is wondering if, perhaps, we can try still using the pick, but instead tie it to the tractor, and let the tractor do the heavy pulling...
Tomorrow is the Frostheim annual meeting during the day (even after seven years in Sweden it still boggles my mind that we have one meeting a year, instead of monthly) so I will make some progress on embroidery for the hood for the Norrskensbågskytt Northern Light's Archer. With luck I will have the energy to go from there to Folk music before dance in the evening. If so, then I will get even more embroidery done.
