No work on the arena today

Probably because of this amazing wind we are having!

So the contractor is a slacker, but I finished Chapter One, posted grades, and J and I replaced 300 feet of fence...

We are both bright red from wind-burn, and I have lost my grip, which I now realize means you are too tired to squeeze the wire cutters anymore.

Good night.

Stall Fronts AND fence posts!

Arrived today! On Friday, the blacksmith comes to finish the stalls! Eep!!

Arena work appears to be stalled (hah!) while we wait for good weather.

Burn, baby, burn

We burned the brush pile today, with proper permits and everything! Anyone who knows J knows that this was a big step for him. 'it will burst into flames' is one of his favorite paranoias. Lots more small cleaning up, rode ponies, and we picked up 1000 feet of wire fencing at Cal Ranch. Our stall fronts are in, although unfortunately, the person we need to deal with to pick them up doesn't work on Sundays...we saw them in the lot, and they are so pretty! We'll get those picked up this week some time, and then our blacksmith has some work to do! I also moved a lot of rocks, we shared a beer with our neighbor, and I emptied out (almost completely) the stall area of the barn.

Yesterday, we picked up a couple of loads from the old house, rode ponies, unpacked boxes, and did some raking.

Our boys (the dogs) had such a good time yesterday and today, that they have just crashed on the floor here. Any minute now, Captain will start snoring... Such good, good dogs... The chickens have settled in again, and increased their laying schedule!

Hopefully, arena work will continue tomorrow... We've had too much rain (!) the last couple of days for them to work on it.

Tomorrow, we also have to finish up the semester at work, finalizing grades, finishing the odd bit of grading here and there, etc. I also have a big presentation to Westinghouse Nuclear, so wish me luck with that. I need to get Chapter one out the door to my editor, which entails minor modifications, some time between 11 and 11:15...if I can fit it in... ;)

On Wednesday, we have the horse dentist in the morning, and all our friends gathering round to help us finish the big move. It's going to be a really busy week...

But the really most exciting thing?

is that the arena has started. They came out on Monday to survey and drop off the backhoe. On Tuesday, they pulled out some posts we couldn't get out, and scraped off the topsoil, making a berm at the east end, and putting in a drain at the west end. They started bringing in filler, to level the sub-base. This morning, we had trucks in and out all morning, dropping off more filler. You can tell just looking that they haven't got it level yet! After this comes about 240 tons of gravel and footing... You just about expect the ground to start sagging under the weight of it all...

1000 pounds of concrete! What?!

I know what you are thinking. You are wondering what the heck I was doing at the dump with a thousand pounds of concrete, anyway. Recall the pole barn. That came down into the pile on the left. See all those concrete tubes around the bottoms of the poles? Four of them weigh about 1000 pounds. Just so you know. On the right is what that spot looks like today. There's still a lot of concrete there. But it's a lot less than before. Oh, and I should mention that I didn't put it in the truck by myself. J and I got the physics out and did that together. But I was being all Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and went to the dump without him so he wouldn't have to do it. And that means I get bragging rights. ; )

The tree guy...

came, and took down some of our trees that were planted too closely together. He left us a humongous pile of mulch and all the firewood we could use... if'n we had a wood-burning fireplace... Well, we'll find a home for it. But for now, let's stack the wood over here, next to the hay barn, and leave the mulch all the way back there at the back of the property! Oh, wait. I'm starting to see how you wind up with piles of random stuff all over the place!

General cleanup...

Again...

This is looking east along the north side of the barn. In the before, you get a lovely picture of the pole barn that's since come down, along with the panels that have since come out, and the tarps that made doors on the stalls. In the after, you see a few of the things we've saved to use again---several bow gates, and a pile of metal siding that my blacksmith tells me he can use to fix up where they cut doors in the side of the barn!

General cleanup...

Sometimes you try not to think about it. Note the rope to swing on to get over this very dangerous pile of rocks. Useful if you have opposable digits. Not useful for the four-footed among us. The rope is gone. The panels are gone. Most of the small rocks are gone. Now we are left with a pile of rocks even John and I can't lift. Suggestions???

Took out the pool!

