We made made a short walk along the river. There's no ice and not much snow melting in the high-country so the water was clear and low. In another month or two it'll be swollen and cloudy with run-off from the mountains.
We made a side trip to see our son at work. He's working at a wood pellet mill during the winter. He mainly drives the Bobcat to bring pallets of wood pellets to the crane so that they can be loaded onto the train cars. The crane picks up the large bags of pellets and dangles them over the opening in the train car. The guy on top of the car opens the chute in the bottom and the pellets fall into the car for transport.
This is our youngest son, his wife and Susan. It was interesting to watch them at work. We headed home soon afterwards, stopping at Fortine to fill water jugs on the way. We had to chain up the Cherokee to make it up the hill a mile from our house. We've had some warm weather and sunshine lately and it's beginning to melt the ice on the road. The hill is a different story. It has a lot of shade so the ice there is still thick and hard. It also had water running down it which made it even slicker than normal. We made it up about 20 feet in four-wheel-drive with studded tires then backed down and put the chains on. No problem getting up after that!
Susan dug around in the toys stored in the shed and found this car for Scott to play on. Of course the first thing he did was roll it on the side and play with the wheels. He likes to watch them spin freely. It's making us a little nervous. We hope he gets over it by the time he can drive real cars.
The next thing he showed us was how he figured out how to get the suspenders loose on his overalls. Great! We already went through this once when he figured out how to take his diaper off by himself!
Scott's also learned a new way to help grandma wash diapers. He likes pulling them through the wringer when she's finished washing them. He's also big enough now to get into the wash tub from the chair. Life just keeps getting more and more interesting around here.
One of our deep cycle batteries got dropped awhile back. I've tested it and it still tests okay so I fixed the crack in the top and we're going to use it for the solar powered, electric fence charger. We have one that needs a six volt battery. Once this one is charged it should last all year.
I bought a knife at the thrift store for a dollar and thought I'd try cutting it down some for a camp knife. I've heard so many people say a short knife blade is "best" so I thought I'd give it a try. It's about 3 1/4 inches long now. We'll see how I like it.
I'd already shortened this Old Hickory knife but I didn't like the curve at the tip. While I was in the shop I went ahead and refiled the curve. It looks about right now. It's going to be my hunting knife for field dressing and skinning big game. All I need now is a dead deer to try it out on.
Some of the kids were up on Friday. It was a beautiful day so we went outside and shot the crossbows a while. They traded off crossbows over the afternoon. This is Stephen (Scott's dad) with the cheap one. We paid about a hundred dollars for it new. It has a lousy ... REALLY HARD ... trigger pull but shoots very accurately and is light weight. The scope is an old scope made for an SKS. It's a poor scope for a rifle but works great on the crossbow.
Victor has the newer, compound crossbow. It's got a great trigger pull and is fast shooting. It's accurate but on Saturday it had some problems. After about ten shots the scope's cross hairs fell down inside the scope so it was kind of "point and shoot" after that. The safety also has some issues. If you have the safety on and try firing it the safety holds. But when you push the safety to "fire" the crossbow shoots the bolt. The way to keep it from happening is to pull back on the string after you try firing it with the safety on. Then it functions correctly. I should probably contact the manufacturer about that. The crossbow itself is fast but heavy. I plan on doing some gopher hunting with them this summer. I've found out that I can cut my broken or bent arrows and shoot them out of the crossbows. It's a lot cheaper than buying new ones all the time. Crossbows are kind of hard on bolts (arrows).
We've both been working on books this week. We spent half a day going through old photos for my book. I took the print photos and scanned them into the computer to use later. That took awhile. There were over a hundred of them. Susan has three of her short PAW books up on Kindle now. She sold over twenty the first three days. We're still learning how to post them and have had to make a couple of changes on the formats since she first put them up. We think we've got it figured out now though. ... We hope!
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