It is a mystery

I am tired, can't sleep well because my brain won't shut up about moving stuff when I'm trying to sleep. Rude

Friday morning I got up decently early and started packing my truck. It went well, I got most of the stuff on that I had packed minus the big shelf which I wasn't sure I could do by myself since it's large. I went to the weavers guild the night before, so I couldn't pack but it turned out alright. I spent an hour carrying and loading and did pretty much everything but pack my clothing and strap everything down.

Then I had a work team meeting, which I had to deal with my coworkers saying nice things about me. One on one fine, but with the whole team there on zoom, it was annoying. I was able to pack my clothes during part of the meeting afterwards where I didn't need to talk or be on video, so there was that. After the team meeting, we had a smaller group get together and talk about who was getting my tasks, mostly easy. Then met with C and debriefed about it and talked about upcoming schedule because I need to use my vacation days or lose them. I only had two or three saved up, but I have multiple appointments and I'm also teaching saturday, so it's actually difficult to cram all the things in.

Once we wrapped up, I finished loading the truck and hit the road. I was on the move and the drive was really nice and easy, beautiful weather for it. Got down to my parents and my mom immediately needed my help moving some heavy pots of maple syrup.

They moved maple syrup bottling to the church kitchen which is way better than crammed in the corner of the milk house/sap house, but mom does love to complain about stuff so I think the switching was difficult. But we sat around and chatted while she did mysterious sap things (brix testing, adding water to get brix to a certain level, heating it up, bottling, etc).

Saturday was a work day, surprisingly cold for the predicted weather but it was windy and the sun wasn't out for most of the day. I got to use the skidsteer wood processor for the first time which is extremely fun and cool. Basically, you pick up a log onto the platform, wiggle it around so it's on there well, clamp, cut, split, move it, clamp, cut, split. There's some nonsense with the moving side to side part of the platform, but it splits really fast for the most part. I got the blade stuck in some cherry but that's because it was not straight and did some pinching. My dad has made a setup where one of those big bulk bags is hanging but sitting on a pallet and we split into the bulk bags directly, so it's really easy to pick up and move around. This is really good for the maple syrup because then dad can just fork a new bag onto the platform near the sap house. As a complete noob, I split one bag in about an hour, which is 4/10 of a cord of wood. Dad is faster and can do a cord of wood in about an hour and a half. Pretty darn good. Now, not all the wood split is good for the boil, because it often doesn't split it small enough, but those get set aside for the outdoor burner or dad will resplit while he boils. This is also going to be very good for me because the farm house is fully wood heated.



I grabbed lunch after doing one bag and then went and pruned blueberries. My parents have a battery powered pruner, which is probably the best investment ever. It works so well and makes it really easy to prune. Just don't put your fingers in it, it won't stop. It took me five hours or so to do two rows, which is pretty solid given the rows are 350 feet long and it took me a bit to get back into the swing of pruning. To prune, you have to eyeball the plant architecture, remove branches that are too close to the ground or sticking too far into the rows, but then also try and clean out the middle a bit to help with airflow, but also only remove 1-2 of the oldest big branches and dead wood. You have to do this because otherwise the plants will stop putting out new sprouts and just decline, so it's a renewal of the plants. It's an art. I didn't bring my super sturdy work pants with the double layer fronts for some reason, not sure why, so my knees are sore from crawling around. Oh well. It got nice and sunny and warm for a while and then a front came in, which immediately made it cloudy and then temperature dropped.

I checked in again with my mom who was over bottling again, checked in with my dad boiling where we did some brainstorming on things and then made dinner.

Sunday was drizzly and gross. Dad had been up boiling until 3am, so he slept in. I did some farm related computer stuff, mostly looking at some farm management software. We struggle with record keeping being in one place, especially with rotations and having the records all in one place. Right now, the records are typically broken out by crop in spreadsheets but it isn't working anymore.

I wanted to get on the road by noon because of the storms rolling in but alas, I had forgotten my parents asked for my help moving an elliptical. I did not remember how big ellipticals were. They are big and extremely heavy. This one was on the trailer in the parsonage garage and needed to go in the house, so we pulled it out and around to the back. Months ago, we removed the back porch railing which was great. So the most dangerous part was when we tipped the elliptical to get blocks under it to raise it up enough to get the forks under it. Once we did that, it was mostly smooth sailing. So we did: block the elliptical to raise it up, pick it up with the forks of the tractor (dad has to stand on the front of the elliptical because it was so heavy in the back). Mom pulled the tractor and trailer away from under it. We put the rolly carts under it and set it down on the carts. Then we put a pallet under it, picked it off the carts and pulled them out and set it on the pallet. Then I forked it (with dad still balancing it), over to the back porch where we set it back down onto the rolly carts. Then we turned it sideways and got the front of the thing into the house up the 6 inch step up. Then we got the car ramps and a jack. Jacked up the back of the thing (I counter balanced the front that time), got the ramps in place and pushed the back rolly cart so it was partially on the flat part of the ramp, let the jack down and pretty much just pushed it into the house extremely easily.

