Rain, at Last

Our April was one of the driest months on record, at least since the NWS started tracking such things. (One gets the distinct impression that Alaska has always been an afterthought.) But despite the melting snow, we got no precip at all.

Thursday night we got measurable amounts, and it rained Friday morning and evening as well. Kind of nice to see the 1/4-sized leaves finally start to hit full growth. Just for the record, the buds on the trees didn't open until a week ago. But now even the dead grass has taken on a greenish appearance.

Younger Daughter's boyfriend works for a tree-trimming company, and came two weeks ago with chainsaw in hand.

He took down about a dozen small-to-mid-size trees, in addition to the ones felled by last fall's snow and winds. The larger ones, he cut into pieces which can be used in our firepit (once they are cured, of course). The rest remain on the ground in piles, awaiting another application of chain and effort. We'll probably have to make several trips each to the local woodpile, once it opens in early June.

There yet remains a lot of yardwork, but my Navy injuries have decided that I've done enough over the years. I disagree, but some days there aren't enough braces and pain pills to make things work. 

That's about all. The sun is shining, and we have places to do and people to go. 

Cheers!

The Great Pandemic Hysteria

No, not the virus: it's real enough, but isn't the global killer the pols would have us believe. The Progressive office-holders (like the mayor of nearby Anchorage) are doing their best to squeeze every last bit of "emergency authority" out of the situation. The better to unseat Mr. Trump with, you see.

Given the majority of the new "spike" in cases are in folks under 35 or so, and most have either no symptoms, or are sick for only a couple of days, it's not a reason for concern.

This is the virus adapting to live in healthy folks; it's what viruses do, to survive. This is how herd immunity is built.

Wear a mask? Since the CDC, the mask manufacturers, and the honest medical professionals all tell us that the only mask effective is a full-fledged respirator, I'll pass.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, the recent rains and our 24 hours of daylight have caused all the weeds to go from 12" to 30" in the last five days, I guess we need to attack the yard again. I note that about half the homes on our road haven't done so, but it bothers me.

Ah, well. This too shall pass.  I keep reminding myself we'll have snow in October, so enjoy the green while it lasts.

sigh ...

Trees-B-Gone

Our lot is heavily wooded. Old photos show it clearly:

But spruce bark beetles killed the biggest spruce of them all, shown above on the left side at the end of the drive.

Two more birch trees, just on the other side of the front stairs, were dying and had lost their tops in the recent past.

It makes me sad when a big tree dies, and the big spruce had a trunk the diameter of a trash can lid.
So this happened an hour ago:

There's a lot more light on that side of the yard, now, but the yard seems rather bare. Oh, well ... everything changes all the time.

The Week That Was (Updated Pics)

The last four days have been busy around the ol' homestead.

The 7.1 'quake on Nov. 30 put the final nails in the coffin of our septic system (for city dwellers, that's a septic tank and drainfield). It caused the steel tank to collapse, which flooded the drainfield. The field, however, was over 90% saturated and couldn't handle that much water all at once.

Long story short: we had to replace the whole thing. On Monday all the equipment showed up, and for the last four days our front yard looked like a construction site.

It required the removal of many trees in what was a heavily-wooded yard.

North view, driveway entrance

West end of the front yard "bowl"

East end of the "bowl"

Panoramic view from north to east, with the resulting distortion. This shot
covers about 250 feet of road frontage.

The first two days, there was so much smoke from the wildfires that we had to leave all the windows closed. Thankfully, by Wednesday the smoke had mostly cleared, so we were able to open the windows on the south side of the house for some fresh air. It was getting a bit stuffy inside.

A neighbor has claimed the piles of logs in the front (to the right of the driveway, above), which shaved a couple hundred dollars off of the job for hiring a truck to haul everything away.

Wednesday afternoon

Wednesday was the busiest day, with the excavator, industrial wood chipper eating trees, front end loader, chain saw, dump truck, and laborers all going full bore until 8 pm.

But the work is done now, and all we have to do is get enough grass seed to cover some 4,000 to 5,000 square feet.

We also need to repave the north end of the circle drive, although that may now have to wait until next spring.

Oh - and how much has all this cost? Trust me, you don't want to know.

Post #6,601: Back Yard is Done, Again

Back yard is mowed, raked, trimmed, bagged, and finished. Time for a shower, and cold beverages.

This pic was from July 1st, but today looks much the same, other than no cleaning supplies
on the BBQ shelter.

Beating Back the Forest ... Again

We spent much of the early afternoon mowing, trimming, whacking weeds ... lather, rinse, repeat ... and managed to push the encroaching Chugach Forest back for another week. What was a smallish clearing in a heavily-wooded backyard has become a passable back yard, some of it level enough to permit easy walking (smile), and permits us a place to escape the noise of civilization.

