Up a Hill

Inspirational song: Climb Every Mountain (Sound of Music)

There is an excellent chance  that I will not be home to post my blog at its regular time, and it's also possible that neither my phone nor my person will have any energy left by then anyway. It's worth it to me to go ahead and do it now, so I can crawl straight into bed when this impromptu adventure is over.

I didn't plan on coming up to the claim today. My intention was to sleep off all the fatigue that had built up over the last month. I had even begun to do just that, crashing for a hard nap at 930, after being awake less than 2 hours. (I finished the last drop of my coffee and crawled in bed, where I was quickly surrounded by all four feline satellites.) Mr S-P woke me at 1030 and asked whether I wanted to come with him after all, and at first I said no. While he loaded the car, I scrolled through Twitter long enough to wake, and decided maybe I wanted to climb a mountain after all. I don't get invited up here very often, mostly because for the first year I wasn't capable of hiking here. Now that I'm significantly healthier, I'm training myself to say yes whenever I am invited to do so. I'm glad I saw the light today.

We bought some lumber on the way here, pieces that will form a more sturdy frame for the solar panels. There still is no road all the way to his property, nor will there be anytime soon. We had to haul everything in. He filled a wheelbarrow, and I tried bringing up just one 2x4 on my shoulders. I had to abandon it halfway up, and when he made a second trip with a flat cart, he retrieved it. I stayed at the top and burned through a little of the slash pile. (Yes, we checked to see whether there was a burn ban first.) I'm not a boy scout-level fire starter, but I impressed myself. One match, caught instantly, and burned steadily for 2 hours. I'm starting to really dig this mountain living stuff.