All Greased Up...

Back in the day when I was still working, I took a one night course on taxes for  small businesses. The main thing I got out of it was that the quickest, easiest, safest way to get a tax deduction was to buy something for the business. This allowed you to deduct all or part of (depreciate) the cost as a tax deduction, as long as it had something to do with your business. So naturally it became an excuse to buy a bunch of attachments for the tractor, my so called business. One of the first purchases was a chipper shredder. Now back then, in the early aughts, I wasn't particularly internet savvy, so went to a local dealer and had him order one. Now the down side of this, besides paying full price, was that the dealer didn't know much about it, so just ordered the base model, when there were several better options available. While it fit the the tractor and worked fine, when it came time to service it, it wasn't very user friendly.

 According to the maintenance chart, you should grease it every 8 hours of use, but then in the written text, the manual says 50 hours. So I guess it's your choice. I know which one I'll choose. Then you have to remove all the black cover panels to grease three of the zerk fittings.

The fourth zerk appeared to be located under the black plastic cover, but after removing it, I could see there was a cutout on the bottom to access the zerk. So now I now where all the zerks are for the annual greasing. There's nothing in the manual to show their location, just a brief note about maintenance at the end. It took several hours of removing various panels, some with difficult to access nuts and bolts, others that didn't need to come off, just to find them all. On the job training at it's finest.

Finally It's Spring...

 After the fourth coldest April on record, spring has arrived in May. I was able to run dogs until almost the end of April, the last time that happened was in 1985!. But after scraping the melting hard packed snow off the road and clearing the upper dog yard last week, we're ready for spring.

This is what the dog yard looked like last week when I started clearing the upper part of the yard.

This is what it looks like now. Pretty amazing how fast the snow finally melted, considering it was well over a foot deep on May first.

Yankee Doodle Dandy...

I've written before about how, when I'm doing something kinda boring like scraping the slushy, melting snow off the road with the tractor, odd things just pop into my head. Sometimes it's songs I hadn't heard for years, like The Shape of Things to Come (2/28/23). Well this time it was I'm A Yankee Doodle Dandy. This song was written by George M. Cohan for a musical at the turn of the last century, but became a big hit in a Jimmy Cagney movie of the same name, back in the early forties. Read about it here...

https://unrememberedhistory.com/tag/james-cagney-yankee-doodle-dandy/

So the other day Jimmy was still singing in my brain when  I was cleaning up the dog yard. I started singing it to Mac, the Mackenzie River Husky pup we got a few years ago. Since Andy calls him Mackie, I changed the words a little bit, so now the song is...

Mackie Doodle Dogo...

He's a Mackie doodle dogo

He's a Mackie do or die

A real live nephew of his uncle Cy

Born on the fourth of July

Mackie doodle came to town

Just to pull a boggan

Mackie's a real good boy

Now sometimes Mac's a good boy, sometimes not so much. He sure doesn't care if I sing, cause mostly his head's buried in my pocket, at least as far in as his big head will fit, searching for a dog biscuit. But goofing with the dogs breaks up the time you're out there shoveling up dog poop, so that's a pretty good thing.