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well i’m. sort of declaring defeat on all social media, idk what y’all have
been up to and i’m sorry and i haven’t been replying either and some of you
said really nice things about my cold and i appreciated those and some
others of you said nice things about the dragon threesome erotica and i
appreciated that too and actually really wanted to have conversations about
it but was not online.
anyway i did manage to get a bunch of stuff done. On Friday I went to my
mother’s house and borrowed a tool of Dad’s, a pickaxe only the back side
was a mattock, which is a fiendishly useful device. It looks just like what
the dwarves in Snow White carry so like, i had slight trouble using it
because I kept needing to pause to whistle.
cut for length, there’s a picture of some work anyway, and some bittersweet
dog news at the end, but that’s how dogs work, isn’t it.
Anyway I used it, eventually, to dig a very narrow trench around the tiny
house, and I was trying to make it a foot-deep trench but somehow I just
couldn’t manage that. I maybe cleared like eight inches. Anyway then I
stapled a 24″ wide roll of hardware cloth (¼ inch holes, tiny) around the
base of the house, so I could hopefully exclude rodents and like,
groundhogs, from living under there and making burrows and gnawing their
way into the floor and such. I went to a lot of trouble making that fairly
vapor-tight and I’d be pissed if mice fucked it up. I’d also be incredibly
pissed if groundhogs dug under it and made the whole thing unstable. So.
This is my first organic-friendly overture, which is to just physically
exclude them.
[image description: a view of the cabin under construction, new wood
sitting on skids, and a shallow trench scraped in the visibly-gravelly
ground, and a 100-ft roll of 2-ft-wide fine mesh galvanized hardware cloth
sitting upright leaned against the porch while an expanse of it is unrolled
next to the trench down the long side of the cabin. The tarp covering the
bare rafters of the house is visible hanging down the side of the wood.]
Another set of plans for a shed had called for burying concrete board in a
similar fashion, but Maryland BIL had thought that might be harmful– no
airflow under the whole thing might make for a damp time of it, which could
eventually cause trouble. Having the netting instead would mean air could
flow, though how much it would I don’t know. So we’ll see.
(Yes, I probably could poison them as well, but I hope that won’t be
necessary, introducing poison into the food chain is not a great thing. But
if there are problems this doesn’t forestall, well. We’ll have to see.)
It was a devil of a lot of work to do, which it shouldn’t have been– the
entire site was excavated and backfilled with loose gravel that only got
tamped down a bit– we used a tamper where the foundation blocks were going
to go, and we drove on it a little with the tractor, and we let it get
rained on for a couple of months by sheer coincidence of timing of the
work, but. Anyway it couldn’t have been any easier to dig that trench and
it was still difficult for me.
In the midst of it, I paused to come in to the house for a drink of water
(having forgotten to bring myself a water bottle) and was met by Veg Guy,
who was coming out to me with the bag of black walnuts my niblings had
gathered from Dad’s trees at his funeral. (Dad loved black walnut trees,
not sure why. He didn’t care for the walnuts! He just loved the trees and
planted them every chance he got.) I’d consulted with Veg Guy, correctly
deeming that he had more interest in the farm’s forestry at this juncture
than my overwhelmed sister or BIL. So he and I took the mattock and my
planting knife and went up to the gravel bank and to the edge of the creek
there, which is all populated currently with sumac scrub-trees and
goldenrod and brambles, and has no proper trees. It clearly was cleared at
some point 20-30 years ago, and Veg Guy has frequently wandered there, and
said “I’ve been here eight years and assumed it was going to go through a
succession to some other phase during that time but it hasn’t changed so I
think if I want it to return to forest I’ve got to do that myself,” and so
I gave him the mattock and he wandered and dug holes wherever it struck his
fancy, and I put two or three walnuts in each hole and scraped the dirt
back over (I don’t know what planting depth to use so I figured I’d plant
them at different depths in the hopes one would be right) and then caught
up to him as he dug the next hole. We planted at least a dozen, possibly
more like 20, and found a fox’s den. And then closer to the road he planted
some handfuls of paw-paw seeds he’d saved. He’s tried several times to
start paw-paws as seedlings in pots and then plant them out, and it fails
every time, so this year he’s just going to direct-seed an enormous number
of them and that’s his plan.
