Easter R & R

We took Easter Sunday off and visited my sister-in-law in Baltimore.  We brought them some West Virginia firewood and started a nice fire in their Chimenia.  I made some forks out of lengths of stainless steel welding wire and we roasted marshmallows - actually we roasted Peeps, which are in fact just marshmallows.  We are turning this into something of a family Easter tradition - roasted Peeps over an open fire.  It doesn't get any better.

My wife Kathryn and brother-in-law Doug roasting skewered Peeps over the Chimenia.

Sister-in-law Susan roasts a bunny.
EASTER: Early April Sunday, Time to Eat Rabbit 

Peeps are best when cooked to perfection.

Deep Cut

Just a couple of photos to show the deepest section of the excavation. 

Nick's car on the road above the deepest part of the cut.

OK, so I'm not particularly tall but most of me is below the level of the roots of the tree near the edge of the cut.

WASPS

Since the tractor was out of commission due to a broken hose, I decided to spend the afternoon working on the shed.  The shed is complete in that it is in use - it's full of stuff already.  It still needs some cosmetic finish work - in particular, siding and trim molding.  Before I could get going, however, I realized that some wasps had moved into the shed (not Espiscopalians but the six legged, arthropod kind).  There are chemicals you can buy to spray on bugs to kill them but I don't like to use them because I don't like to inhale and smell them.  I prefer a pneumatic solution - I suck them up with a shop vac.  It's green and it works great.

One of the bugs shortly before it was vacuumed.

The bug sucker

The B21 Blows a Hose

Our Kubota B21 tractor has been running really well so far this spring.  It has enabled us to move a lot of dirt - and not just move it.  We have been using the dirt we remove from the build site to develop flat ares at several locations on the property.  The B21 can do it all - on some days we can pick up, transport, dump, grade, and compact as much a 30 tons of dirt a day - all with our little B21 tractor.  Today, however, I think the B21 needed a break - so it broke.  I was about to pick up and transport on more bucketful of dirt before stopping for lunch when one of the hydraulic hoses sprung a leak.  It wasn't just s little leak- the hose running from the pump to the control valve next to the operator burst.  The result was a spray of hydraulic oil all over me as well as the tractor.  And since it was the pump side, the spray didn't stop until I shut off the engine.  It took only a few seconds to shut it down but in that brief amount of time I managed to get a pretty good shower of oil.  Despite the mess and the inconvenience, this is a rather minor breakdown.  Hydraulic hoses are easily replaced.

Everything you see here is wet with hydraulic oil. 

It sprayed all the way to the front bucket.

My shoe - coated with mud made with oil.

Moving a Big Stump

We have been digging steadily for the past two weeks and have reached the location of the tree we removed on Mar 12.  It was a big tree and it had a big stump.  We don't have a general solution for dealing with stumps.  Small ones we can burn.  Medium sized ones we often bury if we can get them to a suitable location.  Really big ones are something of a problem - mainly because they are very heavy and hard to move.  The stump we extracted today probably weighs in at a couple of tons.  We can't lift it - we can only push it around.  In any case we had to get it out of the build site.

The big stump right after we pulled it over with the excavator.

There is a large amount of dirt and rock stuck to the root mass.
The wood is heavy but the rock and dirt is even heavier.

We cut the trunk off as close to the bottom as we could.
We used the excavator to knock some of the dirt and rock from the bottom to try and lighten it up.
That helped a little but the thing was still pretty heavy.  

The excavator can't pick it up but it can push it down the hill out of the build site.

We got it to the bottom of the hill.  We wanted to push it up the next hill to a location where we could bury it but it could not be done - too much friction, too much gravity.  We left it where it is - in a future blog entry I will tell you how we finally moved it - assuming we figure that out.

Mud Control

Now that we are digging again, we have a lot of dirt and rock to move around.  We have put in a fairly extensive system of roads to facilitate this operation but some of the roads are still rather basic.  We have been bringing dirt up to an area we call the "filled hollow".  To get to this location more easily we built a short section of curved road cutting a rather tight corner.  We call this little road the "fillet road" because it resembles (to us) a fillet weld between two perpendicular sections of metal.  Unfortunately, The fillet road happens to be in a spot where there is a natural seepage of water from uphill - a sort of almost-spring.  The result is persistent mud, even now when it hasn't rained recently.  We had been driving the tractor through it anyway but it was getting rather messy and every time we drove through it the ruts got a little deeper.  We decided to get some coarse stone and finally fill fillet road.  It worked excellently.  Fillet road is still wet - but it is wet stone rather than wet mud.

Fillet road - wet and muddy

Nick dumps a load of stone to fill the ruts and control the mud.

We brought the stone in with our F450 truck.

Fillet road - stoned and ready for serious traffic.

Digging Resumes

We are getting an early start on the digging season this year.  The weather is warm, and more importantly, dry.  We still have about 200 tons of dirt to move before we are ready to start building, so the sooner we can get started, the better.

My view from the seat of the tractor with a full load of dirt

We are creating a flat area next to our main road with some of the dirt we remove from the build site.