Still mulling things

Not much new today on the Volleyball court front.  A few things have had us hesitant to proceed.  The cost of the operation will be high, but manageable, so we are past that.  The first real puzzler is the excavation with the Bobcat.  It will be difficult to dig three feet of soil out throughout the whole rink and then get the bobcat out of the hole.  The only solution that I can come up with so far is dig everything out except for a ramp to drive the Bobcat out on, then remove the rest by hand.  Yay!  More work!  The other option would be to rent an excavator to dig out the ramp, but:  a) it would double the cost of equipment, and b) I'm not that lazy.  So for the time being, that is the way we will do that.  I still need to call around to see if I can get a better rental rate than $300.00.  

The next hang-up is a bit more serious.  The sand and gravel will be arriving 10 cubic yards at a time on dump trucks.  We will be getting 3 loads of gravel, and almost 5 loads of sand.  The problem is with the yard.  You can see on the picture to the right that there is little room for a dump truck to go between our driveway and the electrical utility box.  My concern is that the blacktop driveway and sidewalk will get cracked and broken by the weight of the truck.  The lawn actually narrows even more as it goes beside the house toward the back.  My neighbor has a small retaining wall dividing our lawns, so the truck cannot possibly go further over than that.  I worry that if it gets too close to the house it could potentially disturb the foundation of the house.  The narrowest point as you can see is the corner of the porch and the retaining wall.  Also, I just did a whole bunch of work on the lawn, and don't want it all messed up by a truck.  I suppose that if I am going to have it squashed by trucks, the earlier the better.  Maybe I can get them to put some kind of steamroller wheels on the truck to flatten the lawn out really well so that we can have an excellent Croquet lawn.  Probably not though.

If we cannot get the trucks over the lawn, the only other option would be to have them dump their loads in the driveway, and then we make unending trips back to the rink by wheelbarrow.  This would DEFINITELY NOT be ideal!

The rest of the day was spent raking more deadfall out of the lawn.  I got the whole northern side of the house completed.  It was also time to get rid of the corpse of the Christmas Tree that has been laying out there since the first of the year.  I lopped all the branches off, sawed the trunk into chunks, and burned it. It wade a really nice fire.  It also helped to burn some of the deadfall rather than just dumping it in a pile back in the woods.  Between yesterday with the lights and today with the tree, i can say that the Christmas season is finally over!

My progress with the raking so far...