Well, that was a busy weekend...

Resolved a couple of open issues this weekend, opened at least one more I had thought settled.

M helped me get the generator's carb apart. We sorted out the needle valve, put things back together, cleaned the spark plug, and the generator was back in action. The genny still being on the trailer, we drove it back to his dome where he'd need it later, unloaded it, then loaded the trailer with a bunch of cement board that had come for Landlady with his last load of concrete. Took the cement board to the Meadow House, unloaded it, ditched the trailer, then went out to the Secret Lair.

M wanted to know if I'd actually tested the new toilet I'd attached so firmly to the Lair's floor. Well no, I hadn't: The toilet isn't actually connected to anything yet, so flushing it would just dump a whole bunch of water under the cabin. He just stared at me expectantly. Well okay then. I'll just go get a bucket of water, shall I? I filled the tank, and wouldn't you know the tank has some hairline cracks and won't hold water without leaking. Bother. We're now zero for two on salvaged toilets, both with cracked tanks. Maybe used toilets aren't such a good idea.

I got a bunch of paneling work done on the Lair's loft, then attempted to drive back to meet Landlady and M at her house. Unfortunately the Jeep chose that moment to run out of gasoline (the fuel gauge never has really worked all that well) and so I got a nice hike to the barn, grab some gas, and then back to the Jeep. That's the last of my stored gas, too, so I needed to spend some money.

Landlady had meanwhile been laying cement board to line the surface where her fancy raised bathtub is going. She brought the plumbing fixtures for the tub up from the city, and they're really gonna look nice.

M brought the last parts we need to get HPAV Gulchendiggensmoothen running again, he and I installed them and the engine started right up and ran sweet and loud. Leaving the tractor's battery on the new Battery Minder for a week seems to have had great effect, and the tractor was officially open for business until the next problem reveals itself. Then we all loaded into the Jeep for food and gasoline in town.

This morning I cooked beans, and Landlady made huevos rancheros for breakfast. Then we went to M's Dome and schlepped concrete to fill one of his retaining walls. 22 bags of concrete poured into the top of a wall 12 feet tall at the tallest point, one coffee can at a time. A bit hard on ol' Uncle Joel's back, but we're slowly gettin'er done.

At that point, M wanted to run the tractor out to the Lair and dig out the pit for the septic system barrels. This has been much on my mind, because there were a couple of possible problems doing that. My driveway has one very (very very) steep spot getting down off the ridge onto the meadow where the Lair lurks. It's enough of an adventure getting there in the Jeep, and I surely wouldn't suggest anyone try it in a big yellow tractor with a rather high center of gravity. The alternative was coming up the wash, and before the Monsoon that wouldn't have been a big deal but since the floods the transition from wash to meadow had a bunch of fairly deep gullies installed that hadn't been there before. It's all soft sand, just made for high centering a tractor. So the process of getting Gulchy onto the meadow proved rather more adventurous than I would have chosen. No way I was going to do it, but M's got more stones than I do - besides it's his tractor. We did in fact manage to get her stuck, and in unsticking her M put her through some acrobatics (damned near aerobatics) that had me running for cover at one point because I didn't know exactly where she was going to land. When he finally got her back on solid dirt she was kind of stuck between a tree and the gully she'd just escaped, without enough room to back and fill to get pointed in a better direction. He looked at me a bit helplessly, pointing at the tree. I shrugged and yelled, "It's your tree."

Yes, HPAV Gulchendiggensmoothen will knock down a large tree. In fact it doesn't seem to notice the effort of doing so.

Once on the meadow, the process of actually digging out the pit went without the slightest difficulty. Our neighbor L had originally dug the pit just before Monsoon with her much smaller backhoe, and she had needed to adjust the pit's location a bit because she encountered a large buried rock she couldn't move. M's tractor didn't even find that rock a minor challenge: Out it came. I now have a pit intended for two barrels, which is large enough for a root cellar.

Right after Landlady and M left for the week, my phone rang. It seems that Saturday morning there was a bit of excitement among the neighbors because of what they took to be automatic gunfire coming from our area, rather early in the morning. That'll be the topic of the next exciting post: M's New Toy.