How do you know how to do the right thing?

Well, yesterday was an almost perfectly difficult day, but those are common enough around here. What was different was that it was a day of almost complete moral ambiguity.

Only time will tell if we did the right thing.

This difficult day involved both sheep and cars, but both stories are long, so bear with me.

The first part of the day we spent car-shopping. I've mentioned before that our truck has developed a coolant leak into one of its cylinders, most likely a head gasket leak, but possibly a warped cylinder head. This truck is Aimee's daily driver and life is hell around here whenever it has to be taken out of service for repairs. Aimee and I never have matching teaching schedules, an administrative problem that costs us a small fortune since it means we have to keep and drive two vehicles constantly. One of us has to come home as early as possible to tend animals, the gardens, and in winter, the wood stove. The other, usually Aimee who has considerably more administrative duties, has to stay late. It buggers up all our house and farm systems terribly, and worst of all, animals get neglected, if I have to stay on campus to wait for Aimee to finish up.

So we drive two vehicles almost daily, all year. If we're going to do this, we really should get the most fuel efficient and cost-efficient vehicles we can. Aimee, who can't drive a stick-shift, drives the automatic truck, while I drive a manual Ford Escort wagon. If there's a snowstorm or other bad weather, we do drive together in the four wheel drive truck. We also need it for moving hay, grain, and other bulky farm inputs. But the rest of the time we drive separately unless for some strange reason that's a day we can both leave for work and come home at the same time.

So as mechanic-in-chief around here, and in consideration of the truck's essentiality and usefulness around here, my advice was for us to keep it and repair it and baby it along as long as we could, but only use it when we actually need a truck or four wheel drive, and instead get a smaller car with an automatic transmission for Aimee to drive to work. Actually, we probably made this decision last fall, or earlier, before the truck had even developed the head gasket leak. But the leak clinched it and added urgency, since a vehicle with such a deep, systemic engine problem can crap out any day, any time.

Which sent me to my budget spreadsheets and the classified ads for about the last two months, while I explored the possibilities for buying new or used small cars more or less exhaustively. We can't afford to throw money at vehicles, and while new cars are nice, they aren't necessarily the most cost-effective choices. As a fairly experienced mechanic, given enough time, I can repair almost anything on a car myself. I rarely have time for car repairs during term time, but in summer I can usually pull out several days and even weeks or work on vehicles. In fact last summer I reconditioned an old motorcycle just for fun. If I have lots of time, I even enjoy the work.

This gives us some options other folks don't have.

Long story short, we looked at new small Japanese cars, like the Fit, Yaris and Versa. We even looked at the Chevy Aveo, but Aimee, suspicious like many Americans of American car manufacturers, didn't like that much. I thought about it for a while, the appeal of a car and warranty for less than $11,000 being quite strong, but the Aveos don't hold their value at all, and I'm not sure they're good for much more than 120,000 miles, whereas the Japanese models get 200,000 or more. Aimee fell in love with the Fit. All that neat cargo room and secret compartments appealed to her organizing nature. But we couldn't imagine spending $18,000 for a tiny hatchback, even if it was likely to get 200,000 miles.

More cost-efficient in comparison were second-hand cars, but not so much the smaller Japanese ones. We actually saw secondhand Honda Fits priced for more than new ones at one or two dealers, less Fits being made than were demanded by buyers.

So after quite a bit of winnowing of ideas and back and forth, we settled on finding a small to mid-size Japanese car, preferably smaller, but not necessarily so, hopefully with less than 100,000 miles, but not necessarily so, and so on. The main criteria being overall value for money. I badly wanted to make a Prius fit this profile because of the fuel economy factor, but that rapidly showed itself to be almost impossible. There was one "little old lady" Prius that sold for $6,000 last week with only 59,200 miles on it, but after careful perusal of the ads and after looking hard and driving one car, I decided that if a Prius was priced for less than $10,000, it was either because it was approaching 200,000 miles, or because it had a dead or suspect main battery costing $3,000 to replace.

