Posts Tagged ‘feed delivery’
Awkward Delivery
In the middle of the day yesterday, I received a text warning of a delivery of feed for the horses expected to happen in 40 minutes. I headed down the driveway with Asher, hoping to meet the driver on the road, in case he hadn’t been here before. Previous deliveries have gone the smoothest when they park their huge box truck on the road and use a three-wheeled forklift to travel up the driveway to the barn.
I’m glad I was there when the truck arrived, but it didn’t make much difference in the end. I don’t know how many drivers they have, but it was another first-timer. He appreciated my advice; however, the truck he was given didn’t have a forklift. It had a folded liftgate on the back and two versions of pallet jacks inside, neither of which would work on a gravel surface.
This was a first since This Old Horse started using this supplier for feed. I invited the driver to walk up and take a look at the situation himself to see if we could conjure up a method that could work. He decided it would be possible to back the truck up to the barn, and we could transfer the 40 bags by hand. I wasn’t worried about that solution, since I had moved one entire pallet-full by myself just two months earlier when the barn doors were frozen shut. Two of us could make quick work of moving 40 bags.
As the driver maneuvered the truck into position, I saw his tires sinking deep into the turf beyond the area of gravel. Those ruts will complement the many holes made there by horse hooves when they got loose on Cyndie a couple of weeks ago.
I don’t know what the load capacity of his lift gate on the back of the truck is, but it looked like he was severely taxing it when the loaded pallet settled onto the wobbling gate. He struggled mightily to get the tongues of his electric-powered pallet jack out from under the pallet because the significant bend of the straining gate made the angle almost impossible.
Once he was able to lower the gate down to stable ground, it was a reasonably easy effort for the two of us to move the bags a couple of steps to an empty pallet inside the barn. It was an overall awkward process, but a reasonable solution that avoided him driving the load back and waiting for a different truck to be able to re-deliver to us some other day.
I’m all for creative problem-solving. As a bonus, I kept the pallet the bags were on, instead of having him take it back, like I usually do. It looked like a good candidate for containing compost piles.
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Some Miscellany
On our morning exploration through the woods yesterday, one of our weird trees caught my eye. It’s kind of hard to photograph, but I tried anyway.
There is a tree right behind it that complicates the view, but if you focus on the closest large trunk, you will find that it snapped off, but a limb pointed toward the ground did a 180 and started growing upwards.
It’s gotten tall enough to compete for sunlight in the overhead canopy. I can’t imagine the success of that wild U-turn growth is going to last indefinitely. Try to picture if it could live long enough that the trunk of the post-incident growth grew as wide as the base portion.
Trees can do some amazing things. Not that I’m still bitter about it… Well, yeah, I’m still bitter that the maple tree I transplanted into the center of the labyrinth gave up without warning after 7 years of promising growth. Why couldn’t it have shown the fight to survive that this tree exhibits?
The big barn doors were frozen solid again yesterday morning, but I wrestled them loose once more around noon, and the delivery of feed happened about an hour later.
When Asher and I arrived to work on the doors, I had left the small door open to indicate we were expecting the driver. Inside, we surprised a pigeon and a squirrel that had taken advantage of the opening.
I didn’t see the pigeon’s exit, but I saw the squirrel trying to hide way up high in the eaves. Poor Asher whined over knowing it was there but not being able to do anything about it.
When the delivery arrived, I left Asher in the house, and when I got to the barn, it appeared empty of intruders.
I paused to capture the state of melting ice on Paddock Lake in the afternoon. I’ll be surprised if it lasts two more days at the temperatures we are enjoying lately.
The horses will likely be holding a splashing party very soon.
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Feed Delivered
On the days we expect delivery of feed for the horses, there is usually a text alert providing an ETA for the truck. Yesterday, I kept one eye out the window and one eye on the phone messages. I even got up to check if Asher was barking because the delivery had arrived, but it was just another of his regular outbursts over some invisible trigger that we fail to see or hear.
I did get distracted for a short while by a movie on my laptop that caught my attention while I was having lunch. When Asher showed up on my hip with insistent signaling that he needed to go out, I prepared to be outside with him until the truck showed up or we needed to feed horses, maybe both at the same time.
In the woods, he decided to take on a snag that was four times his height because his senses told him there were critter snacks inside. He worked tenaciously for the longest time, despite it looking like a useless effort to me.
It doesn’t really bother me that he tries, because it entertains him with one of his great passions: destroying toys (or trees) to bits. It’s always a bonus to occupy his mind and burn some of his energy while he is out in the great outdoors.
To my surprise, after about twenty minutes of his manic pawing and gnawing, what I suspect were small flying squirrels began popping out of holes and racing to the highest point before making a flying leap for the next large trunk.
Asher would catch a glimpse and race to the other tree, but he almost always missed when they would scamper up that one to a dizzying height from which they made amazing leaps, floating down toward the next big tree a safe distance away.
When my feet started to get cold, and it was close enough to time to feed the horses, it took a concerted effort to convince Asher to give up and move on. Eventually, he got the message and joined me down the trail toward the barn.
As we rounded the corner to the front door, we found the delivery had happened without my noticing, having not received any messages in advance. I don’t know if it was while we were in the woods or still in the house. I fully expected to hear the truck if it happened while we were outside, so I’m guessing it was during my lunch break.
