hqueen's collection of Far From the Usual stuff.

[frustratedearthmother]

Your trip sounds like it was awesome! Did you take pictures???? Cool weather sounds pretty good right now - even though I haven't rocked a bikini in decades, lol! We got really hot yesterday - heat index 101 for awhile. So not ready for that - but for me it's better than cold. Trips are fun - but it's nice to get back home.

Hope your weather holds out and that you can get some of your projects knocked off the list!

 

[hqueen13]

I did take a few pictures, FEM! They didn't turn out great, but you can kinda see the baby, LOL.
Speaking of pictures, I found a nest of cardinals yesterday while I was getting the mail. They're so cute! Papa was hanging around and doing a good job of taking care of them. I didn't see the mom, but daddy was working hard! I'm going to try to take pictures of them every day when I get the mail to watch them grow. They're barely getting feathers right now.

It looks like we should be able to get a LOT done this weekend. I'm SO grateful! We have storms tonight, but tomorrow is supposed to be clear and breezy, which should dry things out again. It's pretty dry right now, so even if it does rain tonight, it shouldn't make it too muddy. Then Saturday morning we can really bust out some work. The stone dust is getting delivered at GH and SH's tomorrow morning, and luckily they'll be home, so they can tell them where to put it and pay for it so I don't have to. Then Saturday we'll really work on rocking some stuff out. I have my lesson on Saturday morning, but they BF should be able to load everything up and get started before I get there. Hopefully we can get the lumber on Friday night so that the BF can just drive down on Saturday morning and be ready to go. With the holiday on Monday we should be able to make a lot of progress. I'm hoping the work over at my friend's doesn't take 2 days, but it wouldn't surprise me if it does. We're picking up a grading blade from another friend tonight that fits our tractor (they have the same one) and that will help get the work done.

The BF got the plywood on one wall of the shed frame that we had built, he wanted to do more work last night but he got home late and there was no way we could get it done enough to handle getting rained on tonight. I had to kind of tell him to back down a bit. He is really itching to get it done, and I don't blame him, but I reminded him that slow and right beats fast and wrong. All I could see happening was us trying to move around the sides and ending up puncturing one of the walls with the forks because the wall was heavy and slipped. I know how much cussing he would do (I've heard it before...) and I REALLY didn't want to have to listen to that AND pay MORE $$ to get new lumber to fix whatever broke. Yeah, not signing up for that. So as much as he really didn't want to, we stacked everything back up, and put the tarp back on top, and left it until this weekend. I'm hoping the tarp is enough rain insurance so that it won't actually rain... We'll see how that works...

I spent Tues and Wed roaming around the countryside of northern Virginia. I had to make an office trip to our new office for training, and I have quite a few friends in the area, so I decided to make a longer trip out of it, and stay down there. DR let me stay at her place since she stays at my house all the time, and that was fun. She has a new hot tub, and so we enjoyed that! Then Wed morning I got up and drove up to my other friend's farm to see her place, and she fed me breakfast. Then I drove down the road a bit further to meet another friend for lunch before I came home. I put 386 miles on my truck in 2 days. It burned an entire tank of gas. Not exactly what I like to do, but I really enjoyed seeing some lovely friends that I haven't seen in a long time. And my one friend had mullien growing wild on her place, so we dug up some plants and I brought them home! I hope that it will grow, we'll see how well that goes. I need to get it into the ground tomorrow for sure.

So lots of stuff rocking along, and hopefully we can get some progress made. We'll see how things go the next few days. I'm ready to check some things off the list!

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Yep- you're busy as usual. Cool on the cardinal family. Wonder how long it will be until they fledge? I bet it'll happen pretty quickly.

Really cool that you got to spend time with old friends. Sounds like a good time. Hope the rain is kind and disappears quickly so ya'll can get everything done.

 

[Britesea]

Always wonderful to touch base with old friends. Life seems to be full of dear people that wander out of our lives

 

[hqueen13]

