It ain’t pretty, but it works. Or did after some revision. This homemade harrow — created by The Wandering Monk out of items lying around the property — broke up the nasty, vile, gluey clay behind the house for easier shoveling and removing. It worked better after he added 5/8″ rebar to the small springy tines on the back of the pallet. A final refinement will be fixed bolts. And that should do the job. Particularly since the Monk also came up with a plan that eliminates the majority of the shoveling we thought we were in for. The Monk…
14 CommentsLiving Freedom Posts
… though hopefully not in any dramatic way. The Wandering Monk returns today for a short but unpleasant project — removing the last four inches or so of soil from the 12 x 24 area between the north house wall and the gorgeous retaining wall we built a year ago. The mega earth-moving was all done last year. It enabled us to build the wall and begin the new drainage system. No longer is water freely running down hills on two sides of the house and pooling underneath. But the poor old guy with the John Deere didn’t get the…
10 CommentsWe learned last week that Gregory Gooch — known to the Commentariat and members of TMM and Claire’s Cabal as either gooch or capn — died last May. Gooch was a sweetheart of a guy whose last few years were difficult and impoverished. But if he had any inkling he was headed for an early death, he never said a word about it to any of his online friends. This is something that worries me; that online acquaintances will just disappear. With Gooch, I thought his absence was due only to the fact that he had a poor, and slow,…
14 CommentsI should have thought of this earlier, but it took a neighbor to put it in my head. She stopped me on the street yesterday and asked if I knew of any local relief organizations in Texas she and her mother could donate to. They didn’t want to send money to the ubiquitous Red Cross because of its high administrative costs. The Salvation Army was a possibility but not what she’d prefer. Did I have any better ideas? Well, of course the best idea was to ask Commentariat member, Texan, and shelter volunteer Larry Arnold. He responded: My church is…
9 Comments… I thought I’d take the PITA phone out and attempt to get some pix of where things stand now. They’re not particularly good pix, and please understand that everything is still in progress. But here you go. North wall and exterior of the new screen porch as of today: For reference, here’s what the north side of the house looked like four years ago: The excrescence on the right is the infamous not-a-garage, gone but never lamented. The deformity sticking out on the left was … well, its purpose takes paragraphs to explain, but basically it was composed of…
12 CommentsBeen dry and warm. I’ve been working on the outside of the house (north wall, exterior of screen porch; I’d have pix except for my camera having died and the phone cameras being a PITA). But yesterday was misty. Enough that the “mist” dripped from the eaves all morning. So I slipped under the cover of the screen porch and returned to shingling the wall between porch and bedroom. A small fear I’ve been nursing soon proved true: I’m going to run out of shingles on the last row. On the very last freakin’ row. I hate it when that…
12 Comments… you may have gotten a “security error” message. I apologize. I renewed our hosting service last week, but apparently our security certificate didn’t renew along with it. The certificate expired this morning without notice. I placed new “Let’s Encrypt” certificates on both the Cabal and the blog immediately. Now I just have to figure out why I never got notification and how to prevent that from happening again. But all should be well for now and Claire’s Cabal is as secure as it ever was. (The Cabal is also taking applications for new memberships — now at no cost,…
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