It rained!

I filled in a long gash of a gully in this part of the road

Record-breaking rainfall fell yesterday. It’s almost July, and we got 1.4 inches (35mm) of precipitation in under 24 hours, which is very rare. Several weeks ago I had promised neighbor Bill that I would bring the road grader down and work on getting some bumps out of his driveway. He’s an accomplished tractor operator, but some things can only be done with the really broad blade on a grader.

In a couple of hours I was finished with his driveway, then got in some licks on a piece of the road that was neglected because it was always too hard and dry to work with whenever I was in the area. This morning it was just perfectly moist, so I filled in a very long gully that ran along about a third of the way in from the road’s edge.

Some of these rocks turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought. Several hundred pounds anyway. Glad I had the grader to push them out of the way.

Then, on the way back home, I thought I’d pluck a rock out of the driveway-to-be at our new house site. Of course, there wasn’t just one rock; I found a whole nest of them. So I dug them all up then had their empty nest to fill. The dirt was just perfectly moist, so the rocks got tossed off to the side and the nest was filled with soil. To top it off, I also plucked the stump and roots of a long-dead manzanita tree that was right under where Babe will be in the new house.

Regarding the house, we got a quote from the builder, and it turned out to be much more costly than we had anticipated, and that’s even without a whole bunch of needed stuff. We thought it would be cheaper since we already own the land. But the power company wants $40 per foot to run lines in, which comes to $70K, so forget the power company. Besides the power in our area is at the end of their lines and isn’t the best. Then there’s the septic system, the water lines, well pump (we already have a good well), and multi-thousand-gallon water tank. Solar electricity with storage batteries and propane-powered backup generator will come to a pretty penny. Ground-source heating and cooling adds who knows what. We have no idea what it will cost to put up our clay tile on the roof (we already have over 8,000 handmade barrel tiles). And on and on.

We’ll think about it. So far at least we got rid of some nasty rocks and a manzanita stump.