Kyril's Journal -- November 11, 2004

Productive Again

Thursday November 11, 2004

I had a good day today. My exercises went well from doing the Tai Chi form twice while positioning myself lower, bending knees deeper, etc. to the stretches, arm exercises, and reverse and alternate crunches for my abdomen as well as the time on the exercycle. I really felt it in my legs though but went right out to rake up the gravel into piles to be shoveled into the wheelbarrow in the area of the driveway that will be turned into garden in the spring. Faol called just as I was starting so Tom gave me the phone and I talked with him while I worked. He said he likes to talk to me when I am working because he likes to hear me panting and breathless. LOL

Tom wanted me to get cleaner gravel to fill in by the hottub so I was carefully scraping up the top layer. He wheeled it to the hottub, dumped it, and spread it out. I continued filling up the wheelbarrow and dumped the rest of it in a pile out of the way as we may be using it to support some rocks around the path as we are not going to use mortar after all. But because the wheelbarrow had to be moved through the gravel on the drive it turned out to be too hard for me to move. So I ended up going in and telling Tom when I had another load ready and he came out and dumped it for me.

Faol and I had a good conversation although by the time I was done with the gravel I was really tired. Tom wanted to go look at the grader blades that had finally come in at the Implement store in Dodgeville so we headed out. It has been a bit odd dealing with them as no one seemed to know what was going on the couple of times we called about this. When we got there neither of the two salesmen who knew anything about it were there. The person behind the counter told us we could go out and look at them. They were somewhere around the buildings outside. We wondered around, not finding them, until we encountered a man who had some idea. He turned out to be pretty helpful and led us to the blades in a forklift. We followed in our car. After all that they were too big. He suggested we drive around and see if we found anything that would do. We found one that seemed ok, took the product number, and went back into the office so they could look it up and tell us if it was sold already or not. It wasn’t but at first they didn’t know the price. So the woman behind the counter called the person who had left it there for sale in August. The price was ok so we said we would get it and asked about delivery. She gave us a strange look and then didn’t know what the cost of delivery would be. We left it that the salesman would call us about it later when he got back.

But after we left we decided we didn’t like dealing with this store where no one seemed to know anything and we couldn’t even get the price. We ended up going to the Implement store in our town where they showed us one but told us they didn’t have it in stock. However they had a catalog with all of the specs to show us and they placed an order for what we wanted right away, and said they would deliver it, no problem, no cost. It will take 10 days and cost more than the other but it is new and a little heavier duty. And we can get it here.

I got home really tired but I still wanted to make the cranberry-pumpkin muffins that I had planned to so did so. They taste good but didn’t rise the way they should. I don’t know if the baking powder was old or whether it didn’t get mixed in well enough. Ah well. We like them anyway. Afterwards I made dinner out of redone leftovers.