Back into it

Well, I've been back in the classroom for almost three weeks now and it's kind of tough to get back into the swing of things after the few months break I had over the summer. I almost wish that there was a summer school you could go to so you not only don't get out of the study habit, but you also accelerate getting your qualification.

It was great to have had the time off though because it allowed me to do a lot of jobs around the farm, catch up on my work at the church and also help out a friend tidy up his father's estate. My friend's father was a hoarder and had 40 years worth of collecting in his sheds, the garage, under the house and also in the ceiling. There were also piles of wood stacked outside as well as loads of steel. Once we cleared out four of the sheds I demolished them and took the materials to the rubbish dump. In the end we took well over 10 ton of things to the tip and at the end of each day I took about a ton of things home with me to add to my collection. My ute (pickup truck) and trailer got a very good workout. When it was time for me to go back to class there was still some stuff left to do but at least we managed to cut the job down to size and my friend is managing to carry on sorting things out by himself.

We started off with two weeks of lectures and the pace at which we set of was so fast I was struggling to keep up. I can only imagine how the rest of my year is coping. At the moment we're doing pharmacology, pathophysiology, health assessment and clinical skills. We are writing care plans, developing priorities for the first 24 hours of care on admission and exploring a range of diseases and how they might be treated.

Today was a great day, I spent all day in the library (no classes) and just read one of my text books. I got through almost six chapters which I have been able to summarise onto six A4 pieces of paper. Time well spent and it will make it easier in the future. I enjoyed doing it too, so there is hope yet that I will, once again, get into the study habit. Tomorrow I have a few things to sort out in town before I go back to the library and carry on summarising my text book.

This weekend there will be no, or very little, time for study because we are taking our shop to the Masterton Agriculture and Pastoral field days which are on from Friday to Sunday. The Wairarapa Folk Club is providing the music so I'll be busy going back and forth between the two places to make sure everything runs smoothly. I'm hoping to be able to also get some time to play my bass and do some singing. I might even get to play my harmonicas.

Busy times once again, but we're having fun!

Fixed the tractor and made a scarecrow .... or a scare hawk in our case

Got the part back from the tractor place and installed it, got through the ditch and rotary hoed the bit I wanted to dig over and then drove back through the ditch and into the shed. It took a bit more digging to achieve all of this because both times I needed to reduce the ramp angle in the ditch to be able to drive through but I got it done. The tractor place did make a mistake when the assembled the bit in that they forgot to put the wheel studs in the hub. Luckily I'm pretty inventive and figured out a way around that problem without having to take the parts back again. I have no idea how much the repair bill is going to be, they're sending me a bill next month.

We have loads of newly hatched chickens running around and this is proving all too tempting for our local hawks. Since I'd rather nor shoot the hawks we decided to build a scarecrow.

Of course I wanted to build a scarecrow with fully articulating joints and one that I didn't have to rebuild every couple of years. So I put my thinking cap on (always a dangerous thing) and came up with a plan that involved me cutting up a whole lot of galvanised pipe I had hanging around. It took eleven bits of pipe of various lengths and a bit of ingenuity to make the joints and I had a all singing and dancing skeleton ............ but no head. At least a bit of pipe wasn't going to cut it as a head because it is really difficult to put a hat on a piece of pipe.

So I went and found an old piece of telephone pole and set to it with a chainsaw to do the rough carving. Then I sharpened up a few chisels and got my wooden mallets and carried on carving by hand. I ended up with a rather Hermann Munster'ish head but once I put the cap on it it didn't look half bad. Certainly good enough for a scarecrow.

I then put a few screws in its head and hung the head from the pole I had prepared to hang the scarecrow on. That looked rather amusing having this head dangling around. However fun it might have been the next task was to dress the skeleton and hang it from the head.

The results look pretty good and will be even better once we have stuffed the clothes with old hay. the idea of hanging the scarecrow and having moving legs and arms is so that it moves in the wind and the hawks are less likely to realise that it isn't a human standing there.

Here's hoping it actually works and we don't loose any chicks to those hawks. Otherwise the gun will have to be pressed into service. I wonder what roasted hawk tastes like?

Tractor + ditch = broken axle

There is a wee problem with the tractor at the moment. I was going to rotary hoe a part of the farm and getting there involved going through a ditch. Not usually a problem with a 4 wheel drive tractor with agricultural tyres with superb tread. Except that this time the rotary hoe hit the bank I had just come down and the tractor got stuck.

Again, this is not normally a problem, a bit of sweat expended swinging a spade and we're away again. Not this time though. After I had done the needed digging I tried to drive forward out of the ditch when .... a small 'bang' and I lost drive to the front wheels. Of course I stopped what I was doing and investigated and when I used the front end loader bucket to lever the front of the tractor up off the ground .... the right front wheel fell off! Unprintable words spoken with some vigour and then into problem solving mode.

The tractor is still stuck in the ditch but the front bevel drive is disassembled and ready to take to the tractor fixing place. A plastic bucket is keeping dirt and moisture out of the axle until I can get the bevel drive fixed and then reassemble everything. In the picture you can see the two bits that should be one intact bevel drive firmly holding hands with itself. Looking at the broken shaft it looks like there might be a flaw in the metal. In the second picture you can see a little dark spot in the shiny metal on the left. That dark spot shouldn't be there. If that's indeed a flaw then the axle might have broken at almost any time.

Just what I wanted when I'm trying not to spend money. Ugh! Hopefully it doesn't turn out to be too expensive and hopefully the parts don't have to be flown in from Japan.

The really good news about this mishap is that the axle didn't break while I was mowing one of the more hilly paddocks. If it had broken then; the tractor would have rolled down the hill for sure and that doesn't usually end well for the tractor driver.

Very soon the sequel of me driving out of the ditch and rotary hoeing what needs hoeing and safely crossing the ditch again will be posted (I hope).