It’s been quite a while since my last entry here, and I have to admit feeling a bit burned out on blogging in general.
The crappy winter we’ve had lingers on (in spite of what the rodent said). At least once a week I’m spending hours moving snow.
Last week we finally got back to near normal average high temperatures, only to find ourselves returning to high temperatures 15 degrees below normal again.
Needless to say the warmer temperatures resulted in quite a bit of melting snow and a lot of mud at our place.
That’s usually acceptable to some degree only because we know that spring is near, but with the numerous warm spells and rainstorms we’ve had this winter there was no reason to believe the latest warm-up was anything other than temporary (which it was of course).
While running errands I took a photo of the snow pile in the parking lot at Fleet Farm. This mound has to be over 20 feet high and covers almost the entire width of the parking lot!
Meanwhile my bad luck of 2013 continues (contributing to my overall poor attitude).
Last week when moving snow I broke part of the steering tie rod assembly on my tractor, disabling it. The threaded part of one of the tie rod ends broke off just on the other side of the jam nut at the end of the tie rod itself (probably when the tie rod rode up on some packed snow).
From the glass half-full perspective I was lucky that I was moving snow in front of the new building however (and thus close to my workshop), and I was able to disassemble and repair the broken part to get the tractor operating again, albeit at the cost of half a day spent to do the work.
I had to first remove the tie rod end stem from the steering arm knuckle (without the proper tools to do so – apparently those include a tie rod separator/pickle fork, which would have wrecked the boot, or a threaded tie rod puller), then get the broken threaded part out of the tie rod end.
My method was to use a pin punch and hammer on the top end of the tie rod end stem.
After I had the broken part out I was able to weld it back to the rest of the tie rod end (while using care not to let the heat of the welding melt the rubber dust boot).
Since the tie rod got bent a bit after the end broke, I removed it and straightened a bit on my shop press before replacing it.
But I don’t trust my welding enough to consider it a permanent repair, so I’ve got replacement parts on order.
I also got pulled over by the police last week shortly after leaving work. I saw the squad car drive past and he pulled me over some time later, which led me to believe that he must have had an automatic license plate recognition system on his car. The officer told me that I had expired license plates (albeit with current tabs).
Apparently when I renewed my license tabs last year they were supposed to send me new plates as well (but didn’t). Thus, I simply put the tabs they sent on the old plates (that were expired).
So I had to pick up (and pay again) for replacement license plates from a cheery Minnesota Department of Public Safety clerk who presumably was having as crappy a day/winter as I was having…
Finally to further contribute to my fine mood of late, my mail carrier left me a note in my mailbox last week saying I needed to plow the path to the mailbox (“Box needs to be plowed”).
The only thing is the latest snowfall was only about an inch of snow that didn’t even warrant the plowing of my road (the snow is packed down from the cars driving on it)!
Sorry about all that snow, princess, but it is Minnesota in winter!! Regardless, I cleaned up the road by my mailbox so she wouldn’t get stuck in that inch of snow…
To finish off on a more amusing note, while tromping through the snow to fix an electric fence short, I noticed one of our cows apparently was trying out a different hairstyle (apparently opting for blonde).
