Dog Days of July...

After a warm June with about a dozen days of 80° F or more, July started off cool. But the last five days have been over 80°. While it's uncomfortable for us, the dogs are ones who suffer the most.

The dog yard looks dead during the afternoon on these hot days. At least they've figured how to stay in the shade, moving around with the shifting shadows.  They still enjoy their time off for their free run in the yard. We bring out a couple of buckets of water, so they have plenty to drink. Rudy aka Meathead has figured out a better way to cool off.

While the others drink, he dunks his whole head in the bucket, cooling off while looking like a moose diving for a snack.

R & R...

 Since getting the shoulder surgery, I haven't done much except hang around the house, taking it easy. The pain is mostly gone, just some soreness when I move it too far. So when I went to physical therapy this week, of course Jeff, the therapist, has me moving the arm in all ways it hurts. I think PT really stands for Physical Torture. When we went to the Dr, the nurse checked me over, then pulled up the x-ray and went out to get him. So Andy took a photo of it with her iphone while we were waiting.

Pretty weird to think all that hardware's inside my shoulder now. The doc said it's healing fine and I should be good to go in 4 to 6 weeks.

Anyway, with little to do for the next few weeks, I can just hang out and watch the corn grow in the garden. It's doing great after all the hard work Andy's done with it.

Probably can do some "low impact activity" that won't affect the healing shoulder; maybe even weeding the garden, left handed of course!

Gettin' the Cold Shoulder...

 Mentioned before about how my right shoulder's got the dreaded bone-on-bone arthritis and the failed attempts to get it fixed (April No Fool 4/2/24). So now I finally got'er done. It's been three days and the pain's let up considerably, can even type with the right hand, tho the left takes care of most of the rest of the chores. Been icing it down several times a day; puts new meaning on gettin' the cold shoulder. So now I'm hoping it heals fast enough to get back to doing summer stuff, like riding the Guzzi, before the snow flies. Read about it here...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_shoulder_replacement

Gettin' a Grip...

 After finishing welding up the snow blade, I realized there were a lot of vise grips pliers. So I dug around in the garage, the basement, and upstairs and this is what was there...

Apparently they're all Vise-Grip brand, except the second from the top and bottom, which are Craftsman. Since I always bought the original vise grips, not sure where the one near the bottom came from, maybe out of my dad's toolbox after he died. The smaller one near the top was found on the side of the highway when I was driving the tractor over to a neighbors. Then I remembered there were a couple more...

The top one's for bending sheet metal while is bottom's mainly for welding. It didn't get used this time cause it wouldn't work setting the wings at an odd angle to the snow blade. 

According to Wikipedia, "The first locking pliers, with the trade name Vise-Grip, were invented by William S. Petersen in De Witt, Nebraska, United States in 1924; the brand name Vise-Grips is close to a generic name for this type of pliers. Locking pliers are available with many different jaw styles, such as needle-nose pliers, wrenches, clamps and various shapes to fix metal parts for welding."

So there you go, you can't have too many vise grips when it's time to weld!

Gettin' the Angles...

After mounting the old plow on my new, for me anyway, 4-wheeler, the resulting plow job was less than spectacular (Solstice Stuff 12/23/20). Most of the snow falls off the sides of the blade, so figured it needed some side boards to keep the load intact. A while later, maybe a couple of years ago, made some angle wings out of a piece of steel that had been cut from an old barrel we had used for making a stove.

Finally got around to welding them onto the blade. Since we couldn't find the magnetic welding forms that Andy bought me years ago, had to finagle some way to hold the metal wings on an angle to spot weld them to the blade. Who says you can't have too many vise grips?

Jack Black...

Not much new to report, mostly been splitting and stacking wood for next winter. The wall o' wood slowly disappears as well as a few spruce and birch logs got bucked up and split, adding to the stacks of firewood. But Andy's been getting some random shots of Jack Black, so thought I'd add them to the post. 

Here he is sleeping in the loader bucket. He never had much to do with the tractor before, but now he seems right at home.

Here he is inverted on the floor. Like Ruty before him, upside down is the way to go.

And finally on the bench by the back door. Not sure if he hangs out here to keep an eye on things or it's just another place to sleep. I suspect it's the latter.

Whippet 2...

