Flashback: Arriving at the Homestead

  It's been a hectic week around here.  DW caught the plague or some such related disease when she went to North Carolina to visit our Grandbaby.  It's hit her pretty hard and she's downright miserable.  We've all but quarantined her from *E* and to some extent myself in order to keep the house from turning into a total trainwreck.  Both parents sick or a sick baby is bad juju!

  I thought I'd write down a little bit more of our trip out to the homestead in North Dakota this summer.  This picks up on our arrival following a nightmare last day of travel (see earlier post for all the gory details).
  We pulled into the yard with both of us totally exhausted from being awake for the last 24 hours or so.  The first disaster was evident right away as all the wood shakes were missing from the top three feet of the roof.  It had been a particularly nasty winter and the old shakes just had no more to give.  Who knows how old that roof was?!!  To add to the fun, there was a hole chewed though the roof planking on the west side just big enough for a racoon.

If you look really hard, you can just see it up near the top. 
  The next fun was of the creepy crawly variety.  We managed to arrive at the height of tick season and as you can see by the above picture, the grass was a good two feet high.  We stepped out of the truck and were instantly covered.  Our poor dog Sparky was an instant walking tick feast and I think DW got more on her in the first ten minutes than she has had in her whole life!  We quickly ran into the house and initiated de-ticking procedures.
  With nerves stretched pretty thin, we took a walk through the house.  Our racoon friend had been busier than we thought and had also chewed a hole in the living room addition's roof.  It made for a nice sun roof but played havoc with the wood floors underneath the carpet.

  To top everything off, we also found that every drain in the house was plugged.  We knew from the previous summer that they weren't quite right but now nothing moved.  We discovered really quickly that not having running water is nothing compared to not having drains!
  It was all too much.  I couldn't stand having  DW and *E* spend the night in that carnage so I disconnected the trailer, packed them back up into the truck and sent them off to the nearest motel, which was over twenty miles away.  Sitting empty for 20 or so years had not been kind to our old house.  As I watched the truck pull out of the yard and drive away down the dirt road I asked myself "What have you gotten us all into?".  I spent almost the entire night and next morning cleaning and knocking down the jungle of grass in front of the house.  It was still a nightmare when they came back the next morning but it was bearable.

  OK, OK, that was pretty depressing!  Here's some gratuitously cute pictures of *E* dressed up as a scarecrow for Halloween to cheer you back up.  Enjoy!

The road train is pulling out

  Taking a little break while my DW is out running some last minute errands before I go.  I've been spending the last week or so working over our truck and setting it up to haul our new monster trailer.  This is a big step toward our permanent move next year as it gets some of our larger items out to the homestead.  The manifest reads as follows...

My little Nissan truck (we call her Cranky Pants) that I've had for years and has about 285,000 miles.  She's starting to get tired but still gets around 20mpg on the highway and is a nice size when we don't want to break out the behemoth F-350.  I just don't have the heart to get rid of her so along she comes.

My Ducati and my DW's Ninja motorcycles.  I feel like we've both outgrown these toys and they'll probably just turn into barn ornaments, especially living on dirt roads, but they're so old that they probably don't have much value if we chose to sell them.

Our old IH throttle governed motor.  It's only one and a half horse power and weighs a lot but it just oozes cool.  I don't know if it has the guts to drive the old cordwood saw out at the farm but I think that it would be a neat semi-permanent set up instead of running a tractor over to the saw when it's time to cut wood.  If not, we'll use it to run our third well which still has a working pumpjack on it.

Our Aeromotor B-702 windmill and about half of its 60' steel tower.  The mill has a 10' fan and will eventually be used to pump water up from the house well.  This sucker is HEAVY and took up quite a bit of space.

  This whole evolution has been quite demanding thus far but thankfully everything has gone pretty smoothly and we were able to hit all of our planned milestones.  This is what I like to call the "road train"...

  This flat bed is quite a bit longer than the fifth wheel horse trailer we hauled this summer.  Since it's a bumper pull, I had to rig a weight distribution hitch.  I've never used one before so this was definitely a new experience for me.  I was amazed at what a difference it made in how the whole thing rides. 
  I'm jumping off tomorrow so we're kinda sad around here.  It's the first time that my DW and I have been apart since I got out of the Navy.  It'll be good to get the homestead straightened up a little for the winter so we aren't playing catch up when we head out there next summer.

  Oh, here's a gratuitously cute picture of baby *E* playing in the grass out at the farm this summer.  Couldn't resist!