I really need to work on this site more!

Delia and I spent Thurs – Sat on Basswood Lake with our neighbors.  The weather was pretty bad but we had a good time and Delia wanted to stay out another night.  Delia caught a walleye and ate it!

Henry and I went fishing today for the first time today.  I caught a 20″ largemouth on Johnson Lake – my biggest bass ever (at least in MN).  Emily and I worked hard to get rid of the leaks in the boat and it worked.  Not a single drop came through.  The motor performed well but did have one instance of surging / bogging.  I’ll keep an eye on it.

The big news is our house addition which is moving along, though it feels like it’s going slowly.  That’s just how this type of thing goes, and I think we’re finally getting very close to starting demolition and construction.  We can’t wait!

Joe and Bev were here and we did some work reclaiming our land from the onslaught of brush.  We bought a device called a brush grubber, which is basically a clamp with teeth that grabs onto small trees so you can yank them out by the roots.  It works great.  We cleared a lot and Emily mowed and now the land across the driveway is looking great.  We planted three apple trees and a cherry tree over there.  Some day maybe we’ll have a nice orchard there.

Henry is speaking more clearly but he still has a ways to go.  He’s so talkative and it’s adorable.

Delia and I made a trip to Nama’s house, and Delia did great – Nama made sure of that by spoiling the heck out of her.  :)  They had a day in Chicago and went to the American Girl store, where Delia adopted Felicity.

My garage is really taking shape.  We can almost fit a car in there now.  :)

We lost two cats in a short time.  Harvi developed liver disease and Coby had cancer (or something – we’re not sure).  It was sad and we miss them, but 3 is a more manageable number of cats in one house.

The slide  - the one we bought a year and a half ago and already cost us two full day’s rental and effort jackhammering and hauling and now three partial days of sledgehammering, post hole digging, lifting, jacking, leveling, and concrete pouring – is up.  Holy crap was that an ordeal.  Let me tell you – the kids had better like it, because if they don’t, Christmas is cancelled for the next several years.

When Henry went down it the first time, he stood at the bottom and said “me bove it!”  I hope he keeps on boving it.  Unfortunately the slide part is metal and gets very hot in the sun.  We’re thinking about running water down it to make it a waterslide.  :)

It’s a really cool slide.  I’m guessing it’s from the early 70s.  It was once at the golf course in Virginia, and then set up at a house in Britt since 1989.  It’s all fiberglass, and weighs probably 500 lbs.  We strapped it to an axle and rolled it out of the barn.  We then dug 8 post holes in our horrifically rocky ground.  Then we very carefully and very slowly lifted it, using various configurations of jacks, boards, and brute strength.  We got it held up in place with boards and jacks, and then suspended the posts into the holes and poured the concrete.

So now it’s out there next to the swing set.  And sometime in the next week or two, if all goes as planned, we’ll be adding another huge piece of playground equipment that was originally at the Embarrass town hall.  Luckily that one doesn’t require post holes or concrete, and will be brought over mostly assembled and set in place with a Bobcat.

I mostly got the stalls mucked out.  They’re really smelly so I’m going to let them dry and air out before I put new bedding in there.  Brad and the goats have been living outside in the pasture for a week or so, but I’ll feel better with them in the stalls while we’re in Tampa, hence the stall work.  Man were they gross.  I pulled 4 or 5 trailer fulls out of there and dumped them back on our Pile Of Nastiness.  The trailer was really waited down and I went over really bumpy terrain, and my shop-made trailer hitch held up!  Apparently my welds were stronger than I thought.

I gave the goats some alfalfa pellets in the potato shed and sat with them while they ate to get an idea of how much they’d go through at once.  They’re so fun and friendly.  They’d go and eat a little, and then come over and cuddle with me, and then eat a little more.  Banjo is still the friendliest, and Moon is definitely the dominant one.  Poor Brad wanted to eat the alfalfa so badly, but he’s not allowed to.

