10 - 11 September, 2010 Anniversary, dog, and chainsaw part.

Our anniversary was on the tenth so we decided to do a stealth trip into Kalispell to go out to eat, do some shopping, and watch a movie. We didn't quite follow the plan.  When we got to Kalispell we stopped at the theater to see waht time the afternoon movie began.  After that we went to eat at a favorite Chinese restaurant.  Our next stop was at the county animal shelter to look into getting another dog.  We ended up with three favorites and finally narrowed it down to one.  (It was hard to not take all three.)  The deciding factor was that when you put your hand into the cage with this one it would lean against the wire so you could pet him better.  She had some other good traits too but this one was unique to her.  She was a stray picked up on the highway.  Estimated age is one-year-old.  I think she's a little younger than that and will still get bigger so we'll see who's right.  She was adopted out once by an older couple but returned the next day for being to "wild."  She's young but has had some experience riding in a car before and someone has worked with her a little bit.  We think someone got her as a puppy and dumped her when she got past the puppy stage.  Once we got her home and let her run a bit she's not quite as hyper.  She's extrememly affectionate and comes when called even when she's chasing the cat.  She seems to get along well with the chickens and goat although we'll be watching her close for awhile to be sure.  She's already taken up ownership.  When our son got home later in the evening she almost chased him back into his truck before we made some introductions.  We spent quite awhile at the animal shelter and never did get to the movie and didn't make as many stops in town either.  It wasn't just the dog.  The starter is going out on the Cherokee so we stopped at the reloading supply store (Brass and Bullets in Kalispell) and I bought more powder, primers and bullets.  We filled the car with gasoline, made two other stops and headed home.

The dog kept wanting to drive.

Susan finally got her to sit still long enough for a picture.  We named him "Odie" because when she's panting her tongue almost touches the ground like the dog in the Garfield cartoon.

Dog meets goat, goat meets dog.  The goat got scared and all the hair on his back stood up and he just kind of puffed up like a cat.  I didn't know goats did that.

The dog did whatever the goat did.  When the goat reared up the dog did too.  When the goat got down low the dog followed it's lead.  It would have been good on a video camera.

Cat and dog meet ... from a distance.  The cat wants us to take it back.

The upper picture is of the onions we diced before drying them.  The bottom phot is of the onions in the same bowl after dehydrating them.

The two pictures above were taken within less than a minute of each other.  This cat sleeps in the oddest positions.

This picture was taken this morning.

Our son took part in the fire department's tribute to those who died on Sept. 11, 2001 today.  He and the volunteer firefighters with him spent several hours out there on a cold cloudy day.  (He's the tall one.)

Susan got the future bathroom walls painted today.

I ordered the parts for my Stihl chainsaw over the internet.  The local saw shop wanted $110.00 for a coil.  I got this one on ebay for $40.99, shpg. included.

This is the old coil.  It's located under the cover for the recoil starter.  It's easy to find but but nt so easy to get out!

I couldn't find my set of brass (non-magnetic) feeler guages (I think my oldest son borrowed them.) so I tried different thicknesses of paper to arrive at the air space between the coil and flywheel.  It turned out that an index card was just the right thickness.  I didn't have the right specifications so I measured the air gap on the old coil and will set the new one the same.

I had to disassemble the saw to change the coil.  You can see the magnets in the flywheel from this angle.

The new coil installed and the air gap set.

The plate between the carburetor and cylinder head installed.  I used a gold tee to plug off the fule line so it wouldn't leak while I was working on it.

The handle housing and carburetor installed.

The safety bar mounted to the frame and the handle housing screwed in place.

The bar and chain re-installed along with the muffler.  It's now ready to start.  It started easy as it should so tomorrow I'll give it a good workout if it isn't raining.

Air filter and cover installed.  This picture should have been before the picture above.

The Stihl started and ran great so I decided to put a new chain on the Homelite.  Only problem ... the new chain we bought is the wrong one.  I took the old cahin off wrapped it in a paper towel and put it in the car.  We'll just take it with us next time we're in town.

