I'm done. No, make that well done. Toasted, fried, over-cooked, had enough and quit after about 7-1/2 hours of tractor use. They allow you 8. Whatever, I just had had enough.
Up and down the driveway endless times, and this time a new strategy: take some of the gravel at the far end of the driveway that is never driven over and is thick and put it in the pothole areas up front. I don't know how many times I went back there and box-bladed gravel into a pile and then scooped it up with the bucket. Many, many times, I can say that.
Near the end, I decided I'd give the walking trails a once over. That was a mistake, sort of. Going down the west side and cleaning that out was relatively easy and the dude that likes to ride his bike through there had cleared out the felled trees.
It's the east side where I got into trouble. First was the creek where you just enter the trail head. Have to go over it, I almost got stuck. Actually, I did get stuck momentarily. It's like a giant V and down at the bottom is mud. But, rocking the tractor back and forth it came out. Then I came up on the giant tree. It had finally fallen off of the trunk that is still in the ground where it busted off. Pushed that out of the way rather easily. Then around and back to the creek where I would have to cross again.
I got to the creek and thought, this doesn't look good. I thought about going back, but that wasn't great either. So I plowed into it and yes, got the thing stuck. My mind started racing, how am I going to get this thing out of here? Well, looking at it, it appeared that just digging out one tire would do it. Off to the shed to get the shovel, put on boots and come back.
Dug it out, got on the machine, moved a little but nothing. I had completely forgotten about the trick you use to get a machine like that unstuck, but it came back to me after also thinking about having to get some kind of equipment down there to pull the thing out. You simply use the bucket to lift the whole front end of the machine up. I could have kicked myself for not thinking of that in the first place.
So, I pushed the bucket down, the whole front end lifted and then I curled the back back towards the machine, which pulled it forward. One more time of that and the thing busted free. That was a sigh of relief. But I was toast after that. It's in the 90's today and tho not terribly hot, or at least I didn't think so, it was hot enough to drain me.
I took the machine back to the trailer, drove it up on there, drove to the fuel station to refill it (they charge you $80 if you don't top it off when you bring it back, high motivation to fill it up considering for all the time I used it, it didn't even use 5 gallons of diesel fuel) and back to the shop. They had let me take the thing without paying for it first, which is unheard for that place. But, it's because they wanted to charge me 3% to use a debit card and I said, dang, that's like $11 just to pay for it. Well, do you want to go to the bank and get cash? Thought about that and said no, I'll just pay for it with the card. The manager walked in and said, meh, you've been in here so many times, you can just bring cash back with you tomorrow.
Wow, that was amazing. They're pretty hard-nosed about their rules there. I can understand why I just never thought there was any wiggle room with them. Well, it was just over $300. The $400 the charge you up front is the $80 fee if you don't fill it up, they give it back to you when you return the machine.
I can swallow $300 a little easier than $400 plus per use.
Well, I got those trails cleaned up, btw, it is passable now whereas before there was a very narrow trail where the dude had been riding his cycle. I was happy to get that done and it only took maybe an hour.
I'm just plain tired now and I have no plans for the rest of the day. The driveway was continually on my mind, just couldn't shake it. It was in truly horrible condition and tho this tractor can't make it perfect, it's 100% better than what it was. I've fairly well blown off the idea of buying a tractor, at least for now. I want to clean up the land on both side of the RV park, that's going to take a different piece of machinery and it's going to have to come from somewhere else for that place doesn't allow you to use their machinery in brush like that.
Okay, I'm just wishy-washy on this tractor purchase idea. Just don't want to get into $500 plus per month payments right now.
Whatever, I'm hungry, had a piece of toast with a little cream cheese on it for breakfast. All keto friendly and yes, I'm back into ketosis. Just need a bit more food than that to tide me over until dinner.
