A Sunny Day in January

A rare warm day in January, good opportunity to haul a tank of water. We've had so much cloudy, cold weather that when the sun comes out and the temp hits 20 degrees it seems like spring.
I fired up the "Oldsmobile truck" and headed out for the community well . About an eight and a half mile trip on good roads so I recorded some of the sights and sounds along the way. Water Hauling

As I crossed the mighty Jumping Deer creek I thought of how my grandfather had to haul water from just a little ways downstream from where I was crossing, During the winters of the 1930s sometimes the wells at home would run dry and there was no water for the house or cattle. So with a wooden tank on sleighs pulled by a team of horses he would make the approximate 3 mile trip to the creek to dip water out of a hole in the ice to fill the tank. Slow hard work and cold riding. Get home and dump the water into the now dry well at the farm and hope it lasted a few days.
The irony of this situation was that 3 years after my grandfather died, an excellent supply of water was found just a few feet from the house, only 40 feet below the surface. Too late to benefit him but his son and grandsons certainly appreciated it.
Nowadays I only have to haul drinking water as the well water is too high in minerals for human consumption. The cattle have no complaints though.

Remembering 2002

Grain Annex Move
Cold, frosty day here in Sask. Time to do a little more video transfer to digital before I head out to feed cattle. This video I taped February 28 of 2002 showing the biggest building move that I have ever seen. This grain annex was built about 1975 and saw a lot of grain put through before the elevator closed down. All the other grain elevators in town were demolished but this one was sold to a buyer about 3 towns west so a massive move was in order. It took a lot of skilful planning and time to get this huge building up on wheels and then moving without tipping over. Obviously winter time with it's frozen solid ground was an advantage for solid footing. They used an elaborate setup of hydraulic controlled wheels to maintain the level of the building while moving over uneven ground and it worked well.
At -3 degrees F it was cold for man and machinery as you can see by the heavy exhaust clouds from all the vehicles. I did most of my taping from inside my vehicle with the heater running. They parked the annex for the night as it was too late to head out on the highway at 5:00 pm this time of year.

Stay tuned. Day two of the move is in the works.

Nevard Blog: New Years Day Wedding

Nevard Blog: New Years Day Wedding
Yet another test linking to my other blog.

Gorges' Grouse: W.C. Stiles Ice Pond

Gorges' Grouse: W.C. Stiles Ice Pond
I'm experimenting with linking posts. It seems to have worked for me.

Watching Movies and Youtube

Am I getting old or what? I recall my parents, grandparents complaining about loud noise when we were kids. Never seemed to be a problem for me in those days. Now, sometimes the world is just too noisy.
What brought these thoughts on was watching a recent (2010) movie last night, "The Book of Eli". A pretty good movie overall except for the annoying (to me anyway) feature that it seems most of today's movies have of varying sound levels. The dialogue can be so low with people almost whispering at levels that just wouldn't work in everyday conversation in the real world. So we crank up the volume to hear them better and suddenly some special effect or event comes crashing through the speakers that would nearly wake the dead. You don't dare fall asleep during a quiet spell of these movies or you risk being jarred into a state of startled wakefulness that is not only disturbing , but annoying too.
Turn the volume down and suddenly we need to become lip readers again to understand what the actors are saying.
While I may have some age related hearing loss after 40 years around farm equipment I don't usually have a problem hearing normal conversation.
Funny how that doesn't seem to be a problem on youtube videos. Set the volume and its usually sufficient for whatever is happening on the screen. And speaking of youtube, I've been watching a series of interesting farmer-created home videos at
farmin in Montana
Just a farmer with a webcam recording daily events on and off the farm but its strangely addictive and he has a lot of subscribers already. I wonder if they are the type of videos the lazy farmer would make if he was into that type of thing?

New Year

Well, made it through Christmas and New years. No resolutions here though. Just keep on doing whatever seems to be working. We got lucky with weather over the holidays. No storms or bad roads although a little frosty. Actually had water dripping through my ceiling one cold morning. Turned out there is enough heat escaping through the ceiling and roof to melt the snow which then freezes at the lower edge of the roof backing up the water which then leaks under the metal sheets. I had to climb up on the roof and shovel about a ton of deep snow off to solve the problem.
I broke the bale spear on my front end loader lifting a hay bale today. Weak metal I guess as I doubt that the hydraulics on a 47 year old tractor lifting small round bales should over-stress a spear thats designed to lift any average round bale. I improvised with the remaining stub spears and a chain to get the hay bales out. Another project for the repair shop I guess.
This post was mainly intended to test if I can post those fancy blue links like the lazy farmer
Ok, I think I have it figured.

Dressed for winter, I spent an afternoon putting oats through the old hammer mill for cattle feed last week.