Mr Rainman came out today to help me with projects. For some unknown reason there is a very polite Oregon State Police Officer who is now patrolling our region. I have been pulled over twice and gotten warnings but was told next time is a ticket. Mr Rainman found him this morning on his way to the farm. I have actually started to stop at all stop signs, even four corners as he comes out of nowhere all the times I have been caught. We both had checked the County website to see if today was a burn day but it was not. We need to burn three separate piles and have been saving up all of our cardboard for the last three weeks. I also installed an off/on remote for the lights in the Gazebo. We hooked up the trailer and drove the Kubota over to a friend’s house. She had a power pole she wanted gone. We were able to get three ten foot posts out of the pole and we took all her scrap she had piled up. It was not very much and she was having a hard time getting someone to pick it up. We just tossed it onto our metal scrap pile. Eventually, I will get a bin delivered and will load up all the scrap metal.
I went to town to pick up our beef, #34 is ready to eat! We got five boxes of beef from a 370# carcass. Mr Rainman and I emptied the entire small deep freezer and managed to get all of the beef into it. This way we can concentrate on eating the beef from the two standup freezers before we start digging into the new beef. There is enough room to fit the lamb we have coming in January. Annmarie is going to can spaghetti sauce tomorrow so I was able to remove a lot of frozen tomatoes and get them thawing for tomorrow. This way the peels just come right off and you don’t have to blanch them. I also discovered some more frozen fruit for breakfast smoothies that had gotten buried.
The old lamb shed/chicken coop needed to get moved so I can start storing all of the fencing tools and all of the scrap metal that is still usable for projects and repairs. The building is 12’x12’. It’s old and the bottom boards are rotted out in places so Mr Rainman was skeptical that we could do it without tearing it up. We bet a coffee on it before getting started. The plan was to use the Kubota to lift up one side and insert round chunks of fence posts under the building and use them as rollers. We had checked and the Kubota could lift one side of the building up off the ground about six inches. This was all untested and after looking at the travel path we decided that we were going to have to go up a four foot hill and make a ninety degree turn with the entire building before going up the hill. It was slow going but we were able to get the building moved in under a couple of hours. Mr Rainman had spent the time leveling the future spot next to the machine shop while I was getting lucky #34 from the butcher. We did not break anything and once in place we were able to get three railroad ties under the building edges. The fourth one is at the other end of the alley and will get installed tomorrow. I will be getting a free cup of coffee!
Mr Rainman says there are four teenager kittens living in the hay side of the machine shop. I have not seen any of them yet. The ties are ten feet long so we are ending up with a one foot gap that allows access under the old building so tomorrow we will be filling the gap so that no animal other than mice can get under it. We found a lot of cat poop and a dead flat cat under the building when we were moving it. Once it is resided I think I will screw ground anchors around the building and chain it to down to the ground from an eyelet in the railroad tie. This building has been blown over and around several times. I can anchor the building to the railroad ties via anchors through the floor. Maybe we can just get enough scrap metal in the building so it cannot be blown over. I will get the floor anchors coming and then work on getting the building ready for storage. Somewhere in here I realized that the gas cap was missing from the tractor and after searching neither of us can find it. A replacement was ordered and it should be here by Tuesday.
Now that I had the building moved I had to hold up the other end of the bargain and get the Little Dinky tractor moved to my mother-in-law’s house. The tractor is buried in the ground from never moving. We tried to pull it out with the Kubota but the front tires were trying to bend. We lifted the front of the tractor up and used old roofing panels under the front tires to keep them from sinking and letting them slide on something. We centered the pulling chain on the center of the tractor and tried to pull as straight as we could. We had already had to unbury the sickle bar mower and chain it in the upright position. Surprisingly, once we did all of that the tractor came out! It was fairly slow going as all four tires were flat and had flat spots on top of that. Mr Rainman rode the tractor and steered as I pulled it to its final destination. It looks good and in the spring it can get a good cleaning and it will look even better.
Stewart Creek Somethings 