Happy 4th

Today is the 4th of July, 2011. It is the 9th anniversary of marriage to my wife. Melinda. Happy anniversary Woman.

Today she gave me a gift. A gift of alone time.  I worked on a patio I am building for her today. Today was the 4th session of excavation.  During the 1st session I removed the existing gravel and flat stone.  I used that material and made this:




Then there were two more session of additional soil removal.  Today was the fourth and final. I have move a total of approximately 17 yards of gravel, rocks, and till and now have a perfect hole to backfill with stone, sand and and the concrete patio blocks.  The following pic is the end of the 4th excavation session/. 7 hours today. 22 hours total. 10 tractor hours.

 This hole is level to 24 inches depth (+_3inches) from the pavement on the left, all the way to the right.  The bottom is hand tamped (compacted).  It is about 200 sqft. 2 feet deep.    There was a lot of hand shovel digging.  Hard, but I got my man hands back.
This fucking shit will not frost heave when I am done.  Effort in equals favorable results out.

Excuse my derivation from good formatting, I am too damn tired to care. It is beer O'clock


Oh yeah right. i haven't posted in a while...I got a tractor. Its frigging aWEsoMMMMe.

LumberJackin'

Saturday and Sunday proved to be a productive day in the yard. Brother came up early to help me bring down some hardwood in the backyard. In about 2 hours on Saturday morning we managed to bring down 4 trees about 6-8 inches in diameter, 6 trees about 4 inches, and one maple about 13 inches in size.

The maple was tricky because it was leaning the opposite direction I wanted to bring it down in. So to bring it over safely I put I line on it, up about 12 feet from where I would place the cut and ran the line over to a come-along. We cranked up the tension and I placed my wedge cut. I had my bother crank the eveah-lovin’-crap out of the come-along to really get the tree bending. Then as I placed the backside felling cut the line would slack just enough for him to get one or two more cranks in. The maple went down perfectly and the top landed about 2 inches from my brother.

Sunday morning we went back out and limbed up the trees. Segregated the wood into three piles. Pile 1-Brushy crap. This I will stack off in the woods and let dry out. In the fall Ill come back into it and break it up to use as kindling. Pile 2-small diameter limbs. Pile 3-larger diameters trunks. The limbs and trunks Ill cut to size and split it all. It will dry out way faster and be ready for December.

The pic is a before and after of the area. It doesn’t’ show the maple and isn’t as dramatic if the trees had leaves. Regardless it will be some good firewood and I just reduced my leaf raking about 3 hours.