Well I figured the whippet comparison for Earl was just a joke, cause what's the chance he'd be part whippet. But then I got to reading more about mixed breed huskies and saw there's the eurohound.

Bred from a cross of German short hair pointer, greyhound, and husky, they've come to dominate sprint dog racing. so maybe that's Earl's breed. Here's a few pic's from today's run.

Here's Earl running with Gus. The difference in their gait is pretty amazing.

Whatever his breed, Earl's a pretty good dog. So no matter what, he's our o' hound.

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If You Can't Beat It, Whippet...

 When we first got Earl as a pup (My Name Is Earl...11/17/21), we didn't know much about him except he was bred out of some racing sled dogs from one of the upper Yukon River villages. As he grew older, he got a lot longer and leggy, but his head stayed kind of small  We joked about how he looked like a whippet. So I finally got around to seeing what exactly was the Whippet breed. Here's what google had to say...

The whippet is a hound breed developed in mid-19th-century England to chase rabbits for sport in an arena. The breed was developed from terriers and small English greyhounds; Italian greyhounds were later bred in to give the whippet a sleek appearance.

They are the fastest dog of their weight, capable of achieving speeds of up to 35 mph, due to their ability to run in a double suspension gallop. This gait results in four of the dog's legs being off the ground twice in each stride, once when the legs are completely extended and again when they are tucked under the body.

The whippet at full gallop, they sure can move!

So today when we let the dogs off for their free run, Andy took some pictures of Earl running. 

We knew Earl likely was the fastest dog in our team, but it looks like he runs just like a whippet; never knew we had such an exotic animal. Makes me wish I'd taken one more out of his litter, but then I'd have to move into the dog yard too!

This is spring?

 Last week I finished splitting the wood I'd hauled down from the ridge top in April and was ready to move on to the logs that were stacked up last fall.

Andy had taken this photo a few days ago and labeled it "wall o' logs." But before I could get to it, nature intervened...

Woke up in the morning to this, a spring snow storm. It snowed until mid-afternoon and we got an inch or more of wet, sloppy snow. So spent most of the day doing odd jobs inside the house. Kind of ironic cause the weather bureau proclaimed Saturday as "green-up day" so maybe today was "whitewash day."

Signs of Spring...

 With the warm weather starting in March this year, it shouldn't be surprising that the snow has disappeared so fast. Just last week I started to clear the snow cover from the upper dog yard.

Now the dogs are all moved out of the sloppy snow and mud of the winter sled yard into a much drier spot for the summer.

Last week we were still hauling birch logs from the ridge top with the Skidoo.

Now we're starting to split and stack the split firewood to get it drying out.

And the mosquitoes are already out in force; not all the signs of spring are welcome!

End of the Trail...

For this year anyway, the dog runs are over. Hard to believe that last year we ran until late April (Last Dog Run?  4/19/23). This year we had our last outing on March 20, just after the vernal equinox. I took the Ski Doo out last week to check the trails. The warm spell in late March, 40-50° F,  had taken its toll. Besides the icy trail, bare spots, exposed roots and alder stubs. there was extensive overflow (aufeis) at the creek crossing.

The pond at the creek crossing is filling with overflow, flooding the trail.

All that's left to do is put away the sledding gear.

The sleds are hauled up to the shed and hung, upside down, under the overhang in back. Then we'll be hauling in a few loads of logs to buck up and split for firewood.

There's plenty of trees down along the trail, the problem is finding ones that are still good for firewood and not buried in snow or frozen to the ground. Once you find a few good down trees, it's just a bunch of grunt work to buck'em up, load the sled, haul'em back, and stack the logs. Once there's a decent pile of to logs to split, it'll be time to hook up the splitter to the tractor. Too much fun!

April No Fool...

 There should be a day after April 1, all fools day, when there's no fools; maybe it should be today. I went to to the Dr. for my bum shoulder, the fifth different one. Even tho I said what I thought I needed when I made the appointment, the Dr said he couldn't do the procedure. Then he referred me to another Dr. So who's the fool? 

Here's a pic of the instrument of destruction that took off the tip of my thumb the other day.

Given the amount of safety warnings they put on tools today, you'd think they'd put a warning on these things. BTW, my thumb's healed up fine, so maybe it's better to be lucky than smart!