Friday, May 30, 2008

getting ready for a yard sale

We have a lot of stuff. WAY too much stuff. By tomorrow night we will have a little less but I am afraid a lot of what we would like someone to carry away we will end up carrying away ourselves but to the dump instead.

We hired a kid today to help carry stuff out from the house to the big shop. When we started carrying stuff out there earlier this week I thought we really wouldn't have enough to make it worth anybody's time to stop in but I was wrong. We have two tables each about 30 feet long that are absolutely covered with stuff plus some dressers and bookcases that are covered or filled. Plus a bunch of stuff that is just sitting on the ground. And none of it is really worth anything. Its really depressing actually how much clutter you accumulate that means so little.

We've packed up the important stuff - heirlooms, books, art, pictures - whats in the garage sale is the clutter that takes up room in drawers and on shelves but doesn't really amount to anything other than wasting space. I expect at the end of the day, if we are lucky, we will have accumulated around $500 and that will depend on some of the bigger items actually selling. The little stuff is mostly $1 or $2 each so it will take a long time for that to amount to anything.

We may have lucked into a lawnmower operator though. The kid that Manpower sent this morning appears to have a bit of a brain. Yaps too much and he is grossly out of shape but he wasn't a bad worker. I've got him coming back in the morning to mow the grass. If he manages to arrive for that then that will tell me something. Let's just say he comes from a culture that has a deserved reputation for not always being completely timely and leave it at that. However, assuming he arrives on time and does a decent job then I'll make him some kind of offer for while we're away. Quint will keep an eye on him & I could leave some pay envelopes with Quint to avoid the difficult situation of paying someone who doesn't likely have a bank account and who couldn't be depended on to show up a second time if he was paid in advance.

Monday, May 26, 2008

World's smallest bus rally

Sometimes they hold a bus rally and 100's of busses come. We went to one in Rickreall, OR a few years ago and there were around 175 busses there. We held a rally last weekend and there were 3 of us. We had quite a bit of fun nevertheless. One of the busses came from near Brandon and the other one from Weldon. The folks from Brandon are about 1/2 done converting their own MCI 7. The folks from Weldon did like us, bought a store-bought conversion and now get to fix everything that goes wrong, just like we do.

The rally was very alarming for Squawker and his mate. Its probably a good thing we didn't have more busses because he was really concerned by the arrival of 2 busses. I read somewhere that they will sometimes abandon a nest if they get disturbed too much so I was worried but they seem to have survived the weekend. There was some robins that nested in the spruce tree by the sidewalk going into the house that weren't so lucky though. They must have been nesting in one of the branches that we had to push out of the way to walk along the sidewalk. Those would be the same branches that are now cut off and drying out in the garden.

Other than being visited by busses there wasn't much else exciting in our last week. Seeding is pretty well wrapped up here. We're surrounded by peas - Gary's came up about a week ahead of Gregg's but there's peas on two sides of us now. Next weekend we are going to hold a mini yard sale. We've got a bunch of stuff to get rid of - stuff that we can't pawn off on RJ or Marlan and that isn't worth storing for 10 years. We should have been holding the sale this weekend - there was a yard sale across the road from us and another one 1/2 mile to the west. We would have fit right in.

Monday, May 19, 2008

our yard mother

Last year we had a yard rabbit. He used to pretend to be a rock but I was onto him and eventually got so he would let me get about 6 feet away from him. This year we have a killdeer. She has what passes for a nest - I'm sure she's very proud of it but its just a depression in the ground to everyone else. She blends in pretty well too, maybe even better than the rabbit did. We're guessing that the female is a lot more trusting than the male. They both look identical to us but there is definitely one of them that is much easier to approach than the other one. Most of the time the quieter one is on the eggs but once in a while it is the other one. The quiet one will let us get about 8 or 10 feet away but the other one gets excited as soon as we come out of the bus (about 30 feet away from the nest).

We've been slowly packing stuff up in the house. Its hard to feel any pressure but we are making headway. Today I got the waterbed drained; tonight I'll take it apart. We'd like to get started doing some work on the master bedroom because it is clearly the room most in need of TLC. I got a call out of the blue this week from some woman who is about to graduate from the RCMP academy and has been told she will be posted to Nipawin. We've been hoping to get a tenant that we could trust who would keep the undesireables away from the yard. I guess we wouldn't do much better than a cop. I don't think there's a whole lot of decent rental accomodation in Nipawin so maybe we have a chance of renting to her. Time will tell.

Marilyn got an email from Alison today saying that she has the OK to hire Karla. We tried to phone her this afternoon but couldn't get any answer. We'll try again tonight. Alison has already sent her an email but she doesn't check it real regularly so she may not know yet.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Overrun by mice

So yesterday I was gone all day, taking some reports to clients in Swan River and Marilyn decided that would be a good time to shampoo the carpet. She buys these packages of 5 fluorescent coloured fuzzy mice for dingbat the cat and he just LOVES them. But he loses them. Regularly. Right now there's about 15 of the stupid things in a puddle on the lounge chair where she put them as she found them during the big cleanup. One of them is hiding under the Mexican blanket on the couch with just its tail sticking out. He really likes it when they do that.