We weren't getting anywhere with all of this and we'd only looked at one car by the end of the semester.

Then Aimee spent an hour or two online one night and found a few cars she wanted to go see, and, probably because she picked them out herself, gave me absolutely no trouble in scheduling a day to go see cars. Usually she hates to go car shopping, and will avoid it like the plague, so this was progress, and hopeful.

So I made a list of cars, and planned out a route. We drove first to Lewiston, Maine, where we had scheduled a look at a '97 Toyota Camry. This car, otherwise ancient, somehow had only 44,000 miles on it, asking only $4,000 when the blue book value was $6,500, almost unbelievable, and I wanted to see if I could fault the theory somehow.

So I rolled under it, and prodded it here and there, and listened to the engine, and smelled the exhaust, and tried to find a reason not to buy it. Aimee drove it, I listened and felt with my butt for bad suspension noises. The damn thing was cherry, more or less. Original paint, bodywork, barely a scratch, and no worn seats or key-scratches or any other reason to suspect those 44,000 miles. Disbelieving, I got fixated for quite a while on the fact that there was new underseal on the frame, and I wanted to know why. There were some seams under the thickest coats of underseal on the main box members, and I wondered if it had been welded, or worse, packed with bondo. The guy who was selling the car had been a dealer but was now unemployed, and I was, I admit, a little more suspicious just because of his former occupation.

This suspicion on my part led to a ludicrous moment where we pulled into a Marden's parking lot while I rolled under someone's random Camry to compare the frame seams. Thank you for that, whoever you are, and I promise I never actually touched your car.

I was only looking, your honour, honest I was.

But the frame was sound, just like every other Camry frame, only cleaner and with more underseal. And so in the end we bought the car. The paperwork took half the day, what with a bank loan and insurance and transit plates. We eventually, very eventually, had all the legalities straightened out, and Aimee, by this time just seething with frustration at how long everything had taken, more or less grabbed the keys from me and finally drove the car off the former owner's driveway.

But we had to get gas. And I'd warned Aimee over and over how there was going to be something wrong, that this was too good to be true, and that old cars that don't get use much develop their own kinds of problems, like dried-out seals and so on.

Well, we were putting the gas in and I was wondering what size gas tank a Camry had, 13 gallons, I thought aloud. Aimee said no, the pump gauge was reading more than that, and then, oh no, we saw the gas trickling onto the floor. A leaking gas tank.

All of a sudden, I actually felt better. Finally, a reason why the car was priced so low. Aimee, on the other hand, was feeling pretty low. But I looked at the leak pretty hard, and decided it was coming from the filler neck, not the tank, and that if we just drove away some of the gas in the tank, and if we were lucky, it would stop leaking, and while we might cause some air pollution, the day was warm and dry and the leaking gas would be spread pretty thin across all of Maine and would evaporate. It helped my thinking that I'd earlier bought comprehensive insurance for the car. But common sense dictated that if anyone was going to die in a blazing vehicular inferno, it would have to be the male of the species, the disposable sperm deliverer, not the female egg carrier. Plus if anyone has experience driving dangerously defective vehicles by the seat of their pants, it's me.

So we drove home, slowly, but steadily and uneventfully. And at about one-third down the gas gauge, the tank stopped leaking. And nothing else seemed particularly wrong.

So did we do the right thing? Only time will tell. The only thing I know for sure is that we have a new, and fairly new-looking car in the driveway alongside our two existing beaters. And that there's a faint whiff of gas in the Great Farm neighborhood. I will be working on the gas leak today, and if I get that fixed in a timely fashion I will do some other things like pull the wheels and check the brakes and pull the plugs and so on, anything I can do to look for wear indicative of more than 44,000 miles.

