To all the fathers out there, Happy Daddy Day! My husband included. Our daughter texted him about an hour ago to wish him HFD, and he just smiled this huge smile. Now he's off to Wally World cuz he forgot something yesterday and needs it for work. Ooops. Hey, his fault, he forgot to tell me to put it on the grocery list! I'm making his favorite dinner this afternoon for the day - chicken teriyaki. Yum. It's gonna be goood.
Things are tight financially, but we are making it. My hours have been cut at work to where I'm lucky to get 20-25 hours a week, and his aren't much better right now. We're both filing for partial unemployment so we can try to get back on our feet a bit, which we hate, because mine isn't going to be much, and his original case is only open for another couple of weeks. With luck, his job will go back to full time soon, and stay there, and hopefully so will mine. So things are going really slowly on the move still, but we are making some progress.
We went to the property yesterday in my car to save gas - my little Aveo can handle the mountain road and gets great mileage compared to the van, so we opted to load up in Victor and head down to get something done. Quentin took one look at the mess generated by the power company (they think they did a great job in trimming, wait till I take pictures this week and post them for you), and just about cried. There are so many trees now that have to be taken down cuz they got topped. He got a few down yesterday and one cut up, before the chainsaw got hot enough that it didn't want to work any more. Honestly, I can't blame the thing. It was 90 degrees yesterday and hardly any breeze, but thankfully not that humid. So we did get a lot done with that. The woodpile is now a good foot higher than it was, because Q's logs are so much bigger than mine.
Thing was, when they were doing the trimming, I told the guy in charge of the crew to leave the trimmed stuff on our part of the easement alone, not to brush hog it to oblivion as they normally do. So I got up to the property Friday on my way home and what do I find but a guy with a mini brush hog chopping up the trimmings and shoving the logs out of the way to the edge of the easement. ARGH! He had already done the bottom half, but I got his attention when he came uphill and got him to stop on our property and keep going uphill to the neighbor's and finish up stuff up there. The neighbors I don't care about, it's OURS I care about as that was going to go into the woodpile! But I saved half of it, which is better than nothing. So that's a whole summer's worth of brush trimming and log cutting to do just to clean up the easement. Never mind the stuff Q's got to cut down that got topped, and cutting all THAT up. That woodpile is going to be HUGE by the time we're done, and with as easy as Ozarks winters normally are, it will last a long, long time.
Friday, I splurged a bit from my birthday money I got in a card from my Mom. I went to Lowe's and got a mattock that's got the pickaxe and digger both. So when the chainsaw decided to take a rest, we went up to the house, got the shovel, and started trying to dig up the electric splice. The ground is hard as a rock, so the mattock was a necessity in order to get the splice dug up. It made the job a lot easier. We had a five-gallon bucket, too, so he loosened the dirt, I shoveled it into the bucket and he dumped it off to one side of where we were working out of our way. The splice wasn't down nearly as far as we'd been told. We were told it was about two to three feet down, and were expecting a busy afternoon of trying to find the thing. It took about fifteen minutes of chopping and picking and digging, and the splice was only about two to three INCHES down. No wonder the frost-freeze cycle messed it up.
Add in that it's a big bundle of mess, no conduit to protect it, and it's taped together with black electrical tape that's frayed and come apart, and the wires of course have gotten clogged with dirt. We're going to have a bit of a job ahead of us. The wires have to be dug up enough to have some play, the whole splice has to be cut out, conduit slid on the wires, splice has to be redone, and then bury the thing again and hope it works. On the other hand, the really hard part is done. We found the splice! And with it not being nearly as deep as we'd been told, it makes for a lot easier job in the long run to fix it.
Mind, we've already decided that in the long run, we'll be putting in a solar system. The only bad part with that is the property faces and slopes ENE, so we don't get a lot of southern sunlight. But we do get a lot of sun in spite of that, and a lot of heat. Trust me on this one, getting a tan or heat exhaustion there is NOT a problem. It's awful easy to get heat exhaustion if you aren't careful (hence the cooler full of ice and drinks for us right now, whenever we go up). So a solar system and eventually a wind turbine or two will provide plenty of power for us, we just have to get up there and get to that point. One project at a time. The current major project is fixing the electrical so we can get the deposit together and get electric turned on and finally move. There's a lot of other projects to get done, too, as there always are on a homestead, but the dream is making it's slow way towards coming true. That eases a lot of the homestead frustration we've had the last few weeks.
Happy homesteading, everybody!
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