Chaos? Yeah, we got that.

Work in progress.

Well my work crew showed up Thursday night and Friday we got right into it. This mostly involves moving messes from one place to another in hopes they will somehow magically become smaller messes. So far, no.

The good thing about having young and strong people to help is that they can do in two hours what it would take me two weeks to do. The bad thing about having young and strong people to help is that they can do in two hours what it would take me two weeks to do. In other words staying ahead of them is difficult. I’m about 3X the age of one of them and 4X the other, and it shows.

So while they wait for grandpa to shift things into slots they get to go trail riding and fishing and cutting up trees and getting a truck wedged in the woods … That last part was wrong, wasn’t it? If someone had asked I could have told him it wouldn’t fit; that trail wasn’t made wide enough for full-size vehicles, just ATVs.

Anyway, over-all the plan is working.

Extent of the damage, so far.

As you can see from that photo the road out here is still rough. But only one reinforcing plate broke off, and I should be able to grind & weld it back in place. Trailer certainly tows better now. Although my visitors report that the road is getting worse because yes indeed it looks like logging is starting on the hill up behind here, and that means heavy trucks pounding the gravel into potholes.

After getting this batch sorted there’s a couple of piles of debris from the reno waiting to be shifted into different piles in another location. It sounds ridiculous but it’s how it has to be done: pile up, sort through, shift to different places, and slowly whittle down the heaps into useful material and trash for the dump.

We’ll get there. Eventually.

Bucky says: “Oh my goodness! What next?”

Visitors

Friday was a really intense day of running around at the last minute trying to see to all details before heading out to the cabin to begin what appears to be an endless task of cleaning up after the packrat. It finished with a thunderstorm and the need to run the generator after arguing with the water pump for several hours (the usual refusing to hold its prime problem).

However I did get the SD card out of the wildlife camera and had a look at what it saw over last Winter. There wasn’t much this year: several of the shots were triggered by snowfall which no doubt kept a lot of animals away. Here’s some that came anyway:

Oct 21 2021 – before I’d left for the year. I have no idea who this is.

A moose in the night. There were a lot of moose shots, mostly nocturnal. This was the best of them.

A bear in the evening. 10 days before I came out this time. Must still be around.

Kayaker, taken Saturday the 21st. No idea who it is and the Nikon was not being very co-operative so this is the best out of seven, only 3 of which were even images.

So our Jane is coming up to take the travel trailer away. This will not only free up space in the yard, but will allow me to get at a couple of projects such as running the power line in from the generator shed and eventually putting the brick patio down. Stuff sitting all around here waiting to be used up; last year got interrupted by a detached retina and then running out of time. I barely finished the wood harvest.

Meanwhile, back to cleaning up. One of the projects is redoing the bathroom which not only suffered a lot of water damage way back when I was reroofing the place (Brenda fell and broke her wrist one day – it poured a month’s worth of rain when I took her to the hospital) but also has packrat nests above it which were not improved by the contractor’s failure to repair the ceiling properly. But hey, what’s more work for me right? Well it’s more work for me, right?

Sunshine is erratic so I will probably be using the generator more. That’s expensive electricity!