Weather

The heartland has several cells of rough weather on the radar and it is only a matter of hitting or missing us.   I for one need a day away from the heavy work and to contemplate the work I need to do.  I am tempted to hire a couple of day workers to put up the fence on the south boundary.   Perhaps by the start of next week things will be dry enough to start.

This weekend we had the attack of the fluffy down.  When we were in Germany, Barb fell in love with the down comforters and just recently bought one for the guest bedroom.  It had a small hole in one corner and there is loose down all over the laundry room and the basement.   Kind of looks like snow without the cold.

Here at Rabbit Run we have a couple of big black snakes that manage the rodents and the other snakes.  The first day it got to 90, one of them tried his best to get inside out of the heat.  I found him in the garage first and when I tried to direct him outside, he went down into a crack where the sidewalk meets the garage floor.  I went away and left the garage door open so he could escape.  Yesterday I went out into the shed and out of the corner of my eye I say something move.  Yep, that snake was in the metal building.  I put on my gloves and picked him up.  In the movies and on TV, snakes can't lift their head enough to bite you.   As one of the kind that squeezes the life out of his prey, he simply wound himself up and brought his head up where my hand was.  He looked at the black glove and then relaxed so I could take him outside.  He went off into the trees and I know he is out there somewhere.  I will do my best to not run over him with the tractor.  I can't say that about the copperheads.  So far we have not had any rattlesnakes but I do keep my eyes and ears open.

I have a wide collection of things here on the farm, and it never ceases to amaze me how much work it is to keep things running in good shape.  Every job takes almost as long to get the equipment ready as it does to do the job.  Then there is the occasional dump run to get rid of the debris from the jobs I do.  In fact, the trailer is out there just waiting for a trip to the dump.  Last weekend, we had a concert of the Barbershop Chorus and I volunteered my truck to haul the risers over to the church where we have our program.  On the way home, a car almost ran into the back of me and when he passed me he hollered that my tail lights were not working.    It seems that about a month ago I was backing out the truck and because of the deep loose gravel I wasn't paying enough attention.  A big old tree just jumped out and hit me.  That one hit caused all the connections to stop working.  I went to O'Reilly's and bought a new set of taillights and now everything works fine.  It had even knocked the brake light wires off the connectors.  Oh well, like I said, everything takes a lot of work to keep them working.

This hasn't been my week for my Harbor Freight tools.   I must have sparked the battery charger across two sides of the connection and it burned up the circuit board and that stopped working.  I also used my grinder and it quit, never to work again.  Like the cheap person I am, I buy cheap and do not get the extended warranty.  Throw them away and buy more. 

Oh well, better get busy and pick up the mess I have here in the basement. 

MUD