Another week goes by....

Nothing too exciting this past week. Got to visit with our friends who live in Wyoming some more and did get to go hog hunting on the land in Fisher county. I think I shot a boar hog but somehow it disappeared into the brush and we never found it. Didn't find any blood or anything but I was pretty sure I had hit it. We didn't see anything else the entire night or the next morning but heard some coyotes howling. The trailer was nice to stay the night in and everything went well there. No one got stung by bees!!!

Angel helped me put the steering cylinder back on my tractor. At some point in the tractors lifetime it has been worked on before and several things were not the way they were supposed to be so it took a little more time and effort than we originally thought. The cylinder doesn't leak anymore, but there is still quite a bit of play in the steering so we may get a few more parts and take it apart and put it back together the right way at some point in the future.

I got to spend some time dove hunting and came close to limiting out for the first time ever. I went out at about 6:30 pm and shot 14 birds in just over an hour. I hung around for a while and was sure I would get my limit but a combination of poor shooting and bad luck kept me from getting there. I did get my first visit from a game warden while on my land around the house. He said he had been down in the canyon and heard shooting and figured he would come up and check it out.

Cathy was a group leader at a college ladies day on Saturday so I got to watch Eli. He is now saying Da Da (at least that's what it sounds like to us). Not sure if he knows what he is saying but he has said it several times now.

Another week in the life. Nathan

Ramblings....

Well, a lot of stuff happened since my last post, but really not much happened...

On Wednesday I went back to the land to get the trailer leveled out and get everything completely finished and get my tractor back home and got stung a couple more times by some bees. One sting was right under my eye and one sting was on my left ear. After getting stung so many times just a couple weeks earlier, there must have been some residual toxins in my system or something because I had quite a bit of swelling this time. My left ear turned red and about doubled in size and my right side of my face swelled up to the point that I couldn't open my eye all the way. By Thursday night Cathy was calling me the elephant man! Thankfully by Friday night the swelling started to go back down and by Saturday night it was almost back to normal.

I now know a lot more about bees and will be much more careful when I'm down there. Did you know that bees are angered by sweat? A few other things that make them mad are heavy breathing (like if you are working hard outside or running), any fast motions (like when you are waving you arms to shoo them away), exhaust from a combustible engine (like a tractor you are mowing with) and what makes them REALLY, REALLY mad is when you mess with their hive (like when you bump their hive with your tractor). Also when 1 bee stings you it releases a chemical that signals all other bees in the area to come and sting you too! (I can verify this one as well!) I've contacted a guy that is a bee keeper as a hobby and he is interested in coming and collecting the bees but he wants to wait until next spring so he doesn't have to feed them over the winter. We will have to see how it goes, if anyone else gets stung the bees will have to go sooner rather than later.

I ended up buying a 6 1/2' tandem disc in Amarillo and happened to notice someone selling an old grain drill and ended up buying it as well. I'm going to leave them on the new property so I won't have to be hauling implements back and forth with the tractor each time. Hopefully sometime in the next few weeks I will get the 16 acres in the southwest corner of the property planted in winter wheat to help attract deer during the hunting season coming up and to help them through the winter as well.

Some of our friends from camp came down Sunday and stopped off on their way to Abilene to drop one of their daughters off who is moving to Abilene and it was nice to visit them.

Amber and Angel stopped by on Saturday and I showed Angel my new to me grain drill and the disc that I had bought and he noticed the tractor was leaking hydraulic fliud. We pulled the steering cylinder and I ordered a new one and hopefully it will come in early this week so I can put it back together and get the tractor back up and running.

Eli is getting more and more active. He is really getting to be a handful. He sure is cute though!

Well enough boring stuff. Looks like I'll get to go Dove hunting at the house on Tuesday and may get to go hog hunting Wednesday and Thursday down on the new land.

That's about it for now.

Nathan

More progress!

Well, the 31' trailer is now on location in rural Fisher county! Pulling the trailer down to the land went without a hitch and it fit perfect in the spot we had picked out for it.

Hooking up the electricity didn't work perfect as I had purchased a Square D "HOM" breaker and I needed a Square D "something else" breaker. Silly me just assumed that a Square D breaker was a Square D breaker! After a 130 mile round trip to Abilene (I got to the only hardware store in Sweetwater at 4:04 PM and they closed at 4:00 PM) I was good to go. Within 5 minutes of getting back the power was hooked up and running!

Another snafu was that the 3" PVC fittings that I had purchased didn't fit the 3" PVC that was hooked up to the trailer. I didn't find out about this until AFTER the 130 mile roundtrip into Abilene so the septic is not hooked up yet. The plumbing that was with the trailer was thinwalled PVC and the plumbing that I bought was thickwalled PVC. On smaller diameter PVC it still uses the same fittings but on 3" PVC the same fittings don't work. Another lesson learned.

The last mess up was that I forgot the key to my tractor at home! I had planned on using the tractor to pack the trench from the water line down some more and do a little more work around the trailer. Without a key, the tractor got to sit right where I had parked it.

I brought my camera but never got around to taking a picture of the trailer on site. I had intended to take a picture of the pickup pulling the trailer to give a good perspective on the size of the trailer, but I didn't do that either.

Looking at the radar it looks like it rained pretty good on the land so hopefully some of the loose dirt from the water line trench will have settled. I may end up moving the trailer and packing the trench in some more. The only drawback to the way the trailer ended up fitting was that the wheels ended up right where the water line trench was and they settled in a little and the trailer was sitting a little lower than it should. If I have time to pull the trailer forward a little, pack the dirt down and add some more dirt to the low spot that would help quite a bit.

