Good Morning!!!! 58F @ 4:15 AM PST here at Yankee Hill.
Considerable cloudiness. Occasional rain showers this afternoon. High 69F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
A few days after I broke my leg many years ago, Don, my foot looked just like yours. It seems blood from the broken bone and torn tissue migrated down to the foot. Hope your healing continues.
Wow! 18,000 pages of posts to GM thread. What a prolific bunch we are!
Unloading the replacement trailer on Friday went smoothly thanks in no small part to a friend of my Washington buddy that lives on a 2200 acre ranch outside of Los Alamos, CA, only twenty or so miles from the new house. Charlie is about my age, in good health, and is pretty clever. After the rattling my buddy and I got the day before, his suggestions and help kept us on track. As per previous trips, most of what we hauled ended up in the future office room, to be sorted and put away later. Funny how things tend to grow bigger on the trip down, and the rooms in the house seem like they're shrinking.
The fun stopped there when we went to return the trailer, though. The man from the Bakersfield rental outfit asked us to take it to the Santa Maria branch, which we did. But since it didn't have the load capacity for the next load (or the previous one, either), I rented a larger tilt deck trailer with almost double the capacity, and with two axles instead of just one. Got a call from the Chico rental place, same guy that was helping me the night before, telling me to bring the damaged trailer back to them, and if I couldn't there would be a $4K charge for shipping. WTF? And to expect a call from his manager to discuss additional charges. That gentleman, and I use the term very loosely, seemed quite agitated, and told us he'd already sent the damaged trailer to the scrap yard, and now I would be paying them to replace it. Double WTF! He went on to tell me to bring the Bakersfield trailer to him to replace the vacancy in his rental fleet. And that I would also be responsible for the towing charges related to recovering the damaged trailer. I reminded him that it was his agent that had advised me that the original trailer was appropriate for the load it was carrying when it clearly was not. That set him off on another rage, claiming that neither he nor any of his staff would have done such a thing, as the original trailer was used only for around town hauls and did not have the load capacity needed. Do tell. He promised to send me bills for all the above, and I told him we'd be talking again once I received them.
At that point I contacted the Bakersfield rental agent who then got in touch with the Chico agent. When she got back on the line, she advised me to leave the replacement trailer in Santa Maria as originally planned. I asked her to confirm that with a text message, just in case there were any questions in Santa Maria. Seeing as how the original rental is very likely to end up in small claims court, I cancelled the rental I'd just made, and made plans to dead head back home. Can't say I didn't see this coming, but it sure put a damper on the rest of the trip.
All was not lost, though, as Charlie had invited us to drop by the ranch for a tour, so off we went. Turns out he has his own exit off the US101 freeway, and his driveway is about a mile long. The house sits just below the crest of a large hill, with a commanding view to the north. Beautiful place with several outbuildings, a fleet of shipping containers, a 1,000 yard rifle range, trap range, and a '47 Willys pickup truck my Washington friend had been advising him on. In no time my buddy was diving under the hood in an effort to identify a carburetor badly in need of TLC, and we were knee deep in conversation aimed at getting the grand old lady back on the road. Plans made, we jumped into Charlie's Polaris four seater buggy, a thing with big knobby tires and about a mile of suspension travel. We bounced all over the place, up over mountains and down and across gullies I'd have had trouble getting across on foot. All accompanied by a pretty sunset. Great way to finish the day.
The trip home involved a stop in Boulder Creek, CA to retrieve some household goods from my friend's mother-in-law's house. She had been relocated to Washington state several months previously, and her small cabin was being prepped for sale. It was a pretty small place, maybe 800 sq. ft., located down in a very dark canyon a couple miles outside of town. Not exactly the kind of home where an elderly person could age in place. But both my friend and I had spent many days riding motorcycles through those hills and canyons, and it was good to see them again, even if it was from behind the wheel of an overstuffed van. One riding story led to another, and the good roads too quickly deteriorated to freeways and the urban sprawl of the San Francisco Bay Area, complete with Saturday afternoon traffic jams, ABS brake tests, and even a bit of road rage among our fellow travelers. We were both so glad to be out of that madness. Last stop was for gas in Oroville at about $4.49/gallon, about $2 less than the ripoff station in my new neighborhood.
Today we'll start dismantling the shelves hanging from the garage ceiling, loading what they hold into the van, and the shelves themselves into the 7x14 box trailer. More heavy equipment moves will have to wait until I can find a real equipment trailer, and I'm thinking I'd better just buy one outright so I can make sure it's in good repair and up to the job. For now, my Washington friend's time with me is running short, and I just need to keep the ball rolling.
Hope you all enjoy the rest of your weekend.
www.theguardian.com
I have been hard working in the woods at my rancho for the past 4 weekends. Meantime all sorts of little things have accumulated on my house.
