Praying mantis

This little guy/gal? joined us for lunch on the lip of a yellow pitcher.

This picture is just about her/his actual size.

If I had known to count them I could have learned whether this is a male or female by the number of segments on the underside of the abdomen - eight for a male, six on a female.

You can read about them for yourself. Amazing what one can find on the internet, eh?

Water, water everywhere

Today I arrived at the barn to find a truck from our water company parked near the road. Its driver was there to tell me they needed to dig on the northwest hill, below the road, to find a leak that apparently had occurred, or at least worsened enough to be noticed, over the weekend. It took half the day, and they dug a trench at least 100 feet long, but they finally found a broken pipe that serviced our neighbors across Route 54. If only they had known where the problem was, the whole job would have taken less than an hour.

Here's a view from about where they started digging. You can see they're way up the hill by now, following the underground stream.


And here's looking down the hill.


Here's the culprit: the small black pipe. It was replaced in minutes, lots quicker than if they had had to patch the main line that it comes from below.


They did a pretty good job of refilling the trench,


and they moved a few large rocks like the ones we found below the barn up next to the driveway.


They'll be back after it rains a few times to smooth things off and replant over the trench. (Yeh, like it's going to rain.)

Our first campout

My son, his wife and daughter, visited us from Florida the last two days. He has to be back at his base in Jacksonville on Monday so they left this morning to be home in time to watch the Colts game.

Yesterday he helped me lift all the large joists up to the second floor height. That makes it a lot easier to install them because I only need to measure to mark their positions on the beams and headers, stand them up and nail them. Today I got a full quarter of them installed by myself in just a few hours.

Thursday I built a quick and dirty platform on which to pitch three tents for our seven-person camp out. Here's what they looked like, and the whole thing stayed together! You can tell the slope of the hill there by the space under the nearly level platform.

As you can see from this picture, Sandy's youngest grandsons also joined us. The kids seemed to have a great time. After a grilled dinner, we built a campfire where we told ghost stories and toasted s'mores. The stars weren't quite as brilliant as usual, as the half-moon was casting shadows. We took turns admiring views of the moon's surface through our binoculars.

Up it goes!

We purchased a 32-foot laminated veneer lumber (LVL) beam to be sure the apartment floor would be strong enough to support whatever we might put up there. It came in two parts and weighs, both parts total, 432 pounds.

Here're the two parts waiting to be lifted.

When it arrived and I realized I could barely move it, let alone lift it, I started thinking about how to get it up on the posts.

I thought about using slings and pulleys. I was told the roof trusses were designed to support weight from the top, not the bottom, and the lower joints on the trusses might not hold with a large weight hanging on them.

I considered using sections of heavy posts on their sides, in two stacks, relatively close together near the center of the beams. Since the beams are so long, it would be easy to lift an end by pressing on the other end. By pushing down on one side, a helper could easily slide another post section under the raised side, and the process could be repeated again and again, alternating ends, until the beam was just a bit higher then the posts. From there it could be pivoted onto the posts. The whole process would be repeated for the second beam part.

It was a brilliant idea, until... I asked myself, "What's going to keep the tall stack of support boards from falling over when the pile gets more than few feet high and the center of gravity, when the beam is pushed down, shifts to outside the stack?" Answer: Nothing. Scrap that idea.

Finally I though about using a small front end loader that could just lift the darn things and no one would be at risk. We would just provide a little support on opposite ends to keep the beam from tilting as it was lifted. I called my neighbor to see if he knew someone relatively nearby who might bring a machine to the barn. He said he did, and even came by to drive me to meet him.

Just a bit down the highway lives a neighbor who owns Greene County Wood Products, a maker of wooden pallets. They have two loaders, but only one that could get to the barn, a distance on the road of about a mile. Unfortunately that one is over ten feet high and wouldn't fit through the barn door. (We also discussed whether the weight of a loader might crack the concrete floor.)

Instead of saying "No" though, he suggested he would bring a bunch of his workers and we could all just lift it up. Yeehaa! To be ready for them I needed to set up some sturdy supports at each post and get one full half of the barn emptied so the job could be done quickly, but this solution sounded real good to me.

Here's what the barn looked like before the beams went up. Before you ask, that's not clothes drying, it's dirty t-shirts. I got tired of whacking my head on the braces.

Today, right after lunch, he and four of his guys came over. In two minutes the job was done! First the wider "half" goes up, and on. Then the skinny one. Next the smaller beam will be nailed to the larger one to give the beam its full strength. Then the brackets will be installed and nailed to attach and stabilize the completed beam to the posts. Finally today, the lateral braces can be removed (with the dirty laundry).

Tomorrow the joist headers and joists start going on.

Rocks and roses

Last week while walking the property Sandy discovered some rocks she thought might be useful at the barn. Today she took me to see them.

Holy cow! Some of them are huge. The rock next to the fallen tree below is about 6 feet across one way and about 8 feet the other. Maybe some day we can get it dragged down the hill to use in building a dam below the spring. I doubt it would be worth the effort of moving it up the hill.



Apparently not wanting to waste the walk, Sandy decided to whack off a large multiflora rose. This is one of Indiana's most invasive exotic plants. We have them scattered around the property. They're not a big problem yet, but we don't want them to get ahead of us.

The species is such a problem in the state that it is against Indiana State Law to plant any variety of Rosa multiflora without a permit issued by the director of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources' Division of Entomology & Plant Pathology (IC 14-24-12-5).

One of the smaller large rocks can be seen in this picture also.

Inch and a half worm

As I came back from a short hike yesterday, this little fellow came along for the ride. I put him back into the high grasses after taking this picture. Click on the picture for a detailed closeup.


