25 October: challenging work weather

Monday, 25 October 2021

I had assumed this would not be a work day because of an inch or two of predicted rain. Yet when I woke up at seven, after six hours of sleep, all I could think about (after relief that we’d had no tornado) was work. I watched the wind slowly decrease and felt hopeful that we could at least divest ourselves of the Long Beach debris buckets that we got stuck with on Saturday late afternoon, due to being locked out of the work yard.

Allan looked skeptical but slightly willing to give work a try when he got up at 9:30 (our usual time before I seem to have turned into an early waker). My method of protecting the weed buckets from filling with water had worked.

An equal number of weed buckets were in the garage.

Allan had checked on our storm damage. We knew people with downed trees and even part of a tree through a window so we’re glad of the minimal effects. The wind up in Ocean Park had gusted at over 80 mph!

Before going to the works yard, we deposited checks in the bank drive through window. Torrential rain gave us pause about dumping debris. We drove a bit north to deposit our Mike for Mayor vote in the official drop box at the courthouse.

Not looking like work weather

There was no way I was willing to take the full weed buckets home again.

In continuing rain and wind, we dumped the buckets at the work yard. Now my big idea was that we could load thirty buckets with biosolids mulch, because the mulch is kept inside a large, dry pole building. Then “all” we’d have to do in the rain was dump out the buckets on one of the port gardens. (What I had really dreamed of doing was finishing the weeding where we’d left off at City Hall on Saturday. That would have been too windy and miserable today.)

In the House of Mulch

Because the crew was having lunch break, Allan returned the key to the defunct gate padlock. I’m pleased to report that they gave him a new key without him even having to ask for one. It will make work a lot better to not get stuck with debris on our last dumping run of the day.

Although our weather on the drive to the port promised a drenching…

…even before we left the works yard…

…we mostly got a break in the rain while mulching the curbside beds by the David Jensen architecture office at the Port of Ilwaco. We dumped two inches at least of mulch on top of beach strawberry and some creeping sorrel. I’ll worry about the weeds when they poke their heads up. The soil will be nice and loosened and weeding will work the mulch in.
It’s not ideal but we do what we must.

View south across the parking lot

I had told Allan we’d be done with work by 1:30 and yet, without rain, I suggested we do one more run for mulch. On the way to Long Beach again, I though I might have been overly optimistic.

We reloaded in the nice dry mulch house with the trailer right outside the door. I had the driest task of filling buckets.

The rain pelted sideways as we drove back to the port, where this time we targeted the curbside beds by the port office. Again, we had a good dry spell and I even got one little bed thoroughly clipped and weeded. Our buckets filled two small and one medium bed.

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I checked on the garden on the south side of the office. Not bad, just one yellowing lily stalk that I broke off.

Allan noticed geese.

And lazier gulls.

Tempting though it was (to me) to do yet another mulch run, the remaining beds need some weeding attention along with mulching, and I couldn’t count on weather good enough for that.

We won’t be trying to mulch the beds which are covered with river or lava rock, leaving six more of various sizes. I rewrote the work list so that I’ll have the satisfaction of erasing items more often than if it just read “mulch port and boatyard”. The At the Helm curbside bed isn’t on the list because I think only a small portion of it will need mulch, as it is not as sunken down as the other beds have become.

The Pavilion area consists of three beds.

I felt good about making progress, especially with a very wet weather forecast for the next few days.

In the afternoon, I caught up on the Tootlepedal blog. Although I do like to read it late because of the repartee in the comment section, how does a whole month pass by so quickly that I managed to get a month behind again? Time moves too swiftly while weeding Long Beach.