Hi all!

We had a fun weekend out on the land! We all made it out to the land Thursday night and spent Friday and Saturday out there. This was Lydia’s first time out on the land since we have done work on it so it was really fun to show her around!  We did get a lot of rain Thursday which made it a bit muddy Friday morning.  Nothing more fun than wet clay!

Thursday night and Friday morning I finally finished mounting my solar panels and got it all up and running with AC power.  I claimed victory (see video), and went to dump the oil in the excavator (I went back to the shop and had them smell my sample.. they decided I had the right kind but in my defense.. they did say it was hard to tell because my oil was decently old and a little burned due to getting really hot).  While I was dumping the oil in Karianne told me the power shut off. So after investigating and calling around … I found out that my transformer was only rated for <1 amp instead of 100amps like I thought.. So I fried the transformer…… and don’t quite have AC power out there yet 😦   …. all good education though!

Anyhow .. back to the excavator.. the one 5 gallon bucket I bought was not enough, so I had to run back down to Ogden and picked up another 10 gallons ($77 for 5 gallons… it all adds up!).  Luckily it was perfectly full with 1 more 5 gallon bucket. So the broken hose cost $200 for the hose and $150 for more oil. But that got me up and running. And I decided to dive in at our cliff face finally!  I tore it up.. and left it quite messy.  I don’t want to build any retaining walls right now.. So I just sloped it up to the property line.  I had an 18′ cliff face and spread that out over about 40′.  So a little less than 50% grade (rise over run.. grade = slope from math class). I could drive the excavator up the slope but it did make me a bit uncomfortable as it was decently steep. I also deployed the fixed thumb again and moved a bunch of trees. It was WAAY easier with Kariannes help. That thumb is beefy!!

On the permitting side of things we are getting close to drilling our well. But I don’t have a well permit from the county yet.  I am still trying to sort out the septic leach field.  Turns out even though I have an approval letter, it’s still pretty tight. The well has to have a protection zone 100′ around it in all directions.

That whole area needs to be on your property.  Also the septic leach field has to have a primary location AND a backup location. I wasn’t anticipating that so about the only place that makes sense to put the well is out the front door of the house. Not crazy about that, but it is what it is. The well driller is about a month out so I need to get my permit ASAP. Hopefully I can get that sorted out this week!

At 3p.m. Saturday we decided to take a break and went and played in the almost empty lake! It was very refreshing 🙂

Until next week!

Mark