At least I didn’t need to make a decision about where to have them leave the pallet. He set it right in front of the doors that are frozen shut. That meant I ended up moving 2000 lbs of feed, one 50 lb bag at a time, through the small door and restacked them on two pallets inside.
Just another day of fun at Wintervale that negates the need for a gym membership!
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Our Comeuppance
There isn’t a vast amount of international perspective that I can refer to from my limited travels to other countries of the world, but I believe it’s been enough for me to understand that my home country doesn’t deserve to boast about our democracy as if it is the beacon of greatness above all others.
In fact, I have come to believe that our form of government is proving to be a failure. Our democracy isn’t working. Voting for individuals to represent us is supposed to give power to THE PEOPLE. If the majority of people in this country don’t want our government to bomb boats or commandeer oil tankers from Venezuela, our representatives should have sway in the actions of the current administration.
If we don’t want ICE agents to wear masks and travel in packs, driving in unmarked vehicles to nab citizens off the streets without legitimate charges or warrants, THE PEOPLE should be able to persuade our elected officials to adhere to our laws.
Judges on the Supreme Court should be ethical and unbiased. When it becomes obvious they are not, THE PEOPLE should have a way to ensure that our government officials in each branch are being held accountable.
I admit that I once thought our democracy was better than most of the governments in the world. I’m embarrassed that I thought poorly of populations that allowed atrocities to occur by their leaders, or corruption to run rampant in their systems of governance.
Well, I now can understand it when people around the world feel the citizens of the United States are responsible for the inappropriate actions of our government. We thought we could rely on the checks and balances of our form of democracy to keep the wishes of THE PEOPLE in place. I’m afraid it’s not working.
We, the people, have made this mess. It appears we are getting some comeuppance.
At least my ATV and plow are working well again. We probably gained 6 or 7 inches of new snow from the last system. There was no evidence of my boot tracks from Tuesday night on the driveway yesterday morning.
That’s my path through the new snow upon returning from the barn after feeding the horses. After plowing the driveway, I moved to pulling snow off the roof in the two problem spots. While shoveling away the mess that had been created on our front steps, Cyndie texted that we would be receiving feed for the horses in around half an hour.
That meant I needed to switch focus and get down to the barn to dig out the big doors and slide them open. One of the doors wouldn’t budge. It took some creative persuasion to eventually bust it free, and I got it done just in time to see the huge red Gertens Garden Center truck coming up the driveway.
I had tried to plow that circle around the hay shed extra wide in advance of a hay delivery sometime in the near future. I wasn’t thinking of the feed delivery. The last few times, the driver parked on the road and drove his forklift up the driveway. The driver yesterday had never been here before. He decided to back out to the road and bring it up on the forklift.
He wasn’t confident that the big truck wouldn’t slide sideways. I’m happy he chose the safer option.
I’m feeling a lot less cocky about everything these days.
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Trigger Pulled
We had a full day yesterday with some rewarding outcomes, starting with a vision appointment for me where I learned my eyes are in very good shape for my age. Who wouldn’t be happy to hear their eye doctor offering admiration for the measurements resulting from tests? He probably says that to all his patients.
While I was in Hudson, I was able to pick up an online order that Cyndie had placed with Fleet Farm and then I made a stop at Menard’s to pull the trigger on buying posts and hardware for our shade sail project. I have settled on a supplier for the canopy but haven’t locked in which size I will order.
The first version of shade sail I was considering was a very expensive commercial grade, but further research uncovered a similar technology at a fraction of the cost that I am excited about. They provided a free sample of their corner hardware for attaching to anchor points and swathes of all their color options.
The new posts will be delivered next week but I plan to wait until I have the shade sail to lay on the ground for verification of post locations before digging holes.
Late in the day, we received notice that there would be a pallet of grain feed bags delivered which would be a first to our location from a different supplier than in the past. It was a BIG truck.
Sure beats tossing 28 bags by hand. Unfortunately, the temporary fill-in driver ended up spinning his tires when trying to back away from the pallet and got himself stuck in the barn. Between the two of us, we used a couple of tricks to get the rig unstuck with minor disruption to the dirt floor.
That delivery shenanigans happened just as our streaming program of “Boomers vs. Zoomers” by Jane Fonda’s Climate PAC and MoveOn was beginning. We donated money to their cause which provided a ticket to watch celebrities struggle for answers in a trivia contest.
I joined the program already in progress.
Their contest might have worked well enough as a fundraiser but it didn’t prove to be a knockout for entertainment value. The inspirational talks by a few key people, of which Jane Fonda was one, were another reason they were doing this program but I felt it was just more “preaching to the choir.”
It’s hard for me to feel the efforts of people and organizations trying to rally support against the ongoing destruction of our government are accomplishing anything that actually interrupts the nefarious activities underway. It seems like they are just collecting money, which is what the crooks currently in the White House are busy doing as well.
Bad air just keeps going into this balloon and all that happens is people talk about how bad it is and maybe we can slow things down or in a couple of years make it harder to inflate. I’d prefer someone just put a pin in it right now and pop the damn thing.
It is not crying wolf to say that there is a fox in the henhouse, the sky is falling, and the Emporer has no clothes.
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Relative Something 