Catch Up

Looks like I may have a day to breathe and take stock of what I need to be working on.

Tried to start haying yesterday, only to run into a couple of different snags. Life on the farm! Either one of the problems on their own would have interrupted the work, but happening together it may take a bit to get everything up and running again. On my end, when I was dumping a load a hay that I had chopped into John's truck, it over-balanced (hay too wet and heavy??) and the arm, that hinges at the back of the wagon and helps the 'roof' open and close, broke off. While I did dump one more load after that, continuing with it in that condition would probably cause the one on the front of the wagon to break as well. There really wasn't any question of whether or not we did that because at about the same time the loading ramp that feeds into the blower, that blows the haylage up into the silo, tried hard to self-destruct! This ramp has a moving floor, so that John backs up to it with the truck that has a dump box and dumps his load. The moving floor then moves it up the ramp and into the blower. I'm not exactly sure what happened (and Dan is out trying to spray chemicals, so I can't ask him) but I think the feeder chain must have gotten caught on the 'floor' and everything came to a halt. The fix? Tear the whole thing apart, remove the floor (which consists of a (rotting) plywood base, covered with plastic sheeting to keep the silage/haylage from sticking) and replace with new plywood (which we were able to pick up at Menard's last night, in under the wire time-wise). I'm not sure if they can used the same plastic or not. I don't think the dump box will be near the problem to fix, but that almost sounds like a dare, doesn't it?

Over the last couple of days I got most of the yard mowed with the push mower, the store room pretty much finished up, laundry caught up (at least it was yesterday...) and did some calling and research on goats. We may go and look at some goats, but not sure if we will get any now or not. A lot going on at present to give it much thought or time. We are thinking of converting our little storage shed into goat shelter, and construct a fence around that and the trees in the back corner of our lot. Like I said, "thinking".

With my ''break" today, I may head upstairs and try to sort through some of the stuff in the girls' old room. No time like the present, so I better get at it. It's dump day today, so I will soon have an empty dumpster to work with...