Outside work

I came home from work yesterday and the weather was perfect for spraying weeds.  So I stopped at my in-laws to tell Donna I was going to spray weeds.  I need to use the "mule" four wheel vehicle with a small bed on back. It has a  25 gallon sprayer and boom I can attach to it so I can spray a 12 foot swath at a time.  Much faster than doing it with a wand.  Two years ago, I sprayed about 15 acres with a wand.  Never again.  I spent the next summer repairing the pump on the sprayer, replacing 4 nozzles, changing out all the tubing and mounting the on off switch on the roll cage so you could reach it from inside the cab.  Of course, before I could use it this time I had to reattach the hot wire to the switch, mount the boom and tie in the reservoir.  I was afraid I wouldn't have any spray left over from last year, but luckily I found some from the year before!  So I had lots of spray to hose the place down.  One might question the wisdom of using a herbicide on the property.  That "one" doesn't have to try and control noxious weeds on 10+ acres that have not been sprayed in a decade.  Once the weeds are under control and you stay on top of them, they are pretty easy to keep up with.  I have star thistle and Russian thistle and stinging nettles everywhere.  If you have ever pulled up stinging nettles by hand, you will know why I am spraying them now.
We are hoping that the sheep will keep things under control once I get the weeds knocked out.  This year, I started spraying in and around our house first and then moved out to the surrounding property(was going to finish spraying today, but it rained.  So good thing I sprayed around the house first)  Of course, I needed to get the Mule behind the house and it won't fit through a couple of the gates or go there due to the new fences I installed. I had to drive it sideways through the creek and got stuck a couple of times before I could get through.  Gonna have to think about a couple of planks to get across the dry creek bed.  The banks are pretty steep.
I haven't heard back from the insurance gal or the custom wood cutter.  I keep looking at the bridge thinking that is definitely the next project.  I am even going to wire in two outlets, one at each end of the bridge, for Christmas lights.
I also had the pleasure of trying to mow the lawn.  Sarah is responsible for mowing the lawn.  Last year she talked me into getting one of those old rotary manual push mowers.  Cool in theory, no noise, no gas, mulch the cut grass right back into the lawn, the perfect mower.  Not so much.  They are much lighter now than they used to be, so they jump around more.  Your lawn needs to be perfectly flat, ours has bumps and divots and holes all over the place.  The lawn needs to be bone dry, it is Spring, whose lawn is dry now?  You need fine bluegrass, not course bunch grass.  There was a 15x20 foot section that Sarah couldn't get through.  I got half of that mowed down and was going to finish it off today.  It rained.   So no, lawn care today.  Off to work on the stairs and a little kitchen floor work so we can get our sideboard back into the kitchen.  It is stashed in a room collecting dust.  I need to cut some shims so it go  back against our new wall in the kitchen.  The kitchen floor is a long ways off at this point.