I am beat. I was outside basically non-stop from 6:30 AM until after 7:00 PM. It got up close to 90 degrees today (30+ C) and it was humid. Thankfully we did get a brief shower this afternoon that cut the heat by a good 10 degrees.
It’s now 10:30 PM, I’m feeling the impact of being outside all day, and I’ve been snoozing on-and-off for the last two hours as a result.
Customary Saturday Run
I started the day with my customary Saturday run. I knew I had a lot going on today so I started pretty early. Well, early for me anyway. I was up by 6:30 and running by 7.
I ran a 10k distance this morning (6.2 miles), but didn’t run hard the entire time. I started with a pretty relaxed mile, ran the next three miles at a moderately-high intensity, and then finished up with another 2.2 easy miles.
In the end, I finished up with average page of 8:59, which was rewarding even if completely accidental. More rewarding was the fact that each of my moderate-intensity miles was slightly faster than the last. Typically, things go the other direction.
I felt good today. My legs did feel a little tired to start, but by the time I’d run two miles I found my stride.
Shoot the ‘Hooch
There’s a river in my neck of the woods called the Chattahoochee. Taking a trip down the river, via tube, canoe, or kayak, is sometimes referred to by locals a going to “shoot the ‘hooch”.
Anywho, my sons are in a scouts-like organization that hasn’t been able to meet for several months and riding down the river in tubes seemed like a fun socially-distant way to get everyone together. So that’s what we did next. We headed up to Helen, where we met up with a few other families, rented tubes, and spent 2 lazy hours floating down the Chattahoochee.
Yardwork
I think I’ve written a time or two about my woes getting mulch delivered and finding time to get my yard cleaned up. We finally got a load of mulch delivered earlier in the week, so after getting back from Helen I spent the rest of the afternoon working on cleaning up the area around our mailbox and driveway.
It was a mess. The pictures do NOT do justice to how much work we did today. There was a 10×20 space behind the tree that was covered by a ground-hugging juniper, it’s now mostly gone (just one root ball left to pull out). The gravel by the mailbox had to be dug out with a pick ax. Most of the rocks you’ll see below were actually buried and I didn’t even realize were there until I started pulling weeds back and getting things ready for landscaping fabric.
Anyway, without further ado. Here’s what we managed to accomplish:
There’s still a good ways to go. The tree you can see on the left side of the driveway is mostly dead. So the plan for tomorrow is to dig down a few inches and cut it down as low as possible. Then rake up the remaining deteriorating pine straw, sow grass, and cover the seed with wheat straw–in short, we’re cutting down the tree and letting the rest go back to grass. I also need another bag or two of gravel to put out by the mailbox. With any luck, all of that will happen tomorrow.
Sounds like a productive day! Nice work on the yard.
One of the more rewarding Saturdays in recent memory!
The yard work was nice to get done. Basically the entire yard is in that state. I have bed upon bed that needs to be whipped into shape. We’ll get there, eventually, but my guess would be that it’ll take ~2 years to really get the entire yard caught.