Busy is a busy does

I've been working with a magnet, a rake, and a broom to clean up the concrete slab and the small bits of metal that are in the dirt around it. The 'good stuff' that was hidden in the garage included old rusted coffee cans full of old rusted nails of every size one could think of.

I do know that Rich's father also collected nails, even straight used ones. My Grandparents' generation never threw out things that could be re purposed or reused. My mom was the same way as was Rich's folks and Rich. For those that lived through very hard times, repurposing was not a fad but a necessity.

So, if the garage had never been crushed or inundated with water, most of those nails could have been useful to build something with the lumber that is in the dry confines of our machine shed.

Unfortunately, the clean up dropped a LOT of nails and chunks of miscellaneous metals all around the all garage. This weekend, I filled two 5 gallon buckets with pieces of metal, glass, and nails. 

Patrick will be back to do some more work this coming week in the meantime, I am looking for broken glass, metals, and sharp things along with metals. A good magnet on a handle is a great helper.

The dogs check on the progress and then go lay down on the porch. It is too tiring to watch me work.

I did manage to take some 'fun' time for me. On our morning hike/walk with my 4 legged pals, I took some toys.

Hannah is still learning to not always nose over toys while I am photographing. Charlie has that down pat.

The two shots below were done with a deep foggy morning and very little sunlight. I knew the fungi wouldn't stick around once the sun came out so I grabbed my 1:87 HO Scale mountain climbers and thought...this could be fun!

It turned out to be fun. Twice I dropped the tiny guy in the blue shirt. Thankfully it wasn't in a bunch of flowers and it was in the mulch where I could find him easily.

 I believe the fungi/mushroom is called Pleated Inky Caps. I find them often in the flowerbed mulch. They are doing a job enriching the soil and breaking down the mulch so I just admire them.

On the dog hike, I brought Qilin, the Mythical Creature from Lego. I built this not because I like the kid series Monkey Boy, but because the creature is posable and delightfully colorful.

I know that Qilin and the Ninjango character I acquired years ago seemed to just go together.

I carefully carried it out to the meadow. [Carefully, I didn't want to lose any pieces of this mythical creature!]

I think Lego missed the point in putting these characters in different toy stories. Definitely this guy and the dragon match in glowing and bright wonderful colors.

no dogs knocked this down!

I left the Mythical Creature at the campsite and followed the dogs deep into the woods. I let them be my guides. I should do that more often.

I found dozens of sights in my forest with Indian Pipes aka Monotropa Uniflora. I like the names: Ghost Plants and Indian Pipes better.

What an amazing background a group of them would make alongside a deer trail for my Princess Sara and her faithful bodyguard Joan of Knight.

Yes, Princess Sara rides a horse and carries her faithful stick horse which I am assuming has magical powers. She also has the little red dragon with her. They are on a mission and a journey to defeat some evil in the world.

After an early morning of tromping through the woods and getting soaked by the dew, we returned home to continue working on the cleaning the old garage site.

By late afternoon, I decided I'd had enough back breaking bending over work and charged up the mower to trim the yard. Over the week we had another half inch of rain along with humidity and heat so the grass decided to really get with the growing program again.

Now that it is out of the way, I don't have to deal with it until next week [hopefully].

I went to bed early. The dogs were exhausted from supervising all day.

But when I woke up around midnight, I couldn't help but stay up a bit longer to admire the Milky Way from the porch.

Looks like a busy short week ahead. 

I am planning this weekend to be joyful. With a celebration of my husband's life. Of course it will be bittersweet, but I carry him in my heart always.

In the mean time

I am slowly learning to expand my boundaries. I am an early early morning person. So just before sunrise, I decided to go look at a different place than our ridge to watch the sun come up. It wasn't really going to be a fantastic brilliant dawn.

But I thought, let's just drive around the countryside a bit and take a look.

This is a gravel road called Brookville Road, I drove down this road years ago when I took it to get over to the highway during bow hunting season to get some donuts at the bakery in town.

In September and October, this road at dawn has so much to offer in fall light and fog.

The shot above was at the end of September 2017. The camera was a point and shoot camera that had a pretty cool zoom on it. [I wore that camera out by 2019]

Saturday morning I thought I'd go back to the ponds to see if the Swans were still there. I grabbed the big lens and brought a smaller one. By the time I got into the river valley, I realized I wouldn't be able to see across the pond because of the fog. 

