No sale, evening activities

Mama had a buyer lined up for yesterday afternoon. She had been in contact with him over the weekend and he assured her that he wanted our stock trailer, so she turned away another buyer who was closer. The buyer yesterday lives in Montana. I do not know if he drove down just to pick up the trailer, but he was very anxious that Mama hold onto it for him. He did show up. When he was driving down our road I had a feeling he was not going to buy the trailer. He was driving a very nice Freightliner semi. I immediately thought how our stock trailer would look behind that rig and would have been surprised if he had bought the trailer. He looked it over thoroughly and found enough wrong with it that he offered to pay me $100 for wasting my time. I declined. Mostly, he wanted a trailer with a twenty-four-foot enclosure. That would be a twenty-eight to thirty-foot trailer since trailers are listed in length from the hitch to the tail – not the length of the deck. He also wanted a trailer that was seven-foot-wide inside. It was not what he was looking for. He is used to much, much bigger rigs. Oh, well. It was a little disappointing, but not overly so. Ultimately, Mama and I do not have to sell the trailers, it just would be nice to get the cash out of them since we have limited use for them now.

Mama stayed home yesterday. She was hurting badly enough that she needed to sit still. She did go with Alissa to church last night for a ladies’ meeting – combined with a baby shower. I spent the evening working on a list of songs from a new hymnal bought for the choir to use. It has a lot of newer songs in to as well as many of the old hymns. I have been using it for choir specials for over a year but have not taken the time to make a list of all the songs available for the choir, special groups and the choruses it contains. I sat down last week and made a had written list. Now I am compiling that list in a spreadsheet. That will give me a helpful overview of the entire hymnal, so I do not have to flip through it to find what I am looking for. It also showed me how much I have missed of the songs available to us. I worked on that until very late and still have several more hours to put into the effort. I am trying to consciously use my evenings to do things other than reading or watching something on my phone but I have not gotten the energy yet to practice an instrument or do Ba Gua; but that is probably more of a pride issue than a time issue. Slowly the evenings are getting shorter as darkens settles on us more quickly, so I will have to start adding those activities to my evenings to keep from wasting the time.

I try to take an hour every evening to work on something on the farm. Something outside. Lately, that time has been given to arranging the inside of the shop, but I am at the point of needing materials in order to do more inside. So, over the next couple evenings (tonight excluded) and Saturday I will go back outside to get the addition put on the shop. I have materials for that. Since I had plywood to enclose the wall I will be exposing in the retrofit, the building will still be sealed up when I take off the metal siding I will reuse at the back of that addition. I do not have panels for the roof of the addition yet, but I have all the metal siding I need. The only caveat is that the panels I will install where the used ones are being taken from will be red instead of tan. That is why I am moving the panels. It will keep the outside of the shop all the same color. The three red panels will be on the inside wall of the addition and will not be seen once it is enclosed. I plan on having all the gas-powered equipment in the addition so the shop can smell more like a wood shop…and for safety reasons.

As the shop fills, the garage empties. It’s a win-win.