Within a week, the sun had dried out the new driveway and Mark fired up the skid steer to move the fallen gas tank to a temporary stand in the corral. The trick was to keep the vent above the gas level at all times.
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.The other trick was to see where he was going once the large barrel was in place on the forks.
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.In the meantime, I had found another little friend. Since Dilly was the most appreciative reader of my earlier lizard story, I decided to call this little fellow Dilly the Second (or D2 for short). He hung around, nipped at a few passing flies and eventually fell asleep on the back of my hand for a time.
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.As you can see above, he was definitely in the Brou Zone and in danger of the classic 'flying coyote pounce' so it was a good thing that he decided to stay with me. Luckily, Brou was completely distracted by the crows flying over the mesa at that point. Rather than put D2 back down on the porch, it seemed wiser to bring him along to the corral where Mark was heading blindly with the fuel tank.
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.By now, D2 seemed quite content to ride along on my upraised arm and seemed particularly impressed with what looked like a HUGE green bug headed his way through the corral gates.
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.He seemed even more fascinated with the gigantic yellow cricket which was holding that big green bug in its mandibles. "Wow!"
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.Finally Mark yelled out over the Deere noise "Would you PLEASE put your arm down, stop talking to yourself and tell me just where the hell I'm supposed to be going now?" It seemed a reasonable request and D2 disappeared as I lowered my arm. I checked my shoulders and pullover hood - no sign of D2. Great, now I was afraid to move lest I trample him as he lay well-disguised in the brown grass stubble at my feet. Finally I caught a glimpse of him scrambling off towards the Rat and I was able to walk towards the Deere without worry.
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The tricky part of the barrel roll off would be aligning the valve as close to 6 o'clock as possible since it was unlikely that we would be able to rotate the half-full barrel manually once it had dropped into position. Although Mark has developed a profound deafness to most of what I say on a good day, we have managed to contrive a series of hand gestures which work incredibly well when he has absolutely no other choice but to rely on my guidance. Accordingly, he was able to adjust the angle of the forks, drop down, come forward, forward a speck more, raise back up a little and hold it as we untethered the tank. We rolled the tank forward off the forks and TA-DAH! - a perfect landing position in the stand! Yee-haw! Times like this help make up for our other little communication disasters. I hope Dilly2 enjoyed his big adventure as much.
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