The back yard looked like this when we bought the place two years ago:

More-or-less the way we found it, with little work yet done.

After clearing a few trees, and starting the pavers and footpath for the barbeque grill, a year later ...

and looks like this, today:

7/1/2018

It's been a lot of work, although worth it, and more work remains. But for now, we have a place we can enjoy.

Beating Back the Forest

Several hours of cutting down small trees and more of the overgrown hedge/brush in the back yard yesterday. More of that, plus three hours of raking, bagging, and running two weedeaters today. That's the back yard, back more-or-less under control from the forest which always threatens to overrun us. 

The portion of the front yard which has grass is next. That's about a quarter-acre, give or take.

Those are the oversize "contractors' yard waste" bags, plus a LOT of brush,
laid on its sides.

Bear Trouble

Since it's a sunny day, which has been rare in these parts, we devoted the morning to another round of yard work. Due to the cool, wet summer this year, it a) the first time we've mowed (what there is of) the grass, and b) only took 90 minutes. To be fair, we only have about a third-acre of actual lawn. The rest is heavily forested.

But speaking of the wooded part, my wife and younger daughter decided to clear more brush in the back yard. And that leads to the title of this post.

They were busily cutting away, when they were  charged by a black bear.

It had jumped the fence into the backyard behind us, and heard them chatting as they trimmed and stacked the brush and small trees. For whatever reason, it decided to charge toward them, but the fence between our yards stopped it. At least, this time.

So I spent the next 30 minutes patrolling the back yard with the bear gun on my belt. Fortunately, it seems to have left the neighborhood for now. Both neighbors to the south of us saw it running down their street, and back into the woods.

It's funny; we didn't have any bears at all, last year. This summer, they seem to be everywhere.

Weekend Project: the Update

Four rows of paving bricks should have been enough to reach the top of the steel ring ... but we forgot the ring is sitting on a bed of rock. So back to Lowe's for 9 more bricks, tomorrow.

More forest which will need to be reclaimed ... maybe. We haven't decided whether it's worth clearing. Meanwhile, the three marked trees will be leaving us, later this week: cut down, chipped/mulched, debris removed, and stumps ground down to yard level. 

Reclaiming the Back Yard

from the forest. Previous owners hadn't cleared brush, saplings, or weeds in ... well, nearly forever.

So between the chainsaw and tree pruner, my wife and I have doubled the size of the back yard. And there's nearly that much more still to be cleared.

Looking to right-center from the deck: the new Weber grill which arrived last night. Happy Father's Day to me! p.s. The first round of burgers and steak came out great. :)

Looking east from the deck

Looking to the west side of the yard, part of the area we cleared 2 weeks ago. Note the extensive root system and mounds. Will require a rather spendy root-grinder rental to level the area. Note: there's nearly that much more off the right-hand edge of the photo, which we also cleared by chainsaw.

It's definitely a work in progress, and not your typical suburban lawn. Technically speaking, we don't have a lawn in back ... or in the front yard either, for that matter. :)

Okay, THAT Happened

So Younger Daughter, my wife, and I all arrived home at about the same time, but in that order. I wasn't far behind them, but apparently that made all the difference.

Daughter was cruising happily home, enjoying the sunshine, blue skies, and snow-covered everything except the highway. It's the first good driving day in nearly a week ... except.

Except for Sumdood in his beater of a pickup, scattering random debris and parts along the road. One piece of which she ran over, and promptly heard pop, hisssssss.....

When she pulled in the drive, the rear passenger tire was half-flat. She saw that, called me over, and within another minute or two, it was truly and sincerely flat.

My wife, of course, advised her to drive on the round part. Daughter wasn't amused, but I digress.

Since their plan was to run the snowblower in the driveway, I went inside to take care of some needful things. When I came back out, the area in front of the garage was cleaned. Well, as clean as it gets this time of year, meaning all the loose snow was removed. What remains awaits only a Zamboni in order for a hockey game to break out.

So I changed the tire, there in the gathering gloom and subzero temps. Seriously, it's -7° already. At 5:30 in the blessed p.m.

Did I mention that the wheel was frozen to the hub? I had to use a four-pound hammer and a crowbar to get it off, so that the temporary spare could go on.

But, this being small-town Alaska, the tire shops keep long hours, and there's a good one just a 1.5 miles away, over the ridge and down the other side. So Daughter and Wife are sitting in a waiting room, trying to warm up, and I?

I'm in my flannel PJs, typing this post. But did I mention I changed a tire? Oh, right. Anywho ...

That's all I have for now - and trust me, it's enough.

An Interesting Day

We awoke to find 9 or 10 inches of fresh snow on the ground this morning. After sunrise, we went out to clear all that.

While finishing the driveway, and after cleaning off two SUVs and Older Daughter's pickup, the wind picked up. The black spruce dumped a few more tons of snow on us, the cars, the drive ... and the city's road grader plowed both ends of the driveway shut.