I did get to dove hunt a little around the house on Sunday and shot 4 dove. I need to figure out how to hunt the wheat field a little better, there are plenty of dove out there but I can't seem to get them to fly around by myself.

Eli is doing good. We have been working on getting him to sleep through the night and he slept through the night 4 out of the last 5 nights and the last 3 nights in a row! The one night that he didn't sleep through the night he woke up crying about every 30 to 45 minutes though and that was miserable. He is growing up fast!

Making progress...

After giving up on the windmill I called about hooking up to the rural water line that runs to the corner of my property and called about installing a septic system and as of the end of the day Friday I had running water and a septic system installed on the property. I was impressed with the speed and ease that they were able to dig the trenches, it looks like I have some pretty good soil.




Dove season opened on Saturday, but I was focused on getting everything working so I didn't spend much time hunting. I hauled my tractor down to the property to mow some of the weeds and fill in the trenches for the water lines and ended up making a bunch of bees mad! I bumped a stack of wood with my tractor and was swarmed by HUNDREDS of bees. I shut the tractor off and jumped to the ground on a full out sprint and was probably stung 20 or 30 times. After a few early attempts to recover my tractor, I just waited a couple hours and finally the bees settled down enough to allow me to jump on the tractor and drive it away.

I met the people who are leasing the property to the North of us and they seemed like really nice folks and had some good things to say about the quality of the wildlife in the area. I'm looking forward to seeing if the deer hunting will live up to my expectations.

I went to Weatherford on Saturday evening and spent Sunday with Cathy's parents and Eli. I sure had missed him. He is continuing to grow and get stronger and faster everyday. I think he will be walking within a month or so.

Well, I think that's about it for now. Planning on moving the nicer trailer down to the property on Saturday. Hopefully everything will go smoothly with that!

The windmill won....

Well, (pun intended) I guess the windmill ended up winning the war after all.

It started off badly when I first looked down the well and it had caved in and was full to the rim with soft dirt. After a lot of effort (a couple hours) I ended up managing to get the hole re-opened by sticking a 1" pvc pipe into the soft dirt that had filled it in then moving up to a 2" pvc pipe and finally pouring some water into the hole. I was proud to have won the battle and got everything ready to get the mud out and get the windmill pumping water the next morning.

After an uneventful night (I didn't see any wildlife on this trip) I managed to muck out about 5 gallons of mud out of the bottom of the 30' well the next morning. The problem was that this is supposed to be a water well so water should have been flowing back in as I pulled the mud out. I thought maybe pouring some water down the well would get it started so I poured about 10 gallons of water into the well and proceeded to pull out about 10 gallons of muddy water. No water was flowing back into the hole! I waited about 30 minutes and there still wasn't any more water in the hole. 4 hours later and I still had a dry hole (there was still about 2' of mud in the bottom of the well) . Depending on how you look at it I either spent 3 weeks with nothing to show for it or I went quite a bit out of my way to get some exercise!

I'm not sure if the well was plugged before I started this whole ordeal or if through my comedy of errors and the hole filling up with dirt it ended up plugging the hole through that. I'm going to call some water well folks in the morning and see if they think there is a chance to renovate the well and get it to start producing water again. More than likely the most likely option is to just drill another well that will be cased and set up correctly for an electric pump so there will be no more need for a windmill.

I just happen to have a co-worker that had his windmill destroyed in a wind storm this year and I will see if he wants to help pitch in some on drilling my new well in exchange for my windmill.

Cathy and Eli are going to be visiting her parents this week, so I'm going to be home alone and I may be able to get back out there sometime again this week and will be trying my best to get things ready for hunting season. Dove season starts this Saturday!!

Still working on the windmill...

Well, I guess I'll start trying to post once a week at least. I went back down to the land to work on the windmill and made some progresss but it still isn't working. After spending 5 hours working on it I stopped by a convienience store to buy a diet coke and the clerk asked me if I had a fight with my tractor. (I was pretty dirty and worn out). I told her, "No, I had a fight with a windmill". She quickly replied "Well, it looks like the windmill won!".

It may have won the battle but I still think I will win war. The remants of tropical storm Erin passed through this weekend so I didn't go down there and battle the rain but I plan on making the trip one evening this week.

I did kill a large rattlesnake by the pond while I was there. One thing that suprised me is that I walked within 2 feet of the snake before I realized it and it never ratttled at me. It only rattled after I tried to chop off it's head with a grubbing hoe and missed! I ended up shooting it with my .22 rifle.

Not a whole lot else going on. Eli is growing up fast. He is crawling everywhere and starting to get into things that he shouldn't.

I guess that's it for now.

Nathan

Windmill Repairs

Well, I spent this weekend down on my new land near Snyder, Texas working on the windmill that is on the property. I ended up pulling the drop pipe from the well and it was quite a bit of work and in the end the way it was set up was not quite the standard way. I brought the parts home with me and was able to get everything cleaned up and sorted out and plan on going back down there sometime this week to try to get it pumping water.

I moved my automatic feeder to a new spot and got my trail cameras up and running again. I saw a doe and a fawn by the pond and a covey of 12 quail but no other wildlife this time.

Hunting season is coming up fast and I still have a LOT to get done!