Heavy Lifting

While Marlys finished staining the decks, Derek and I spent Friday putting in a couple of retaining walls.

For one of them we used locally available rock and when I say locally available I mean everywhere around our little compound (more on this definition later).

The work though became how to move them from where they are to where we want them.

To a great extent we relied on the ATV and our POS trailer. Some on the rocks we moved had to weight in excess of 200#. After about a dozen loads we had the incline beside the garage completely covered. One more task to remove from the to do list. We also started on the wall outside of the downstairs back bedroom, but that won't finish up for another week as we ran out of bricks.

To follow-up Friday's herculean activities, on Saturday we installed 500' of snow fence up top. Remember the rocks I mentioned above, try driving t-post through them, ain't happening. After 5 hours of driving posts and hanging fence we were shot. By Sunday morning we could barely move our arms. There is still about 2500' of snow fence to install. Hopefully, we will get it in before the snow flies.

I also had a few hours to fool around in the barn, so I built this dust hood for the radial arm saw. It works pretty good. I think I am going to make a matching station at the same height for the miter saw, so long pieces can span both work surfaces.

Derek has also started work on a totem pole sculpture. The first task was to joint and glue up some pieces of 5x5 cedar scrap that when glued together will give him a workable size. Jointing this size piece on a 6" jointer made for some real sweat work.

Derek brought everything that could be washed home. I mentioned that when I was here alone I used ~60 gallons of water over the weekend, last weekend Marlys and I used 120 gallons and this weekend 500 gallons.

Part of this is due to Marlys being a serial flusher, where as, I am from the "If its brown flush it down. If its yellow let it mellow." school. There is no winning though in this discussion.

Until the spirit moves me next time.