29 April 2014

Finished cleaning up the organic material littering the ground at the sauna building site.  Ended up with one enormous brush pile to be burned once the stumps are put on top.  Also ended up with about 6½ cords of prime hardwood firewood… a good mixture of black cherry, white and red oak, beech, and maple, that has to be cut to length, split, and stacked in the woodshed before September 2016.  If I start now, should be done by then.  Dolores drank another 12 gallons of propane last week.  First little stump I dug out down at the sauna site also uncovered a thousand pound rock… that I got out of the ground just enough to block my exit route back up the hill.  With visions of the Kubota spending the rest of the week marooned, crossed my fingers and hooked up my big logging chain and come-along… which moved the rock just enough for me to escape for lunch.  Spent the entire afternoon digging out the oak stump that was right in the wrong place.  Maneuvering around the stump gave me many, many gray hairs… even wearing the Kubota’s seat belt.  Eventually got the stump loose, and found out why my brother keeps urging me to put a winch on the tractor.  Took every chain I had, and countless resets, to drag the stump, using the backhoe, up the hill far enough that I could then tow it the rest of the way to the burn pile.  As a side note, there ain’t no way I’m going to get the footers for the sauna down to the elevation called for on the site plan.  Good thing it’s supposed to rain for the next two days, as some redesign is definitely needed.