Taking Advantage Of The Son

We had a nice sunny day yesterday so we took advantage of it to get a lot of work done outside. First thing in the morning I picked up our son Travis at his place and brought him back to ours to work on several projects.

The first order of business was to take down part of the fence that separates the front part of the property from the pasture. The fence was the typical metal posts pounded into the ground, with wire stretched between them. Since we don’t have any plans to have livestock, we really didn’t need it, but we did have use for some of the fence posts.

Travis thought we would need a shovel to dig the posts out, but that’s way too much like work. The kid forgets that his old man has a master’s degree in lazy. Instead, once he removed the wire, we wrapped a chain around my Kubota BX 2680 tractor’s bucket, then around one of the posts, and when I raised the bucket, it pulled the post right out of the ground. Quick and easy. Just like they used to call me back in my bachelor days.

We wanted to put up a mesh deer fence around the fruit trees that we planted a couple of weeks ago. The fence is 7 feet high, but when we bought it, Tractor Supply only had a few fiberglass-wrapped posts long enough to do the job. We decided to start sinking some of them, but quickly learned that the ground was much too hard. Darn this clay. It’s either as hard as concrete or soupy wet with mud. Lazy dad to the rescue again.

Well, at least lazy for me. Using a post driver, it was quick and easy for Travis to set some of the fence posts we had just removed from another location.

We put in about 15 of them, then zip-tied the longer fiberglass posts to every other one of them. That way, when Tractor Supply gets more of the 8-foot posts we needed in stock, I could get them and fill in the low spots. It took an hour or so to get the whole area fenced in, thanks to all of Travis’ hard work.

Until now I have been keeping my tractor and its implements, along with the Kawasaki Mule side by side in a small pole barn type thing toward the front of our property, but I wanted to get them inside, someplace out of the weather. The old barn on the back of our property is in disrepair, but it has good bones and eventually, we will restore it. In the meantime, I didn’t think my tractor would fit into it, but in checking things out yesterday, we realized that if we lower the tractor’s ROP (Roll Over Protection) bar, it will fit in one door in the back. So, Travis started moving the pallets that we bought a while back from our enclosed cargo trailer back to the barn using the Mule, while I tilled a strip of land on each side of the barn road to give Terry an area to plant wildflowers.

I figured I had abused my hard-working son’s good graces as much as I could for one day, so in the afternoon we dropped him off at home. Then Terry and I went into town and stopped at Tractor Supply to get another roll of deer fence, and lo and behold, they had gotten more of the long posts in, so we bought every one they had. Today I will try to have Terry help me put them in the rest of the places needed around the trees, which shouldn’t take long.

After stopping at Pastor’s Mexican Restaurant for dinner, which has become a favorite of ours, back at home Terry helped me get all of my tractor implements moved into the barn and sitting on pallets. Then we parked the tractor and Mule in it and called it a day.

While Travis and I were doing all of that earlier in the day, Terry was being no slouch. She had a big project of her own going on inside, which I will tell you about in tomorrow’s blog. Thanks again for all of your help, son.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Thought For The Day – You learn a lot about people when they don’t get what they want.