Oh, for heaven's sake. After worrying and fretting about whether that thing was going to start, the skidsteer started right up today. There is a lesson there: try it before assuming it's going to be a big problem.

I had to take a moment to recover from the surprise.

I got back on, and backed it out of the garage. I've used it before, but that was snow, which is much easier because you can leave a few inches on the ground, and it's relatively lightweight. Dirt is different because I was trying to be careful to just remove the dirt from the grass so it can recover, and smooth out high spots, but it's heavier so more skill was involved.

It was like all your life you wanted to paint beautiful landscapes, but couldn't start until you had all the supplies. So one day you get the supplies, and you set out to paint what you see outside your window. Well, crap. You discover that even though you can see the finished painting in your mind's eye, your hands don't know how to paint.

But this wasn't dainty little brushes and pots of paint, it was a big, heavy, noisy machine that could really do some damage.

There is a lot of hand/eye coordination required because all the steering and bucket up/down, and bucket tilting is done with a lever in each hand.

Meanwhile, Diane has invented some strange hand signals that she thinks are going to help me know what to do with the bucket because it's hard to see what's going on with the scooping and dumping from the driver's seat. And there was no place to put the dirt I was moving. And I got stuck down next to the river. And didn't think I would be able to get it out of there.

I decided to take a tea break and wait until tomorrow when I can practice unobserved, but I'll stay away from the river. I'm sure with practice I'll gain more confidence.

But then, the phone rang and it was my road contractor. He's going to send some fill dirt to finish the things left undone, and his driver can use my skidsteer now that it's running, saving me more than $250. He said it won't offend him if I want to hire his equipment operator, Carl, to operate my skidsteer to do some of the projects I wanted to do myself, and that's exactly what I was thinking about doing when I was out there this morning fumbling around and getting scared.

This is an old picture of me driving the skidsteer.