So, Charlie and I took our time and drove through the hills and valleys looking for something amazing and interesting. We found that and spent about an hour finding valleys, fog, trees, rays of light through the fog, and whatnot.

But I'll share that later. 
When I got back home, I got to work on my storage project. For all of our years, hubby insisted on having a large trunk in the house. It was a huge ugly shipping sort of trunk. It took up too much room in our tiny house and served no purpose other than to hold some of his Highschool books and an old Teddy Bear that was his when he was something like 6 years old.

Let me tell you, it smelled inside of it. Musty and icky. I rarely opened it other than to confirm that nothing in it was something I needed. This had been a bone of contention ever since I'd first lived there. A behemoth of a trunk that was not useful. 

I did later learn that Rich had stored this in his barn for years where he and his first wife had lived. [ewww, explains the musty smell]

These are photos that include a portion of the trunk from before our house remodel. To hide the trunk, I often put a table cloth over it. The TV sat on it.

Well, we no longer have Morris [the dog] or the bricks, or that heater.

Here is the living room now. The blanket on the couch is for the little dog how likes to hop up there. With the trunk gone, the room has opened up so much!

This was in the kitchen area for ever. This shot is from when I was trying to decorate for Christmas. I used the trunk to display my polar bears doing things. In the summer, it was a place to drop mail, keys, and junk. By the time we added several bottles of 02, the walker, and other items this summer, the space on and around the trunk became a disaster area. The little table on the left is an old farmhouse entry way table.

I've kept that. I'm going to find a nice spot for it somewhere and add the old water pitcher and washing bowl to it along with towels.

So to make a long story short.

I decided to order this....

After all, I've built really hard Lego Builds, so how hard could this be?

I sure learned a lot about cabinets, hinges. and drawers while making mistakes and doing it over again.

I learned how to fix and replace the hinges on the Lazy Susan by studying the hinges on this thing.

And finally, I got it all cleaned up and put together.

Tah Dah!

Done. Finished.
I'm getting another one to go around the corner from this one and replace where the trunk was. The storage really helps me with things that were just stacked around the place. Now the house/kitchen area looks very tidy. 

In another week, Ill be building again. I guess I do like 3D puzzles.

I wouldn't have taken on this task at another point in my life. But I thought this would be a good thing. Yes, it isn't top quality, but it is useful and I like it.

One of the weirdest things

Today I went back to fixing fence and prepping for Fall and Winter. I change things up a bit when I do that. I re-arrange a few fenceposts and change gates also.

I noticed that a boxelder had twisted over the wires but wasn't touching them. This was a job for hubby always. It was a chainsaw job. The tree part that was over the fence was 6 inches in diameter. I started with my little reciprocating saw that Rich bought me years ago.

I trimmed off all the little branches that were in the way and then started working my way back to the thickest part. Back in the day, hubby was the chainsaw operator and I was the picker-upper. Now I got to do it all.

I couldn't get through the large part of the branch I wanted to take down. I made some headway, but my little saw just wasn't going to do it. I have a 6 inch little battery chainsaw, but I didn't want to use it at the angle I needed to.

What to do? Dang it, I was not going to call a neighbor up to ask them to cut through 4 inches of wood. Nope, not me. I remembered that we had a series of little hand saws for when we were riding in the woods and came across a snag.

Bingo! 

I walked into the house to make lunch and tend to Charlie and found myself talking to Rich in my head. Explaining what I was doing and where I was doing it. 

I nodded as I made my sandwich as our conversation went on. 

"Yep," he'd say, "use that little hand saw that way you won't be taking off your leg or something. Those boxelders are a pain, and by the way...trim up the branches that will knock me in the head when mowing while you are at it."

Okay. The conversation took place in my head, but his voice there was clear as a bell.

That's the strange part. I didn't even think it was strange.
For the past 10 years, I've always run things past him before I doing it. We'd discuss the pluses and the minuses and he'd give me tips at how to get things done.

After I made lunch I looked out at the yard thinking about mowing at least the ragged part of it. I could hear his judgement on the matter. "It might be a bit wet yet. Maybe later and... besides, it doesn't look that bad yet."

