Morning: brush burn. The guy who'd been doing the brush clearing in the Annex returned to incinerate one mound that had turned out to consist of new bushes and vines growing up through a years-old unburned burn pile.
The well-decomposed wood in the bottom was uncoöperative at first. "I don't want to burn!" it said. "It's too cold this morning, and besides I'm still wet from Sunday night's rain!" (To be fair, the temperature at sunrise was right around 21°F.) With sufficient encouragement (involving extra Diesel and application of a leaf-blower), much of it eventually did burn, leaving a mixture of ashes, small pieces, roots, and really old rotten wood that the tiller can deal with. Once it was pretty well burned down, I went up the hill to fetch a bucket of water, a process that involved putting the bucket back on the loader (I'd most recently been using the pallet forks), adding many gallons of water, and then trying not to spill too much on the drive down across lumpy terrain.
Around noon, I decided it was sufficiently out, if not entirely California out (Tennessee is much less flammable than California, so people are a bit more casual about small smolders).
Afternoon: Errands! In town! (Well... not technically a town, but at least a census-designated place.) Owing to household scheduling constraints, I ended up leaving around 1500, which turns out to be just about the wrong time, as that's when the after-school traffic gets going. Main errand was to the eye doc's office, to pick up my new glasses (I can see clearly! They're not all scratched up yet, nor otherwise damaged! And, I can kinda-sorta wear some types of safety glasses over them) and contact lenses (which I guess I'll try out tomorrow). Before that, I swung by the local post office (not the less-local one that handles our mail) to have another go at sending a small package that the Post Office had bounced after I tried mailing it using a bunch of stamps - it seems that the old First Class rule of thumb, one stamp per ounce, no longer applies, and now it's so much per ounce plus so much per being over ¼" thick plus so much per various other factors. Meanwhile, Amazon is apparently getting super-cheap rates on priority parcel delivery (except when the destination post office gets overloaded and gives up on delivering stuff, which event is seemingly not communicated to Amazon, because the lines of communication are apparently FUBAR).
Anyway, in one sense I arrived at the post office at the wrong time, there being a few people ahead of me, and the clerks being tied up with customers who had a lot of special-handling stuff, but in another sense it wasn't the worst time, because the after-school crowd started accumulating rapidly behind me.
Oh, and the "masks required" sign was getting maybe 20% compliance, which included neither of the visible employees.
Then home, deal with Tuesday afternoon chores, cook & eat dinner, and now it's well into evening and practically time to start winding down from the day.
Recent Comments