Work night, training, yardwork

Mama and I worked hard Tuesday night. She was fairly adamant that we clean out the old freezer we have in the barn since the coon soiled it and the sacks of feed we had stored in it. I thought that was a good idea even though it was not on my list for the evening. It took us a bit longer than I thought it would but we got the whole area rearranged, the feed allotted to different storage and the freezer pulled out of the barn. I will take it to the dump tonight along with several trash bags filled with old plastic feed bags and some sundry items we cleaned out of that area. Mama and I have committed to getting things cleaned up. I am not a lover of clutter or of saving things indefinitely. It is far past time to discard some of the items gathering dust and providing homes for rats and mice in the barn. I had Mama ask Grandpa if he would like to go through the items on the shelves in the barn and he declined. He told Mama they have so much stuff in the large workshop on the property they are renting that he cannot walk through the building. I just have a lot of stuff getting really dirty, serving no purpose. I am not sure how most of the things even got there, but I know where I need to take them.

I worked in the garden and got a lot done to the raised bed. It is starting to take shape, which is a good thing since Mama has plants ready to bed down in it. I hope my design works out – it is set on center posts almost like trestle table – but if not, I can easily amend it by putting in some corner braces. Either way, it should have dirt in it this weekend and I can move on to the next project. Meanwhile, the trees and plants survived the last light frost without any noticeable adverse effect. Mama was very happy about that since she had tried to convince me to cover them with sheets that night. My thinking was that a sheet buffeted by the strong winds we were having had the potential to do more damage than the light frost would. I don’t know that I was right but the vision I had of what that would do kept me hesitant. It was good to have the extra hour of daylight. We used that and then some.

I taught all day yesterday. The class is an eight-hour class and we use every minute of that eight hours. By the time the class was done and I was cleaning up the room, my voice was worn out. I told Mama that I did not know if I had the voice to lead the song service at church but went prepared anyway. Fortunately, Kaylen and Brianna came last night and I asked him to fill in for me. It was very last minute but he did a great job. It is nice to have people who are willing to help – even in a pinch. We had a missionary last night. He is a Canadian going back to Canada. He and his wife came out of the Mennonite faith and are going to a predominantly Mennonite town in northern Saskatchewan to evangelize there. He preached on obedience. It was a great message.

Grandpa came over yesterday and scraped and leveled the back yard. He could not get all of the rough spots but he got the vast majority of them. It was a huge improvement – which will help Mama in mowing this spring and summer. Many of the holes filled in were the result of Kobe’s digging tor moles. Somehow, I would like to get that stopped but we have not happened onto a way to do that since she is not under constant supervision. Grandpa suggested that he could come back in the fall and we could make the changes to the yard to redirect rainwater away from the patio.

That is a project I am looking forward to.