Hot and the forecast has all of Texas in a potential thunderstorm area. It sprinkled several times yesterday, once in the morning at the house, once while I was driving the 40 miles to the Lowes store. Since I’m doing dirtwork with red clay, even a tiny bit of rain is a mess.
That said, I did get a lot done. I dug out the drainage ditch at the edge of my lot. I needed to practice with the miniex. The mailbox will probably go back into place… the ditch was silted up with the crushed gravel road base, so it needed some digging.
Despite my misadventure with the water line, I feel pretty good about what I got done. Operating the machines is coming back to me as muscle memory, once I changed the control paradigm for the mini excavator. There are at least 2 schemes in common use, and many more from various manufacturers over the years, and the ISO standard one doesn’t work for me. Fortunately, it’s a simple lever to move on the hydraulic mixer to select the scheme that seems natural to me.
At the end of the day, when I didn’t have enough light to see the detail I needed for my project, I did some scraping and compacting on the boat ramp. There has been significant erosion with all the rain we’ve had up here and one of my goals was to see about fixing some of it. I could work fast and loose in the fading light, and made some improvement. More practice for me with the skid steer too. The main cost for the HOA is maintaining the gravel roads and several of the guys will do touchup with their tractors or other equipment. For me it is part of being a valuable member of this community we joined. Meatspace baby!
Today I’ll do what I can to get the walkway area ready for the crushed slag. If it’s raining I will look at doing something else that isn’t as fussy or right next to the house. There’s a list.
Always be working… and stack up some goodwill if you can.
nick