When I talk about “yards” of topsoil that is a cubic yard, about half a ton.

Okay, put out three more yards and drank a gallon of milk about it. Minimum of 15 left.

Okay, three more yards today. I’ve totally got the best pitching motion now, I stand beside the bed facing towards the center of the hood, and with my outside arm on the handle and inside arm choked by the head i canoe-paddle through the topsoil, tossing it behind.

Helped the fencing crew (a brother + sister team) and put 3 yards of topsoil down behind the retaining dam of Strawberry Ridge today.

Alright, drawing on further experience how and where to unload I managed to spread out a yard and a half of topsoil today and don’t feel half wiped. Key is figuring how to use torso twisting. To build up specific areas along the fence I’ve had an interim “transfer to garden cart” step, with this done and spillage along the way building up Strawberry Ridge I’ll be able to back up and just pitch it directly out of the bed to where it’s going (and then next load back up onto that and compress it with Darwin’s weight).

Could get up to 6 yards a day that way, which is nice because it’s been somewhere between 3.5 and 5 yards since I said there were a minimum of 6 left and there are now a minimum of 10 left.

Now that they’re all fully trimmed and growth won’t make problems worse, and I added good piles of mulch around the bases (with a layer of bark nuggets on top that will over years decay into the base for more bark nuggets), seeing huge returns on watering trees in terms of summer growth, though I’m sure the relatively cool and moist year helps.

Makes some bushes I’d been trying to trim tight real leggy, though, so hold off on that.

Okay, distributed another yard of topsoil, focusing on by where the fence is getting replaced on Wednesday, then took the mattock and got the rest of the lower backyard bamboo from the Yard Task Updates. Not in pain or sore anymore, but God I’m wiped.

Okay, today I relied more heavily on my left hand to push the short pitching shovel from choked up by the head while the right pulled from the handle (& vice versa), that avoided aggravating my recent issues and even if it started to aggravate the left shoulder it was in an at-the-time dull “hey, that’s enough” way that then faded with rest rather than fire two hours after for days.

Got a yard since last time when I said as few as 6 left and yeah, as few as 5 left now. At least before leaving it to settle & be rained on for a season, after which it’ll need at least 2.5 more.

Between the better motion and experience on where to unload and how to shift the load around as the bed empties, much faster today, but one yard + var. sidequests still took up a full day of work (and further efficiency will likely keep pace with earlier sunsets), so I’ll probably only get 1.5s on Saturdays when I won’t be active before the yard closes noon Sunday.

Looking good!

Okay got a new yard of topsoil and did some very minor distribution and leveling of yesterday’s, in looking for something strenuous to do that wouldn’t aggravate the stitch in my back I used the new mattock to take out maybe 20% of the remaining lower backyard bamboo.

That exhausted me, but in how well my core was holding up even exhausted AND favoring the back I’m appreciating how fucking strong it’s getting, curious what it’s gonna look like when the rest of the fat melts off over the next year. “Oh I’m suddenly getting thin for no reason” was already so dumb you could only just “sure~”, so “and I’m actually gonna be kinda ripped” is just more of the same.

Gotta plan some stuff for the fence to tell the contractor by tomorrow. I was gonna get one gate with over-height posts so that when I tile the roof in Japanese style of authenticity to be determined I could use some tiles and set up a small matching gate roof, but I’m realizing I have to make decisions about specific height and crossbar now. My mind’s still recovering in terms of how many factors I can account for how many steps ahead in a way that makes planning hard, so I’m gonna have to take some graph paper and draw things in a way that concretizes them tonight.

Alright, last few days as the anxiety disappeared actually very productive in terms of small projects; I could do things “right in front of me” and the next one from there in a way that actually admitted a good deal of mental work in conceiving of a possible next project, so if there was like anything I had put any thought to in the area…

So the bedroom and sitting part of the front room are much more pleasantly cleaned, the garage is now lined up for final go-through, the kitchen is like one activity station away from being tidied, I’m back to excavating the ramp from upper to lower backyard so I don’t have to clamber or walk barrows around, Im in the process of pipe-strapping a flagpole mount outside my front door and swapping in a new fan switch unit with a replacement pull-chain, some other stuff too.

Okay, didn’t have initiative for… initiatives, but the non-disorder anxiety let me take action against things annoying me in my direct line of sight, and then things I can see from there, so I tidied up the front room some and did a round of weeding to catch the stuff that last rain brought.

At one point an old blackberry rhizome put up its first shoot in a while, I got it with the mattock but just swinging that thing tangibly decreased my mental/spiritual initiative, which was interesting.

Got a new mattock with a longer composite handle and boy does it chop what remains of that downhill bamboo better than that old wood-handled cultivator mattock (whose handle dried and split), but I’ve still got some pectoral muscle tweaks from all that mulch pitching to rest off before I swing it more.

Starting to suspect that the injunction against tree-base mulch piles being right against the trunk is really that the portion of trunk buried in mulch will stop acting like tree, with thick bark keeping outside out, and more like root, creating permeable interface, and that’s fine in its own right but when the mulch rots down and that’s exposed to the open again it invites disease

Okay, today I got up early (cause setting my alarm ain’t no thang anymore) to talk to a landscaper about tilling up and leveling the lower backyard, then I finished distributing the last of the medium hemlock mulch, went back to the landscaping yard and got half a yard of bark nuggets, distributed them as a durable top layer around trees, and assembled maybe half the weight bench before it got too dark

Okay, today was rained in a while but outside of that did most of the last half-yard of mulch, some more ditch digging, and before it knocked out a petty fetch quest that had been on my to-do list for a while and arranged for a landscaper to come by tomorrow to talk over regrading my lower backyard.

Alright there was some medium-light rain – we’d had some drizzling when the air was thick with soot but this is the first real moisture since the real rainy season stopped, nothing like this last year – but the landscaping yard’s closed Sunday (well, only open in the morning for professional crews coming in to worksites) so no work planned to interrupt.

So, I started extending the ditch along the other edge of Strawberry Ridge – not digging it as deep, this is next to the trail and I don’t want anyone to step in and twist an ankle.

Also I prepared to stake retaining wire grid over part of the back retaining wall of Blueberry Hill and prepared some coconut coir to place there to try to hold on to any moisture that way, also I set up a weight bench and plate rack in the lower backyard, that’s gonna replace the basement for my weight stuff.

Okay, another yard of medium hemlock mulch put in, now just another half-yard and then a half-yard of bark nuggets as a durable top cover around the tree bases.

Yeah, still preparing the backyard. Gotta:

• Chop up and compress down the last loose twig-end branches into what’s kinda a wood shrapnel to use as a top layer in filling in the Blueberry Hill “dugout”
• Drag my weight bench up from the basement, the weights are already out there.
• Smash up some broken ceramic flowerpots onto chips to mix into soil to adjust drainage
• Dig up every bit of a clover before it starts flowering, pitch the pulled stuff in a bucket, fill it with water overnight, tomorrow use the wet cleaned green debris to build the ramp into the Blueberry Hill dugout and dump the muddy water into the sandy ditch so it deposits and starts solidifying
• Mow the grass, dump the clippings on Blueberry Hill wood fill

And then after it’s photographed still

• Transplant annuals into pots from beds that’ll be redone away
• Split some wood that’s drying cracked for firewood
• Assemble a wood rack

Turns out I have bought a deadly weapon that was only euphemistically being sold as a grass sickle on Amazon