"Wagner's music is better than it sounds." - Mark Twain

This has been another very eventful day. Lots of things accomplished and lots of progress made.

Having rec'd formal approval yesterday from the Dept. of Forestry I went out at 8 a.m. and removed the tarp and set two highway flares in the slash pile. WHOOSH!!

An hour later it was "fully involved" and putting off a lot of heat. The plexiglass window in the goat shed 30' away is no longer flat. That's no problem because it's still water tight and is only intended to let sunlight in.

Todd came over this afternoon to deliver and spread 7 tons of 3/4=minus gravel and also used his Bobcat to push the edges of the pile in to the center so it would burn more completely. It looks like it will burn through the night so that by the times the rain starts tomorrow evening it should be little more than a pile of ash.

Those rains will add up to over and inch and a half by Thursday night with 30 mph winds. By next Tuesday we'll have rec'd over 5" of rain. I'm curious to see how full the creek gets with that much rain that quickly.

I'll get pics tomorrow, but that 7 tons of gravel also created paths to the goat shed and to Fred (the old one got obliterated with the logging operation). I did that one wheelbarrow load at a time. (ouch) But now we won't be tracking through the mud and bringing it back into MoHo all winter long.

I also got more firewood stacked and now have 2 cords put up, with another 7 or so to go. And I raked all the branches and brush from the area between the path to Fred and the road. Todd used his Bobcat to level it out and that area, about 100' x 100', will be where we put the fruit trees.

Because the rains are coming, and because the truck doesn't have windshield wipers I called Leroy this morning and said I'd either get the truck tomorrow or not for another week. He responded that he was about to call me because IT'S READY!! The tranny is in and working great, and he installed a new set of gauges under the dash to give me the info the stock dash gauges don't provide (for reasons I'll have to figure out). So tomorrow morning we'll go up the road 5 miles and fetch her, drive her home, and get her safely into Barnette where I'll work on the punch list items. First up will be getting the wipers working, figuring out what I got wrong when I connected the linkage. The motor works but the metal arms that run from the motor to the wiper arms don't. Hmmmm.

We're going out for an anniversary dinner tomorrow night, someplace special TBD. We were married on August 7, 1971, but it was one year ago, on 10/12/15 that we drove a rental truck loaded with all our worldly goods down the drive to MoHo and officially took up residence on Baker Rd. It's been a very busy year with lots of hard work, but we've made great progress, learned a ton, and still feel VERY blessed to be here.
So dinner someplace fancy, maybe even with real menus, not a reader board.