Saturday, Sept. 11

We headed in to Eureka this morning.  We checked the mail on the way through Fortine and we had checks waiting for a couple of articles we wrote and also had an envelope from Primitive Archer with five copies of the Oct./Nov. issue in it.  An article I wrote on making the Flemish Twist bowstring is in this issue and when they publish an article they send five copies of the magazine to the author.  One f the things I like about this magazine is that they do a very good job with the pictures that accompany/support the article.  This one is no exception. 

We bought a bag of alfalfa pellets for the goat for the times we'll be gone all day and need something to feed him when we can't let him out to browse.  We can't leave him out unless we're here becasue he sometimes get tangled up in the lead rope and we worry about predators getting him if he's alone outside the pen.  It isn't unusual to have coyotes, bears, mountain lions and wolves in the area and all of them like the way goats taste.  We've had friends lose livestock to large predators (usually wolves or mountain lions) and would rather not have that happen to ours.

We went to the grocery store.  We were interested in the bananas, ice-cream and hamburger they had on sale.  When you can meat you miss out on grilled hamburgers so we buy hamburger on occassion. I tried to get starter bushings and brushes for the starter on the Cherokee but the parts stores in town can't even get them anymore.  They'd be happy to sell me a remanufactured one for $73.00 and up though.  I could fix this one for $10.00 if I can find the parts.  I'll check on Ebay tomorrow.  We stopped at the hardware store and bought a new chain for the Homelite saw.  It was the wrong one so we'll take it back and they'll hopefully have the right one.  The hardware store in Columbia Falls could make up their own chain which made life easier for their customers.  We made a quick stop at the health food store for some stuff then headed for Fortine.  We made a stop at the Fortine Merchantile (a small  grocery store or large convenience store depending upon how you look at it) and I bought some files for sharpening saw chain (they have the best price around) and Susan got some tortilla chips.  We then headed for home.  We had the dog with us this morning and had to do some training on manners.  She seems to thin she should get out every time the door is opened and wasn't waiting to see if anyone was in it.  We had her doing much better by the time we got home.

After getting home I replaced the coil on the chainsaw and Susan painted the room.  We are suscpicious the dog may have stolen and ate some eggs from the chicken house.  I was sure the lower nest box had several eggs in it when I let the chickens out but when I went to gather them later the lower box was empty.  I got three out of the uppoer box but there were probably six or more in the lower box.  I think from now on when I let the chickens out I'll collect the eggs then.

9 September, 2010 Wood splitting and stacking...

Another overcast, internittently raining days.

Susan is cutting up onions so we can dry them.

Here's a picture of the whole operation including the cat who was under my chair supervising.

The onions in a big bowl ready for the dehydrator.

Susan caulking up the corner under the window.

These are dried squash peelings.  We'll feed them to the goat in the winter.  We already checked to see if he liked eating them (and he did).  We also dry the onion and rutabaga tops for goat food.

Me cutting the alfalfa into smaller sections to store it in old dog food bags.

Stuffing it in the bags as tightly as I can.

The goat tethered out to browse.  He seems happiest when he's eating.

Splitting firewood.  I seem to do a lot of that in the fall.  It takes about 10 days of work to get the wood cut split and stacked for the year.  Not many people can heat their home that cheaply.  Back when I worked a "real" job we spent a lot more than two weeks of pay to heat our home for a year.

Yesterday it rained most of the day.  In the morning Susan and I diced onions for dehydrating.  Tristan got sent homne from work at the golf course due to the rain and planned on running his generator all day so we decided to take advantage of the electricity and run the dehydrator.   The rain slacked off for a couple of hours in the afternoon so Susan worked in garden awhile pinching off blossoms on squash plants (they won't have time to mature before the frost gets them), digging more hills of potatoes and doing other things in the garden.  I put a couple of strands of wire up for training the grape vines and stacked some of the wood I'd split in the wood shed.  We watched a movie (Shallow Hal) in the evening.