This guy taught me how to cut up limbs, fix fence, run his country clipper, fix a weed whacker, hunt with a hound dog [dawg], fish, watch for critters, trap varmints, and use a lot of common sense.

It may be weird to some, but to me it makes perfect sense. I often went to him -- even in his last months of life to get an opinion or help on a farm project I was working on. I wanted him to know how much I respected his ideas.

I will however completely fail at being any sort of mechanic. If something won't start, and it is an engine. I am completely and hopelessly lost. He could look at it and fix most things without hesitation.

Give me a problem animal and I can usually turn it around. Engines no. Animals yes.

I did finish cleaning up the mess, rewired the fence, replaced the broken post, and mowed a section of the yard.

Charlie and I then enjoyed some quiet time on the porch.

Lucky us. We saw our first monarch of the year.

More Outdoor cleaning...

Above. The shot before I started my second day of clean up around the old outhouse. 

I cleaned out the little outhouse and pulled all the buried blocks that made a walkway to it. The poor thing does have a list to it now. The cost of fixing it would be too prohibitive at this point. I thought of painting up the door and fixing the lacey curtains for one last season.

Yes, the walkway is a mishmash of different sized pieces of broken concrete pavers I found behind the garage years ago. I figured to reuse those and all of the bricks I found tossed back in that area. Putting them back down is like working with a puzzle.

I dug out the plants that had been next to the outhouse. One of the peony bushes had been there since 1997. The root ball was monstrous! Pictured is a portion of the root ball. It weighed over 25 lbs. I have two more peonies on the other side of the outhouse that explode with blossoms each spring.

I do love those flowers so I may break this up and put them in other places.

I also removed a huge root ball of Blue Flag Iris. It was huge and apparently loved the spot it was in so much that it expanded. I put a small plant there in 2016. I may break up the roots and see if any neighbor is interested in it.

Below. Done. 

Charlie is watching a hole in the wood in the corner of the outhouse. Apparently there must be mice living in the walls. He stood guard there for a good part of the day while I was digging about.

It's funny how barren this spot looks right now and how it will change in the next month or so.

This fall I'll split up the daffodils I have on the east side of the house and move some to be near this garden. I do love seeing the daffies come up each spring with their yellow cheer.

Over in my Red Shed Shady garden, the Virginia Bluebells are starting to emerge! They are not too far off the mark for showing up. Usually the don't emerge until the first week of April.

I have so many other projects to get done, but I am happy to have finished up the work I've neglected for a few years.

I know it is too early to plant flowers, but I'm already planning my zinnia garden. Yippee!

Never a dull moment

Kaboom. This is the oak that fell next to the old red shed.

In the first photo, you can see the wood stacked up by Olive

and her hubby in late April.
A slippery elm fell over after
a wet heavy snowfall.

The old oak fell right on a metal fence post and drove it another foot into the ground. The thing I love about my enduro soft fencing is that I can repair it so easily. I just rerouted the fence to go around the fallen tree and it was all good until my neighbor came down.

This photo shows the base of the tree. The one part that is leaning to the right is also dead and hung up in another oak. It may come down yet this winter or years from now. There is nothing holding it in the ground.

My neighbor and I decided to just ignore that for now. I will have to hunt around and get someone with some equipment and insurance to come out and do some work for me.  A dozer could push the whole works over and be done with it.

As it is, it may one day fall and crush my little shed.

Justin did some quick and hard work. He also set aside some nice oak firewood that he'll pick up at some point.

I spent all day cutting up branches with a nipper and rolling rotten chunks of wood to the fire. At least it was 34 degrees out so it was comfortable working hard. I am pooped! 

Tomorrow the neighborhood children will come to trick or treat and show Rich and I their costumes! What nice people I have on our road! Parents making sure that the housebound veteran gets to see kids in costumes. I am really quite lucky. There are 3 homes on our ridge that have children now. What a delight. 

Charlie got a costume to greet children with.
HE is not impressed.

Then he yawned and I got this! He looks frightening. But he isn't.

My cellphone catches more than one shot when the subject is moving. I thought the yawning was hilarious.

Never a dull moment at our place.