I've had a new kitchen installed, a new living room set delivered in boxes from Amazon, large screen TV, bedroom set along with a Murphy bed set up and installed, which meant lots of floor rip out and rebuild, a swim spa install which means an enormous thing delivered on a huge pallet that I had to hire a construction forklift with 6 ft forks to move along with a second pallet with all the side and tiki bar roof pieces, infrared sauna installed, many many tools and Amazon deliveries, a washer dryer big enough to handle a king size comforter set up on my front porch, fish pond dugout and laid in with a 25x25 liner. That liner came on its own palette.

There is a junction box on the side of the fish pond that I can have a plug installed. I'll have that going in the next couple of days. And at that point I can build my filter system. I'd say I'll probably will have it running in about a week.

Still working on electricity. I maxed out the circuit box in my house, running the various new lines I needed for the new kitchen and the outside washer dryer and a whole bunch extra outside lines and a whole bunch more in my upstairs kitchen.

So I had the electric company upgrade the transformer on my pole and today the electrician installed the new 320 amp service which required a 5 ft deep 8 ft long trench right up against the electric pole. That will allow three RV plugs to the long driveway plus 200 amps to the back to run the swim spa, the sauna, the projector room, the wood shop, and the fish pond.

That still requires the electric company inspection plus more electrician work and filling in the hole and cementing everything down. And more inspections of course. And then they have to dig from that point 150 ft to the other side of the property to feed it into everything else. That's going to be at least a couple more months so I've got some serious extension cords from the house right now running everything in the back.

The infrared sauna claims it will fit four but will comfortably fit two with lots of extra room. There is lots of glass and half of it faces the projection screen and it has its own speakers built inside.

When I say new kitchen, I don't mean we swapped out some appliances. Our current kitchen is upstairs and are our new kitchen is downstairs which allows us to have two kitchens operating simultaneously.

While there is a bit of finishing work to do I'm sure it will be ready for M's father in January (we get him two months a year) and for visitors after that.

I'm not sure I'm going to pursue the current boat further. It's too big and too old and too complex for me. The trailer can kill me just when I'm trying to hook it up. Too much to go wrong. Gasoline engine dying out on the water in a boat too big to row is not something I'm looking forward to. I'm going to start off with a zodiac and a trolling motor that is a 10 HP equivalent running off of a battery. That will be plenty to get me into the middle of the fishing lane to throw the crab traps.

And something with that little power does not need a state safety certificate so I can just do it.

Pretty much everything I described came with cardboard. The stuff on pallets had enormous amounts of cardboard interspersed. The refrigerator came in a cardboard box as well as the oven and all the various bits of cabinets. All the furniture came in boxes. The Murphy bed came in many sets of large boxes.

Anytime I order anything off of Amazon it comes in least two and possibly three boxes. And I order a lot off Amazon. I wanted olives. The store is 20 minutes away. So I ordered a case of them and waited a day. Now I have plenty of olives and two boxes. I never tell Amazon to consolidate everything into less boxes because that means stuff is sitting in a warehouse waiting for an internal step as people gather stuff and put it together to ship it somewhere else to take stuff out and put it back together. No thanks. So lots of individual or few items in lots of boxes. Multiply that by every impulse buy I could ever possibly want in the last 6 months.

Right now I have a pile about 8 high and that pile is mostly sliced open and flattened boxes shoved into other boxes with absolute maximum fill. And that pile is about 20 feet wide.

If you are willing to delay a day or two or three or a week. When you go to do a final checkout it will attempt to push you for a further delivery date to allow for the consolidation.

The discounts are usually a dollar or two for the entire order. I never take it. I don't want the delay and I don't want pieces of the order lost as they go through the human consolidation process. I tell them to just ship everything individually as they can. Sometimes they will consolidate certain items depending on where they are coming from.

And yes I have that Amazon prime thingy. As far as I'm concerned, the entertainment I get off of prime is worth the 6 bucks a month. The free shipping and prime member discounts are just a bonus. Also, as a prime member, about 20 or 30% of everything I click on adds an additional discount of 5 to 20%. It's worth it just to click into the actual entry rather than trust the initial price because it could always possibly be less.

Yes, the vast majority of my purchases are done. But there will be plenty of cardboard in the future.

I'll be doing the gardening setup in early spring and at that point I will set up 3 ft high steel beds. The first foot and a half will be cardboard and chunks of wood (I've got a pile of fireplace size split logs that could be the base of about a half a dozen beds) and a few rocks and some brown brush and a bunch of leaves. That will take a year or two to break down but that's exactly what I want. That will give me a decent aerated drainage area while the wood rots. The top foot and a half will be decent dirt.

Edit: actually this pile of logs could be the base for 20 3 x 8 beds. I don't want beds wider than that so I can always sit in front of one and reach into the center easily and I want pathways between them so I can only fit around 10 of these on my property.