that could have been very bad

Yikes!

/ Re-Farmer / 4 Comments

This morning I went to get a meter reading to submit to the electric company.

Being rather short, I tend to see more glare on the cover than the numbers themselves. My solution has been to hold my phone up and take several pictures. The display cycles, with a short blank period in between, but after taking 3 or 4 shots, I can be pretty sure at least one of them has the reading in it.

What this means is that I’m fiddling with my phone to open the camera as I walk up to the power pole.

I really should pay more attention.

After I took the pictures, I looked down and found myself staring at this, maybe a foot and a half away from my face.

There were no wasps flying around, so I took pictures.

Because I’m like that. :-D

But why were no wasps flying around?

I think this is part of my answer. These are not the aggressive yellow and black wasps. I couldn’t see much, but they look a lot like the docile bald faced hornets in the Chinese elm trees.

From what I could see, they wasps were not so much “docile” as “sluggish”. It was a bit cooler this morning, so maybe they just weren’t warmed up yet.

We are actually going to leave this nest. We go to the post once a month to get a reading, and since I’m using a camera to see the numbers anyhow, we don’t disturb them in the process. In the winter, after they die off, we can carefully remove the nest. Who knows. We might Ebay it or something. There is apparently quite the demand for the nests!

I just wish I’d noticed it before I took the meter reading. It would have been much easier on my heart! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Found it!

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

No, we didn’t find the source of the knocking in the van.

We picked up the van, dropping off my mom’s car at the same time, then did a quick trip to the grocery store before we had to pick Two-Face up from the vet. My daughter also made an appointment to get our original Mama, who showed up as a stray on our balcony, years ago, and brought us her baby. She has been acting very ornery lately, growling and hissing at the other cats, and sometimes nothing at all. So she will be brought in for a check up on Monday.

Then we headed home, and…

The van is running smooth as butter.

We had talked to the mechanic for a while, and we still can’t figure out what caused the knocking and shuddering. If it had been the CV joint, it would have made a different noise. Still, I’m glad that in the process of trying to track down the noise, we were able to find and fix another problem before it became a bigger problem in the future.

Two-Face, meanwhile, seems to be doing okay. She’s found a place to sleep things off, and I haven’t even seen the surgical site yet.

No, what I found today was the source of an odd pain I would get in my foot, when I wore my runners. One of those little stabbing pains that I couldn’t quite tell if something was stuck in my shoe, or stuck in my sock. Then, while I was moving things we’d taken from the basement to the barn, I happened to step on an edge of concrete, and something stabbed me in the foot again. Hard.

So I took my shoe off right there in the barn and this time, I could feel something inside my shoe. It took some hunting on the sole, but I finally found what stepping on the concrete had pushed into my foot.

Thankfully, among the things we brought to the barn from the basement was a tray full of odds and ends, including the remains of a small standard tip screwdriver. I was able to use it to pry the nail loose from my shoe. It had to be pushed in really deep before I could finally find it from the inside! I have no idea when I stepped on this but, thankfully, it went in at an angle, or it would have gone right into my foot.

Meanwhile, the girls and I were able to clear most of the stuff away from the front of the house, either to the barn, the burn pile or the junk pile that we’ll need to get hauled away with a trailer. What’s left needs to go to the dump. The van has already been filled, ready for tomorrow. We’ll have to make sure to take multiple trips this week, to catch up on all the trash and recycling we normally would have taken to the dump earlier in the week.

It feels so much better not to have all that stuff in front of the house!!!

My other project of the day meant I got to spend some time with the (still pregnant) mamas in the basement. I dismantled the hanging frame I made for the cheese and started cleaning up and sanding the wood.

Some of the wood needed to be shaved and smoothed with a knife, first. One of the side pieces had a bit of a crack in it, so I glued and clamped it. I’ll need to pick up some coarser sandpaper before I can continue working on that one. I was able to get some progress with the rest of the pieces, though.

Here’s a before and after, so far. I was able to whip the rig together in about half an hour, and it did the job. I just want to get it finished properly, now that there is no rush. My daughter has a shift tomorrow, so I should be able to swing by the hardware store and pick up more sandpaper and be able to continue.

Well. Not right away. With the van already packed for the dump, I’ll have to do that first. I’ll just have to remember to go back into town to pick up my daughter early enough to catch the hardware store before it closes.

I am so happy to have our van back.

The Re-Farmer

This is concerning, plus progress

/ Re-Farmer / 8 Comments

Not a lot was done in the yard today.  We made a much needed dump run with garbage and recycling – including a lot of garbage from cleaning the sun room out, then my younger daughter and I went into town to run some errands (plus play some Pokemon Go for community day, while we were there ;-) ).  It was almost evening when we got back, but I still wanted to get at least a bit more clean up done today.

As I headed over to the Eastern end of of the bushes and trees I’ve been clearing out, I found something very disorienting.

In the false spirea I was planning to clean out was a large branch.

Funny, I think to myself.  I thought I’d cleared away the crab apple branches I’d cut.  Did I miss one?

Except this branch wasn’t a dead branch.  It was mostly green.  I didn’t remember cutting a green branch in that area and leaving it there.  Also, it wasn’t apple.

Then I started to pull it out and saw the end of it.

At which point, I stopped to take pictures.

Here is the branch I found.

20180616,fallen.branch

It’s a maple.  Aside from a couple of small dead side branches, it is in full leaf.

20180616.burnt.end

That’s burnt wood right there.

What the heck?

I started looking around to see where it came from.  Then I called my daughters out to look, too, just to make sure I wasn’t jumping to conclusions.

This is where we think it came from.

20180616.possoble.source

The arrow at the top is pointing to the end of a branch that we think it came from.

The double ended arrow is between the two power lines.

If my guess is correct, some time during the night, the branch hit the live power line, got burned, then broke and fell down.

Now, I can’t say for sure that this is where it came from, but it must at least be close to the source.  There just aren’t any other maples close enough.

I am not feeling confident about this.

I had asked for the electric company to come out and check the line a second time when, after the first time they came out, the woman who followed up with me could not see anything that said they’d checked more than our own power line to the house.  The second call, I basically was told the same thing as the first time; whenever we hire someone to clear the lines, let them know and they’ll cut the power for us.  I don’t know when anyone came to check the lines a second time; this was after we had to put locks on our gates, and we did not get a call from anyone to let them in.  However, someone could have stopped on the main road and simply ducked through the barbed wire fencing.  The locks just keep vehicles out.  People can get through easily.

I’ll be asking some advice from family who works with the electric company before I call them again.  There’s no point in calling again, if they expect us to clear their lines.

After clearing the burned branch away, I cut back the spirea completely.  Here is the before picture from a few days ago.

20180613.bushes.cleanup.before4

All I did was cut away the spirea, plus break off a few dead lilac branches that were overhanging them, so I wouldn’t stab myself in the face or something.

Here is how it looks now.

20180616.cleanup.bushes.after4

To the right of the lilacs was the beginning of a path to the big garden.  It is now almost clear and open again.  At least at this end.  The other end has dead spruces partially blocking it.

Here is another look at the lilacs.

20180616.cleanup.bushes.east.lilacs.before

You can see where I broke off the branches that were overhanging the spirea.  Most of the lilacs appear dead.  These lilacs used to be so thick with greenery and flowers, you couldn’t see stems and branches.

It should be interesting to see how they recover, once all this is cleared up and they are getting sun and space again.  It might take a few years, but lilacs are so resilient, I am sure they will grow back well.

There is still lots of work to do, but it doesn’t take much for it to look so much better.

The Re-Farmer