May 23 2011

Three Weeks Later

by andrew

Well, in the 3 weeks that have elapsed since my back became a confounding component of every day life, adventure has still managed to hunt me down from time to time. I’ve usually paid for it the next day, but am still figuring out how quickly (or not) I can force a return to normality. Daily lower back yoga stretches (thanks again brother D for the recommendations) and natural bromelain / turmeric capsules have been helping quite a bit. Never fast enough, but definitely progress.

I can summarize the last few weeks by the events that my back has not appreciated.

Leon and I thought we’d head out for a leisurely evening of knocking down trees along what will become our driveway. As many a good tractor adventure has wound up, we broke through a soft patch and got quite stuck. The mud pit got the better of our heroic attempts for an hour or so to rescue the thing. So, we were doomed to head back the next rainy evening to pull it out with an even bigger tractor.

This worked out to be a blessing because the only way to get the big tractor out was directly through the woods along the path where the bigger trees were. With the soft ground it pushed them right down no problem and the driveway was officially carved.

Once the weather cleared up and everything started drying out rapidly from the warm, sunny weather I made several trips back there to start limbing and chopping up all the trees. We’ll have to get an estimate on what it will take to build up the driveway and dig the substantial drainage ditches that will have to go in. But here’s a few shots of the lot and the path we carved, and the beginning of the clearing effort:

Overall view facing east. The gap in the trees will be the driveway.

The highlighted greenish patch is the building site and the gap again is the future drive.

The chopping and clearing project.

And on top of all that I have edited and uploaded Episode 11 of Journeys and created dated posts for every previous episode, AND updated The Movie page to list them all out for quick reference.