Woke up VERY stiff and sore, but it's because of this:
Note the nice bark-rock borders of the ratty-ass lawn. There are hundreds of feet of those borders, the photo only shows a small portion of the yard. With a small start on the project Friday (we got maybe 40% done then), we banged out the rest of it yestiddy in four hours of grunt work with the little black truck as a motorized barrow, with hand barrows, shovels and rakes. Crew was the Olde Fharte (yours Truly), the #1 daughter and my young side-kick from next door. We moved 7.5 yards of that stuff, and spread it under bushes, etc all over the property.
That's a GOOD sore, comparable to coming back from the range and noticing the blue shoulder...
BTW, we got that job done just in time: the first Fall front rolled in off the Pacific yesterday, wet mostly WA, but it rained just west of me. All signs are for a month-early start to the Fall season. Have that from three sources: my own observation that the Eastern Pacific High has already retreated Southward to it's Winter position just 17 degrees north of the Equator, opening the door to winter weather off the Pacific; the local blueberry farmer who said two weeks ago that the seasons are all advancing by a month, and the Cottage Grove Weather Witch*, who has noted all the usual change-of-season flora and fauna arriving a month early. All these sources agree, so the NOAA Warming Wallahs who predict a long, hot, summer-into-Fall are out to lunch this year. With the FROPA (frontal passage) yesterday, the Weather Discussion from NOAA remarked, "the models didn't handle this well", meaning to ordinary folk that Ma Nature threw a curve ball when NOAA's computers were expecting a fastball. The Farmer's Almanac, which is as reliable as any forecaster and better than some (uses sun data, like the accurate Russian long-range forecasting), says we will have a long, brutal winter. BTW, up in AK, the first Siberian front and arctic air mass crossed the Bering Strait into AK three days ago, ending AK's growing season with a blast of below-freezing temps.
Some of the smarter climatologists say that despite the bleatings of AlGore & Company, we are about to enter a Cold Period, and that it will be comparable to the one which peaked in 1950. The cold period has probably already begun, but it will slam us hard in two years. Wonder how all that "Climate Change" rhetoric will fit into the 2016 election cycle, hmmmm?
Speaking of Al Gore, who owns one of the biggest "Carbon Credit" trading banks, isn't it a bit of a conflict of interest for the guy to use his bank's money to promote Marxist revolution against energy availability while sucking up the bucks he makes trading the "Carbon Credits", which increase in value with every anti-energy act he funds? If we had a REAL Securities and Exchange Commission, they would be looking into that.
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* Cottage Grove Weather Witch: aka the Rivrsis.