M's Dome is gonna make an old man of me.

 The point of the exercise is to move the dirt from here...

 To here.  Simple enough, right?  Sure.

Except those piles of dirt were excavated from the hillside several years ago, and they've pretty much decided they like being piles of dirt.  You can't just ram the bucket into the side of a pile.  You have to pull it down with the backhoe first.  That's actually the easy part...

 Except for the rocks.  Most of the time you can convince a rock to get into the bucket, and then it joins the dirt as part of the fill.  This morning we started with a rock that wasn't no way going into the bucket.  Nor could I move it by hand.  I don't know what it weighs, but certainly a few hundred pounds.  I wouldn't have been happy dropping it into the fill anyway, because with my luck it would pound the dome and damage the concrete.  So I decided to tow it out of the way.

Naturally, I'd left my tow strap out of the Jeep.  So I went home and got it...

 The bucket rolled it off the pile, but that was all I accomplished.  Couldn't get it into the bucket, couldn't get it to follow the tractor on the strap.

 Wasted a good deal of time trying, too.  So finally I did the sensible thing and used the Jeep.

To my surprise, it gave me no further trouble.  I towed it out of the way in one try.  The second rock went into the bucket with no trouble, and it's now back where it started years ago.

I promised this morning that I'd give it three honest hours on the tractor, because really I've been putting the job off.  Some jobs are easy, like digging holes.  Digging holes with the backhoe is just good noisy fun.  But moving the dirt up the hill and dumping it into the hole brings out the worst in Gulchendiggensmoothen, and all the bouncing around, popping wheelies, slewing sideways without warning and for no apparent reason, well, it works on old Uncle Joel's nerves.  It makes for a long three hours, and my heart gets to racing till all I want is to find a shade tree and a glass of bourbon. 

Without the tractor.  Trust me, on my worst day I'd be firmly convinced that tractors and bourbon do not mix.  I feel the same way about chainsaws, and chainsaws don't even scare me.

The afternoon's rather more sedate project: Putting together the shelves for Click's cat ladder.