This post is a collection of activities last week. Images below.
The main event was being taken out by Romeo. He got his long lead wrapped around my leg and took off while on a walk, taking my feet out from under me. What made it worse was I was carrying a big post, so it crashed down on my leg. It still hurts, but icing has helped a lot. Sue was with me when it happened; she said it was like a cartoon wipeout, which meant it looked pretty funny.
That Romeo-wipeout curtailed my training for the week. I got a short ride in before it happened and some climbing. I missed a weight leg workout and a hike we had planned. I went heavy on my lifting this week. The ride had the feeling that I had gotten back into the groove with the bike – a long time since I had experienced that. Climbing is my forte and what I enjoy that most and the hills felt pretty good this week.
With the bum leg, I spent more time working on house projects. I finished repairing the driveway from rain downpours over the summer that have created some gulley’s. I also got a ton of chainsaw work done, taking down dead trees and branches. We had one very large tree that was dying. It took some chainsaw work to weaken the base and then I used the tractor to pull it down.
This week I am taking off from lifting and anything significant…a planned week’s rest. I hope to take most of the week off from work and spend the time tearing down part of a barn that needs to go. Hopefully, the leg will be back for some hiking Sue and I have planned for the Labor day weekend.
I built a table that we put in the A-frame near the dining room table . I suck at any kind of woodworking, but I took my time and I think this table came out OK.
We bought this house over 2 years ago as a foreclosure and while we got a great deal on it, it fit the stereotypical foreclosure that you buy cheap but it has a lot of things wrong. Chief among those things was the junk left strewn across 13 acres, including everything but an abandoned car (unless one is buried somewhere). Yes, old water heaters, toilets, books, broken glass, old tires, used gallons of oil, etc, etc.
But, I think this place is a gold mine. We have gotten rid of the junk except for a lot of old wood piles. While a lot of this wood needs to be carted of to the dump (something we are doing slowly), there is a plenty of decent wood to build things like tables. I included some images of the raw materials for this table, including old doors for the table top.
Eventually, I would like to build a climbing wall and I think we have most of the wood required to build. So, we are slowly working away at whittling down the piles, stacking the good stuff up in the barns and throwing out the useless stuff. I don’t know when I will start the climbing wall, as there are quite a few other projects that take priority.
This past summer was not quite all about working on the new house and property. I did take some time in outdoor activities.
Biathlon
Since the property did come with a little shooting range on it complete with timbers as a backstop, no doubt I take advantage of that little gem. I try to get out once per week and usually take my .22 biathlon rifle and do some running and shooting. Some targets below I scanned for safe-keeping.
I’ve owned a pair of rock climbing shows for 20 years. They have never gotten much use. I don’t own other safety equipment, so my rock climbing has always been staying very close to the ground and going horizontal versus vertical (called Bouldering). I really enjoy it and I now do it at least once per week on our big rock chimney. Maybe after I get our main barn repaired, I can build a climbing wall on it.
We have not checked out our local area too much for hiking and biking activities. I am slowly building a map of stuff I find via online research. In the future, we’ll start to do more of these activities.
I am a weather nut and love Wunderground for all the weather data and maps it puts at our fingertips. We’ve had a very active summer thunderstorm and monsoon season, so its been pretty wild watching storms come rolling through. The house was hit by lightening twice (minor damage the first strike, but after that, we installed lightening rods), we were hit with 1 inch hail in one storm and I saw a tornado funnel cloud. It did not touch down, but was my first tornado experience. I took two images of local area thunderstorm activity from Wunderground. The little black squares represent lightening strikes. The second image shows a storm that was bearing down on our house and the purple triangle represented a tornado signature. The storm veered north and ended up missing us and also weakened.
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