Yummy Soup and a Pallet Ripper


April 8th (Wednesday)

Today, since the conditions looked good and the weather was nice we decided to head out fishing again.  We ended up catching three Pacific Cod, two were on the smaller side, but one was a pretty good size and they gave us meat for a few delicious meals.
On our way back home we checked our prawn trap and we had three large prawns.  Jason and I shared them, 1.5 each, as an appetizer to dinner.  Mmmmm, they were so sweet and delicious, hopefully we will get a bigger haul sometime soon.  It has been a long time since we have had a good number of prawns.  
When we got home I made a batch of cookies to have with our milk that needed to get used up, and Jason made a delicious soup.  Since we needed to use the cream, and we also had a giant head of cauliflower from Kelly, he made a cream of cauliflower soup, and since we also had a bunch of crabmeat that was getting old in our freezer he added that as well.  The result was a truly scrumptious, creamy cauliflower and crab soup.  Yummy!!
Basket Star on a rope snagged from the depths.

April 9th (Thursday)

This morning at around 11:00 Dorothy came and picked us up.  She had asked us earlier in the week for some help with some things at her property in Martin Valley, and we had agreed to help her today.  We were happy to go and give her a hand, especially after everything that she has done for us since we arrived in Ocean Falls almost four months ago.  
She had a large number of pallets stacked up on part of her property and she wanted a hand ripping the boards off of them so that she could remove the nails and then cut them up for kindling.  She had a tool that one of the other residents had made, a pallet ripper, that was very helpful in getting the top boards off, and especially for the first boards; it was definitely a two-person job.  Some of the pallets came apart relatively easily, but others were quite weathered, and because the wood had swollen it made the nails very stubborn to rip out.  
Jason used the pallet ripper tool, because it was made of steel and quite heavy, and I used my body weight to hold the pallet in place.  Often I had to increase my weight's impact by jumping downward on the pallet to help rip the first boards free.  On the most stubborn of pallets Jason and I switched jobs for the first board and, while I used the pallet ripper, Jason jumped to release the nails.  Once the first board was popped free it was relatively easy, and as each board came free from two of the three studs I could pull it upwards and free of the third stud, while Jason was already working on the next board.  We got it down to a pretty good system, but since there were so many pallets, probably about 70 in total, it took us a few hours.  
While we were ripping boards Dorothy was working on removing nails, and we were chatting away.  When she drove us home after we were finished we rode in the back of her pickup truck so as to maintain our social distance of 6 feet, and she was very happy to have gotten such a big job done.  We were happy to have helped, and we got our exercise too. 
A sign of Spring! 

Comments

  1. JanApril 24, 2020 at 11:07 AM

    Wow, sounds like a tough job - but you did get your exercise.

    ReplyDelete

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