I certainly appreciate everyone's good wishes. The one that captured my spirit the best was bmac: "So, once your new camera arrives, have the trackhoe operator replace your tractor in the pre-recovery position...", especially since exactly that same sequence had occurred to me.
Folks, I'm not really trying to make light of what could have been a serious situation, nor do I think I'm simply whistling in the cemetary. What I actually feel is stupid, mad at myself -- and danged lucky. What really scares me is that when I was 15 years old, my father escaped injury in a serious accident with the bus he was driving (it slid down a hill on ice, hit a steel pole and broke in half; there were no passengers and he was back at work the next day), but 6 months later he had a mild angina attack, fell off the 3rd rung of a stepladder, fractured his skull and died. He was 47 -- I already felt relief when I passed my 48th birthday, and I'll feel a lot better about 7 months from now if I'm still around. What, me superstitious?
Alas, I won't try the reenactment because I think I've used up my luck. The hoe would probably tumble into the hole on top of the tractor and me...besides, the hole is filled.
I sure did take a lot of ribbing from the crew today...all I needed was Marsha yelling, "Look out!"
The camera will be here tomorrow, and I got a good deal on not one, but two i1000plus Nextel phones on EBay. They're going out tomorrow priority overnight, so I should be back in business on Thursday. $73.50 plus freight for 2 phones, chargers, holsters, car chargers and a hands-free setup, because a nice man moved into an area that doesn't have Nextel service. Of course, priority freight was expensive, but my total cost of recovery was around $300 plus $20 for hydraulic fluid and a hunk of black duct tape over the hydraulic fill hole until I can get a new plug. What the heck did we do before EBay?
I was tempted to update, but I was happy with my old, out-of-date Mavica FD71 and my no-longer-available i1000plus phone, so I replaced them exactly - although from the descriptions, both should be in better shape than what I had.
On the seatbelt issue -- I made a conscious decision, based on my own terrain, to circumvent the conventional wisdom. I run with the ROPS up but no seatbelt most of the time. My land is flat. The few times I've worked on a sloping swale with a full bucket, I used the seatbelt. However, I'm more uncomfortable than ever with the single roll bar style ROPS. In our race cars, we use a full cage. My son rolled our car in two different events and I can attest to the safety. I can't do anything about it now because I'm in between shops, but as soon as the barn is built and I get my tubing bender installed, I'll be adding front uprights and a halo to connect the front to the rear hoop, and some diagonal reinforcement. If the front of my tractor had not gotten hung up on the bank of the hole, it would have possibly crushed me, or at the least, done serious damage to the tractor. Remember, more than half of the ROPS got buried in the sand under the water...Once I have a full cage, I'll wear my belt.
Progress today -- they finished digging the pond and trucking the spoil. The excavator moved on over to reshape my s-i-l's pond. The dozer arrived - a D4H instead of the D6 I had thought it was, but still more than powerful enough - and started grading the house and barn pads. He climbed up on top of the densely paced piles and started cutting them down and spreading them out. It was neat to see 6' high piles being reduced to a 30" high raised yard. The weight and vibration of the dozer does an excellent job of compacting, especially since the sandy soil compacts so easily. The road is nearly finished, all the debris is buried, the loader and dump truck have moved on to another job, and the whole project should be finished by tomorrow.
I should have pictures to post Thursday evening. The only disappointment was that there wasn't enough spoil to do everything I wanted, but it wouldn't have been easy to make the pond any bigger. I got all the work done that required expertise...what's left is filling some low spots along the highway and doing some swale work, stuff the TC18 and I can do.
Next, I have to get some sod in quick to stablize the banks of the pond. The growing season for Bahia grass is over until spring, and its a little early for winter rye to take hold, so seeding is not a good way to go. I know they use rolls of sod in many areas, but around here we use pallets of cut squares of sod.
The road needs about 6" of shell rock along the entire 800' length to stabilize it, and that has to be trucked in. I've done some research, and using a hauling service will run about $2500. The actual cost of the material at the pit is just a fraction of that. A couple of weeks ago, I was planning to get a dump trailer, but now I'm looking hard for an older 5 to 8 yard dump truck so I can get my own shell rock. The pit is less than 3 miles from my property. It will take a lot more trips with a smaller truck, but I can haul one day and spread it the next until it's done. If I can pick up a truck for around $2K or less (and it looks like I can), the road project alone will pay for the truck. After that, I can get the rest of the fill I need for the non-critical areas for around $1 per yard at the pit plus my own operating expenses for the truck, which is even cheaper than the pond project. The difference is that I'm not in any hurry, now - there is no deadline for filling the low spots, like there was for the road and building pads. I can't use a larger dump body -- the 12LA FEL will only lift about 80".
