It was time to mow the lawn again, so I did that and then poked around in the back garden area, weeding some of the maple and dandelion shoots out of it, both of which would otherwise get out of control, especially the maples because if I don't get them the first year they come up, the roots are too deep to do a good job of it on the second. I don't mind dandelions in my yard, but they crowd out the other stuff that I'm trying to grow in the garden.
It's been raining here almost every day for a while, which is not unusual for this time of year. Unfortunately, this is when I promised myself that I would start walking more, so perhaps I need to do that whether it's raining or not. It's not like a little water is going to kill me. One of the reasons I use Grammarly is for the compliments. Actually, I sometimes wonder why I use it because it's not like my grammar sucks. However, it sometimes catches things I might have missed, although I reject as many suggestions as I accept. It seems that it wants me to always say things the same way, and since most of my writing is in the web directory, that is something that I can't do. In thousands of town and city subcategories for Faith and Spirituality or Education & Instruction, it would be all too easy to use a boilerplate description of the category, but that is what I try to avoid. If I used Grammarly's suggestions more often, all of these subcategory descriptions would look the same.
My left leg has hurt since I carried nine large bags of potting soil (one at a time, not all at once) from the car to our above-ground planters a couple of days ago. The pain is at the point of the Achilles tendon, although I don't know if it's a tendon or a muscle that hurts. The pain will probably recede before I die, or shortly thereafter.
Ever since I started putting food out on the 2nd-floor fire escape, we have seen mostly blue jays and gray squirrels, with a spattering of other birds, sometimes raccoons, and only occasionally a chipmunk or a red squirrel. This year, while the gray squirrels and blue jays were frequent visitors throughout the winter, I don't think I've seen a blue jay at our bowl since spring, and, while we do get a gray squirrel once in a while, we mostly see red squirrels and chipmunks, both of which have previously been rare.
After several days, it got better - so much better that I carried six more bags of soil today, and now my leg hurts again.
You felt better but I think you should have waited longer Ken before putting that same pressure as before on your leg. Sounds like a doctor's visit is in order.
I carried three more today, which should about do it for this year, although I drove close enough to where I am storing them this time so I could simply unload them from the car, which didn't add anything to the pain but is still hard to do with a loss of muscle mass.
With all three of the above-ground planters planted, I began rebuilding the larger one, which isn't on legs but is simply a box made of boards on the ground to which I added soil and compost. It's been there for a while, and the boards are pretty much rotted, so I am rebuilding that one with 2x8s. Building that planter was pretty easy eight years ago, but rebuilding it has proven to be more of a chore, largely because things didn't hurt eight years ago, and now they do, but also because it's harder dealing with 2-inch lumber than with 1-inch. I wanted to use screws rather than nails because they hold more firmly, but I'm not about to use a manual screwdriver, due to arthritis, and my battery-operated ones didn't stay charged very long. I tried using a drill with a screw bit, but it was too hard to control the speed, and it would tend to strip out the screw. I'm getting it done, but not as easily as envisioned. This planter is in the middle of the yard, yet the soil/compost mixture that I put in years ago and the stuff that I added over the years are full of roots from something; I don't even know what, some of them a couple of inches in diameter. With the coal ash in my yard, trees often try to root horizontally, but these roots are quite a distance from the trees along the edge of the yard. Nature's weird. Anyhow, since we didn't use this planter last year, I dug up as many of the weeds and grass as I could, with the aim of getting their roots as well. Then, I turned the soil over, leveled it off, put some newspaper or thin cardboard down to discourage any of the weeds whose roots I may have missed from growing, and then put down a few inches of new planting soil. When I first built it, the job was done in a couple of hours. Today, I worked on it for several hours and only finished about a quarter of it. By then, I was sweating and hurting all over, so I took a shower and decided to read in bed for an hour or so. I ended up sleeping for about five hours. Most of the soreness is done, but since I got up about 9 pm, I don't know when I'm going to be able to get to sleep tonight.
If you do much outdoor building, it is very worthwhile to invest in an impact driver/"rattle gun" for driving long screws. I use one all the time to build wood racks and sheds, etc. I built an above-ground bed a few years ago, but an angry bull moose in rut destroyed the thing. We have metal ones now, and so far they have been mostly untouched except for one dent.
Of course, you could get a nail gun as well. Faster, but not so easily disassembled and rearranged if you want to change something.
I haven't done any more work on the garden in the past three days. I'm telling myself that I'm letting my leg heal, but maybe I'm just being lazy. One good thing about growing old is there is always something you can point to as a reason for not doing something.
Did you drill holes before driving the screw into the wood? I found that much easier when working with screws. What is the coal ash for? Is it real coal?