It absolutely didn't make the turn into the bedroom, so it will live permanently in the living room lol. Extremely inconvenient given we need to lay flooring but we'll just do the flooring in two batches, first the living room, kitchen and dining room while the elliptical lives in the hallway, then move it back into the living room while we do the hallway.

Then I got on the road around 2pm. The drive back wasn't too bad. It was only windy, not raining. But it was really windy.

I'm at the point in packing where I need to go digging through places to get things that belong to me, like last night I reailzed I hadn't emptied the junk drawer of my stuff. I suspect there will be a lot of that since I need to untangle my things from F's. No word on my parents' flooring yet, but it shouldn't be that much longer.

we did it

I'm very tired despite the fact that this past weekend was very lazy in terms of farm work. we only had two groups (plus one no show group womp womp), and not many people stop by the weekend after halloween. But we do stay open because if we have bad weather earlier in the season, then this weekend is the rescheduling weekend. It was pretty chilly, windy but sunny, so I was constantly putting on hoodies and taking them off. I did build myself a fire at the selling area and warmed myself up. A few people did come by specifically to buy stuff which was good, including a couple of people very interesting in the now $3 carving pumpkins.

since it was a quiet weekend, my dad and I used it as a review, what worked, what didn't work, plans for future years so it was good.

I also picked up my sister on the way and my brother and his fiancee also came in with their dogs so it was a little bit of nice chaos. my sister came in specifically to take photos of my waistcoat and let me tell you, it looks fricken amazing, I can't wait to write a post about it. it's so good looking and the pictures came out so well that I'm considering putting photos of my face on the wider internet which I've done...once maybe? my private instagram doesn't count towards that.

I was able to early vote before I hit the road on friday and thus will not be reading any news or going on social media until at least tomorrow. I'm playing a video game called Traveller's Rest, which is basically a Stardew Valley/Diner Dash mashup where you grow crops, brew drinks, cook food, forage, mine and then serve travellers coming to the inn and I love it so much. It's so good. I bought it a week ago and I've already put 30 hours on it which is a wild amount of playing time for me. I vowed never to buy another early access game but here I am.

I'm casually doing NaClYoHo via copperbadge because the house and my room is now a disaster after two months away every weekend. F is not a spectacular housekeeper even by my low-ish standards (weird thing she does occasionally is clean my toilet. it is technically the guest bathroom since it's on the first floor. but she won't clean anything else in the bathroom, just the toilet. idek). today's cleaning was unpacking my dry food bag and running the dishwasher. tomorrow I'll probably tackle some of my room. I expect these first few days will be handling the biggest messes of travel stuff and then later in the month, I'll go for actual projects. I also want to get cranking on my weaving project, so I can also start thinking about what I'm making for christmas gifts this year.

I'm also going to sleep a lot. it's slouching time

I did the last big countertop and the little one under the microwave this week. Worked on it a lot more piecemeal than the other counter. Hardest part was not hitting the lights with the plywood when I brought it inside. Only casualty was that I cut my middle finger with the exacto blade this morning, cleaned it and its stopped bleeding, so that was irritating. Tiny countertop under microwave was very easy because they used nice plywood already, worse glue so I didn't damage it and I didn't care much about the edges since it isn't super visible. This counter was much less square than the other, so I goofed my measure a tiny bit for the plywood, but the 1/8 inch where my plywood doesn't cover the old plywood is on the far side where it isn't really visible.

Before



After

I didn't take a true before photo, where there was a file cabinet and a ton of junk piled on top of it, but this was the closet in the living room:

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The other thing I did was pick up rolled linoleum. We've decided to skip tiling the countertops and instead are simply going to rip the old linoleum tiles up, scrape all the gunk up and lay the rolled stuff on. The main issue with the tiled stuff is the cracks between, not great for counters. It's not nice but again, it really needs to last until a few kitchen renovation happens.

It was chilly cold the last few days at home (not now here at my parents), so I bundled up in the afternoons and did some workshop work. I got a ramp built for Mara to handle the stairs at my parents, which was two 9 foot rough cut 2x4s with 3 10 inch connector 2x4s in between them. I then took mostly rough cut plank but also some smooth scrap pieces and screwed them down. Put together a quick 2x4 railing. When I got here, I cut a notch for the stair to rest in and attached the railing.


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Life is interesting. But Mom bought me four boxes of gluten free cookies at the store, so I'm happy.