Father's day choo choo break

  We're in the homestretch!  There's very few projects left on the house before we do the big bugout to the homestead.  *A* has a few painting projects left inside and I'm finishing up the staining on the back deck and handicap ramp that's been three years in the making.  We've been busting our humps so there was a little breathing room for a father's day break.  *E* has been absolutely fascinated by train videos on the computer so we took him on his first train ride on the Lebanon Railway.

It was a one hour trip on 1940's era coaches pulled by an old diesel locomotive.  I was hoping that they'd have the steamer out but no such luck.

*E* was having a ball until the horn blew and the car started shaking as the locomotive started to pull.  That whistle is sure a lot louder and scarier than on the videos!

After a while he got bold again...it never takes him long.  You could see that the coaches were built long before our society turned so overly litigious.  We kept a close eye on *E* to make sure he didn't lean to far out the window but he actually behaved quite well.

Honestly, I think his favorite part was the snack bar.  He ate most of mama's popcorn and drank most of her Sprite.

  It started raining soon afterwards so I decided to go pick our monster flatbed trailer up from the stable and start loading our stuff (no staining today).  It was pretty daunting looking at that big empty trailer and all the stuff stacked in the garage.  By the end of the day, I'd say we were about halfway there.

  You can't really see into the garage but the trailer is backed all the way to the rear wall and is still sticking out about eight feet.  We ended up tarping it for the rain showers.  That's Bonnie's fancy cart and my motorcycle lurking in the back of the truck.  Less than a week to our going Galt!

Hectic days

  We just finished our last day of a three day moving sale and really thinned out the stuff that we have to move to the homestead.  Goodwill ended up getting the lion's share of what was left.  The realtor brought over the first prospective renter this morning as well.  It's hard to believe that "bug out" happens in only three weeks!

  *C*'s high school graduation ceremony was last night.  He has all summer to enjoy himself before heading for Navy bootcamp in September.  The awesome thing is that our grandbaby and family came up from North Carolina for the festivities.

Here we have grandma reading a story with Uncle *E* and Nephew *R*.  It's really cool that they are less than a year apart.  We get to see *R* so seldom that we're doing our best to hog him to ourselves!

Bonus garlic

  We arrived back in Cinci at the end of last August after a summer of fun out at the homestead only to find that the garlic we had planted the previous fall was waaaay overdue to be harvested.  We kind of figured that this was going to be the case but dug right in anyhow.  All of the plants yielded up handfuls of individual cloves which were a real stinker to handle.  I suspect the bulbs lose their integrity after so long in the ground.  We gathered up all that we could and I ended up drying them in the oven.  The house stunk to high heaven and even made us feel a little queazy...but that's another story.  As you may have guessed, there was absolutely no way we were going to get all those individual garlic cloves out of the ground.  The result?

A whole patch of volunteer garlic!!!  We dug them up today and some of them were real beauties.  It was really too early but we are about to move and don't need to be bothered with this at the last minute.  I got the bright idea that I was going to braid them for ease of transport but had no luck whatsoever.  It was a total mess.  Hey! I was a sailor...what gives?  How different can it be from ropework?  After a little research, I discovered that you need them to "cure" out in the sun for a week or so before braiding to let the plant stems get nice and pliable instead of all fat and juicy.  Live and learn!

Spring homestead pictures

  Just some quick pics from my blog from 21 May as I'm getting more used to Linux on my computer...

The posts are set in front of the coop for the chicken run / solar panel mount.

All of the posts and plates are up including the center king post.  It's a little overbuilt but it's going to have thousands of $$$$ riding on it.

All the rafters are up and we're just getting to the planks.

This is where we had to quit since we ran the small town lumber store out of planks.

Grinding the faucet off of the kitchen sink due to horrendous corrosion.  Who knows how old it was and it was a wreck where the connections needed to be made.  Sure was nice to have running water back...even if it was only the cold.

Bonnie and her two new friends.  She's getting along with the mini on the right but not so much with the one on the left.  It's an alpha mare thing I guess.

That's all the pictures that I managed to snap on my cell phone but we should have many more when we get out there.  Thanks for visiting.

Incommunicado

  I've been gone for soooooo long.  My computer was hit by a nasty virus back in January and during my hammer-handed repair efforts, I finished what the bug had started.  Strangely, as time went on, I found it easier and easier to live without the infernal thing.  I had almost completely recovered from my addiction when...*A*'s number one son came for a visit.  He works in the high end product support division for a computer company we all know.  He convinced me to wipe my crippled machine clean and try a Linux operating system.  I've heard the good and the bad in the past but figured "what the hay" I'll give it a try.  So far it seems to be working alright so keep your fingers crossed.
  I just got back from the homestead in ND last week.  All in all, it wasn't in bad shape.  My dad spent almost the whole two weeks with me and we got quite a bit done.  My sister, brother-in-law and mom came out and helped as well.  Our accomplishments included...

  Most importantly, we got our horse Bonnie trailered out there.  She did the trip fine but was REALLY sad for about a week.  She went from a whole stable of herd mates to being absolutely alone.  She eventually perked up and is now waiting at my dad's place with his two mini's.  The pasture was an absolute disaster since there have been no animals on it for a good 20 years.  We mowed about a quarter of it and raked all of the dead grass off.  It looked like a sad dirt hole when we were done but little green shoots were starting to pop up by the time I left.

  On my trip last fall I drained the water lines and fresh water tank in the house.  The pipes are an unimaginable tangle of corroding copper.  They weeped and seeped even on a good day.  I thought I'd drained them well enough but evidently not enough for sub-zero Dakota winters.  We hit the valve and it looked like the Great Flood in the basement.  I'd had enough of nursing this garbage plumbing along so we cut out the copper and ran all new CPVC to the kitchen sink and upstairs toilet.  We also left stubs for the shower and bathroom sink.  This officially gives us more amenities then we had at the end of last summer.

  The biggest job was adding a 20' x 20' chicken run to the front of our 20' x 20' chicken coop.  Seems like a lot of work for our future chickens but we have an ulterior motive.  The coop has the only south facing roof on the whole farmstead and we need someplace to mount our twelve 230 watt panels.  This now gives us plenty of room with even more space for expansion if needed.  We got almost everything finished but ended up running the closest lumber store out of the wood we needed.   An afternoon of work and we'll be able to install the metal roof and then the panels.  Very exciting.

  Last but not least, I polished up the 12V system a little.  It's now almost up to the task of running both the inverter and our new DC fridge.  Sadly the batteries are old and just don't store well anymore so we had to run the generator every day for a while.  We're bringing the set out of my old sailboat in June which should be quite a step up.

  Everything is on track so far for the big jump next month.  We're really excited even though there's a mountain of "to-do's" beforehand!  Sorry about having no pics on this blog.  Just trying to get back in the computer swing of things.

Christmas ride

  After all the gift opening this morning, I decided to go for a ride on Bonnie.  It was a nice sunny cool day today; couldn't have asked for better.  I've been driving her so much lately that I figured  a little change of scenery would be nice.  What fun!

  Yesterday, Bonnie pulled her first piece of farm equipment (with me anyway).

It was a four foot spike tooth harrow that weighed about 80 pounds or so.  I was amazed at how easy she pulled it.  I tried dragging it myself and made it about 10 feet before I quit.  Horsepower is really amazing.  We ended up dragging the whole arena...

The drag marks weren't really pretty but I think that was more my driving than Bonnie's pulling.

Lucky shots

Ever see a picture unfolding in front of you and wish "Man, I wish I had a camera"???

This morning...

And yesterday...