Our neighbors really think we're pretty cool. We took down the above-ground pool that had stood unattended last summer, with several inches of standing dead water in it. Almost the first thing they said to us was, 'Are you keeping the pool? Because it does nothing but breed mosquitos... Almost the third thing we did was take out the pool. It was gross. It was disgusting. It was smelly. It was microbiology, and even we scientists couldn't appreciate it. The pool was actually mixed in with the 1220 pounds of concrete I took to the dump. So it might have been only 1000 pounds of concrete, and 200 pounds of pool. It was kind of fun to take it apart though.

Moved the Chickens...

into their quasi-temporary home... The roof had collapsed on the gazebo, making it unfit for humans taller than 4 feet. We were standing there trying to figure out what to do with it, when we thought, 'Hey! That thing would hold chickens!' Our chickens now have the very nicest coop in all of Utah. Thank goodness, because I'd already taken 1,220 pounds of concrete to the dump this week...

packrat

The guy who lived here before us loved to save EVERYTHING. Broken pieces of PVC pipe, metal pipe, cinderblocks. It was a full afternoon to turn the spot on the left into the spot on the right. And we even found some useful stuff in there!

A flurry of posts coming...

Sorry folks! It's been busy around here this week! Not only is it finals week, and I am fully into two jobs at work (last Thurs was the other person's last day) and I have a looming deadline for the first few chapters of the book, but we've also been really busy around the farm! We've got all the books, clothes and the kitchen moved, in a grand effort to spare our friends the trauma of our books. We have a bed and our comfy chairs. The dogs have been to the groomer, and our new lawn tractor has arrived. Work has started on the arena. But before all that...

The funny thing about horses is that if there's even a little splinter somewhere, they will find a way to cut themselves on it. You wouldn't think it would be a good adaptation for a prey animal, but it makes us take care of them, I guess... I spent a day turning the picture on the left into the picture on the right, and wearing a pair of wire cutters right out.




Oooh! Dinner! Back soon...

Ridiculously Satisfying...

Today, I took this pile out of the pasture, where some pony would find a way to hurt themselves on it:

And turned it into this pile in the hay barn, where they can't reach it:








Eventually, we'll lay those bricks in the tack room, to make a nice, sweepable floor. I'm not sure what we're doing with the cinder blocks yet---there are lots more to pile up, so we'd better think of something!

It's ridiculously satisfying to do a job that takes only a couple of hours to finish, and then you can actually take a picture of it!

Before'n'Afters

We spent the weekend out on the farm. We raked and picked up baling twine and cut wires that were holding the old fence panels together, and we started to take down the half-built pole barn that was the chief (perhaps only) eyesore on the property. Here it is before, probably from too close, but you get the idea.

There are ancient, falling apart tarps. There's a pile of weeds. There's baling twine galore. So we started to take it down, a piece at a time. That was Saturday afternoon. Sunday, we got up, and John took his turn up the ladder with the cordless drill, while I started taking down the aluminum fence panels. Once he got the siding off of the north side of the structure, he notice that his ladder was swaying a little. Uh-oh. So he came down and looked at the pole, which looked a little bit, but not really, like this:

We had assumed (not unreasonably), that the concrete posts all went into the ground. And that the wood posts went all the way to the bottom of the concrete. Not so. The particular post that John was leaning his ladder on was being held up by the rest of the structure. The concrete had cracked away all around it to show that the post was sitting about 18 inches deep in the concrete, which was just sitting on the ground.

Oh dear. That meant it had to come down, now. Not later, not next week when the tree man comes, but now, before it fell into the neighbor's cow pen. So, we took a deep breath, and got our physics out. We took down 5 of the nine posts all by our lonesome, (I was like superwoman, pulling them down!) and then we got a little stuck, because the final four were attached at the top, and we weren't strong enough to just pull them all over at once, and also had nothing left to get all kinds of physics-y leverage around.

Our exceptionally nice and friendly neighbor, Dale, shouted at us to open the gate. 'I'm coming around!' he said. In he comes on his Kubota tractor, and pushes the rest of the thing right over. Now, it looks like this:

That's John, in his best conquering lumberjack pose, standing on the field of battle.

As an extra-special bonus, not only did we find out that our neighbor is one of the good guys (also one of 'The Club'---he'll have a beer with us...), but we uncovered this incredible view, which we will see everyday when we turn horses out, bring them in, ride in the arena, or even when we muck stalls. To think it was all covered up with shredded tarps, weathered wood and baling twine...