Today Susan took the carpeting and padding out of the future bathroom, cleaned the wlls and floor and did some caulking around the windows.  We're ready to put some sealer on the floor next.  I cut the alfalfa I'd cut a couple of weeks ago into shorter sections and packed it into old dog food sacks for storage.  We'll feed it to the goat in the winter.  I stacked the rest of the pre-split wood in the wood shed then split more and stacked it in the wood shed.  Susan fixed tuna cassarole for supper and we're both working on our blogs on our computers.  We each have laptop and netbook computers.  We use the netbooks most of the time because they use so little power.  We use the laptops mainly for viewing netflix online movies.  A little while ago it was raining.  Now the sun is shining.

7 September, 2010 Tuesday

The first two pictures are from the brag page (that's the page grandparents have reserved for pictures of their grandkids).

These are pictures of Anna (our youngest grandchild) taken in "Playland" at McDonalds for our daughter's birthday.  The grandkids love going there.

I was doing Sudoku puzzles by the wood stove the other morning and the cat wouldn't leave me alone ... so, we gave it the puzzle book and pen.

This is Plantain in the yard.

Susan picked a bunch of it to dry.

These are dried peelings from the squash we dehydrated earlier.  We'll put them away for goat food for use later this year.

Susan has been watching some rose hips with plans to pick them next week.  Unfortunately, the goat got loose and ate them all.

Monday was laundry day for me.  There was supposed to be sushine and there was ... for about 30 minutes.  I ended up taking them off the line when it began raining and they finished drying in the house.

Susan made a trip into town and got to meet one of ur children's new kitten. 

We've done some bedroom switching in the cabin and this room is now going to be our "bathroom."  We need to take up the carpet and seal the floor then I'll install the composting toilet and our laundry tubs and wringer.  We'll be able to do laundry inside this winter. The shower is already in the corner on the left.

Susan found an anarchist in the house while cleaning out the bedroom.

I took Sunday off.  It was cold and rainy all day and we couldn't get anythng done outside anyway.  Tristan ran the generator and we watched a couple of movies in the late afternoon.  I made the high bid on a dozen muskrat fur stretchers on Ebay.  They've never been used and I got them for about $15.00 less than the best price I could find anywhere else.  The shipping was most of the cost.  I kept running out of them last year so this should be enough to keep up with the catches I make.  On Monday I washed clothes and fixed the Craftsman chain saw.  I took it apart expecting to find a cracked fuel line but it turned out to be a plate that was loose betwen the carburetor and the cyinder head.  I tightened it up and put the whole thing back together again and tried it out.  It worked good!  I sharpened the chain and filed the depth guages down while I was working on it.  Susan was busy picking and drying more herbs and dehydrating more eggs.  She has around 20 dozen eggs dehydrated now and wating for winter when the chickens stop laying.  The chickens are finished molting so egg production is back up to five or more per day.  (We have seven hens.) 

Susan went to town Tuesday to take care of some things.  I stayed home and worked on a couple of articles.  I put the goat out on a tether for a few hours.  After about two hours he got his collar loose from the lead rope and wandered off.  When I found him (its a good thing he's white and easy to see) he thought it would be fun to run away.  I didn't chase him because I didn't want him to think it was a game and he eventually came to me.  That didn't mean I wasn't angry enough to look up some recipes for barbecued  goat though.  I put the lead on him and put him back in the pen.  I took him back out again a couple of hours later with a new locking system on the lead rope.  It rained at times all day long.  The solar panels never did get the batteries fully charged and the only things on during the day were the fridge and my netbook computer.

I had Susan pick up a couple of pounds of smokeless powder in town.  It came to $47.00 total.  The last time I bought gunpowder it was $18.00 a pound! 

5 September, 2010 firewood, wheat harvest, chainsaws, and rain

It's a good day to catch up on the blog!  Cloudy and cold outside with intermittent rain and hail.