But that's not the end of the day's ambiguities. About a half an hour after we'd settled down after all this excitement, the phone rang again. Another sheep call. I'm not sure I know how I became the go-to sheep "whisperer" in the area, but that sure seems to be what has happened.

So I pulled on me dungerees and wellies and went a mile or two up the road to another sheep farm, different than the last, where another Churro ewe had been in labor all evening with a tightly packed lamb.

Where I encountered the tightest ewe's vagina and uterus I've ever seen. I could bearly get a finger past the labia, let alone the cervix. The lamb was almost certainly past saving, its tongue bloated with asphyxiation. The ewe was healthy, but in a poor fix.

I struggled for about half an hour, first as gently as I could but eventually with more and more force. I was able to get one foreleg out, but not the other. I couldn't even find it, but then I couldn't get in past the head without tearing tissue. And I couldn't push the head back at all, to reposition the lamb's legs. It wouldn't go back, and as I tried I felt the lamb's teeth breaking and jaw tissues tearing. So I just pulled, while the owner pushed on the belly. There were no contractions, although the ewe would push a little. But the lamb wouldn't budge.

Eventually, I used so much force, I pulled the foreleg right off the dead lamb. That was gruesome. But even then, the remainder stayed put, not moving at all, the lamb's shoulders jammed tight in the womb. Normally, you could pull a lamb like this out easily enough, once you got a grip on a leg or two, but not this time.

I've never had a case like this. The only solution, and probably what we should have done as soon as we realized how tight the lamb was, would have been a cesarean section. But there was no way to succeed at that without a lot of pain and risk for the ewe. Even if there had been a vet willing and available to come out, which I strongly doubt, there would have been more pain and delay.

Which was a pitiful shame, since this ewe was bright and alert and well, just lying there with a lamb that wouldn't come out. We thought about cutting her open in case there was a second lamb, but that just seemed like throwing mortal insult after mortal injury.

So the man of the house went for his pistol and I shot the ewe in the head and she died. More slowly, too, than I would have liked, for the heart kept pumping for several minutes. But I'm sure she didn't feel anything by then, with most of her brain messed up.

So, more moral ambiguity. Did I do the right thing? Should I even have offered to help? I honestly don't know. I'm not a vet, and not even really a very experienced sheep midwife, just more experienced than other folks around here fell themselves to be. The owners were somewhat out of their depth, but so was I. I just felt more comfortable being out of my depth, is all, and for no particularly good reason except I seem to have found myself out of my depth fairly often in my life and have got more used to it than perhaps I should.

The only thing I know for sure is the ewe is now feeling no more pain.

In both cases, the car which is vital for our family, and the ewe's life, vital for her, the stakes were fairly high. These settings we encounter with our rural and self-reliant way of life come with this effect: the stakes are often higher than most folks, particularly most Americans, normally come across in the developed world.

In fact, when stakes do get to be that high, or more so, such as with my elderly parents, both now in hospital in Wales, the system we live with tends to take responsibility from us and give it to specialists.

I'm not sure this is such a good thing for society, not all of the time at least. I may not feel that good about yesterday's problems, or how we muddled through in dealing with them, but at least we did deal with them, all of them. And we even resolved them, in our own fashion, for better or for worse. And we'll deal with more problems today and resolve them too.

There are plenty of problems around the world that are not being dealt with and are not likely to get resolved at all, possibly because we fail to take responsibility or to act, both individually and collectively. And so problems pile up.

Until they get to be really big problems.

Pregnancy toxemia

I got a call last night from a neighbor who keeps sheep, about another neighbor who needed help with theirs, and, long story short, finished up jumping in the car with the sheep kit and the 30-30 and going on a house call. Not that I'm a vet, but we are starting to get some experience with sheep and their numerous medieval diseases, or at the least learning to cope, the hard way, and anyway there is no vet for sheep that you can call, really, in Maine.

The rifle is the vet of last resort for most of us small sheep farmers in Maine.

