Been sitting on these pictures for a week now, so I guess it's time to wrap this one up.
Although I wound up with precious little time to work on it, I finally got that danged pole planted. Turns out I not only had a piece of PVC pipe that was just the right size for a sleeve, but I found another short length o' plastic pipe that fit inside the sleeve like a glove. Since my steel pole is long and heavy, this short piece of plastic stuff made vertical alignment much easier.
I thought two sacks of fast-setting QuickCrete would do the job, so I brought three just to be sure. Guess I was thinking in terms of the ol' 90-pound sacks, 'cuz it took all 3 of these wimpy 50-pounders and begged for one more. /w3tcompact/icons/tongue.gif I made up the difference by waiting for the concrete to set and then topping off the hole with the same crush I used for my culverts. Brought out my tamping tool and really packed it in. Not ideal, but the pole seems sturdy enough so far.
Rather than leaving the pole there all the time, just begging for some clutz with a tractor to bump into it /w3tcompact/icons/eyes.gif, the plan is to simply remove it whenever we're not there or when I'm working in the area. I let the sleeve protrude from the ground a couple of inches so's I could cap it off, hopefully preventing the sleeve from getting filled up with dirt, leaves, etc.
I probably spent more time taking the attached pictures than I did actually working on the project this time, but hey, once you start a photo documentary you just gotta see it through.