I cut open a new round bale today.  There’s still quite a bit left of the last one, but I want to take that whole pile out to the pasture on Thursday so they can eat on that while we’re gone and won’t need to be fed more for a while.

Emily and I cut the goats’ hooves.  They weren’t very cooperative, but we got it done.  After that I put the new latch on the gate.  The big wooden post Delia and I put in the ground has loosened up so the gate is kind of wobbly, and it was getting hard to chain it shut like we used to, so now we’ve got an easier to use latch.  I had to use the torch to make some modifications, but it’s on there now and works very well.

Brad’s nails had gotten out of control.  They were really long and curled around and it was getting to the point where he was going to be crippled if they weren’t trimmed.  The problem is he’s touchy about his legs, and whenever we’d even make a gesture toward them, he’d flip out and run away or nearly knock us over.  I decided to build a chute to restrain him so we could safely get him trimmed.  Using only materials I got from the dump (with the exception of about $5 worth of screws and bolts from the hardware store), Delia and I built the Llama Salon.

It’s 25″ wide, 65″ long, and 70″ high.  Brad walks in from the back, and then there are two moveable boards at the front that can clamp down (lightly!) on his neck right by his shoulders so he can’t walk forward and also can’t thrash the front of his body around.  The rear of his body cam move some, but he can’t spin around, which is what he’d do when we’d try to do it before we had this chute.  He’s then tied in the front with a lead rope so he can’t move backward.

The Llama Salon made it a LOT easier to get the job done, though it was still FAR from easy.  Let me tell you something: llamas are strong.  Even with his neck immobilized, he was able to completely throw us around when we’d grab one of his legs.  He’d also cush (that’s what it’s called when llamas lay down – don’t ask me why) when we were trying to grab his feet.  The funny thing is he was like an Irish dancer while this was going on.  The front of him stayed completely still while his legs were flailing around like crazy.  He kept eating his hay even while flinging us around.  We finally just grabbed onto one front foot and held it as still as we could and held on until he mostly gave up thrashing it around, and got his nails trimmed down.  The back feet were another story.  We finally gave up trying to hold them after getting slammed against the walls of the chute a few times, and then we discovered we could trim them while he was standing as long as we were quick about it.

On the last nail, some blood was shed.  We cut him a little too deep and he started bleeding pretty badly.  It slowed down but never stopped, so I went over to a friend’s and got some blood stop powder, which did the trick.

So now Brad’s nails are less of a disgrace!  We’re going to try to trim them back a little more next week, and then hopefully they’ll be somewhat slow growing so we don’t have to repeat this process too often.  Nobody enjoys it.

Emily and I went to the dump today, and literally took more than we dumped.  We came home with some good 2×6 boards that will be great for a restraining chute for Brad so we can cut his nails (he’s very nervous when we touch his feet) and also hay loft railings, an old ironing board for setting plants on (Emily pulled that out of the scrap pile), some good steel for welding practice and projects, two bikes for parts so I can fix some things that are wrong with Delia’s, concrete blocks for new steps for the chicken coop, some really cool old rock drill bits from a mine, and some other cool stuff.  We also got a really beautiful old wringer washer that’s now sitting in our back yard, hiding our ugly well head.  The cost of all this was getting yelled at by the dump staff for various rule infractions.  They really take stuff seriously over there, and while there are a lot of rules, none are actually posted, so the only way to learn the proper procedure is to get yelled at for doing it wrong.

So now Emily likes the dump almost as much as I do.  When we got home, Delia ran out and said “what did you bring home from the dump?!”  She knows the score.

A trailer hitch for our old 4 wheelers was a special order item with a price tag of about $50, so I decided to make my own.  It cost me about $6 in parts and allowed me to practice welding. I’ve used it quite a bit, and so far it has held up perfectly, even hauling a whole bunch of dirty chicken bedding over rough terrain to our dumping area.

I’ve been setting two of the bus seats I got from my Grandpa’s bus garage in the cart and hauling the kids around.  They ask me to do it every time we go outside.

