Dirt over tree root

I'm on a week's vacation.  Usually after a vacation -- or even a weekend -- I know I did things, but it's all kind of a blur.  So this time I'm keeping a list, so I'll feel like I accomplished things.

More specifically, I've been doing a lot of small- and medium-sized projects, to achieve a sense of accomplishment -- instead of setting out to do some giant project, running out of time before completing it -- and feeling like I didn't accomplish anything.

Here's one of my small things:  there's a tree root in the front yard to rises up from the grass.  When I ride over it on the riding mower I sometimes get stuck -- the wheels dangle -- and I have to get off the mower and pull it sideways to free it.

So, today I got a wheelbarrow of dirt and spread it around the protruding root, to make the over-all curve more gradual -- so that I will no longer get stuck.  Blondie boy (B1) helped me

The Girl drove over it on the riding mower -- and didn't get stuck!  Yep; seems to have worked.


--GG

A good weekend

A good weekend. Pulled nails out of wood, nailed pieces of wood together, and mowed about a quarter of the yard.

Specifically, I made subtantial progress on the luggage shelves for the shed (in the U.S. you'd call it "the garage" -- except that it'll never house a car), to get the piles of boxes up off the floor and stored vertically, instead. I'm about 1/4 of the way through the upper shelf. The project is taking a fair while, partly because there's a surprising amount of "handling costs" (drilling pilot holes, cutting the slats to length, scrounging up additional slats). It's also not often that I can shut myself away in the shed to work on it, as it's a task that's incompatible with supervising the kids.

"Pulling nails out of wood" refers to my disassembling a pallet, so that I can use the slats for the luggage shelves. I've also salvaged three decent-length 4" x 4" beams from the pallet: they'll probably become workbench legs for some future workbench (probably for the kids).

Because it's summer, the grass is growing pretty quickly. I didn't have time to mow the whole yard, so I just blazed some trails. I also mowed the "soccer field" -- the name we use for the drainfield from our water treatment system.


Plus the usual errands, family time, and such.


So: a good weekend. :)


--GG

Gravel

For the past few weekends, I've spent a few hours either Saturday or Sunday shoveling and raking gravel, in an attempt to fill in the darned big mud puddles in front of our carport.

For the first three (or was it two?) weekends, I'd basically been doing one cubic metre per session. But two weekends ago I decided to just pay the $25 delivery fee and get four cubic metres all at once.

That's the pile that you see, there. Each stripe on the stick is 10cm (about four inches). And the can of soda is also there as a size indicator.

I've shifted about 60%-80% of it, with just a spade and a wheelbarrow. Another two sessions and I reckon it'll be all spread.


Homeowner Guy.


--GG

I dig

We don't have an actual driveway -- just the area of lawn between our front gate and our carport.


Over the years, a fairly large depression has formed in front of the carport. When it rains, water collects there, and stays for a few days. If it rains at least twice a week, then it never completely dries out.

Every time we drive through the mud, some of it sticks to the tires -- then gets thrown off when we drive down the street. This process of transferring the mud (i.e. "wet dirt") from our yard to the street further deepens the hole -- which allows it to collect even >>more<< water -- which creates >>more<< mud to stick to tires. Etcetera.

The big problem is that we can no longer park the other car (the non-Four-Wheel-Drive) under the carport, because it's in danger of getting stuck in the mud. So, **something** must be done.


Originally we were saving up to buy a few thousand dollars of gravel and such to make an actual driveway. The idea is that it's best to do it all at once, as if you do it in little bits, it's not cost-effective: it costs thirty or forty bucks to rent a trailer, which would add 50% to your cost ($30 for the trailer; $50 for the dirt or gravel).

BUT -- Friday night, while perusing the price list from the local landscaping supplies place, I noticed that they offer a "courtesy trailer" (that is: free!!!). Ah!

So, Saturday (today), I went down, picked up 2/3 of a cubic metre of gravel, and shoveled and hoed it into the hole. Helped a bit. Made another trip: better. And fifty or sixty bucks per trip is certainly affordable. ("Doing the whole driveway" can wait for another time.)


Looks like this might be a once-a-weekend practice for the next month or so. Kinda fun. And certainly, it feels good to be **doing** something about the situation.


--GG

Flooding update

Previously, I'd said we had no worries regarding the flooding here in Queensland, Australia.

The situation has changed.


So far, so good for our specific neighborhood. It rains sometimes, then stops. Sometimes heavy rain, sometimes a drizzle. Water covers sections of the road, about axle-deep -- but we have a four-wheel drive with a pretty high undercarriage (and the water isn't "rushing" water -- it's fairly still) -- so we just drive on through. And four or five hours after it stops raining, the standing water has drained off.

However: Today they shut down parts of the downtown area, and some neighborhoods adjacent to downtown (most with "Valley" in their name...) have flooded. Also, we were phoned about 2pm to come get the boys out of daycare: they were shutting it down early, although a handful of staff would be staying behind to look after the kids whose parents weren't able to get them.

They're expecting the floods to equal, or possibly surpass, the 1974 floods (which were the largest since the 1893 floods -- a nice graph and timeline here).


For the last "big" flood (1974), the water blocked off sections on the road, up and down the street from the trio of properties belonging to my wife's family -- so they were cut off for about a week. However, it didn't reach the houses.

We have about a metre of slop, I reckon: as long of the flood levels don't exceed the 1974 levels by more than a metre, it shouldn't reach the house.


I'll try to post a blog entry every day or two. If it goes more than two or three days without a blog posting, it could mean that I'm still at home, but just lacking phone service (DSL) or electricity. Somewhat ironically: if we get evacuated, I probably **would** continue to post blog entries; presumably the centre we go to would have some sort of internet access (in this modern day and age; for contacting family).


--GG

Tadpole rescue

A few days ago I noticed, as I was leaving the car, that there were tadpoles in the series of mud puddles in front of our carport. This means that we've been inadverently bonking them on the head every time we arrived or left (Sorry!!!). :(

Here's a closer view of one of the mud puddles. As you can see, it's clear enough to see things on the bottom.


Thus, I mounted a Tadpole Rescue Mission. I knelt near each of the populated puddles with a soft drink cup, scooping up each tadpole (and accidentally, a bit of mud) whenever I saw one, and dumped it into a small bucket.

You can see my boot print (circled in red), which gives a sense of scale, as well as a sense of squooshiness.



I then dumped some of them into an alternative mud puddle, in our back yard, which is fairly permanent during the rainy season -- as well as out of the way of the car.



But most of them, I dumped in the kids' plastic wading pool.


I showed the tadpoles to the kids, and they were pretty interested.

Some of the tadpoles have hind legs, and two or three have leetle front legs. Cute!!!


--GG

Record rains

November apparently had record-breaking rainfalls, and December's doing pretty well, too.

Here's a snapshot of our driveway. Looks like we'll be needing some gravel.

It's an interesting lesson in erosion: a slight hollow in the ground; fills with water when it rains; drive through it, mud sticks to tires and comes off in the streets; hole gets deeper, fills with even more water next time; repeat.


--GG