Leaf gathering
I finished my duty as acting TA for the division on Thursday. I had Friday off for CWS. I got up a bit early on Friday and ate a good breakfast of leftover Chinese food - lol. I was sitting on the couch either playing video games or watching tv when I notice the sound of a large truck in the neighborhood. They have been doing some water-main repairs a couple of streets over so at first I didn't think anything of it. Then it got louder - like it was getting close - within a block. So i got up and it suddenly struck me that maybe it was the leaf gathering crew. I check out the front door and sure enough - they were VERY close - going down the other side of the street! I rush to get my rake and started raking up the front lawn to try to get my leaves out before the truck got to my side of the street. I worked furiously and did it! The workers actually helped me finish raking a small part of the lawn on the far side of the driveway. Whew!
Anyway, we got out the door and up to the farm around 12-1pm-ish. I soon started vacuuming up the leaves in the front lawn of the farm. Unfortunately I had to stop and take care of some mechanical issues. The blade on one side keeps coming loose for some reason, I tightened the blade and continued vacuuming a bit too aggressive into the woods - up the trail down by the persimmons. Well, i got the mower stuck - stuck real good! I eventually had to go get the UTV and pull it out. in the course of pulling out the mower I bent the front mower mount so much that the front of the mower deck was dragging the ground. So I had to stop and re-adjust the mower deck. I finally got everything back up and running. I vacuumed the leaves so late that I had to use the headlights on the mower, but I got the front lawn done!
Cleaning the chimney
I gt up the next day and decided I had better get the wood stove chimney clean - they were calling for very cold weather! I got up on the ladder and used my "new" chimney brush to clean from the top side. It doesn't reach all the way down, but I did what I could. The top of the chimney didn't look too sooty. Then I went inside and started cleaning the horizontal pipe that leads up to the chimney. That was filthy. I had to use the wet/dry vac to vacuum-up the soot. There was a lot of dangerous soot that I needed to get out of there. Once the soot was cleaned up I reassembled the stove pipe (making sure that the flue vent was working right this time!) I think everything is in good shape now. I didn't start a fire though because my sinuses were in rough shape from all those leaves from the day before.
Digging out the Taproot radishes
Mom had expressed interest in trying the tap-root radishes last weekend, but I forgot to get some for her until it was too late. So this weekend I made a point to dig some up for her! I dug up about 5 nice ones. I tasted them again - not great, but not horrible either. I am just not a big radish fan. We did end up dropping them off for her late Sunday. I have no idea what she is going to do with them
Shelling the sunflowers
While I had the leaf vacuum set up, I decided to shell the sunflowers out using the cyclone rake. It worked, but not as well as I had hoped. All of the stuff pretty much stayed together - i was hoping that the seeds would separated from the chaff more clearly. Also, I noticed that some of the seeds were shelled out - separating the kernel from the seed! I will have to winnow the mess out later. I just put it all in a tarp and stored it in the garage for now.
Digging out the shop wall
I decided to risk damage to the shop wall by using the backhoe to dig out the mass of dirt there, I just didn't have the time to do it by hand. I dug down until I hit a gravel layer. I accidentally bumped the bucket into the concrete block wall and the wall flexed a bit! I went inside to check to see if there was any damage and found none. In fact, it looks like that bumped caused the wall to re-normalize - there is no longer any offset where the wall had pushed in some last year! There is still some cleanup to do by hand, but that can wait. the most important thing right now was getting that weight off the wall before water got behind it again and pushed it even further in! It should be safe from that now.
Re-attaching the satellite cable
I got the co-ax cable out and started the process of re-attaching the satellite dish to the house. It took awhile but I finally figured out how the co-ax plug-tool worked. I got it all connected and ran the line up to the house after marking a "safe route" to bury the cable. I started digging the cable in but I ran out of daylight. I was, however, able to finish the in-house work and re-attached the satellite dish to the modem. I called Hughes Net and had them re-activate my service. After the service was restored I did some speed checking and found everything worked as well as it did before! Whew! I still need to finish burying the remainder of the cable but that will have to wait until next time. I had an appointment Sunday to help Chris get some walnut wood off John's property.
Walnut Wood
Chris Murray and I headed up to John Mahaffey's farm near State College PA on Sunday morning. We got there and I sawed down the tree while John and Chris pulled on the rope. I had to leave the saw when I noticed that the tree was pinching the chain - it was leaning the wrong way! I ran to help them pull the tree toward them - whew - it worked! The tree came down where John wanted it. We trimmed off the stuff we wanted. John helped us load it into the van using his front loader. We zipped back to my farm as quick as we could - we were afraid the weather was going to be uncooperative! We got back to my farm and ate a delicious lunch that Katherine had prepared for us. Werested only a little before I took Chris on a whirlwind tour of the farm on the UTV. Of course, the UTV ran out of gas on the FAR side of the big field - ARGH. Anyway, we finished the tour and got back to work unloading the walnut wood from the van. The damn stuff was leaking sap all over the place and had soaked into Chris and my coats! I used my tractor to unload the logs and stack them on the locust wood pile next to the garage. They need to lose some of their liquid before we can doing anything else. I would like to saw them into boards ASAP - but I am still waiting on the sawmill from the guy in Michigan!
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