What a Blessing!

On Saturday, someone we know very generously brought over a trackhoe that he rented. He needed it for himself, but brought it over to us first. With his help, we got a huge amount of work done on the creek crossing. (The pics are still in the camera.)

He left the trackhoe here overnight and all day Sunday for Dave to continue working on the crossing, the driveway and on some of the trenching we needed to do to protect the meadow and our driveway from being washed out again.

When he came to pick it up, he finished a trench that Dave had started. He is used to using it and so much faster. We are very grateful. I will get pics up when I can.

Trenching to the Creek! Success!

Note the big rock in the foreground. That is what we were running into the closer we got to the creek.


There is water flowing through it!


Here the water is flowing down the bank toward the creek!

Meadow Trenching Pics!

This is actually not too bad. Usually, there is a huge "puddle" right here and it is fed from a drainage "stream" that runs through the middle of our meadow when it rains heavily. We have been working at both ends of the meadow to deal with the problem. At the "source" end, we have a trench to drain the water toward the creek and we started a kind of dirt "dam" to help block the water from going through the meadow.

This is the source end. The water drains from down the hillside and across from our neighbor. It usually creates a very large "pool" right in the middle of what you see in this picture. This nothing compared to what it usually looks like in a rain storm. The beginning of the trench toward the creek can be seen in the bottom right of this picture.



This is the beginning of the trench to the creek. Below are more pictures of the trench with the final one ending just short of the crest. There is a big stone in the trench preventing it from being dug deeper.

The Joys of Trenching & Inertia!

I am not what you would call a "fit" woman. I am so out of shape. *sigh* Now, you would think that I would take advantage of living on a hillside out in the country to go for walks, right? Wrong!

I seem to so easily succumb to the inertia that comes with living in a space that is so small that there is really no place to move around. I am used to being up and around, walking from room to room or, as in the case of the house we used to "rent" from the bank, up and down the stairs. I really miss that. I miss being in motion. There really is no way to be in motion like that in the RV unless I do an actual workout, which is a bit tricky! So, I end up sitting an awful lot and inertia sets in. Yet, when I do go out to do something like trenching, I just keep going and going and going. I amaze myself with how much I actually get done.

We have water that drains down the hillside from the neighbors property and from ours. It pools at the far end of our meadow, creating a little "creek" running down the middle of our meadow and causing pooling right over our leach lines. Not good! So, Dave had started a trench from where the water joins at the far end of our meadow toward the creek in an attempt to divert it.

I have worked on extending the trench when I can. Yesterday afternoon, I worked hard and got it all the way to the crest above the creek bank. However, it was not deep enough for the water to flow all the way to the crest and down the bank into the creek.

Today, I dug it deeper and got the water much farther along, but got stopped just a few feet short by a very big rock. Dave had been working on the creek crossing and on the drainage of the pool over the leach lines. Then he went and got out that huge rock. He deepened the trench and the water started flowing into the creek. Woohoo! Boy, does that feel good. We will have to keep working on it to keep it clear and deep.

At the beginning of the trench, where the water pools together, I dug on one side and made a dirt "dam" on the other side to try to prevent any more water from going into our meadow. Dave built it up a little bit more. Between the dam and the trench on one end of the meadow and the trenching Dave did at the other end, I have never seen the meadow with this small of an amount of water. Of course, the real test will be when a big rain hits; but any way you look at it, it has to be better than it was.

I did take some pictures of the trenching and will get them up when I can.

Back to Work, Trenching & Life

Well...Dave dragged himself into work today. Our son and I are still dragging a bit, too...but definitely on the upswing! Yay!!!!

I am listening to PBN and writing here in my blog, then I will be off to lay down again.

We still have some bits of snow covering the landscape and patches of ice going down our gravel driveway. One thing we really need to do is to find a way of getting all the water trenched away from the driveway so it won't run down it and freeze.

Ah, trenching! Such fun! NOT! It is always a challenge to try and figure out how to reroute the water. I have spent some hours on rainy days out there in my red mudders, jeans tucked inside, digging trenches. When it rains we have a mini-creek running through our meadow...something we definitely need to reroute as it sits on our septic leach area!

The last heavy rain, I managed to clear the growth out of the trench running alongside the lower part of the driveway. I also dug little mini channels to keep water off the upper driveway. It always feels good to get something accomplished!

My brain is still a bit foggy from being sick, so hopefully these ramblings actually make sense!

Today I need to dump our black water tank again. It is supposed to get up into the 40's, so hopefully, the water hose for flushing the tank will thaw out. Otherwise, I will have to dump dishpans of water into the toilet to sort of flush it out.