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| Thurman starts scraping "botanicals" |
Yesterday was busy, with us driving all over the place multiple times. When you live on a road that others refer to as “a trail, not a road,” you can get pooped out if you drive on it too much, especially if you’re a geezer.
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| Karla and cousin Bill check out the cleaned-up house site |
Thurman came back and used his backhoe/tractor to scrape off the “botanicals” (as weeds are called by foundation contractors) from our house site. He did a wonderful job.
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| A nasty hump has disappeared! |
Then he attacked some of the problem areas of our “trail.” He and his son, Chad, suggested that a bulldozer would be much better to do the conversion to a real road. We are very open to the idea. It’s a thousand bucks a day. Well worth it since they work fast.
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| Trench for culvert going in. Then the hydraulics quit from a broken fitting. |
We were putting in a culvert when a tree limb that was cut out in order to make room for straightening the road fell on a hydraulic fitting and broke it. “That little bitty thing broke my fitting?” Thurman exclaimed. He has a very cool demeanor. I would have blown up and made a fool of myself with a tantrum. The tractor had to be hauled out for repair. So much for road building for the day.
We haven’t seen this much nice clean clear water in Martha Creek in several years. This is about half the creek’s flow since it goes underground for several hundred feet in this area. Twenty-five years ago or so we witnessed this culvert half full which is pretty significant since it’s about a foot and a half (half a meter) in diameter. Then there’s one time we would rather forget when the water diverted around the plugged-up culvert entirely and took out a few hundred feet of road. Another of our creeks flooded so much we had to use our old bulldozer, rest its soul, to remove the boulders that blocked the road.
So this new climatology is a lot more to our liking, thank you.