Good Morning!!!! 41F @ 4:45AM. Partly cloudy. High 53F. Winds light and variable.
An early start yesterday had me skipping my usual post here. The plan was to load up the sprayer and finish the pre-emergent/glyphosate around the house, but the sprayer wasn't cooperating. An intermittent open in the wiring loom, or maybe a bad switch, caused me to cut the whole mess out and go looking for a new one in town yesterday. That wasted most of the morning.
My custom bike builder buddy is starting a new project, and the donor bike had a very nice Pichler full fairing on it he wasn't planning to use. I dropped by his shop yesterday to remove it and found a place for it in the back of the truck.
He has a line on a very well priced BMW R100R, a naked street bike version of the big touring and dirt bikes I've been riding, and the Pichler would work very well on it. So I may be making room for another airhead in the garage soon.
I was able to clear the driveway the day before yesterday, with some very careful chainsawing, especially once I found that one of the larger limbs was hollow. It broke loose half way through the cut, a not fun surprise that fortunately left me unhurt. I made a point of taking more weight off the remaining limbs before getting to the trunk; more work but a whole lot safer. I also used a chain and the tractor to break partially cut limbs that were holding the tree up, staying well out of the way of falling branches. Dragging the large chunks down the driveway chewed it up a bit, so I used the box blade to smooth it out again, which it needed anyway due to little trenches forming from recent rain runoff. Still have a few branches to gather up and put on a new burn pile, and a little smoothing to do around the base of the tree, but the worst is over. There are two more oaks of similar size that are down, but more of their trunks burned and I don't think there's as much wood up in the air as with this first one. The biggest disappointment was finding the main trunk mostly hollow; I won't be getting much firewood out of the deal. The inside of that tree was well charred as well, as the fire found its way inside the trunk and also burned down into the root system to cause the fall. Must have made a heck of a noise when it came down, too, because I found six inch diameter limbs broken like match sticks and driven a foot or more into the ground.
This tree was also located in the easement for the driveway; I thought the land owner was responsible for keeping that easement open. No telling how long that tree had been down, but there was no sign of anyone but me trying to clean up the mess. Just as well, judging from the sloppy job his kid did the last time...
Most of my contemporaries have sleep issues as well, folks. One common thread is we're all retired and don't have a job that keeps us on a regular schedule.
No red squirrels here, but a couple large grays help take care of the pine nuts from the ponderosas. I think they've learned that it's easier to let a car/truck makes short work of breaking up the cones, since there sure seem to be an unusually large number of them on the road out. Haven't seen any squirrels near the house, though.
Only in the last year or two have I heard coyotes, and then only faintly. I don't have any pets to worry about, and with mountain lions already keeping me on my toes, the yodel dogs don't amount to much of a threat.
Sounds like your detective work has paid off, Don. Won't be long before you're the one giving the training classes on the tractor.
Hopefully the new wiring loom will get the sprayer going again this morning; a new series of Pacific storms are due in tomorrow, lasting most of the week and dropping upwards of five inches of rain. Saturday and Sunday the weather guessers are warning us to batten down the hatches because winds topping fifty miles an hour are expected.
