Repair attempts, coordination of efforts, reading

On the way home yesterday I stopped at the auto parts store and got a few items for the little Ranger and the Flex. I was hoping changing out the fuel filter on the Ranger would help with the problem I had coming home last week. It took some time to get the new filter on the truck but all in all it was not too bad a job. Laying in the cold, moist gravel was a bit uncomfortable.

After I got everything buttoned up I took the truck got a test drive. I was pretty encouraged when I drove the three miles to Montague so I turned around and headed from there to Bowie. I was only a few miles from the farm when the same problem began to happen. At least I know it is not the fuel filter. It will be the end of the month before I will have the money to take it to a shop to see what is really wrong.

I worked a while in the garden spreading out the manure we had put there several weeks ago but held off getting the tiller out since it was a little too wet to do any of that kind of work. We are planning on cleaning the calf lot again this Saturday so I wanted to get ahead of the effort by spreading out what we had already put there. By the time I got the piles spread out it was pretty close to dark so I closed up the chickens and went inside to clean up.

Mama left the farm about the time I got started replacing the fuel filter and was gone until I was ready to go to bed. She and Victoria met up at Walmart so they could team up on grocery shopping. We are still at the stage that requires us to share certain cooking items. It is not worth outfitting both kitchens to be completely self-sufficient but we like to limit the number of trips from one residence to the other when preparing a meal.

Since we have been on the farm we have always had more than one place to store items; a refrigerator and freezer in the farm house, a freezer in the shop, canned goods in plastic totes in the farm house, etc. Now, with two homes and two kitchens it has become more complicated to just do normal meal preparations; not to mention where we will entertain guests when was have them. It has become a standard question for Sunday afternoons; do we have dinner at Victoria’s home or ours? When Grandma and Grandpa come back that will no longer be an issue. We will eat at her table.

Victoria got me started on one or the rewrites of the Star Wars sagas: Allegiance, by Timothy Zahn. It is a well written story but it is difficult to backtrack to a prequel having watched the movie series. Besides that, I am not a cultish type of fan of Star Wars so when he brings characters into the story and begins commenting on their dress, their voice or their culture I am at a complete loss. Not that it interrupts the story much, but I will not take the time to look up the descriptions in order to get a visual – because there is a complete catalogue of such information available on the internet.

I am enjoying the story but that kind of research is outside the scope of reading for fun.