This was a down ewe with what was most likely pregnancy toxemia, which, according to the online Merck's Vet Manual and a dozen other sites and the Storey's sheep "bible," is caused by either too much or too little nutrition in pregnancy. The sheep has a hard time supporting the growing lamb and begins to eat its own tissues. The toxemia comes from ketosis, as protein is broken down for energy. The cure is either glycol or glycerin, as an energy source, to stop the need to breakdown tissue, and then of course, better nutrition. In this case the animal hadn't been grained much, and there had been a transport too, recently, adding to the stress, which also fits the diagnosis.

And, miraculously, after the glycerin was administered (snagged from Aimee's soap-making supplies), and after about a twenty minute wait, the ewe was rolled onto its legs, whereby she then got up of her own accord and ambled, albeit somewhat shakily, off to join her sisters.

I wasn't that surprised. I've become familiar with the miracle cure aspect of some of these sheep problems from our own bouts with White Muscle Disease, where the sheep and lambs are up and back to normal within ten minutes of administering the shot of BOSE. Milk fever is supposed to be a quick recovery too.

Sheep really do spend half their lives figuring out how to die, but some of the time you can save them rather miraculously too.

Very gratifying, if you can keep your nerve and do the first aider thing.

Better yet, of course, to have good systems of prophylaxis and prevention in place. We grain our pregnant sheep twice daily, so we haven't had this one yet. But we had bad luck recently with Maggie's tetanus, Larkie's vaginal prolapse, Polly's septic arthritis, and the ram-fight last fall.

Three out of four of which, were we really that experienced and deadpan self-honest to boot, we would have to admit that we could have avoided. Only Maggie's tetanus was unavoidable and not the result of one of our own mistakes.

We can say this because we gave her the vaccine as we should have right on time. But each of the other cases was partly our fault. If we hadn't tried to have two rams on one small farm, Abe would still be alive; if we didn't keep pigs on the same ground as sheep, and if we hadn't allowed Polly to get WMD by being more careful with feed, she would never have gotten septic arthritis; and if I hadn't lacked experience and confidence in my midwifing of Larkie, I would never have had my hand in her uterus so long looking for that second lamb that wasn't there.

Still, I do think we are learning from all this. And not just the sheep vet stuff. We'll be better people as a result, calmer in any emergency.

Back in the day when I was in the RAFMRS, fellside emergencies were supposed to be my job. I handled quite a few human casualties over the years on the teams, but frankly my testosterone level was so high as a kid, I was always a little nervy.

I think I'd be better at it now, after all this practice on sheep. Just not fit enough. Too old and fat.

Dirty little chick

Sometimes baby chicks get their bums plugged up. The cure is a little warm water and a gentle de-plugging.

Here Aimee is applying the treatment.

I heard the peep in the house and came into the kitchen to take a picture.

Later in the day, the lambs decided to break out through one of the cheap gates we make with lumber from our local apple ladder mill.

I guess this one needs an extra rung.

Peep panic

Here are all our peeps piled into the corner of their brooder, to avoid the camera as it appears from above, like some giant scary space alien.

It must be scary to be such a tiny little being, all full of peepy life and just wanting to survive, and then the big beings show up with feed and cameras, and yes, Aimee, cruelty incarnate, did lift the cat up to the brooder -- Shenzi the vicious hunter cat -- so the bloody-clawed feline monster could get a look.

Poor little peeps.

Aimee, who is In Charge of Peeps (ICP?), decided to branch out and try some Araucunas, in addition to the usual Golden Comets and Buff Orpingtons. She was funny to watch as I drove her back from the Farmer's Union, with her nose in the box, laughing at all the peepy antics.

I like the Buffs myself, such big fluffy, solid hens. And any hen named after an English village, even one that probably votes Tory and is now part of London's sprawl, is fine with me.

Araucunas lay blue eggs. Nice for a change.

