We got to use our new tall hoist today. Had a big chipper come in that had thrown a blade and busted through the drum. Jakob cut out the bad steel , rolled a new thicker plate and welded it in. But only after pulling out the cutter drum seen here.
He heated up the bent part and beat it back down with a jack hammer.
Turned out that a heavy steel digging bar worked better.
While he was doing that, the girls were sorting all the bolt bins for the past two days. They have sorted around 23 five-gallon buckets of bolts and hardware.
While that was happening, Luke and Jesse and I were putting the metal on the new shop. I will have to post some pics of that tomorrow because I forgot to take them. I will try if I can, but we are expecting tornadoes in the early morn ing, so we will see if it is possible.
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We also decided to put out a little extra garden this year considering the uncertainty of things going on. SO Jakob got the David Bradley going a few days ago and Luke and I have been plowing.
I went to town to get supplies, including seed. A couple years ago I bought 20 of these fireman air breathers for the boxes they were in. Turned out they all work and are full. So we use them for jobs that are very dusty or smoky. I wore one to town to avoid bad air. Lisa at the co op said I was the best prepared customer in RANDOLph County. Laugh if you want to, but Iâm not sick. Many of the businesses here have shut down because they canât get the locals to take things seriously enough. We are having our own little spike in this part of Alabama because of it. I know 2 so far that have died.
Still lots of Mechanic work happening too. And Iâm getting calls to come do lots of construction bids, and skid steer work, etc. I guess people are home and bored and want to do projects.
I think weâll probably go for a Sunday drive tomorrow in the 95 just to burn some wood. It doesnât seem right to have so much wood sitting here and not be gasifying any of it. :s
I drove across town to day to a sister plant to get a circuit breaker.
Parts are getting hard to come by now.
There was a road block, there were riot control barriers, lines and arrows painted on the sidewalks.
Cameras everywhereâŚ
Yellow ropes to direct foot traffic.
I saw 3 people in a plant that should have hundreds in it!
One foreman I know from years back who smiled and painted arrowsâŚ
The first aid attendant I knew from way back too and she said its a disaster waiting to happen
I think this is the first time I have ever been scared of something like this on a mine site.
Iâve been to gold mines with less barriers to movement.
The number of hospitalizations has dropped from a high of 423 Thursday to 331 today with with only 8 more deaths during the same period with a total today of 81. Thereâs hope.
Hey Wallace, we donât have any kind of restrictions like that at all. I guess there have been a couple of arrests for people blatantly defying the order to stay at home and then fighting with the cops over it. Not close by, but in Birmingham. People having big parties and stuff like that.
We took a drive today to burn some wood. Went about 90 miles round trip. Spent about an hour catching up with a friend of mine who is in the rescue squad and also the fire chief of the town of Wadley. Just stood in the state hyway and talked for an hour. Only 2 cars passed in all that time. But we got to burn a few bags of wood.
Also, the girls have been sorting bolts. Actually it was only 17 buckets, not 23.
Turns out the bad weather is hitting right now instead of early this morning. Weâre kind of expecting tornadoes, so all my neighbors might end up in our root cellar and concrete domes. Not sure how social distancing will work for that.
And here are a couple pics of the shop that I was able to get this morning.
we found the windows in a junk pile. The bubble wrap was scraps from the barn shop. we scrounged up a good bit of the trim and repainted it, or used the packing material they ship to stiffen a stack of trim (culls). But we did have to buy the metal panels and a lot of the trim. Hoping to finish the last wall tmmorrow, and the bolt sorting project.
We finished the chipper this morning. Not what we usually want to do on our day off, but customer is in a bind since the recent tornadoes and other storm damAGE
Then we had to test it, so Luke and I went to town to switch out the trailers at the cabinet factory. Instead of making firewood or charcoal. We bagged the chunks and then ran all the bigger stuff through the chipper to make garden mulch.
Does storms and tornadoes have anything to do with cows calving ? Yesterday and last night we had 10 -12 hours of heavy storms with lighting, tornadoes , flash flooding that came through our area .
We had 4 calves born in all this mess ?? Luck only one young heifer required help
I better clear this up!
These are barriers to movement inside my employerâs property.
Road block on the mine roadâŚ
Riot barrier fencing to separate people coming and going to work so people do not mixâŚ
My employer is from a south American country and I always made jokes about their management style and why so many Nazis went there after the war.
I donât make those kind of jokes these days, because the place does have a real detention camp kind of feel too it.
Even during strikes I havenât seen this.
To that end, yes I hear there are actual road blocks in Quebec.
The tribal police will not non Indians onto the reserve near here.
Police will issue tickets for people in groups larger than I think its five in public and bigger fines for people that violate quarantine but I donât know much else.
I have been sitting here reading the news on my PC and I do not think I have seen a car all day on the street and I only saw one woman walking a dog today. ( rain my be part of the reason ).