The weather since we’ve been back has been amazingly warm.  It’s nice that we’re having an early spring, but it cut snowmobiling season short, and I only got one short ride in.  Emily rode with me for the first time ever!  We went to Giants Ridge for lunch, cruised around Wynne Lake a little, and then rode home.  That was it for me for the whole season, though it was a very nice ride.

As of today, the driveway is almost completely clear of snow, and large portions of the yard are too.  Everything is really muddy and wet, but in another week or so I bet it’ll be nice and dry.  Of course, as soon as that happens we’ll probably get two more feet of snow.

A couple weeks ago, Henry and I took my Dad’s truck to Virginia to have lunch and get a yard cart that was on sale.  I’ve been wanting one since we moved here, and now we finally have one.  Henry helped me put it together, and he really did help – he handled a socket wrench like a pro and together we got the axle bolted on to the cart body.  My 4 wheeler doesn’t have a trailer hitch of any kind, so after much thought and a great suggestion from instructables.com, I made one out of muffler clamps and a steel l-shaped bracket.  It was a bit of a tricky welding job, but I got it done and after some use it seems to be holding.  Welding is hard.  There are so many variables to figure out in order to get a good weld.  With this project I winged it, and while it does seem to be holding, the welds are far from good.  My problem was mostly getting sort of a hollow bead.  Instead of having a nice smooth fill, it’s like there’s a groove in the bead, so it almost looks like two small beads.  I think it may be due to using too much current, but it might have also been the angle at which I held the rod, and the motion I used.

My Mom stayed with us for a week and the kids had such a great time with her, as did we.  She got to meet Brad, the goats, and the horses for the first time, and she stayed at the great B&B near our house.  The weather was gorgeous so we even got to spend some time outside.  She also provided babysitting duties so Emily and I took a super romantic trip to the dump.  She even rode on the back of the four wheeler while Delia and Henry rode Sancho down the road.  Sancho did great – especially since he hasn’t been saddled since last fall.  We had some nice meals out, and she got to see Delia’s big ice skating show!  Delia did great, by the way.

We got 6 big round bales from Dale.  It was quite a chore to get them off the trailer.  The other round bales we got rolled right off, but these were SUPER heavy.  With his help, we finally got it done.  They’re all scattered about and I’ll have to get my tractor running to move them around.  Delia is having fun climbing and jumping on them.  She calls it Haytown.

We had a bit of sadness too.  Two of our chickens had apparently been sitting in some water late in the day, and ended up getting frozen to the ground.  Hypothermia claimed them during the night and I found them in the morning, stuck to the ground.  :(  We had thought about getting chicks this year and then decided against it, but now we’re going to since we only have 4 layers left.  I think we’re going to get six – two white leghorns, an easter egger or two, maybe a black australorp, and I’m not sure what else.

After much back and forth, consternation, worrying, aborted plans, and research, we decided to put up an electric fence for the horses.  We needed more area for them to roam and while we want to do a nice permanent fence at some point, time and money just weren’t going to allow that to happen right now.  I found a good deal on used fence chargers and T-posts, and the relative ease of putting up a large electric fence made the decision for us.

The project started with an afternoon of pulling the T-posts out of the ground at someone else’s farm, followed by spooling up a few thousand feet of wire.  I got about 75 T-posts, two fence chargers, a fence tester, a couple hundred insulators, large wood posts, and various other supplies all for about $90, which was a great deal.  I also found an old electrical box at the dump which worked out perfectly to protect the fence chargers from the weather.  I decided to use both chargers – one for the top line of tape, and one for the bottom wires – so that if one failed or one wire strand was shorted out, at least one strand would still work.

It took about two partial days to lay out our fence lines, mow and weed whack, and drive all the posts.  We put the corner posts in, and then stretched some string between them to get the line posts straight.  I discovered that posts drive much better when you let the weight of the post driver do most of the work instead of trying to really ram it down on top of the posts.  Delia helped me dig the holes for the wooden posts, and I used my $2 post hole digger I got from the garage sale in Hastings the day we picked up our goats.  We didn’t use concrete.  We just tamped the dirt down around the posts, and they feel very nice and solid.  3 ground rods is recommended.  I bought two and I’ve only driven one in (that was a chore!) and it seems to work fine.  I’m definitely going to do the second one just to be safe and maybe even a third so that I have a good chance of it continuing to work when the ground freezes.  If we notice it not working as well in January, it’ll be too late to drive another rod.

