NOT the most productive day

Well today It was supposed to get way up into the twenties and I am on vacation this week and need to mill SIX more purlins for my house project. What a great day for getting it done right? If this was summer time those purlins would have been done well before lunch even with a late start, but things are a little different in the snow.

First I had to plow out around the mill (and out to the burn pile) and I dont mind admiting the old 'Bota struggled in the 2+ feet of crusty snow. There were a few times I had to row myself out of a snowbank with my bucket/blade with my foot on the axle lock.

After an hour of this it was time to switch modes, drop the wing blade and put my forks on and grab some logs. Well it sounded easy enough, but the logs were so buried/frozen together that it took me TWO FRICK'N hours to dig up FOUR logs.

In hindsight I should have put the block heater on the old excavator and brought it out to the mill, but I got caught up in the "moments" and stuck with the kubota spinning it's tires and straining its FEL against the ice.

In the end I got the logs I needed, but I still had to dig out the mill, which proved to be even more work since it is mostly by hand. AFter two hours of that I called it quits and it isn't even done yet.

Then my wife had to go to work tonight without the mill even being turned on.

IT BETTER NOT SNOW TONIGHT!

A little better today

Got up sort of early today and finished digging out the mill. It went a little smoother than I expected and I didnt have to use the flamethrower as much as I thought I would. In less than an hour I had the tracks de-iced and the mill leveled up and sawing. After about three of the 6 purlins were done the mill ran out of gas and I hadn't brought any out with me in my haste to get rolling this morning so I went to dump the slabs I had generated thus far and noticed that one of my front tires was a little low and decided to fill it up when I was back at the barn. When I got out to the burn pile I noticed the tire was completly flat and had unseated itself from the rim.

What to do? I doubt my little air resevoir would reseat an ag tire and I knew driving it the 1/4 mile back to that barn would fill it with snow and probably rip the tire completly off if not outright destroy it. SO I put it in 2 wheel drive and put the bucket all the way down and drove backwards back to the barn skiding on the bucket the whole way. I guess the ice and snowbanks are good for something. It was as gracefull as the Jamiacan Bobsled team and almost as fast.

THen it started snowing pretty hard, but there was no stopping me now and I milled what I needed to keep going...for now.

One more reason to keep a small can of either in your box! Lift the front with the FEL squirt one shot into the dismounted sidewall, toss a lit match at it lower the front end and drive home!