I dropped off some eggs, bananas and turkey+mash potato to an elderly neighbor up the road and just left it at her door, then I called her from home to say I made a delivery.
Funny you say that.
One of my chums has cattle and he always blows a few shift work when the weather is bad in spring because of calving.
He has the added issue of keeping them warm and sheltered ( seems to me his heard calves early in the year just before the snow melts )
I canât imagine working 12 hours days/nights, then going home to work a farm.
The man is as tough as nails.
We call that farmer strong up hereâŚ
I am lucky!
I want fresh eggs I talk to a mechanic with laying hens.
I want real grass fed beef or free range roasters I talk to an electrician.
Most farmers here are what you describe, âHalf farmersâ Me included. It isnt realy possible to live off of just farming here, unless you are realy inovative or work like 37 hours a day. Yes those people do exist and in great numbers⌠the inovative kind is rareâŚ
We had high winds yesterday too. Again. At least close to storm. Roof tins flying. And even more trees down
Apart from a couple hours when a storm passed indoors (grandchildren visiting) I spent most of the day in the basement, trying to tidy up. Sorted out 100s of pounds of gasification material. Had a hard time keeping myself from start building something
We call them moonlight farmers.
Like you said, impossible to make a living. To make it happen you need to be big enough that you need employees and you end up being an office clerk yourself, filling in EU-forms
HiAll
Got my last 200 feet of new property perimeter dog fencing finished finally two days ago. Ha! I am now get up and community walk around again.
In out little towns center someone had set up a canned, dried and packaged self-help food bank table. A books exvhamge box. A kids toys exchange box. A box for DVD videos. A box for jigsaw puzzles exchange.
Like all of the best of good works this was done anonymously.
(From the initial stocking Iâm betting it was the local Adventist Church not able to do their community Wednesday for-the-hungry-free-meals)
Iâve now exchanged out some books and videos.
For the virus fearfull all things easily surfaces sanitized.
Try this. Will bring a smile and hope back onto your local worlds.
Steve Unruh
An item exchange seems sketchy. From what I gather most recycling programs even are shut down for the duration, they are still doing pickup, but itâs going to the landfill. Was always greenwashing to make end consumers feel both responsible for unregulated market driven packaging and as if they were doing something good anywaysâŚ
Talking about sorting JO. I finally had to get involved in the hardware sort that Erika and Naomi have been doing for a few days. They got most of it basically sorted into categories, then me and Jakob spent today doing a final sort by size and such. Bolts, washers, nuts, screws, brake parts, hinges, etc⌠from mixed up 5 gallon buckets I have collected from auctions and sales through the years , into 1 gallon tin cans. Jakob built a nifty shelf from structural steel framing that holds the cans just perfectly. Weâre not really going to know how to use the system now, itâs too organized.
Wayne, we had some good storms here, but the bad stuff was, as usual, south about 30 miles. JUst some trees down.
Looks like theyâre going to try to open things up here in AL in the next week or so. At least thatâs the rumor. I wonder if anyone will go out anyway.
The only way we could make a living farming was to work those 37 hours a week and find a lot of different little niche markets. Constantly trying new things to get people to try them. Lots of marketing gimics, etc. New product lines, etcâŚ
Ultimately we got tired of trying to make people interested in something better than their normal lazy ways. So we went to work doing other things that made better money in less time and effort, and just let people shop at Walmart, which is what they want anyway.
The only farmers I know here that make a real good living are those that work really hard raising chickens by the bijillions , and are the best at it so they can turn around a flock in 5.5 weeks.
Storms and tornadoes rapidly change the atmospheric pressure. Could be that has something to do with birthing timing. Same reason women in advanced pregnancy arenât supposed to fly or change altitude quickly. Maybe?
Well things are changing now thugh⌠Farmers report over 10 times higher direct sale now that the virus is going on. Lazy âWallmartâ people finaly found out it is better to buy local food, that went trugh less hands and is usualy even cheaper thain the store bought.
I suspect we will see the same trend here this year. I have had a few people ask me if I have beef of free range chickens for sale right now. Ofcourse this isnât really a good time to be trying to provide more harvest from a farm in New England we are just comming out of winterâŚ
In general over the last decade there has been a slow growing willingness for people to pay a little more from a small local farm here. It hasnât gotten to the point it is actually profitable yet I donât think but part of that is the high property tax burden we have here in New Hampshire. It really is hard on farms where you have to have a lot of land. That is largely why more of NH has been converted into housing developments over the last half century than our neighbors on either side. Vermont is very supportive of agriculture and Maine just has a much more favorable tax structure for keeping old larger properties together. Anyway I think there is hope still for some family farms to survive but I am mostly dreaming because i hate the large factory farming it is sickening to me.
I slept in this morning. It was actually down to 1F (-17C). All the sap hanging on the trees are froze solid. Fortunately Iâll be able to collect tomorrow or Friday and be able to make syrup again. Next week we will get back up to 50 and the birch trees will start running.
:s