“This,” he said, as he dug a hole, “is what I have that the average home
gardener does not,” and he straightened and looked around with a kind of
grim satisfaction: “Sheer volume.” People ask him for gardening advice all
the time and he’s like “well see what I do is that I research the right way
to do it and then I do it several hundred times and probably it will work
one of those times, and maybe I write it down and maybe I just do it the
same way the next time.”
We took the remnants back and planted several more of each kind of tree
around the cabin, in the hedgerow edge there, where there’s sun, filling in
gaps where older and bigger trees had died or been removed.
Who knows if any of that will work.
Anyway, during this I got a handful of burdocks wedged into my hair down at
the roots, which fucking sucked. And I had to do several more hours of work
on the tiny house ditch, with these burdocks prickling me. And then the
tarp started to come off the roof so I had to hastily ask for help and get
BIL to come fix it.
But I also got BIL to change my car’s oil over lunch, and we discovered all
the ways that my garage has been carelessly mistreating my car, so I won’t
be going back to them alas, and will probably caution Dude’s mother, who’s
been a customer of theirs for years. The last time they did my oil change,
I brought it in for that and a state inspection and they just didn’t do the
inspection, and– I learned that when you do the oil on a subaru there’s a
disposable crush washer that goes on the drain plug on the oil pan, and you
gotta replace that every time you take the plug out? Pretty basic, a fairly
common practice, the washer costs pennies and it’s a standard part of the
oil change. WELL they didn’t, they just didn’t put a washer on, and then
they attempted to rectify this error by over-tightening the drain plug. So
my car has leaked oil for the last five thousand miles, and there’s nothing
to be done because of course if you pull the plug out to put a washer on
you’ve just drained the oil pan, that’s what it’s designed for.
ANYWAY. BIL managed to get the over-tightened plug out, and I’d had to go
to the dealership since no auto parts store had the correct washer in
stock, and I’d had to buy an entire new drain plug assembly of course for
ten dollars, so. At least it’s done now. And my car doesn’t leak oil. And I
need to find a new garage.
I did eventually manage to get the burdocks out of my hair but it had to
wait until evening, as my sister was cooking dinner and some friends had
come over. (Farmkid’s BFF’s folks; her dad is an auto mechanic, and BIL had
called him to ask advice about that drain plug– dare I use excessive force
to try to get it out? he asked, and FK’S BFF’s Dad was like ‘yeah go hog on
it, if it wrecks the threads I have the taps to fix that and it’s only like
1pm on a Saturday, we have time, also fire that garage’, so. We did not
need him but it was really lovely to have the knowledge of him as backup.)
(Absolutely fascinating character. Unfortunately he works at a Volkswagen
dealership, so I cannot make that the garage I always use for my Subaru. I
have brought it in there before though, and his coworkers think it’s funny–
he works on my sister’s Mitsubishi sometimes too. I got to walk under my
own car while it was on the lift and I can’t recommend that enough as a
totally wild thing to experience.)
I think the only way I got the burdocks out was that I hadn’t washed my
hair in a week or two. I didn’t add any oil or conditioner or anything, and
I don’t have a good history with combs and this hair, I just used a brush
and my fingers and more patience than I had, but I was mostly sitting there
on the verge of tears anyway because i was so tired, so it worked, I just
zoned out and got it done. It took about 45 minutes.
Now, the other big news of the week I haven’t addressed at all but it was
on Thursday and it was horribly sad, but we were prepared for it and had
made our peace, and I don’t think I’ll discuss it much except to say that
the vet made a housecall and poor Dini the dog’s confusion and suffering
have come to an end and she is now safely at rest in a new spot of garden,
in front of the solar panels, surrounded by a beautiful sweep of
well-established comfrey plants and next to a sapling elm tree, and there
will be a new garden atop the mound come spring. Probably we’ll put a bench
there, too, as it gives a great view of the picking garden.
[image description: a green hillside with clouds and blue sky overhead, and
in the foreground the sign for my sister’s farm (I’m standing next to the
highway as I take the picture, waiting for the bus for my niece to get off
it), and up on the green hillside, small with distance, a red tractor with
a small backhoe arm on the back and my BIL in a blue shirt sitting in the
seat controlling it to fill in the hole, and my sister a tiny figure in
khaki-colored trousers and a red sweater hugging herself next to the hole.]
She was a good dog.
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