59°F and mostly clear skies this morning, going up to 82° today. Looks like we're warming this week, and will be in the mid-90s by Wednesday. I guess Summer's not going to wait a few more weeks here either.
Got home Friday evening to find a CAT 953B Track Loader sitting just off the end of the driveway. New guy's apparently not wasting any time.
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Got most of the grass cut Saturday, with the exception of half of the pasture that was still pretty soggy from last week's rain. My camera clamp mount finally arrived as well, with no explanation as to why it was 2-1/2 weeks late.
When The Wife and I were sitting down in the sunroom Sunday to eat lunch, we noticed a strange car parked back by the barn, and some older guy walking around the pond area. Hmmm. Had an idea who it might be, but was aggravated that he didn't stop at the house before just driving back there. Walked out to talk to him, and it was who we thought; the father of the guy who is going to finish the pond work. Before both father and son worked for the construction company my Wife was working for before she retired, he owned his own excavating company. He told me his son had asked him to come by and take a look at the project and give him some advice. I explained to him the timeline of events, and he was appalled at both the seeming lack of direction of the work, and the condition in which it was left. It was nice to hear from a seasoned veteran that what we'd always thought about this project was indeed true; the landscaper had no idea what he was doing. We talked for a bit, super nice guy who seems to be enjoying his "retirement," and they plan to start correcting the mess this week. Wife and I later went over the itemized quote from the landscaper, and based on what he did (some of which has to be redone) and what he left unfinished, versus what we've paid him so far, we have it basically at break-even at this point. So, she's going to contact him this week and let him know his services are no longer required. With any luck, it will just end there and everyone moves on.
I went out and finished mowing most of the other half of the pasture late Sunday afternoon, after it seemed mostly dry enough. There was still one low area where I didn't dare push my luck, though.
Good to hear from Drew again. Sounds like he has a decent plan in place.
That's a nice-looking new truck, Phil. Congrats.
Pretty slick mod on that ammo can, RNG. I've thought about painting one of those LS blue and replacing the right side steps with it (controls on that side make it almost impossible to use that door, even if I lose about 100 lbs

).
We have iPhones and I have an older iPad I use for music, but all of our computers are PCs. We both have HP laptops we bought back in 2014, which seem to still be working fine, and our HP printer/scanner has worked great as well. I have a Dell Inspiron all-in-one that is my studio computer, which I bought used from a local (St. Charles, MO) vaping store that was "upgrading" to Macs. Got it for $200. Even though my initial computer experience was on the Apple IIe back in the '80s (remember Apple Basic?), I've always owned PCs. The music industry was once ruled by Macintosh. Not so much anymore. In fact, there are now more PC-related programs available than Mac, at least in music production. Besides being prohibitively expensive for noobs, it seems the newer crop of Apple products are not nearly as service or modification friendly as PCs.