Friday, July 20, 2012

07/18/2012

I've not posted in a few days, so am playing catch up. We had a power outage Wednesday night, then I was gone all day on Thursday.

Wednesday was a fairly productive day. I got up early and mowed weeds. I didn't do quite as much as I had planned, because I got sidetracked by another little task, but did get everything around the trailer trimmed up as well as a couple of spots in the yard I can't get to with the mower, such as over the septic tank and around the power pole. While trimming around the trailer I picked up some rock as well as some old pieces of wood. After finishing my trimming I hauled the rock down to the rock pile. The new puppy insisted on riding with me every more that I made in the RTV. He's not quite big enough to get in by himself, so I had to pick him up everytime. He'd lay on the floor, basically under my feet. Looks like I'll never have a shortage of passengers, since Luke enjoys riding sometimes as well.

While I was cleaning up around the trailer, I also decided to deal with some water we had standing in an old plastic kiddie pool. We bought it last summer for Luke, so he could get in and cool off. He never used it, though. We've used it a few times for other tasks, such as soaking cardboard before putting down as a weed blocker. Most recently, though, it was just sitting in front of the trailer, filled with dirty water. When I was mowing, some of the weeds ended up in the water, so I decided it was past time to empty it. At first I tried using our new self-priming siphon hose to see how well it would work. It did work, although was incredibly slow. I don't think it was ever able to get a good strong siphon going. I think this was partly due to the shallow water it was in, as it was hard to really get the hose filled with water. It was also, I'm sure, due to the fact that the water we being lifted approximately 6 inches to get over the edge of the pool, and then dropping only 7 inches or so. I suspect that a bigger drop would have helped a lot. Had I left it going for hours, it probably would have drained a good portion of the pool, but I wasn't that patient. I ended up just flipping the pool over by hand.

At lunchtime I went out to the front porch and worked on those old pieces of wood I had picked up. They had originally been the trim around the front door. When we put in the new front door, they were just thrown down on the ground next to the porch, and basically forgotten about. They had nails and screws in them, so I didn't want to burn them without cleaning them up first. The cleanup took maybe 15 minutes, if that long. Sometimes its amazing how small a task really is, once you finally get motivated to do it. Now all I need to do is haul it down to the burn pile, which I'll do next time I have the RTV out.

It started storming in the evening, and just after dinner the electricity went out. It was nice and cool out by then, so was no real issue. The only probably was that Andrea had planned to cut my hair, which she does with electric clippers, so we had to postpone that. We needed to get ready for a trip on Thursday, so I shaved and them we both took showers. I used a battery operated flashlight for light when shaving and showering. There was plenty of hot water, as long as we didn't waste it. Sometimes things like this are good to remind us of how wasteful we can be when we have plenty of a given resource, like hot water in this case.

It was after bedtime before the electricity came back on, so that is why I didn't do my daily update. I did, however, get to read more of the garlic book I'm reading, so that was a good benefit of not being distracted by having electricity.



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