FEM, the cardinals fledged in about 2 days! They're all already out of the nest! I was surprised how quick it was. I was a little disappointed I couldn't get any pictures of them after they were out of the nest, but the bush is so dense I couldn't see them!
@Britesea yes, it really is!!
I'm just glad that the week led to a 3 day weekend! WHEW.
I had to pick up KN from the airport on Fri night, he flight didn't arrive until almost 11. And my lesson was a 8, which meant leaving the house at 7. UGH. My lesson went GREAT, though, I rode for almost the entire hour, which was awesome. I left the barn and headed over to SH & GH's house to being the next phase of work on their place. The stone dust had been delivered on Friday, so we were set to start. I called the BF on the way over to find out where he was and discovered he was JUST leaving the house. It was 9:30 at this point. I had left the house at 7. He was awake at 7.
I got there and started to take care of the horses and clean up the manure, and GH came out to say hello and give me the check for my pay for June. I noticed their truck was still in the driveway when I got there, and figured they'd been delayed. She and I chatted for a minute, and then she headed back to the house to finish getting ready to leave and the BF pulled in finally. He unhitched the trailer and we headed down to his work to pick up the tamper. He was supposed to have done that already that morning. Oh well. On our way back we decided to grab lunch, and then the truck wouldn't start back up again, so we ended up sitting in the parking lot to eat our lunch waiting on the truck to cool off.
Finally an hour later we were able to head back to GH's and get started. We grabbed the bobcat from KD's place around the corner and the BF got our tractor off the trailer and we got everything started up. He moved the hay feeder and I started driving the bobcat back and forth to get loads of stone dust. We ended up leveling it by hand because the machine cracked one of the boards trying to drive on and off the box. We'll have to replace that later. He tamped that down while I got more loads and spread them out. We finished that, finally, and dumped the first load of manure and called it quits. We decided to grab a new starter for the truck so that we wouldn't get stranded again on the way home. Got home and took showers, and then decided to go grab something to eat, and finally came home and fell into bed. I got sun burnt pretty bad across my shoulders and upper arms. The breeze was SO lovely, and I didn't notice how bad I was burned until it was too late.
Sunday morning I dropped the BF off at GH's and then ran up to the farm to get started on my chores. By the time I came back he had gotten the second load of manure off the pickup truck, and was attempting to start leveling the area where the new box was being built. It had rained a little overnight and it was SLIPPERY, and he was getting nowhere. When I got there we went over to get the bobcat again from KD's place, and he tried using that. He mostly just made a mess, and then the bobcat died on him due to a silly wiring harness that is attached to the seat belt. (It won't run unless your butt is in the seat and the seat belt is attached...). We decided to take a break, go home and get lunch, replace the starter in the pickup truck, grab a new wire harness to fix the bobcat, and pick up lumber and an auger from Home Depot so we could get the box built and maybe the ground would dry out enough while we were gone.
We finally got back (everything takes way longer than it should, right?!) and the ground has dried which is great. It takes the BF a while to get the wiring harness fixed, but he finally does, and so he finishes scraping the area for the box. We get ready to build the box, and he gets the first smaller box built, which is great. He was having a little trouble with the way the auger was running, but was working through it. It's hot (my truck said 90 ) and I can tell he's getting fatigued, and running an auger like that is HARD. It jerks you around every time it hits a rock. We start on the first hole of 8 that have to be dug for the big box, and he auger gets stuck, and rips out of his hands. Instead of stopping, like it's supposed to, it just sits there and SPINS. We're both standing there waffling between terrified and amused. I almost took a video with my phone, but was more concerned with how the heck we were going to get this thing SAFELY stopped. He couldn't grab it, it was going too fast. He finally pulled the pin out of the auger, and then managed to pull the thing up out of the ground WHILE THE TOP IS STILL SPINNING and threw the whole thing on the ground. Once it was on the ground, it quit spinning since he'd pulled out the pin. I'm SO grateful he didn't get hurt. They're supposed to have a safety in them that if you let go of the throttle the machine goes to idle. This one didn't. The throttle got stuck wide open. Which is DANGEROUS. At that point I'm pissed, and he's hot and tired. He started to fuss with trying to get the engine to work correctly, and I was like NO. We're not doing this. We PAID to rent this machine, and it wasn't cheap, and I'm NOT going to fight with it to get it to work right wasting the precious time we have in order to finish the work when we're already hot and exhausted. So we just packed everything up (which took almost 2 hours. in the heat.) and went back to Home Depot.
We go to return the machine and explain to the woman what happened, and she tried to just give us half off the rental. I said no way. Not only did it not work correctly, but it was a safety hazard on top of that. She did point out that we should have called when it happened, and I agreed with her, but I was still not going to pay for the rental. I get her point that I'm sure a lot of people come in there and try to say it didn't work, and they likely don't know what they're doing, but that's not us. She did give us the money back but she wasn't happy about it.
We finally left there and grabbed dinner. And of course we picked the restaurant which didn't have any a/c working. We finally got home and got in the shower and crashed. Thankfully we JUST beat the storms home. The bottom fell out AFTER we got in the house.
We took it easy yesterday. The BF went with me to the farm to turn out horses, and then we went down to GH's to take care of Cowboy and Coyote. It had rained pretty hard so even if we had wanted to work we really couldn't have. We had a nice brunch together after that and then headed home. I took a 2 hour nap, and then got up and we ran some errands, stopped by Cowboy and Coyote's again and then ate dinner. Thank goodness Chili's was open their regular hours on Memorial Day. All of our other picks were closed, especially at 6:30 when we were ready to eat.
The fun thing is that I picked up a seeding stand from SR. He got it from someone else, and wasn't using it, and tried to sell it but no one would take it, so he gave it to me. It's got 3 levels to it, the lower 2 have lights in them so you can start seeds in it. It will be nice to use, we were even talking about putting it in the house and growing greens in it through winter. We'll have to see how that works LOL. I'm grateful to have it, it's pretty nice.
I got wet this morning taking care of Cowboy and Coyote. I knew it was supposed to rain, but I didn't think it was going to until later, so I didn't put ON my jacket, I just had it in the car. Got down to their barn and was picking up poop and was about half finished when it started to rain pretty hard. I was not pleased!
At least it's only a 4 day week, even if today is a MondayTuesday.

