Some months ago, Sue purchased an electric week wacker to use around the house. We have several electrical outlets in various places out in the yard most adjacent to the porch, so she thought it’d be an easy way to keep the grass down in the front yard. The electric trimmers are so much more light than the gas or even the battery operated types. So, she plugged in the weed wacker and began a-wacking weeds. Not five minutes later, the motor began smoking and the it blew itself up.  

IMG_2157Sue took the wacker back to the store, showed her receipt, just purchased yesterday, used for 5 minutes, motor burnt up. Yep, they agreed it was no longer working. They gave her a new wacker. She brought it home, plugged it in, and — the new one burnt up again. Two in a row couldn’t be a coincidence. So it was determined that the outside outlet to which it had been plugged, was having issues.  Fast forward to a month ago.  Snowbird friends of ours returned from Minnesota and we mentioned to Ron the problem that Sue had encountered, and asked if he might be able to investigate (did I mention Ron is and electrical engineer?). Fast forward again, to yesterday.  Ron and his wife Kathy came out to see the place and to look at what’s IMG_2161going on with the electricity. Sue showed him the offending electrical plug. When he tested it, it was reading 240. That was disconcerting, so she asked him to check the others, and they were reading 130; actually one outlet had a socket reading 130 and one reading 240. Those are not normal numbers. He was perplexed. Sue took him around to the panel and he pulled off the cover to look at the work that was done when the electrical was added out to the dinky house.  He determined that it wasn’t the problem at all. He was giving Sue an explanation of what exactly happened, I didn’t catch all the details, but it sounded very complicated. Turns out that what happened is, when Sue had accidentally pulled up the electrical when digging a trench close to the house, the electrician she hired to fix it rewired it incorrectly. He was an electrician! Whatever. Ron was able to help rewire the outlets so that they are working correctly now. He mentioned that we’d need to mark them with electrical tape so that the next guy who looks at them understands what he did. And that the panel was all hosed up internally as well. He’ll try to get help us get that taken care of as well at some point. Wow! Isn’t it great to have friends that know what they’re doing? We are so blessed to have met so many wonderful people here. We really wish Ron and Kathy were here the whole year round, but we’ll definitely take what we can get! We thank them both so much for their time and their expertise.

IMG_2168In other news… When Kathy and I were watching the Banties be silly, one of the little layers was feeling especially adventurous and made her way out of the coop! We’ve been waiting for this to happen for about a week now. They have been terrorized by the Banty chickens every time they try to come out. This one wasn’t venturing far from the door, but out enough to get a feel for the big, wide world. You can kind of see the head of another poking through the door, and testing out the rarefied air! Maybe they’ll become more self assured as they continue to grow larger than those silly Banty chicks. Eventually they will be about twice the size; I remind the Banties that pay backs can be rather an unpleasant thing. This was pretty exciting for us, I know, it’s just one of those weird little things that we like. We’ll keep you posted on their “coming out” adventures! Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!

Today’s Weather: A bit warmer today than yesterday. 68° was the predicted high. Overnight low will be around 42°.  Sunrise was at 7:11 this morning and sunset will be around 5:19 p.m.

Egg Report: Tuesday we received 11 chicken eggs, and 1 duck egg! Today there were 12 chicken eggs, and another 1 duck egg. steady layers.