Snow, gravel, shed, and Monty’s nails

We’ve had a significant snowfall this weekend! I didn’t really see this coming. This will be our 4th winter here, and the last 3 were … well…. duds… I wasn’t expecting snow until Christmas.

I did trim my hedges in the snow this weekend, and raked up the damage. I LOVE my electric hedge trimmer. It is a blast! Although my arm is usually weak for the rest of the day after I trim away!

We worked today in the snow trying to level the site for our new shed. We desperately want a garage, had it all planned out last year, but the quote for the cement made us cancel our building plans. Now we’re planning a small shed in the woods for our quad and plow so it is on the same side of the house as the driveway this winter.

The first step was cutting down the trees. There are just small alders and hawthorns growing up there, on the far side of the driveway from the house. But the entire thing is sloped because .. well we live on the side of a valley.

Jeff found a good spot that is fairly high and flat. High is important because it is wet there, especially in the spring. We are thinking of maybe clearing out more of the scrub brush and setting up a chicken coop! This area was once a field, and I suspect maybe 10-15 years ago there might have been a garden over there, based on some of the wood scraps and artifacts we found over there.

So we worked on that in the snow today. Jeff had bought some big heavy pressure treated beams so we had to square an area and use the level to make the beams flat.

We had a load of gravel dropped off a few days ago. It is going to be A LOT of work to get gravel up over there to line the bottom, instead the wooden foundation beams, but luckily Jeff was able to patch the wagon tire so we should be able to use the quad to haul gravel and use the dumper feature of the wagon. We want to also line the ground in the woodshed with gravel because it is so muddy in there all of the time.

Hey! Guess what I just did. I cut all of Monty’s front nails in under 30 seconds without a fuss! Normally we have to muzzle him, pin him down, fear for him having a heart attack, and wrestle with every claw and we end up completely wounded and he hides behind the chair for a few hours.

He is sooooo bad with his nails, I asked at the vet’s clinic if they could try for me, and all of them at the clinic working as a team couldn’t cut one.

But I put his leash on, pulled him close when he tried to run, sat on a chair, had him sit, lifted one paw, snip x 4, then switch paws, snip x 4 again, quickly took the leash off, praised, gloated to husband, and then fetched Monty’s cookie award. DONE!

This worked once before, catching him completely off guard. I have no idea how I’m going to manage the back paws with such ease though.