And The Hits Just Keep On Coming!

I suppose it's a good thing we didn't do the kitchen update after all.

My husband took his truck in yesterday to get some work done on the front end and now they are saying it will be more than the original $500 estimate. Aarrrrgh. He also decided (rightly) that the truck needs a couple of new tires... to the tune of about $260 apiece. More aarrrrgh!!!!

The fence guy came out and gave us some advice about the electric fence. The bad news: We are in a bad area for electric fences. It has to do with the dryness of the area, the rockiness, the climate, etc. It's not impossible but it's not the news I had hoped for. Meanwhile he took the measurements for the area we wanted cyclone fenced and he will be calling us with that estimate.

Tonight we went out to #1: feed, and #2: chop wood for this evening's fire. Hubby went out first to cut the wood and a minute later came back in to let me know the bull was not in his pen.

CRAP!

We both went out to find him. I opened his gate wide and threw a flake of hay in his pen. We found him to the far south west (not far from his pen) and managed to herd him back. I think it helped that it was the normal dinner time.

I found the spot where he escaped from his pen and fixed it. I did see some blood on the ground and after examining him I found a small scrape on Dakota's shoulder. *HUGE SIGH*

So hopefully now things will calm down a bit and the $ bleed will slow down.

I took some comfort tonight in a picture of our old cat, Kneadermeier (about 13?)...

...and our goof ball dog, Clyde.

One day at a time...

Moving Rocks

We've been working on getting our electric fence to work for a long time now. Every other day my husband has been trying different things and buying different things in an attempt to make the fence work. I've been asking him to call a professional fence guy for a while, but I guess he thought he could do it. He's probably thinking: After all, the neighbors behind us have an electric fence that works. I'm thinking: A local professional would certainly know what he's doing.

I may have mentioned way back when we had stopped by the fence company and left our number. The secretary was supposed to give the owner/worker the number but we never got a call back.

Today when after two hours of more work and no results my husband decided we needed an $80 electric fence checker I just looked at him and kind of pouted a bit. And then he had a moment of brilliance. "You know," he said, "It will probably cost that much to have somebody come out to check it. What do you say to calling someone and having them take a look?"

Being the wise woman I like to think I am I wholeheartedly agreed. And being the wise woman I like to think I am I never said aloud what I was thinking: We could have saved some money, time, and aggravation if we had called sooner!

So he went into town to talk to the fence guy. As we suspected he never got our number. He said he would have remembered it since we have an out-of-state area code (cell number). He'll (hopefully) be coming out some time tomorrow to take a look and maybe fix the electric fence and also give us an estimate to build a chain link fenced area for the dogs.

In preparation for that we decided to move the (killer) rocks along the front of the driveway. In this picture we have cleared the rocks from the area next to that cement curb. Beyond that you can sort of see the curve of that section of driveway where the rocks have been pushed in line with the tree. That's the part where my car got stuck when I didn't turn sharply enough when I came out of the garage!

Next section getting cleared.
Making a nice rock pile. I already have plans for repurposing some of these rocks!
The rocks are mostly gone from where we want to build the chain link fence.
The rock pile.
And the only casualty from the day. I somehow managed to smash a finger and break my nail. Ouch.
Oh well, it's about time for a fill anyhow.

Our Garbage

We did not sign up for garbage service so we have to deal with our trash ourselves. This is the first time we've ever been without any sort of garbage service so it is a little bit of a learning curve.

We have learned to separate cardboard, glass, tin (and aluminum) cans, magazines, plastic containers, and paper. Here in the laundry room is the bottle container, plastic bags with plastic containers and metal cans.

We've only been to the landfill once so far, which was at the end of November.

All the "recyclables" are unloaded outside the dump in marked bins, so we have learned to load the truck up accordingly. All the household trash goes in the back toward the cab.

The Christmas tree is the last to be loaded, then we tie down and go.
Here are the bins for newspapers, magazines, plastic containers, etc.

After off-loading the recyclables we drive onto the scale to get the starting weight. Then we drive to the various "cells" to off-load miscellaneous trash like a broken Rubbermaid box, giant plastic tarp thing that covered the new guest mattress, and so on.

Final stop is the regular household trash.

The truck gets weighed on the way out and we pay our fee. So far we haven't gone over 300 pounds so our dump fee is only $10.

It amazes me how we have changed our garbage habits. I used to put a new bag in the kitchen trash at least once a day. Now that we are separating everything it's more like once every three or four days. It's not that difficult to put the different things in their place once you get used to it. The only thing we don't bring to the dump is paper trash, like paper towels, trash mail, the rolls inside the toilet paper or paper towels, etc. All that stuff is burnable so we put it in the fireplace to help start the fire. I'm not sure how that will change come summer (maybe chiminea fodder?).

The only thing I'm not doing at the moment is an indoor compost pot (coffee grounds, peels, etc.) Baby steps!

Now that I think we have the hang of it I'm going to get a place outside to store everything until we make our dump run. It is definitely worth it if we only have to go to the dump once every month or so and it's only costing us $10. I can certainly live with that.

Red Sky

It snowed last night and this morning we woke up to a light one inch of snow covering the area. I had taken a picture because besides the light blanket on the ground there was a fog blanket (or low cloud?) covering the town below. Sadly, I accidentally erased that picture.

Here are a couple of progressive pictures from this evening.

You'll have to take my word for it, it's much prettier in person!