Impending Work and Work Impediments

Daylight Savings Time
For whatever reason changing our sleeping patterns is disruptive.  Exactly why to we wait until a particular day to "change the clocks" and adjust.  After all these years you'd think that I'd start this change a few days early, perhaps in 15 or 30 minute increments.

This leaves me a bit crabby.

Impending Work
The last decade has included a number of ventures, including expanded beekeeping, some rental challenges, the "small business" of my wife and daughter and "the farm."  For years we drove past a small farm on the way to our rural property.  Over time you pick up on things, noticing the movement of cars or equipment, tracks, or the lack thereof, in the dirt or snow.   There was a small farm house, a metal clad legacy barn and a Quonset hut.  As they say, we "bought the farm."  It's been an interesting project.  We've producec significant quantities of fruits and vegetables and have begun some restoration projects.

In the mid 1800's every county in Minnesota east of the Mississippi was covered with 150' white pine trees.  By 1900 or so all of those white pine in Minnesota and those of Wisconsin and Michigan had been taken by the lumber barons who left massive amounts of debris in their wake.  We're close to Hinckley, MN, which was the general location of a massive post-logging fire which killed many people and which torched the earth.  The farm is in that zone of devastation.  We've been planting white pine and red pine trees for over twenty years and for the last eight on this farm property.

The farm house is occupied by a caretaker couple who are there primarily to keep the meth heads from stealing whatever copper is left in the house and the barn.  We've done a few upgrades for the caretakers.  The next project is to replace the bathroom floor.  For whatever reason this one is waking me up.  Not knowing what's under the floor, worrying about the bolts holding the commode, facing the certainty of bad shutoff valves is disturbing my sleep. 

Bad Night's Sleep...
Sunday afternoon I took down a half acre of small poplar trees which will be the site of further red pine plantings this spring, following the frost departure.  This left me a bit tired.  I went to bed about
midnight which was eleven yesterday and anticipated having trouble getting up at seven which previously was six.  Instead I'd awake at 4:30 AM trying to figure this out.  Last night I replaced DVR for or satellite TV system which had previously been mailed to two wrong addresses.  I'd like to eliminate that cost given my current dependence on Amazon Prime and Netflix.  There appears to be no reason to continue.  at 4:30 AM there was nothing I wanted to watch in the wide range of weird reality shows.

Replacing the DVR took much linger than I expected but it was somewhat flawless and the online

chat option did get three questions answered.  Given my lack of interest in having the second TV work I skipped that.  Now at 4:30 AM I did have to reach for three remotes to watching something.  I cannot get the Satellite system remote to work with the TV so used to TV remote to start that and cycle through the input options.  The Satellite remote showed me 150 channels of nothing.  There should be a reality show about people trying to get their remotes to work.  Finally the Roku remote presenting "classic" films from Netflix.  I'm not sure who I'm enjoying more, Patton or George C. Scott.

The fourth device is a temperature sensor.  It's cold in MN.  We're 100 miles away for our rural property.  I have two systems to keep me abreast of temperatures that notify me when in-house temperature drops below 40 degrees. 

Work Impediments...
So much for my past serious interest in images.  

All this video stuff is nice but I believe it's the written word that really sticks.  I'm distracted from work and from writing, about work and other.

The most positive accomplishment recently was further progress on eliminating the tedium of grinding.

  

No photographs
Boiler
Me
No Grinding