Maybe I'll have some regular old brown eggs for breakfast, come to think of it. On toast. Doesn't look like the blue ones will be ready for a while.

Hot buggy sheep

Sheep were trying hard to keep their noses away from the blackflies today. Maine blackflies are a hazard of life here and very buggy. The easily draw blood with their bites. I've grown used to them, but even so I prefer to avoid them when I can.

The sheep dislike them too. Especially when they get on and in their noses.

So they try to keep their noses as covered as they can. The flies can only really bite them there.

This little lamb was using the feed bowl, while the rest of the flock was using numbers and the picnic table.

Sometimes the sheep get in a circle with their noses all in the middle, other times they stand with their noses up to a tree.

Sunday jobs and early heat

I guess I'd better post some pictures soon, so readers can see what I'm talking about. But we've been too busy to take any. Getting lots done, though.

Yesterday started with a bit of school work, but I didn't mind it. Editing a report due tomorrow. The hour or so I spent entering changes from another faculty member will make for a less stressful day today. Aimee and I may not have classes to teach, but there'll still be reasons we have to go to work on and off all summer, and so today is the first day of the non-class based summer schedule, and my big thing is this report due by noon. The student poster session is the morning though, and my efforts Sunday will let me go enjoy that, free of nagging worry about the report.

Feed the sheep some grain, mostly for little orphan Quinn's sake. I think if it wasn't for her I'd have cut back on the grain by now. But she seems strong and sassy, no sign of starvation even without mother Maggie's milk. Then let the woollies out to graze on the Front Lawn.

Aimee woke early for her on a weekend and went right back to her chicken tractor project.

While I put up yesterday's elm-wood. Disappointing, not even a quarter cord. But the firewood pile has begun to grow again for the first time since last fall. It has to keep growing a load at a time until we have the requisite three-four cords. This pile of well-seasoned wood, which sits in more or less full sun all summer, is much more reliably dry than any we ever buy in.

Then it was the onions. Two hundred feet of red and yellow onions is more than we've ever planted, but we do use them and they do keep. I've been wanting to gravitate away from the designer crops like Arugula, and instead plant more old-timey storage crops like plain old onions. It may not make economic sense to grow spuds and onions, but by golly we do eat them, and it's nice to eat your own food in December or February. Worth much more than $1.99 a pound to me at least.

I never eat the arugula anyway. Aimee does, of course. I do sometimes eat salad, but usually right off the plant in the garden is when I like to eat it.

My Grandad the English master gardener would have been proud of me. I actually used a string for the onions to keep the row straight. But it does make for easy weeding.

Then I gave the rest of the garden the second tilling. The first tilling, with the Kubota tractor occurs after the compost is spread, to help it break down faster. The second tilling, with the rototiller, is to make a nice soil consistency with the compost now broken down, and to kill the weeds that have germinated since the first. The "new" recycled motor on the tiller worked fine except for dripping a little gas from the carb, a real slow drip, like a dewdrop on a cold nose. Gas, otherwise poisonous to plants, evaporates immediately especially when it's hot, so this small amount didn't bother me, but I would be smart to order a new carb for this thing. And if I ever see another nine horse motor that might be cannibalized, I should get it too. This one won't last forever.

I even used the tiller to do the uppermost patch of the terrace garden, where a second's delay with the controls would undoubtedly send the beast over the edge. But no worries. Tilling on the edge. The beast responds well to its controls. Better than a Toyota, and a lot cheaper.

Aimee came back from grocery shopping, and I cut some bits of plywood for her chicken-tractor masterpiece, which must surely end up in the Louvre. Then a short nap.

The afternoon was spent sealing leaky guttering, planting the flower bed in front of the house, fixing a fence around the same because the chickens have claimed it for dust bath central, and fixing the sheep fence down on the front lawn where some silly woolly knocked it down last year.

All in all a steady day's work. Enough to keep the wolf from the door. Warm, though, 75 degrees or more. More like late June than early May.