Jorgito has his own little routine now. Marilyn has been working in the office in the house. Actually she has paper spread over three rooms in there but that's a whole 'nuther story. Anyway, she goes off to work in the morning and Jorgito is always waiting at the door with his little arms stretched up so he can go with her. He likes the room to roam in the house. He roams in the bus too but it tends to get on our nerves. Karlita taught him to scare people while she was here. I doubt she realized she was teaching him but she certainly taught him well. He hides at the end of a hallway or behind a doorpost until you are just about at the doorway and then leaps around the corner, bounces off the wall and runs away with his tail in the air. When he did that to Karla she would always scream and then chase him. Later in the day Jorgito will be ready to come home before Marilyn is ready to bring him. If I happen to go into the house he waits at the back door and puts his little arms up to be carried back to the bus.

It just won't warm up here. There's still a snowbank on the north side of the big shop and in Marilyn's north flowerbed. The grass on the south-facing ditches has turned green but it is brown everywhere else and the trees are ready to bud out but just can't bring themselves to do it. I guess that's better than what they did last year but its getting monotonous. I got my new tractor home last week and did some work with the blade to get a new pad ready to park back by the barn but there's no point mowing the grass yet. We're still parked on the pad in front of the garage and we'll likely stay here until we get some rain. I'd like some moisture to compact the new pad and I'll probably drag some more fill into that area before we finally move. I've got an external wi-fi antenna coming from the US so I'm not in a big panic to move before that shows up either. It will be quieter once we get moved back there. We get a lot of road noise from the highway here.

I made a hurry up trip to Swan River and Minitonas yesterday to get some client signatures. We're as far along with seeding as anybody along that trip. It still amazes me that some areas haven't figured out zero or min till. You drive through regions where they still have cultivators going hard. I can understand using a cultivator to put on ammonia but full tillage?? Give me a break. That's just a sign that our farm support programs have failed miserably. Any government policy needs to be responsive to change. Unfortunately our farm support policy is locked into supporting everyone at any cost. I think it is slowly changing to accept the reality that some farmers just don't deserve to survive but that change is way too slow. I'm especially aware of it in the context of some of the farm reviews I have been doing. I gave one back yesterday and the farm wife said "There was no point in us doing this because we didn't get any money anyway." In other words, learning or making change based on the content of the report simply wasn't on the table. The only reason to do the exercise was to get a cheque from the government. Fortunately they aren't all like that but unfortunately some of them still are.

Its over 15 years now since Jim Halford had Keith Head doing a min-till tour with his then revolutionary ConservaPak drill. At the time we thought it was stupid. It would never work. But time has proven us wrong and it not only works, the technology works so well that it should be the starting point for every farming system. Fuel prices have probably quadrupled since 1990; fertilizer prices have more than tripled and seed cost is likely up by a similar amount. Any businessman who ignores the potential efficiencies of min till is simply too stupid to deserve to continue in operation. Any government support policy that tends to keep that business in existence is a drag on the whole economy.

I watched Gary Armstrong seed the quarter west of the yard here earlier this week. He's a smaller farmer, probably 6 quarters now, with correspondingly smaller equipment. His drill is about 35 feet and he pulls it with a medium sized front wheel assist tractor. He seeded that whole quarter in an easy day, all alone. I don't think he got rolling before 9:00 and he was all wrapped up well before 9 at night. Compare that to the performance that would have had to occur for him to seed it with a high tillage system and he likely took 1/3 of the time plus he did a superior job of seeding from a fuel efficiency, fertilizer use efficiency and moisture efficiency standpoint. Any program that supports an idiot neighbour so that he can compete with someone like Gary to rent land is just plain wrong.

Its starting to smell pretty good in here - Mama's making ribs for dinner. Ribs and corn on the cob. It must be summer, no matter what it looks like out the window.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

birthday parties and football

We just got back from a brief roadtrip. The Miners kids were throwing a 75th birthday party for their father today and RJ had his end-of-camp intersquad scrimmage so we combined a trip to Shellbrook and a trip to Saskatoon.

We left here at noon on Saturday and went over to Shellbrook. We had a good visit with Reg, Ken & Mer at the farm. Just as we were getting ready to go into town Arlene and Cam showed up (with multiple coolers of food) so we had a brief visit with them too. We visited some more with Ken, Mer and Kyle in town and then left early this morning for Saskatoon.

We had a bit of a false start on the trip to the city. The sign was up for Wingard ferry so we went down to the ferry and it was in the water and working alright but the ferry operator didn't think we could get off the ramp on the south side so we had to backtrack to Marcelin. That put us a little late arriving for RJ's scrimmage but we still got to see most of it. Marilyn had made some of her stuffed pasta shells so we heated them up and had lunch with RJ. That was a chance to test out the new generator too - it performed just fine and I don't think it is any noisier than the old one. Mind you, the old one was pretty damn noisy so it isn't all that hard a hurdle to get over to be no worse than it was.

I took the old generator out last week and hauled it up to the Super Uke. He will get around to looking at it when he gets around to looking at it. In the meantime we have the new noisy generator to replace the old noisy generator. At some point I am going to build a hushbox for one or the other of the generators but my preference is to use the old (diesel) one so I am holding off on starting that project until we determine whether the old one is worth fixing.

It still isn't very warm but I think the leaves are going to come out on the willows around the yard either tomorrow or the next day. The bark on them has really changed colour the last two days. We didn't see any seeding going on the whole way to Saskatoon but there are a few ammonia trucks running around this end of the world so somebody must be in the field.