A very productive Tuesday

I don’t know why, but I watched Sean Hannity’s interview of Gruesome Newsome last night. I don’t have a good explanation for that. I did what I did.

The heavily promoted encounter pitted the principled-but-clumsy Hannity against a smooth criminal, The Glib Lib, poster boy for anti-American progressive poison. And while I can’t quite say that the long-time Fox host got owned, it was painfully obvious that he was the wrong tool for the job — he short-armed virtually every chance he had to expose and embarrass Gruesome, almost as if he was squeamish about taking the dialogue in that direction.

Instead, we got Hannity’s annoying predisposition for shallow, non-confrontational bro talk.

Gruesome is no Swalwell. He and his people knew that doing this interview posed virtually no political risk. That’s why they agreed to it.

So don’t buy Fox‘s post-game hype today. There was nothing “wide-ranging” or “hard-hitting” about this. But if you want to play a what-if game, imagine how it would’ve turned out if Tucker Carlson had conducted the interview.

After a brilliant early morning drive to The Mountain, our meeting with the electrical contractor didn’t go exactly the way we thought it would. We found out that he and a helper were planning to dig the hole for our temporary meter pole by hand, and no, that wasn’t going to happen in solid rock.

He offered suggestions, and a friendly conversation followed. At one point I proposed that rather than digging down, we build up. He liked the idea and gave us advice on how to proceed. It ended up being a good outcome, though it’ll delay getting electric on our homesite by a couple of weeks.

Right after the electrician left, a dump truck of gravel arrived. I directed the driver, who’d been to The Mountain several times before, to the spot where we wanted him to deposit the load, and he skillfully dropped it on a dime.

Deb alerted me about that time that we needed to replenish our supply of fresh water. A familiar routine by now, it went smoothly. When I got back to the homesite with a full barrel, our backhoe guy was already hard at work.

First, he appropriated some of the structural clay originally placed for parking pads. He moved that red dirt across the driveway, one bucketful at a time, and buried the septic tank. With what he had left, he leveled a new parking pad tucked into the woods off the south end of the driveway.

Finally, he distributed the pile of gravel over all three areas, essentially completing this phase of developing the homesite. It turned out great, just the way we wanted. We wrapped our Tuesday with pleasant conversation under the fifth-wheel’s awning.

Here’s a gallery from this very good, very productive day.