Things Have Been Going Well

   Hello readers, how have you all been doing?  I’ve been keeping busy still. The garden is doing very well and so is pretty much everything else. Whatever I can think of to do, I’ve been doing. Fortunately there has been no shortage of things to keep me busy.

   I’ll post some more photos of the garden in the next couple days. Tomorrow I am going to start cutting wood for the Winter.  I like cutting and splitting wood, so I’m looking forward to that. I’ll put up some photos of that too sometime in the next week.

   No one has called about the land in two months.  Needless to say I am getting pretty worried. Five years ago my brother Tim sold his land, which was right next to mine, in five days. Mine has been for sale now for over three months.

   I’m going to put up a sign next to the one I already put up saying I reduced the price, but I don’t think a couple thousand dollars is going to make much of a difference in whether I sell it or not. Quite frankly, I think I’m screwed for the next few years. All I can really do is wait for people to call.

   I wish someone would come along and buy it, because I want to get a motorcycle. I’m going to help my Dad pay off some of his debt too, since I don’t really need all of the money right now. I thought about getting a truck, but I’d rather get a motorcycle first. A couple people brought up getting a moped to me.

   Why in the world I would want another one of those, I don’t know. People say they get 100 miles a gallon, but as I recall the one I had when I was 15 got about 30 miles a gallon. Plus, it was a moped. Why get a moped when a 750 cc motorcycle gets 60 miles a gallon?

   Here’s the motorcycle that I want to get. It’s a Honda 2008 Shadow Spirit 750.  My Dad had a motorcycle when he was about my age, a 350 cc Honda. He slammed it into a hay bale about two months after he got it. I’m not sure if he broke anything, but the bike was totally ruined. He says I should get a 500 cc, but I’d rather get a bigger one and just be careful with it.

   Oh, yeah, it was my 24^th birthday on the 6^th this month. I didn’t post anything then because I wasn’t really looking forward to my birthday. At my age all it really means is that I’m getting older. My Dad got me a small cinnamon cake and a card, my brother Gabe got me a card too. That’s all that really happened. Anyway, I’ll post some pictures again in a couple days of the garden and some of wood cutting shortly after that.

I’ve Been Busy

   Hello everyone, long time no entry.  I’ve been very busy lately. I was planning on posting something a couple weeks ago, but never got around to it. I have been working my butt off on my garden. It’s almost all planted, and it’s quite a bit bigger this year.  About all that is left to do with it right now is put in a couple more sprinkler posts.
   I have also been working my ass off to reduce our electric bill. So far I have managed to reduce it by about 66%. How did I do that? Well, for starters the old fifty gallon electric water heater was replaced with a Rheam tankless propane water heater. That alone is twice as cost efficient to operate.
   All of the light bulbs have been replaced with compact florescent bulbs now. I like the CFLS a lot, because they are actually a little brighter than the old incandescents, yet use 75% less energy and emit pure white light instead of yellow light.
   Also, pretty much everything is unplugged when it’s not in use. If it’s not unplugged, the surge protector is shut off. My computer monitor puked a couple months ago and I bought a new LCD that uses one third of the energy my old monitor used, and it’s a few inches larger and wide-screen to boot. I did a lot of other things too, but I won’t bore you with the details.
   Other than that, I increased the fuel efficiency of my Dad’s truck by about two miles per gallon.  We are still testing it, but so far it looks like two to two and a half miles per gallon. We’ll know in a couple weeks how much better it really is.
   What I did was install a bed cover and reprogram the truck computer. It runs a lot better now. There are many other things I have found that I could do to increase the fuel efficiency, but they would be rather costly and would take a few years to pay for themselves. I don’t know how, and don’t really want, to install a new transmission anyway.
   I have also lost more weight. I’m not too ashamed to say what I weigh anymore, 307.8 pounds, because I have a lot of endurance now and rarely get tired. I can hardly tell that I weigh that, to tell you the truth, because I am usually too busy to notice. I should be down another 20 pounds by the end of July.
   The strawberries in the garden are almost ripe already. I’ll be picking those in a few days. I probably won’t be making wine out of it this year though. Dad says he wants to give quite a bit to my brother’s kids. We’ve never really had a year where we all had plenty of strawberries to eat. The first year I ate quite a few and made some wine, the rest my Dad ate. The next year it was almost entirely used to make some wine for my Dad. Speaking of which, I’m going to be bottling his strawberry wine in a couple weeks.
   Well, I guess that’s enough for now.  I’ll be posting some pictures of the garden and some other things in a few days. I don’t know when I will be able to take the photos because the weather is supposed to be stormy for the next five days, so we’ll see what happens.

   P.S. I haven't sold the land yet.  Lots of people have called, but no one wanted to pay that much for it. I'm not really surprised. The economy is nearly in a depression here, despite whatever the news says. Everyone is either broke or selling their homes and land.