which_chick | A Saturday of Accomplishment!

Saturday I plowed through a list of to-do items, some of them regular everday weekend stuff, some of them seasonal, and some of them one off.

Friday night after work, I mowed the grass for the penultimate time. I'll have to hit it once more before winter, but the end of mowing for the year is in sight. I'm excited. (I hate mowing.) This was to free up more time on Saturday for #Projects.

Saturday morning, I got up, loaded two buckets of loose stone for the chicken coop project, went over to Lala's, swept out chicken coop, fed horses and pigs, moved next week's hay for the boys, leveled the two sets of chicken coop stairs (the ones I fell off of and bruised the shit out of my ass last week and the other ones that were wobbly and bothered Lala's mom) with the stone, rounded up and filled six 100lb feed sacks with dried horse poop from the bottom of the barn, put those in the truck, went home and proceeded to seasonally wrap up the gardening areas a bit.

I raked off last year's mulch from the asparagus bed and laid down fresh (this is what the bagged horse poop is for -- mulching/fertilizing). The old got thrown in the wheelbarrow for later. I definitely need to put on the new wheelbarrow arms (I broke off a wheelbarrow arm earlier this summer which makes using the wheelbarrow kind of weird), but I haven't done that yet. The new arms are in my Fit, waiting for me to be motivated and have tools handy. *sigh* I cut down all the peonies and raked off their old mulch (wheelbarrow again) and re-mulched them. (Peonies are heavy feeders. If you want nice flowers, you need to feed the peonies on the regular.)

I also did the rake-n-refresh on the massive rosebush in the rebar cage (I should get you guys a picture of him to update that slow moving project...) and the smaller one I stole from Sue's house on Richard Street. I did not do Chuck yet, but he also needs to be fed. All the dead mulch went in the wheelbarrow.

I dug up and divided my fancy yellow Itoh peony with brother the elder in exchange for two very nice red/pink peony root hunks. I planted the new hunks and reburied my half of the fancy yellow Itoh, but they still need mulched as I ran out of horse poop mulch. (It's OK, there's more in the barn.)

I raked the garden off (straggler tomato vines, general neatening) and put the old mulch from the wheelbarrow on top of the garden to improve tilth.

I went up to Weber's and cleaned up the three pine trees that Kevin had felled for me earlier in the week. They were "dead" and "going to fall" in an allegedly worrying sort of way, so yeah. OK, boomer. That took two hours, but Roy and Dash helped me with it. We stacked all the dead pine tree bits at the burn pile for later. (Sunday. Sunday was later.) This took until noon.

I watered all my houseplants (There are a lot of houseplants these days. It's kind of a thing. I should post about that, but... maybe when I have some free time this winter.) and had some lunch before I settled down to the intellectual work of the day.

The day's intellectual labor was writing a truthful and supportive letter for Waylie. Waylie, as regular readers will recall, suffered the loss of his six year old not-a-son in August and he's facing child endangerment and manslaughter charges as a result of that accidental drowning. His mother (who works for me and is married to La's brother whom I used to date back in the day) asked me if I could write a letter in support of Waylie.

This was... hard. I did the best I could, but it was still depressing and hard. I've previously discussed some of Waylie's brushes with the law, but not all of them, and there's definitely a pattern of not being able to color inside of the lines. The shit part is that there's not ever been particularly evil intent behind any of it. On paper, it does not look good. *sigh*

After that, I went over to Lala's where I took Bird for a spin. He was fine, as usual. We worked through the stuff I did on Mystic at lesson last week and he handled it like a trooper. (This was leg yield facing the rail, which we do not have a rail but we have a road and that worked fine, and then transition from walk to trot, while still in the leg yield and still facing the rail kinda. It was weird but went pretty well all things considered. It's an exercise to develop the inside leg to outside rein thing.) I also worked with the two little bays with Trys. These are the don't-ride-yet little bays, Snap and Switch. They're definitely pony pony pony, all the way pony, stolid little 12.mumble hands of shaggy unflappable pony goodness. And they're middle aged and they need to effing ride. Not that anyone needs a damn bay pony, but they need to have some skills. So, yeah. We're doing that. Basic skills, rideable style of a thing. I'd like to have this knocked out before Xmas. It's going well. Ground skills have been installed and we did the corpse pose thing without any incident at all. Gonna throw a leg over next weekend, I expect. Do some little "rides" in the driveway. It'll be awesome.

And then I went home to dinner and sleep. It was a busy day.

Sunday it was raining in the morning so I lit the burn pile on fire. (This is really me practicing images with the new image hosting, which I do not love having to learn.)