El Nino at work.

It was warm and muggy out there still this morning, too. A nice fragrant warm night, as well. I doubt it dropped below 60 F. No need for the greenhouse heater.

If it's like this in May, what will it be like in July?

Freedom Friday

Friday was the last day of class. What a relief.

Don't get me wrong. I love teaching and I love my job, although I know I complain a lot about some of its more stressful sides. But college teaching is stressful. You're in front of an audience trying to deal with something important, and you need to deliver. I imagine stage acting or giving political speeches is similar.

The other thing is, there's a place you have to be, several times each day, no ifs, ands, or buts. You can't easily take a week's vacation, or schedule a day for the dentist, or call in for a comp day if your car won't start. You have to be there, ready to go, with new material prepared and rehearsed. It's the only way to handle the job responsibly.

So when the last day of class rolls around and summer is here with the vastly greater freedom of schedule, and that three-and-a-half month vista of stress-free days ahead, there's a great feeling of relief. Saturday morning was like that. Like a birthday, or a vacation.

I think I got into the habit of summer when I was a college student myself, at the University of Montana. I was older, having been in the service, probably not unlike one of those mildly creepy, non-trad, older-guys-around-campus that these days make me routinely suspicious when I see them around our eighteen-year old girls. An escapee from normal wage labor, I had been used to working eight hours or more, five days or more a week, with the usual vacation time and so on, so when my first college summer rolled around, the summer of 1990, I was admittedly at a bit of a loss.

But I rose to the occasion. I grew a big garden on an allotment (community garden), put up a lot of veggies, did some fix-up work on my rental house, walked the dogz (Liza Jane, the world's best dog ever!), went fishing, climbed some mountains and otherwise spent time outdoors (oh, those Montana hot springs!), wrote some articles for an environmental paper, did some search and rescue training, and generally pleased myself. That summer set up a pattern that I keep up today, more or less, with the few minor differences being that I work on our own farm, not a community garden, and I do a lot of wind power work.

Aimee has her own pattern involving the greenhouse, gardening, raising chicks, doing marine research, guest lecturing, grading AP biology, occasional trips to the shore, and the like.

So what did I do on my first day of the summer vacation? I worked my butt off, of course. That's what we do. It's just a different pace, and a different kind of work, and a whole lot less stressful.

Mostly I think because you can see the difference right there.

So first I raked up some branches and twigs and trash where the chickens have been spreading stuff out of one of my brush piles that is on top of one of the old trash middens we have around here, some of which must date back to the Romans. (My hope is that brush rots and buries the trash naturally. It's illegal to bury trash in Maine, but it's not illegal to pile brush on top of someone else's fifty-year old trash.) Then I moved the creep feeder to the sheep's security pen from the North Paddock, so we could use it to make sure wee motherless Quinn gets her kibble.

That was a good start.

So then I cut more sumac out of the New Paddock. I've developed a severe dislike for this tree, because it has so few uses. This is probably short-sightedness on my part. Apparently this particular variety, staghorn sumac (not poison sumac), can be used for firewood, but I'm not bothering. It's supposed to burn fast. And it's not a normal firewood species in this part of the world. I don't want to risk it. Perhaps it's just the name, too much like the poison variety, which puts out a chemical weapon if you burn it, a substance that can sear your lungs. Guilt by association, I know. But firewood is too important to us for me to want to try something very new. I might save a couple of pieces and experiment, but not a whole bunch. So I'm piling it up as waste, just to get it out of the way.

I don't burn brush piles, although most folks do here in Maine. Brush piles eventually rot down, while burning is dangerous, smoky and can start forest fires. And they are always about half the size after the first winter, because the snow pushes them down. It's not like we don't have room for them. Small critters, squirrels and deer mice, use them for cover. After two sessions of sumac-cutting over two weekends, we have a much larger area of brush free-grass in this paddock, and Thorndike's grassy ruin is much more visible.