It’s mostly rectangular except for one corner cut out of it to go around the pond.  The long dimension is about 330′ and the short is about 175′, which works out to about 1.5 acres.  It goes west a little past the pine trees in our back yard, north to about 20′ from the garden by the pond, east to where it starts to get swampy, and south to about 15′ from the tree line.  I left room all around it to be able to drive the tractor or truck.  We have one gate near the barn.  In the future I’ll want more, but that’s good enough for now.  It’s 49 T-posts and the one big wood corner post with the gate on it.  I know it’s 49 posts because we had 50 post toppers and luckily I had one left when we were done and didn’t need to go back to Hibbing for another bag of 10.  Emily and Delia helped walk around and attach all the insulators.  I started to unroll the wire I collected and found that it was a lot more kinked up and bent than I thought it was.  I worked for a few hours on cutting out the kinks and re-splicing, but then decided it wasn’t a good use of my time when a new 1/2 mile roll of fence wire isn’t all that expensive.  $50 for that saved me probably 6 hours of work and gives us a stronger and much nicer looking fence.  We decided on poly-tape for the top strand for visibility.  We wanted poly-rope, but the tape was quite a bit cheaper and almost as good.  The tape is so lightweight that I was able to run that around myself.  Emily helped me with the wire.  That part of the job was very easy and we got it done in less than an hour.

The two fencers just barely fit in the box I got from the dump.  I mounted some wood in the back of it with t-nuts in it so I can easily attach and remove the two fencers.  I drilled holes in the bottom for the wire.  I attached a bit of treated 2×4 to the wooden gate post and then bolted the box to that, and ran the wires down to one insulator for each fencer, and then I have them going to the actual fence wire with jumpers with alligator clips on the ends.

It works!  I used my tester all around it and it all checked out.  I also tested it with a piece of grass and got a good jolt.  Cowboy touched it and acted like someone had just shot him.  Sancho has gotten zapped a couple of times and he startled a bit, but didn’t seem too bothered.  Foley has run under the low wire many times and doesn’t seem to have ever gotten zapped.  Same with the goats.  It’s not really meant to contain them at this point, but if we want it to we can just add another wire to the bottom.  Cosmo touched it with his nose and jerked his head just a little, and then promptly touched it again with his nose.  That makes me think I need a little more juice.  That or goats are really dumb, or don’t conduct electricity well.  I haven’t touched it yet, and neither have the kids.  We’re going to turn it off when the kids are out playing.

The horses have spent the whole night in the pasture and haven’t escaped.  It’s so much fun to watch them roam and run around.  They were really bored being in their little paddock all the time.  Today I put Brad in there with them and it was peaceful.  I thought there might be some battles, but they did fine.  They kept their distance though.

 Tonight we had our first fire of the year and we heard frogs for the first time.  Based on their calls, it seems we have:

• Spring Peepers (Pseudacris crucifer)
• Wood Frogs (Rana sylvatica)
• Western Chorus Frogs (Pseudacris triseriata)

This evening I went up into the woods and cut up some really large trees that fell across the trail.  Once I get (or make!) a trailer cart I’ll carry them out to the wood pile.

The kids and I spent the day outside yesterday, enjoying the beautiful weather.  We played in the sandbox, stumped in puddles, rode bikes, and rode the 4 wheeler.  Delia took pictures with her new (our old) digital camera.  We saw an eagle, and ducks in the neighbor’s pond.  I spent some time working on getting the swing set installed, and I even successfully welded one leg.

This morning I saw a pair of geese fly over the pond.  They chose to keep moving, but once more of it’s thawed I’m sure we’ll have visitors.