So we got the snowblower back out of the garage, and took care of that.

The wind has been gusting from time to time, and huge amounts of snow come tumbling down. But we've done the driveway once already, so whatever remains can be done tomorrow.

But the sun finally came out, an hour ago, and shone on the mountaintop above us briefly.

The temp is starting to slide south, and AccuHunch continues to insist that we'll be below zero tonight.

But we got the bulk of the snow moved, and the driveway is passable. All the rest can wait.

Hard Work, Yard Work

So yesterday we decided that most of the leaves have fallen (say, 90+ percent) and so we attacked the lawn portion of the front yard with a leaf blower and a rake.

Eighteen 50-gallon bags of leaves later, we had a two-layer pickup truck load of yard waste bags to haul to the landfill.

This morning, we played hooky and did the same thing to the back yard. Only 12 bags this time.

This afternoon, we'll mow the backyard one more time, and then that's about it for the year. We also plan to inaugurate the fire pit which we so lovingly built several months ago, and have never used.

But first, I'm taking my lovely bride out to lunch.

It Was a Busy Day

We spent most of yesterday doing yard work. Mowing is the easy part; the bulk of the work was in treating, brushing, rinsing and re-scrubbing the moss which has grow on the most-recently seal coated portion of the driveway.

Our efforts were only partially successful. Killing the moss is going to require a much heavier application of the bleach treatment than we were able to put down.

Because of the time of year, it's not possible to find a one- or two-gallon pressurized garden sprayer locally. So once again, Amazon is our friend.

Speaking of yesterday, it was a beauty. 68 degrees, sunny, with a mild breeze. Absolutely gorgeous, in fact.

Today it's cloudy, as a new front moves in. AccuHunch is promising rain later today.

We checked out a new (to us) breakfast/lunch establishment: the Bear Mountain Grill. The burgers were really good, but the sides were bland. However, the place was packed during the lunch hour, and it's hard to go wrong if you follow the crowd to a restaurant.

We also avoided the national news like the plague, because it's a) all the same, all the time, and b) tiring verging on nauseating.

We already know for whom we'll vote, assuming that nothing changes in the next two months. These days, that's far from certainty.

But God's still on His throne, and Jesus is coming soon - so how bad can it be? :)

Yard Work, in Pictures

Friday morning

Sunday morning

I told you the leaves are falling rapidly. But 45 minutes with a 210 mph leaf blower, and they're 95% somewhere else, now. :)

AAR: Yardwork

Rock was delivered at 0845. The dump truck driver just got out of the Marines, after 10 years and "too many" tours in the sandbox. He still had the white sidewalls, although they're starting to fill in. We had a brief but good conversation about the modern military versus the 'Nam era, and jungle versus desert warfare. (Main difference: humidity, leeches, and mosquitoes.)

Some 11,200 lbs of 2" rock later, the job was completed at 1300 hrs.

We added approx. 630 sq ft to the driveway. The rock's 3" deep in the parking pad area, and roughly 2" deep everywhere else. Now we've decided that the rest of the yard work can wait another day.

Lunch followed completion, and now it's time to go hit the recliner, 'cause my dogs are barking! (And hips, knees, lower back, and an occasional cramp in a forearm or two.)

The Weekend

The load of 2" gravel will be delivered around 0900, so it's going to be an active morning. I've got an extra rake and shovel if y'all wanta stop by and lend a hand with the driveway project. :)

But first, methinks a hearty breakfast is in order.

Done (For Now)

We'll have the inaugural fire tonight, once everyone's home. :)

Tired But Happy

We started out bright and early this morning, with an abbreviated shopping list. The list got longer before we were done, as it often does.

We stopped at the nearby builder's supply store and picked up pavers, sand, and gravel to make a rudimentary fire circle in the back yard. Since the long-term plan is to build a second deck, we don't want to invest in anything permanent right now.

We raked a ton or so of brush cuttings, tree branches, a couple of saplings, and a bunch of straw which the previous owner had left behind. Then we carried the pavers, 60 lbs of sand, and 60 lbs of pea gravel up from the driveway  ... oh, didn't I mention that? The backyard is about 10 feet higher than the driveway ... and arranged things so that neither the chairs nor the chiminea would sink into the mud.

And just in case there are any remaining Stargate SG-1 fans out there, that's not Anubis rising from the depths.

Not this.

Rather, it's one of these:

This.

At least that side of the backyard looks like a deliberate design now, rather than a poorly-tended clearing.

We've grilled both lunch and dinner today (steak and burgers, respectively), and are now ready to call it a day. After cleaning up, we'll be back out on the deck to enjoy the peace and quiet. At least, that's the plan. But you know what they say about that.

"No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, or General Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz ... depending on whom you ask.