kareina

When I went to sleep last night my tentative plan for today was to do a morning workout and then head to the office to do a bit more uni work, even though I don't work Fridays, to catch up on some of the hours I am behind. This didn't happen. Instead I slept till 09:00, did hardly any morning situps (only 6 minutes), had some breakfast, and then went out to work on my sledding hill as my morning workout. Places south of here already have snow, but, other than a light dusting on Monday, which has long since vanished, we haven't been so blessed. However, that means that I could still dig and bring dirt to the hill to finish getting it ready for winter. I think I am reasonably happy with the result: . . However, after I finished working on that I was hungry, so I curled up with a book and some food, and then fell asleep for three hours! By the time I awoke it was getting close to sunset. Since then I have managed to do the vacuuming (which was really needed in the entry area after foolishly walking back into the house without completely cleaning my boots earlier) and taped together the "tiled pages" I had printed the other day in preparation for painting a back-drop for the Norrskensbard contest at Norrskensfesten next weekend. It will have the same motifs at the cloak that the winner of the contest gets to wear for a year. I wouldn't bother, but the contest hall this year is a chapel, and I don't really want the religious art to be visible.

As I mentioned on Tuesday's post, the guys went back out after dinner and continued working, and didn't come back in to the house till after 23:00. Therefore they opted to sleep in on Wednesday, and we didn't get up till around 07:00. Once again we worked all day and then some--this time they weren't done till after midnight! I participated a little with outside work (transplanting berries, setting in stone steps, etc.), but spent much of the day inside the house cooking food for them to eat on their rare breaks.

Wednesday's yard-work accomplishments, roughly in order of accomplishment (some things happened at the same time, others happened in tandem--a bit of one, a bit of the other, etc.):

* clean out ditch at edge of field
* transplant more smultrons from area by shed
* dig up really big rock from the field
* look at, and re-bury an even bigger rock in the field
* put really big rock on top of the buried even bigger rock, so that no one ever tries plowing over that one* dig up two remaining bushes by shed and set in small tractor scoop for later replanting on other side of the house
* surround earth cellar with large rocks to support the dirt that will go over it* dig trench for earth cellar ventilation system
* install earth cellar ventilation pipes and bury them
* level area between shed and earth cellar
* dig down and level the start of a new terrace on the far side of the earth cellar between birch trees and raspberry patch
* set large rocks around the curve at the edge of the terrace to keep higher part of lawn from collapsing onto the terrace
* set/dig in stone steps to get from the upper lawn to the terrace
* start piling dirt and rocks between the earth cellar walls and the ring of stones
* use large rocks and dirt fill obtained from leveling elsewhere to extend the terrace several meters out towards the field
* extend the terrace extension along the side of the hill a bit and then down to create a place the digger can drive down off of the terrace


I was especially pleased with the steps. On Tuesday when I briefly watched him working on leveling the area behind the sheds, when he was at the stage of "use the grasping attachment for the digger to pick up the big rocks and put them in the trailer to be hauled away" stage there was one stone which caused me to say "oh, that would make a lovely addition to a set of stone stairs!", but, of course, I didn't expect to see it again, since there are so very many big stones, and they were being dumped in a pile and most would go into fill where needed.

However, as luck would have it, he happened to dump that particular load at the edge of the temporary pile or rocks, and that stone happened to fall directly onto the grass, with nothing else atop it. I saw it there early in the day, and made a mental note of it. They found a couple of other nice stones for steps when digging the terrace area, and set them aside for use as soon as we had the terrace flattened and ready for that part. While they were doing the the final bits of finishing the part of the terrace right next to the upper yard, packing dirt around the big stones that mark the transition area I took the rock-carrying cart down to the field and tried putting the stair step I had noticed onto it. Of course, it turns out to be just out of my ability to move on my own, so I waited till they had set in their first step (which is much longer than mine) and then asked David to help me fetch the one I had chosen. It was small enough that he was able to roll it onto the cart, and then we used the little drive-on lawnmower tractor (which, these days, is only a tiny tractor, as the thing that covers the blades has rusted off, and until he has time to fix it we can't use it as a lawn mower--so he removed the blades, too) to pull the cart up the hill to the stairs in progress. The rock was just large enough (and the ride on mower just small enough) that I needed to walk behind the cart and push in order to make it up the hill.

My chosen step is kinda triangular with a nice flat top and bottom, and one edge is a very nice width to make a good middle step, so we set it over their first step, with the point of the triangle dug into the hill behind the steps. Then we tried setting their rectangular third stair step on top of my triangle, just far enough back to leave a step-width of the triangle showing. However, this meant that the top step was 2 to 3 inches too tall compared to the nice level upper lawn. (Ok, upper packed & level dirt area, right now, but plants will grow on it, even if we don't encourage them.) Around the same time they found another, slightly smaller rectangle stone that would make a good step, but even it was just a bit too tall to stand atop my step.

Therefore I suggested that, since my step was triangular in shape, we just dig away enough dirt to set both of the rectangles behind the triangle, and we would have a bi-directional access to that step. Both David and Gustaf thought that there were too many rocks to bother digging anything, and they both moved on to other tasks. Undaunted, I first dug a place for the larger of the two top steps, and started trying to get the stone into it. Seeing me struggling with it, Gustaf came over and helped me set it into place, and it was a perfect fit--the length of the rectangle is exactly as long as that side of the triangle. Then we both noticed that it isn't a perfect rectangle (no surprise there, it is a stone!), but the edge towards where the other rectangle should go happens to be curved, and (this is the good part), the other rectangle happens to have a curved edge on the side that should face this one--at the two curves are perfectly complimentary! So we dug in the spot for the second stone, and, sure enough, its long straight edge is exactly as long as the side of the triangle of the step below it needs to sit against, and the two curves where the top two stones meet match up perfectly. I love it when that happens.

Part of the reason things went so late last night was the fact that sometime shortly after 18:00 the hydraulic cable that controls the digger's ability to use the grasping extension broke (normal wear and tear). Of course, both of the shops in town that sell such replacement parts for diggers close at 18:00, so we were out of luck and all large stones from then on had to be lifted by wrapping chains around them and attaching one end of the chain to the digger scoop to drag/lift them into place, which, no doubt, added hours to how long the stone placement part of the project needed.

It wasn't really an option to just quit and wait till 07:00 today when the shop opened again, because we had a different set of tasks for today's (Thursday) to-do list that are too important to skip before they move the base of operations to Gustaf's place to do some major landscaping there before Per has to drive south again in a few more days.

Since we didn't finish last night till after midnight, we slept in this morning, again rising around 07:00, and set to work. So far today (14:30) we have accomplished:

* pile more dirt and stones between the earth cellar walls and the ring of stones
* pile unused large rocks in a very tall decorative stack
* sweep dirt off of the stones edging the terrace
* fill the trenches which are to become the container base with gravel and use the compacting machine to get the gravel base suitably thick and solid

Now the boys have driven off to fetch the container from Hemmingsmark, after which I will feed them home-made pizza and they will unload the container and get it situated in its new home. Then they can rest for whatever is left of the evening before they drive two hours south to start Gustaf's yard work.