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.