 

[baymule]

When we bought our place, we bought a hand held auger from Harbor Freight. Best $200 we spent. It sucks that the one you rented spun out of control and the safety feature failed. Good that you were insistent and got your money back.

Y'all stayed on a dead run all weekend!

 

[frustratedearthmother]

geezelouise! That auger experience was no Bueno! So glad nobody got hurt and so glad you got your money back!

 

[hqueen13]

Yes, thanks ladies!
It was a bit crazy for sure.
And unfortunately, things have gone to hell in a handbasket since then.
Tuesday evening I found out that I screwed up the order for the appointment reminder cards that we had made, there is an error in one of the phone numbers on it. At first the gal who texted me was angry, but when I owned that it was my mistake she softened up a bit. I was really irritated that she was so angry about it, but I can kind of see where she's coming from. Oh, yeah, and we ordered 10,000 of these. Which will only take us barely a year to use. And we can use them for the other locations without any real trouble, but it still SUCKS that I screwed up.
Then yesterday I was going to enter the BF's pay check in the budget, which wasn't huge since we took some vacation days for the beach, and discovered that I had made a $1200 mistake. In the wrong direction. $200 of his pay check automatically gets deposited into his savings account. When I was entering the info in the budget last pay period, I accidentally entered the full amount under his savings account and checking account, instead of just $200 in the savings account, which made it look like we had $1200 more than we really had. Thankfully we had enough extra that it didn't put us in the red (it would have before, but I probably would have noticed that there was a lot more than usual if there was less in general...) but it sure wiped out THIS pay check in a hurry. We'll be fine, but it only leaves us with about $450 for our current shed/driveway projects. Which is a LOT less than we were thinking we had.
I'm just frustrated with myself for making 2 pretty big mistakes that are the result of me not paying attention quite as good as I normally do. Both of them originate about 2 weeks ago, so I guess I was pretty fried then, the trouble is that it took me 2 weeks, and having stuff completely printed, to discover it. To say I'm burnt out is an under statement. I'd love to say there's a break coming, but I don't know that is really gonna happen either.
My parents kind of ticked me off this week, too. We were working on arranging a trip for them, and they had let us know a range of dates, and the BF had checked the vacation schedule and we figured out what was workable. In typical fashion for my parents they're trying to tack on other visits around us to break up the 9 hours of driving, which I get, but it complicates things. The BF had already taken off some time, which is right after the 4th of July, and so my dad and I are trying to figure out when they'll be arriving and leaving along with where they want to go before/after they're with us, and come to find out my mom told my sister she'd watch my niece for her because my nephews are away at camp and my sister wanted to kid free days to get some things done. I don't blame her, but now my parents are pretty much like, oh we can't come, claiming that my sister's schedule is less flexible than our schedule because of the kids. I'm a little to say the least. It's petty, but it feels like my sister's stuff is more important than my stuff. The BF isn't sure he can reschedule his vacation, or at least he's not sure that they'll be happy about it. He has basically said to just tell them to come and he'll see if he can get off when they're here later. I don't want to do that because they want to spend time with him and we wanted to go to the beach. If he doesn't take time off then we're probably not going to the beach with them. Of course, I'd rather take vacation with just the two of us, but I don't get to spend much time with my family either.
So who knows how this snafu is going to turn out. He's supposed to be checking the vacation calendar at work to see if there are any other options in the next 2 months. He's a little resentful of the situation as well, so of course he hasn't done it the past 2 days either. I hope he does it today because I don't want to drag this out any further than we have to. Part of me is tempted to tell them that he can't change it and doesn't have enough time to take off additionally so they either have to come then or they have to come when he can't get off. But the other part of me also really wants to be able to take the time together. If my parents come on vacation with us they'll pay for most of the meals we eat out anyway Of course my dad just says that it's my inheritance anyway... LOL
Yeah. Crappy week, and I'm glad it's short because I wouldn't want any more days in this week than I have to!

 

[Britesea]

One thing to think about, is that if you move heaven and earth to accommodate them, they will figure no big deal, and you can expect them to do this kind of thing again.

 

[baymule]

I sure can see your frustration. Hope it all works out.