Near the bottom of the hill there are a lot of milkweed plants expelling their seeds. This one was particularly bushy. Each seed is attached to its own tiny cluster of silky down that serves as its own parachute. Unfortunately the other grasses are growing so tightly around each plant that most of them don't get to fly very far. I took a handful of the seeds and their down to the barn. In the spring I'll see if we can get them to grow so I can plant them in more areas of the property. I'm thinking of it as growing my own monarch butterflies.


Here's a nice link to the Kid Zone web site about milkweed and monarch butterflies.

Making a barn a home - Entryway

For the past few days Sandy has been working with a shovel and pry bar digging up pieces of broken concrete that were apparently dumped as the barn was being built between the gravel leading to the sliding barn door and the side door. I've helped lift the largest pieces, but she's done all the hard work otherwise.

This is what it looked like before she started. You can see weeds along the wall which are thick and grow in dense clumps. She is pulling them out as she goes. Then she flips the concrete pieces over and away to the south (left in this picture).

Notice Sandy's homey touch - the welcome mat.

There is a wood apron around the entire building except directly under this door. This will allow us to slide a concrete chunk right up to the concrete at the doorway without risking moisture seeping into the bottom of the wall there.

Here's what it looks like after the concrete is pulled away. In the soil underneath there is a thick network of roots from the grasses and weeds that were there. She is trying to pull all of them and toss them down the small bank. Next she plans to replace the concrete pieces so they form a flat walkway sloping away from the building just enough to encourage water. We will need to import some sand to level the concrete and we'll probably

leave a small border of soil for planting something at the wall.

A walking tour

On Friday our neighbors to the south stopped by to say hello. We talked for a few minutes but they didn't have a lot of time. He said he had gotten his tractor fixed and his bush hog* sharpened and would drive it over and mow some paths for us through the fields. I wasn't expecting him to do it so soon.

Apparently yesterday while we were at a wedding in Indianapolis he came by. This morning I found at least a half-mile of trail running up and down and up and down our hills.

Though it wasn't particularly hot today, especially compared to the last few weeks, it was humid and uncomfortable, so I took a break and took some pictures around the property. Here they are in my Picasa Web Albums space. They are in no particular order. I just walked along the various paths he mowed.

More than halfway through the album you can see the fence at the south boundary. Greene View Springs is on the left of the fence. The neighbor's property is on the right. The next two pictures show the west boundary fence as I walked north. Way in the distance you might be able to make out the state highway which is our north boundary at that point.

Near the end of the album you can see an enormous oak tree. The diameter of its foot print is at least 100 feet. And, finally, the last two pictures show views of the barn from the south west and along the north wall.

You're welcome to view other albums in my public space from various trips over the past few years. To do so, click on "Ed's Public Albums" near the top left of the page.

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* It turns out that "Bush Hog" is the name of a company that makes equipment for homeowners, landscapers and agriculture. "Brush hog" describes a heavy rotary mower. Many people use "bush hog" for "brush hog" just as they use "Kleenex" for "facial tissue."

Guest book added

I added a simple guest book to the blog because I'm curious to know who's following along. It'd be great if you'd sign in, especially if you're a repeat reader. When you post your entry, if you enter a comment, you can choose to make it visible only to me. You'll find the guest book link in the column to the left.

Of course you can send a message to me whenever you wish.

Let's not do that again

We got home just after 10PM from unloading a rented trailer in the dark.

In fact, we unloaded the trailer 5 times this weekend. I don't know if I can survive another holiday like this one.

The place we rent the trailer isn't open on Sundays so with a Saturday rental one gets two days for a one-day rental. On a three-day weekend we get one day more.

Saturday we moved the cabinets from the ReStore in Bloomington to the barn early and then got one more load of heavy things from the old place in Indianapolis and filled the rest of the trailer with lighter items from my daughter-in-law's garage.

Sunday I emptied the garage in Indy and we got it unloaded at the barn just as it got dark enough for the lights to come on.

Today we moved almost everything from the old site at Raccoon Creek. I took apart the tent platform I built last fall while we were making barn beams. The 4X8 panels were saved but the pallet bases were too far gone and will make good firewood some day.

We moved about 80% of the patio bricks we had moved there more than a year ago. Also retrieved were all the clay and most of the plastic flower pots, more steel shelves, the picnic table, a metal glider with side table, some concrete blocks, three garden benches, a stock trough and other miscellaneous outdoor items.

We had the very old (100 years or so) porcelain sink on the trailer that was removed from the Indy house years ago, but it is very heavy and just one item too many to get the trailer on the road. (Some day the old sink will be hooked up near the garden work area.) The trailer's tires were so flat we just took the sink off on the north side of the bridge to be picked up another day. We had to use two large 2X12 boards to get the car and trailer over the hump at the bridge abutment.

The left tire still looked so flat that we stopped within a few miles to check the load. The trailer's left fender was warm indicating that the tire had been rubbing it. We moved some of the paving bricks to the car and many more from the left to the right side of the trailer. The rest of the trip was uneventful, but with the delays at the bridge and in reorganizing the load it was dark all the way back to Greene View Springs.

And that's why we were unloading the trailer in the dark.

I set up a few lights to see the path to the brick pile, but when the lights were turned off it was very dark again and the stars were beautiful. The Milky Way was very visible almost directly overhead. Watching the night sky will be a favorite pastime when our home is built a bit farther down the hillside and even more removed from other light sources. Long ago we decided we would not use outside lights at night except when they were truly needed, and a beautiful night sky like tonight just reinforces that decision.