Ha! After an hour, the snow stopped, and by about noon, the sun had come out.
Our truck is almost all fixed! Enough, for now, to drive fairly safely. I forgot to take photos of the new manifolds and the new muffler, but I suppose they are not that visually exciting. Our truck is now so quiet, I didn't even hear Phil come back. I used to hear him, even inside, before the truck came into view! It's always sounded like a monster machine, since the muffler vanished long ago (before we bought it? on the trip out east?). Now it just sounds like a truck.
As Phil drove us all up to get the truck, I read to the family. When we grow tired of the myriad CDs we have, I might use the car time as a way to get more literature time into the boys. It's a blessing I don't get car sick: the roads are typically rural, winding and hilly.
When I drove home, Phil went and used our fixed truck to pick up two important implements we plan to use.
A rotary tiller and
a moldboard plow. Now, if there's one thing to know about agriculture, it's that moldboard plows are quite villified in eco-ag circles. Back in the middle of the last century, a man wrote about how badly they were eroding topsoil and such. So I'm a bit embarrassed to admit we have such a tool on our farm. However, a market gardener shared at a seminar last year that if the user drives very slowly, and turns the soil "like you would turn a baby," all will be well.
Phil hurried home, only minutes late to greet the driver of the greenhouse delivery. How to unload this massive shipment was truly a mystery. It took over an hour of strenuous labor to offload the 2400 pounds, much of it unwieldy. We are thankful for Butch and his tractor. With the rain earlier this week, and the snow this morning, even our driving is a slushy mess. Had we attempted to unload with our Little Blue (Tractor), it would have been sad times. Our treads and the size of our tires is not sufficient (see above).
But Butch's big orange tractor managed just find (above), even if the driveway looked a little worse for the wear (below).
We have 38 curved supports, unloaded two by two (below).
In the photo below, the blessed tractor carried the intact pallet, and the small box that has the covering, and we unloaded all the lengthy poles on our own, one by one, trying not to knock each other in the head, and stacked them on the tractor forks. (No photos of that: I was working hard.)
And that's all the greenhouse. A building that takes up a small portion of a 28' trailer. (We asked the driver how they loaded the greenhouse to begin with, and he said that they would have loaded it at Rimol, and the truck came here. I am so used to the FedEx version, where all packages go to a central location for sorting and dispersement, it surprised me to realize that some trucks actually carry an item from start to finish. Large carriers: it's a whole different world.)
Incredibly, we had just finished unloading the greenhouse when our next delivery truck arrived. The two drivers and Phil chatted for a time, so you can see the traffic jam at the top of our driveway. Our truck off the driveway (hood popped so Phil can do some deferred routine maintenance); greenhouse truck on the driveway; potting soil truck blocking in greenhouse truck.
That's not something that happens every day out in the boonies!
Much easier to unload 1700 pounds of potting soil, all nicely contained in a tote. And how handy, to have both deliveries back-to-back like that. We were supposed to have the potting soil come yesterday, but the ice storm delayed delivery a day. So nice not to have to bother Butch two days in a row! (Though we severely missed Phil's moratorium on asking Butch to help us unload. After a spate of deliveries in October, Phil said, "No more for six months!" Ah, well.)
Now, maybe, things will really start to happen! Right now, though: a view almost unchanged for the previous year.
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