April through June, 2012

Doing Our Part to Stimulate the Economy

This is a short quarter for us: we were on the road for 45 days with trips to or through CO, ID, KS, NE, NM, OK, TX, WA, and WY to visit family and do sightseeing. Total miles: over 8,000. Of course, we travelled in our little RV and spent every night in it. One of the objectives of our Spring trips is to miss the Mud Season that lasts from about mid-April through May. We got home on May 22, which meant we still experienced a couple of snow storms. On the sunny days between rain and snow storms we managed to whip the lawn and landscaping back into reasonable shape. Then, on June 9 we hosted a canyon-wide cocktail party. Actually, attendance was supposed to be limited but the email invite was mistakenly sent to the entire canyon. 50 people showed up.

Aside from our trip spreading money around the western US we had two big projects this Spring. First was resurfacing the driveway. It was installed in 2003 and 9 years of traffic (including building three residences) and snow plowing had worn down to the pit run. Restoring the 0.8 mile driveway required about 516 cubic yards of road mix (about 50 dump truck loads). One reason for doing this in early June was to take advantage of the wettest month of the year: the road mix needs to be wet before it can be leveled with a road grader and compacted with a vibratory roller. However, as soon as the road mix was down the weather changed and we have had very little rain.

We hope it will be much more than 9 years before we have this expense again!

Our second big project for the Spring was to have a shed constructed at the boneyard. The shed is 20' wide and 30' long with a 10' high garage door. It will have a concrete floor, will be insulated and have electricity. We will use it to store the snow plow in the Summer and to store the RV when it is not in use.

Gary set up the game camera to take a series of pictures that show the construction of the shell of the shed. These photos are summarized in a 2½ minute movie.

Three years of relatively mild and wet Summers have built up a lot of fuel and this Summer has started off hot and dry. Although Colorado is getting most of the press, Montana now has more fires and more acreage burned than any other state. On the other hand, far fewer people are directly affected by our fires. There is already a ban on all open fires and fireworks in our area.

Sidebars