Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Final Preparations

We have been extra, super busy the last few days. We are preparing to finish up moving horses. If all goes as planned, and we all know the saying about the best laid plans, we will be moving the mares and ponies in the next couple of days, and then have one more moving day hopefully next week.

I have mentioned before that Jason likes to give his best Scarlett O'Hara impersonation from time to time. We all know how his announcement about "as God as my witness I shall never pick up another rock again" turned out. We've spent some time the last few days working on the "as God as my witness I shall never repair a fence board again" statement. We want to eventually have hot wire on the top board of the fences, and possibly even the top two boards, to keep the fence from being a perpetual scratching post. The fence is always the loser in this scenario. By default Jason is also the loser since he has to repair the fence. The mares are, by far, up there with the worst offenders when it comes to breaking fence boards. Thus we want to make sure that the wood fence is officially not a pleasant place to scratch.

I have come to realize over the last few days just how many fence posts it takes to fence off a pasture. Each pasture has a few thousand feet of fencing. There is a fence post every seven feet. Every post needs an insulator for the electric wire. You see where I am headed with this. Every time Jason would start throwing a temper tantrum about what a pain it was to rig up the hot wire I would remind him how many hours of his life he has spent repairing fence boards. That was all it took to shut him up on that topic and he went back to work. One pasture hotwired, several more to go.

One of my cousins commented to me a few years ago that farming felt like trying to empty out the Mississippi River with a teacup. There is a lot of truth to that statement.


Jason unrolling the wire

If anyone is ever bored and would like to nail a few thousand insulators to fence posts we can get you hooked up!

Elfin and Homer

Snappy and Thor

Slinky

Lightening, Snappy and Noble

Lucky and O'Reilly

Rampal on the move

Tiny

Norman

Winston and Faune

Tiny and Johnny

5 comments:

Funder said...

Woohoo, you're gonna finish the move? That's wonderful! I forget, what are you going to do with the old property? Run cows or sell it?

I hate those stupid nail-in insulators. I am normally pretty good with a hammer but I always end up mangling every other nail-in. Hotwire is definitely worth it though!

lytha said...

what a great quote by your cousin! i love it.

oh, putting up electric is such a rewarding job! the horses leave the fence in its original pristine condition ---for-e-ver!!!!!!!!!!

i'm so happy for both of you that things will be easier in the future.

Candy'sGirl said...

See that's the kind of job where you call up the local high school and get the coach to hire out the football team for an afternoon. Tell them all to bring a hammer and a tape measure and set them at it. Our local high school does stuff like that all the time to make a little extra money for uniforms and whatnot before the season really gets going. The boys do a good job because they know the coach will kill them with drills if they don't!

Jenny said...

I would love to go down there and nail up insulators! If only i didn't have this job chained to a desk all day, aughhhh. Love your pastures, Snappy & Thor don't even have to bend their necks to graze. Keep up the wonderful pics. Your blog keep me sane here at work. :-)

Calm, Forward, Straight said...

I'm looking at a small electric fence repair job soon - restringing electric rope with insulator replacement and some P.H.D. work... (post hole digging)... my favorite ;)