House site

When you have 640 acres to choose from, selecting a house site is not always a quick decision. 

After much deliberation and more than one scouting trip . . . drumroll please . . . this is the road to our house. Nary a billboard or traffic jam in sight.

The house will sit here. Nathan is standing where our front door will be. 

After several more discussions on what future additions might look like, we fired up the bulldozer.

Of course, by "we fired up the bulldozer," I really mean Nathan fired up the bulldozer. Cotton and I kept ourselves occupied in various other ways while we watched the progress.

What can I say, we lead a hard life. 

The scraper

While Nathan is busy bulldozing, I've been tasked with scraping. Meet the scraper.

Now it's not a thing of beauty, but it does a tremendous job hauling sand.

It's hard to tell from the following photo but there is a ginormous sand dune we need to relocate in preparation for future grapevines. And by ginormous I mean something like 15+ feet high and 20+ feet wide.

So Big John and I pull the scraper along the dune, picking up as much sand as possible and then hauling it out to a low spot that needs to be filled.

It is, at times, a harrowing task as Big John is wider than the path itself. Let's just say there are seat belts and roll over cabs in tractors for a reason.

More than once I've gotten stuck on the off ramp, needing the bulldozer to pull us through our homemade sandpit.

All in all, it's actually not a bad way to spend a day--or several weeks, in my case. But it sure does make one wish for a cup holder.

Bulldozing delight

Art

Nathan's been working on a new piece of abstract art.

He calls it "Old Fence."

We're so proud.