 

This is one of the areas where I'm cutting firewood.  It's been logged but there's still a lot of stuff left on the ground.  About half of what I'm cutting is green so we'll put it in the back of the wood shed to season until we need it.  Generally once it's cut into firewood length it will be dry enough to burn in 3 to 4 months. I usually cut about a pickup load a day.  It can take me anywhere from four to six hours to drive there, cut and load the pickup and return home.  Most of it depends on how easy the wood was to get to.  What is best is a large dead Larch or Fir tree that you can drop on the road.  Unfortunately, everyone is looking for those so they're not that easy to find. 

Tristan went with me Saturday to cut wood.  While out we stopped at this cave.  It's along an old logging road that was closed off but is now open while they log the area.  The cavern where he's standing is about 8 X 10 feet long/wide and would probably be about six feet to the roof if it was cleaned out.  Packrats have made it their home at times so it smells bad and has a lot of small branches, pine cones and assorted trash in it.

This is the inside of our wood shed after we put the last load in it.  We're not quite half full yet.  The wood in there now is mostly green although there's some seasoned wood in it.  We usually split it before storing it but green wood is difficult to split so this will have to wait until it's dry and we get ready to use it.  The wheel barrow in the foreground has alfalfa in it.  We still need to tie it into a bale to store until we need it.

Our outside pile of wood waiting to be split is growing too.  The dry wood is being thrown here and will be split and stacked in the front half of the wood shed where it will be used first.

I've had my share of problems with the chainsaws this fall.  The coil went bad on the Stihl (my primary saw).  I called the local saw shop and they wanted $110.00 for it and it would be almost a week to get it.  I checked on Ebay and found a new one for $40.99 and they paid shipping.  It will be here in about a week too so the Stihl is downf or repairs.  I took our 18 in. Homelite out next.  It cuts fine but is slower and the bar is 6 inches shorter than the Stihl.  I went to replace the chain and found out that the new chains we bought for it don't fit.  So ... since I'm not going into town just to buy a new chain ... I began using the old Craftsman saw.  It was made by Homelite and cuts well but uses more gas and oil than the new Homelite.  Both have 18 inch bars but the chains we bought will fit the Craftsman saw so I can replace the chain as needed.  Tristan and I took it out Saturday and about half way into a full load on the truck it began having problems starting.  Once you got it running it was fine but if you shut it off for a couple of minutes it didn't want to start again.  It acted like a fuel restriction somewhere but as I fiddled with it I came to the conclusion is has an air leak in the fuel line.  Tristan was using my MiniMac with the 14 inch bar to trim limbs.   When it gets hot it won't start.  Probably a bad coil but the part costs more than the saw is worth so I usually use it for little trim jobs at home.  I took it along in case the bigger saw got pinched so I could use it to relieve the pressure to release the big saw.  We had about 3/4 of a load and both saws were acting up so We headed for home before I threw both saws off a cliff somewhere.  Looks like we'll be going into town soon for fuel line and saw chain.

This is one of the second year carrots that have gone to seed.

We've had a couple of hard frosts this week.  Even though we covered everything except the carrots, strawberries and raspberries the frost burned the tops of our tomatoes, squash (pictured here), beans and corn.

Our corn isn't doing well (which isn't unusual this far north and this high in elevation) but we've let it grow so we can cut it up for fodder for the goat.  We have squash planted in there too.  The cold season stuff is doing great.

We'll get some apples from our apple trees this year.  The top one is doing well.  A rabbit girdled the other trees during the winter while we were gone down south.  The top tree had very little damage from the rabbit.  The bottom one was badly chewed up but still had a few apples on it.  The other trees are in worse shape with one being dead as the proverbial doornail.

Our raspberry bushes are growing well but producing little.  We had to trim a bunch of the vines out last year because of disease so what you see is mostly vines that grew new this summer.  They won't produce until the second year.  Usually we pick gallons of raspberries not counting those we snack on anytime were near enough to pick a few.

