We went yard saling Sturday morning. One of the yard sales in town advertised a bunch of reloading stuff at a great price. Right! They wanted the same prices as the stores charged and didn't have anything I was looking for anyway. The only thing we bought there was an electric fence charger. Later on in the morning we bought the following items like the cast iron cookware, butcher knife, manual can opener and coffe percolator.
One of the things we bought was Magic Chef electric dehydrator. It's output is less than our other dehydrators but for five dollars we couldn't pass it up. It was still in the original packaging and had never been used. In this picture Susan is cutting some plastic screen to put down on the trays. The grid is so open that the huckelberries fall through.
I picked up some used archery equipment. There were ten aluminum arrows, two bows (one PSE take-down, 60 in. long, 50 lb. draw weight, one Bear Grizzly, 58 in. long and a 45 lb draw weight), a three fingered shooting glove and a recurve bow case. All were in excellent condition. I plan on selling the bows on ebay and keeping the case, arrows and glove. I should come out way ahead on the deal. The Bear bow should bring as much as I paid for the entire package.
Saturday evening our son stopped at the post office and his pickup wouldn't start when he came back out. He walked over to the Fortine Merchantile (one mile each way) and bought new battery cable ends and replaced them but it still wouldn't start. I drove our Cherokee down there and we couldn't get it to start with jumper cables either. We towed it over to the fire dept. parking lot and left it for the night. We took another battery down on Sunday morning and installed it but the starter still wouldn't crank the engine over. I had him take the starter off and we ran juper cables to it to bench test it. It worked but sounded gritty like the bearing/bushings were shot. We tried it several times and it worked every time. I had him take a screwdriver and pry on the flexplate to turn the motor over to be sure it wasn't seized up. It wasn't. So ... we tried hooking the jumper cables to the starter again. It worked fine the first time but the second time it didn't. The jumper cables immediately got hot enough to melt the plastic insulation on the clamps. We put everything away until we could take it back to the parts store on Monday. He'd just bought the starter three months ago and it was still under warranty.
It felt cold out Saturday night so Susan and I covered the garden up with tarps, old blankets. old sleeping bags and sheets. It was good that we did. It was 35 degrees on Sunday morning when the sun came up. The lower picture is of Susan uncovering plants on Sunday morning.
I fed the buffalo and cut some poles in the buffalo pen on Sunday. These are anywhere from 15 to 20 feet long. We'll use them for various projects around the house. There were a lot left so I'll probably cut more later.
This morning we (our son and I) took the starter in to the NAPA store in town. They tested it on their machine and it passed. I offered to take the back off of it and test the armature with an ohmeter to prove it had a bad bar on the commutator but they finally believed it was bad and gave him another starter. We drove back to Fortine and he put it on the truck and it worked great. This afternoon Susan and I went to check out another huckleberry patch. It was pretty well picked clean. We got enough huckleberries for a pie and that was about all. The deer pictured above were about a mile from home.
We stopped at the county dump site Saturday and found some bed frames. We're going to enlarge our solar array and I need the frames to make the frame larger. I also changed the oil and filter on the motorcycle and the new generator. We've been working on cleaning out storage space and cleaning out the U-haul truck so we can begin making it into a camper. We caught another packrat this morning and reset the trap in a different building. Susan peeled the last crate of last year's potatoes and I sliced them up. She cooked the slices while we went to get the starter. They're ready to be dehydrated now.
It's been one of those weeks when we were busy most of the time but looking back it's difficult to see a lot of progress!
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