Saturday was a light day.  We did haul a bunch of lumber down to the dock site and cut some to desired lengths.  Mostly toured the farm and reveled in everything greening up.  Saturday night the rain set in for real and continued on and off most of Sunday.  We caught up on our cattle registrations online.  Ended up logging 10 animals in the official American Highland Cattle Association database – or at least filled out the paperwork to have them entered.  Its a manual process, and they will auto-bill our credit card for those we actually registered.  We don’t register any of the males unless they are the rare perfect specimen, like Larry was.  However its still important to get those males entered into the database for tracking the productivity of the mothers.  Then it was off to dinner.  Gabby loves King’s Buffet – and in fact, had her first adult food there when she was two:  Egg drop soup.  She still loves it.  So there we went.  Prices are going up, but the kids are getting older too.  I remember when I could feed all (4) of us there for $22+tip, now its $32+tip.  Of course, that was 8 years ago…

Monday was lost.  I spent a bit of time wandering around outside, but everything was down right soggy.  And COLD! (relatively speaking)  All of my 3′ deep post holes were filled to the top with water.  And… the lake rose visibly.  The water is now almost up to the post I put in a couple of weeks ago.  The area I was driving my tractor in to dig those holes is underwater.  Glad I came out when I did, otherwise the dock wouldn’t be.  I did finalize the purchase of my weather station.  Have I mentioned that?  Everyone who is online around here uses Wunderground.com for their weather information (its not as radical as it sounds, its owned by the Weather Channel).  What does make it unique is that it integrates data from over 100,000 Personal Weather Stations across the USA.  The nearest station to our farm is over 10 miles away.  I’m fixing that.  Just bought a Wireless Davis Vantage Pro2 Plus weather station with all the bells and whistles, including solar irradiation, UV level, and with a 24 hour fan aspirated Radiation Shield (important for “in the shade” temperature readings) – with upgraded sensors.  Thanks Bick!  (Its nice to have a bit of pocket money to play with).  Anyhow, the folks I bought it from deserve a plug, so Thanks Robert (who helped me through a lot of options).  Robert and his wife run:  www.rainmanweather.com. Very nice people.

Today was interesting.  I woke up at 7:30am to the sound of the ice-maker discharging a chunk (did I mention its really quiet here?).  Evia took the dog with her, so its REALLY quiet now.  No cat, no dog, just me this week.  Although I wanted today to be full of dock work, since hopefully things had dried out some, I decided to roll over and sleep just a bit more.  Woke up at 11am!  Made some brunch, checked email, posted a few things on a game site I’m stuck on, and made it outside about 1pm.  Worked until 7pm.  Almost double my typical dock period.  That gets us to today’s topic:  How to make a hard job near impossible…

You would think having holes full of water would be a good thing – should soften the dirt, make it easier to trim the holes, etc.  Right?  Well, I bailed out the holes with a slightly modified milk jug.  Then plunged in my post-hole digger.  Nice soft mud, east to grab.  AH What?  Why won’t this mud come off the post-hole digger blades?  Oh, right… its Adair County mud.  The slickest, stickiest, substance know to mankind (or at least to me).  Ok, so now every posthole digger full of mud needs to be banged, repeatedly, on the ground – or cleared with my tamper pipe (a 4′ length of 3/4″ iron pipe with and end-cap – perfect to compressing the ground after back filling holes – and kind of handy for moving cattle with leverage – although we bent it doing that) – or my boot.  So what is normally a 15 second operation of filling the post hole digger and dumping it is now taking a minute or two.  But that wasn’t the bad part…

The bad part was positioning the poles in the holes.  Normally this is work, but not as bad as carrying them.  Ware long sleeves, wrap your arms around the 6×6 treated lumber pole, and lift with your legs. Ignore the inevitable bruises.   With a 16 foot one, its work, no doubt.  This hole had a 12 foot one – shouldn’t be a problem right?  Remember that sticky mud.  Give it all you got… doesn’t matter.  Mud holds it in place.  I did manage to move the pole about 3 times (out of the typical 6-9 adjustments to get one aligned with everything else).  With each success there was this massive SUCKING sound, as the mud slowly let go of its prey.  Tried removing as much as I could.  Didn’t matter.  Gave it all I had, and still couldn’t move it most of the time.  Eventually broke down and used a chain and the tractor to free the bloody thing – three times – before I got it positioned right.  Easy on the back, but time consuming to move the tractor, wrap the chain, raise the bucket, position the pole, knock the chain free, etc.  Bottom line:  I spent TWO HOURS positioning one pole.

Over the next 4 hours, having learned my “The power of Mud” lesson, I positioned (2) 8′ foot poles (still had mud issues, but they were light enough to overcome, and I cleared as much mud from the bottom of the holes as I could before I dropped in the pole), and drilled, positioned, and locked in the first two of the “other side” of the walkway.  The first was a 16 foot pole – about all this old man can carry, the second was blessedly only a 12 footer.  Started using some of that lumber Evia and I cut up on Saturday.  Some of that was spacing/support board – cut to exactly 4′ 11″ – the distance between the outside edges of the poles along the future walkway.  Figured on using one per set of poles to hold them in place, ended up using two:  one at the base to establish the rough orientation and hold it, the other right below the 2x12x20 that is tied into the right hand post.  That second one will end up doubling as a support brace for the left hand 2x12x20 main support beam.  I have to tell you, mere clay, in the bottom of the two new holes I drilled, was downright wonderful to post hole out after working with the mud.

Ended up calling it quits at 7pm.  Normally I do about 3-4 hours of hard manual labor, like lifting 16′ 6×6 treated lumber poles, but since I lost Monday, I was enthused.  Seriously feel it now.  This message is being brought to you compliments of a half-empty glass of Jim Beam Bourbon.  Bourbon has several advantages over Tylenol:  1)  Its faster  2)  The pain is really lessened  3) You don’t care about what pain remains nearly as much.  Downside:  Can’t use it on a regular basis.  Well, you can, but then you need a membership to AA.  It will be interesting to see if I can move in the morning.  If I can go back to 3-4 hours a day, I can see having this dock finished before I leave – or nearly so.