Susan was cutting wheat and took the goatling into the pen with her so it could graze.  It's standing where we had soybeans and peas and sunflowers planted a couple of years ago.  The deer got in one night in the fall and ate all of the peas and beans right down to the ground.  They ate a couple of the sunflowers.  Susan came out and sprayed the remaining sunflowers with pepper spray (the kind you use on bears).  The next morning we saw where the deer had eaten one of the seed heads then spit it out and stomped its feet all over the place.  It was nice to think we caused them at least a little bit of distress for their transgression (of course we put a couple of them into canning jars later during hunting season too).

This is part of the wheat we grew.  There's a little rye mixed in too.  It's all volunteer now.  We planted wheat as an experiment a few years ago just to be sure we could grow it but some of the seed fell to the ground during harvest and it came up the next year .... and again the next year ... and again ... well, you get the point. Same thing with the rye. 

She clips the tops of the heads off and puts them in a bucket.  Later we'll thresh and winnow out the grain and through the leftovers to the chickens.  They'll scratch around on it and find a little more we missed.  We've used it for people and chicken food.

Susan's digging potatoes.  It's a joy to play in the dirt in the garden now.  It's so soft and crumbly from years of piling on compost.  When we first work it up it's mostly clay and rocks.

Some of the potatoes and a few volunteer carrots that were excavated too.

This is Shepherds Purse Susan dried.  She stripped off the leaves and saved them in a jar for later use.

We made a quick trip into town last night to get the mail, fill gas cans for use in the pickup and chainsaws, dump trash and fill water jugs.  She made sphagetti in the solar cooker yesterday and made dinner rolls to go with it.  Very, very good!

2 September, 2010 Wood cutting and onion harvests ...

The cat usually wants to "cuddle" when you're using the computer or reading or any other time she can be in the way by laying on your lap.

We save the seed from our carrots.  (You have to leave some carrots in the ground in the fall because they don't form seed heads until the second year.)  You have to carefully put the seed heads into the bag because the seed fall out very easily. 

Once they're bagged you can shake the bag and the seed will fall to the bottom.  Now just close up the bag and save it for next planting season.

Susan harvested the final third of our onions today. 

I cut firewood today.  I had a little over a cord on the truck. About half of it was green and half was seasoned.  When Tristan got home from work he helped unload it. We put the green wood in the back of the wood shed and threw the dry wood on the splitting pile.  It was cut in the logged area on state land south of our cabin.

Tristan fueling up his generator.  He usually runs it a couple of times a week to play video games.  The game and TV set-up draws too much power to run it on the batteries and inverter.  He's a volunteer fireman so his radio goes wherever he goes.

This is the squash Susan put in the dehydrator last night.

This is what it looked like before drying.

I cut firewood today while Susan stayed home and worked in the garden and around the house.  She pulled the rest of the onions and dug some potatoes, did some laundry and other things and boiled potatoes in the solar cooker for supper.  We had mashed potatoes and gravy with venison chunks for supper (along with corn and applesauce).

I left to cut wood in the morning.  On the way out I noticed that the neighbor had dropped off more hay for his buffalo.  On the way down the hill I saw that some had fallen off his trailer on the way up the hill so I stopped and loaded the bales in the PU and drove them back up to the hay stack.  It wouldn't be like him to leave the hay on the side of the road like that so I'm wondering if he had someone else drop the hay off.  Later I'll shoot an email over to him to find out.  I met a neighbor going out and we stopped to chat a bit.  He was going in for a dentist appointment.  I was glad I was going to cut wood.  That's a lot better than getting a tooth pulled.

I tried using my Stihl saw this morning and after about twenty minutes it started acting up again so I guess I'll order a coil for it.  It doesn't have any spark once it warms up.  A new plug did not fix it.  I cut most of the wood today with my Homelite with the 18 inch bar.  It does okay but it kind of knaws through large logs whereas the Stihl just powers through them.

After I got home I got my bow out and my broadhead arrows and did some shooting.  Arrow flight was perfect so I just need to touch up the broadheads and I'm ready to hunt.  Bow season for deer and elk opens this weekend.