81F and 53% humidity @ 8:00. Partly cloudy. High 101F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
Finished spraying the thistle yesterday morning, emptying the last of four 2 1/2 gallon jugs of 43% concentrate glyphosate. Mixed, it amounted to about 300 gallons, or twenty reloads of my little 15 gallon sprayer. Putting all that out took so long that the first places to see the spray are already dying out, and some that should be tell me I wasn't as careful as I chould have been with my driving. The meadows were already tracked from earlier mowing, and the RTV wheels don't make much of a mark themselves. And of course there's nothing to see of the spray, either, so sometimes deciding where to spray next was something of a guess. So I'll snag another jug next time I'm in town to have on hand for the missed spots, and to mix in with the triclopyr I use on the poison oak, which is springing up in the same shady spots it does every year. The spot sprayer will shoot about 25', and since I don't like to walk around in the stuff, I end up reclaiming another bit of ground around the wooded margins of the meadows each year.
Temperatures only made it into the mid 90s yesterday afternoon, so I put a little more time into cleaning up the fuel tank on the for sale bike. Got it off so I could work on it on a bench, and used lots of paper towels and more brake fluid to get the black gunk off the flange where the fuel pump mounts. Finished up flushing it out several times with the garden hose to get the chunks of old gasket and even older fuel completely out. I suppose these ridiculous temperatures are good for one thing after all :laughing: Now that the tank is off the motorcycle, I'm giving some thought to painting it. The primer that covers it now is still in good shape, and I've got some white acrylic enamel left over from another job that will coordinate with other parts on the bike. It'll be a kind of Hodge podge of blue and white, but it'll look better than blue, white, and gray in the for sale pics.
Then it was on to the new fuel pump, which turns out to be an aftermarket part that does the same job for a quarter the price. But I needed to make up the space formerly taken by the mount that had turned to the black muck, and a short length of gas pump hose and some stainless steel safety wire were substituted. The bandsaw made short work of dicing up and splitting the hose, with the belt sander thinning the last layer to give a snug fit. I finished up by reinstalling a pair of turn signals and the license plate bracket. I won't be able to test the turn signals until the fuel pump is back in place, so for now I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed.
My family started from English, Scotch, and German roots, and I'm thankful their immigration helped create the greatest nation in history. How lucky us Yanks are to have ended up in such a wonderful place. Happy birthday, Miss Liberty! May you have many, many more!!!
Hope everyone has a great weekend, no matter where you are!
As far as I know my family came from British stock. A cousin tried searching our family genealogy but could never nail down the earliest immigrant. A Swede once asked me about my origins and when I said British he decided that a Viking had had his way with one of my ancestors. :laughing: I could see that as a possibility. Sharon's background is half Scots and half German.