According to neighbor Hamilton, this is a collection of outbuildings, not the main mansion.

I have a bit more cutting to do in this area, but not much. And the power line to our neighbor's house is now much more free of brush, which helps us because when the trees short out their line, our power goes out too.

One big cherry tree is all wrapped around the power line, and I don't know what to do for the best, so I left it. When I get a chance, I'll talk to Ham. Best thing to do is probably to call the power company, but it's his land, or at least his mom's.

It's definitely his line.

So that took me up until 10am. Car Talk time. So I listened while cleaning up the shop, which needed to be done just because, but also since Aimee has a project to do, a new chicken tractor. Her exacting nature with these kinds of projects doesn't allow for the natural disorderliness of my shop, which is usually playing host to a half-dozen different jobs at once. I put tools away and made space for her and swept up.

I also exercised the generator. That's a funny phrase to use, since it sounds a bit like like walking a dog, but if you have a generator that you don't use regularly, you must exercise it. You check the oil, start it, run it, test the power output, shut it down. Only this time there was no power.

Cursing once more the feckless people who have occupied our spare house for nearly four years now and cost us thousands of dollars because they won't make any contribution to the costs, and because we're too nice to kick them out (there's a kid involved -- I won't be that guy who made a kid homeless), and who almost wrecked this and another generator we provided them with for free (the Bale House is off-grid), I began to take it apart, pushing wires around, looking for a loose connection. Something was loose, but I don't know what, since it powered back up during these efforts, and so I decided it was fixed and put it back together.

This family is supposed to be out of there this spring, in fact they no longer live there, just keep their stuff there. I will be able to get the place back, one way or another. I gave them until May to get their shit out. After that, it will be dumpster Sunday. Then I'll have to make repairs, fix all their damage, and find a more responsible tenant.

Or not. One option is to use it for guests and visitors, a family camp. For old students and family members and ex RAFMRS to use, for free, or a donation to the cause. Why not? It's in a nice woodsy setting, great for walks and deer-hunting, fifteen miles from the Maine coast, very rustic. There's even some fishing. But it sure is buggy. Mosquito city until August. One reason we moved out. And the folks who stay there would have to be self-reliant, 'cos I'm not going to blast over there every five minutes to empty the compost toilet or pump gravity-fed water. Those off-the-grid systems are not for the faint-hearted.

Those morons who borrowed (stole is more accurate) this house for so long kicked in a wardrobe door! An obvious boot-hole. Imagine that! How shitty is that? To borrow someone's house and kick in a door?

Anyway, back to the thread. After fixing up the generator, I sharpened my chainsaw, the nice new one. Then it was time to cut down the dead elm in the North Paddock, which had succumbed to the Dutch Elm, and so had to go or it might infect others. That made about a quarter of a cord. Elm makes "fair" firewood, according to the Forest Trees of Maine, our bible for such things and free online, but it's bloody murder to split. All twisted up inside, it used to be employed for wooden bowls and wagon-wheel hubs, because it makes good circular shapes and doesn't split easily. So I don't split it. Not needing any wagon wheels around here, it's better to leave it whole and use the biggest rounds in the wood furnace, where they'll burn all night. The door of that thing, The Beast in the Garage, will easily admit a foot-wide chunk of elm.

The elm quickly dulled my new saw blade. I will need to buy a couple extra blades so I can get them professionally sharpened and keep spare blades. But I do like having a more powerful saw.

So then I planted the potato patch, which took me up to dinner time. Too tired to plant the onions, so left those for today.

Some vacation, huh? But it felt good to get so much done after months of too much schoolwork on the weekends.

Aimee's chicken tractor looks pretty good. It will be picture perfect, of course. Everything she ever does is. How come she married a dodgy bodging geezer like me?

Photos of the world's prettiest chicken tractor to come. Something to look forward to.