Getting an early start while it’s cool…

This week has been all about yard clean-up. I had to haul out about 40 sandbags, rake much packrat nest rubbish out from under the cabin, move a lot of building materials I had foolishly stored under the cabin on a couple of now-hopelessly-fouled pallets – basically I had built the perfect matrix for a perfect packrat palace, then sealed it against entry by anything but rodents – find the decomposing corpse that alerted me to the debacle and dispose of it FAR from the cabin…

Well. Getting things back shipshape has been a project and I’m not quite done, but yesterday and today I hauled off and emptied the bulk of the rotting sandbags, filling some erosion damage here and there in the bargain.

This morning that pointed out yet another maintenance issue, when I loaded 16 sandbags into the Jeep trailer – any more than that and the Jeep can’t run through sand – pulled it up to a steep part of the driveway that had a big erosion ditch carved through it, got out and realized that one of the trailer tires was nearly flat. So much so I’m surprised it didn’t come off the bead – again. I’m not very good at making sure the trailer tires are up to pressure, I do confess. Usually get reminded about it when I put the trailer under some unusual load.

I could have taken the whole thing to Landlady’s barn and fired up the compressor, but decided to stay at the Lair and finish my yard work while the little tire inflator a reader sent me a couple of years ago did the job. Still works great, for that.

Now things are starting to warm up a bit, though not nearly as bad as a week ago. I’m gonna enjoy second breakfast and then wash laundry. We might supposedly get some rain in the next day or two.