Huh, yesterday. Well Sue said last night when we went to bed, "Do you hurt everywhere but your hair and finger nails?" When I really thought about it, it was only my hair. I had a hole in my glove and that finger tip and nail were sore, and I had a toe nail that was complaining where I dropped chunks of fire wood off the splitter on my right foot.
Sue has several wild flower beds in addition to our two parcels of prairie, and her flower beds require extensive cleaning in Spring. So she is on her hands and knees for hours and so far has hauled 6 Ranger loads of debris off to a dumping spot we have where it can break down. One of her wild areas was getting over run with black raspberry canes. It is also full of last years Phlox stems. There was an old fence running through it so yesterday I pulled up and coiled the barbed wire, and took my Bachtold Fence Row King to whack everything taller than 4". The patch was about 35'x90'. Trouble is everything here is on a side hill. A friend who has borrowed the Bachtold calls it my "Man Killer."
Then I took the forks off the Kubota and put the bucket on. Hauled two bucketfuls of gravel to level the pad where I am going to put the two shooting benches now that the syrup arch is put away. Then I raked that out level, took the bucket off, put the forks back on and hauled the benches out of the shooting shack and reinstalled them on the pad under their new roof. That made room in the shack to get the Wisdom Oak #19 wood stove and accessories out of the back of my truck.
Then we unloaded and stacked one trailer load of firewood, split and filled the trailer again, unloaded and stacked that load, and refilled the trailer again. By that point Sue was out of steam so we will unload and stack that another day. I told her to go grab a hot shower and I'd be in shortly.
Well, not really. I store my Grumman Sport Boat upside down on the trailer and chain it down for Winter storage. I unloaded it, flipped it over and reloaded it on the trailer. Then I went in the shed and carried a 6 hp Mercury outboard motor out and secured it on the transom. Then I got a 30 gallon plastic barrel and placed it under the outboard and raised it up with a milk crate and filled the barrel with water. I got the motor running to my great satisfaction.
I was looking for a place to park the boat and motor where it would be less obvious when we are not here and since there is a vacancy under a leanto I opted for that. That accomplished I went to put the Ranger away, and......spotted the rhubarb sticking its red and green noses up among last year's dead plants. Pulled all of those, and they must be the most brittle plant detritus known. Might make good fire tinder. Pulled that all up and hauled it to the brush pile. Then I finally called it a day. Ah retirement, the leisure, the relaxation, the peace and quiet, you gotta love it.
I do my mixing in my sand berm. Over the years, recovered alloy stays pretty constant at 14-15 BHN. Even when shooting copious amounts of hard commercial cast and a lot of 3-1 alloy (pure-lino) made from corresponding Roto-Metals ingots. The commercial cast was an assortment of newer powder coated and thirty year old Magnus 44 caliber bullets, I had laying around for that many years.
