We broke down and bought a helper for the old farmer butts.  If you’ve ever worked on a building project in your mid-50’s, forgot a tool and said tool is in the shop a quarter mile round trip away (especially if it happens more than once), you will understand the need completely.  Hauling straw and hay and 50 pound feed bags will now not seem so torturous.  I’ve heard slavery is illegal, so we went with this instead. Happy Birthday to the grumpy old farmer with the fused spine!

Our son has my old little running around car up at college.  He needs it to get back and forth to his lab job.  As a result, dear old dad just has his ginormous pick up truck that we try to only use for hauling and towing needs.  It is hugely uneconomical for going to the grocery store.  So we have taken to having me go into the city with Zina on Fridays, when needed, to do the necessary hunting and gathering.  This keeps the truck parked.  I’d like this to be one of the last gargantuan trucks we ever need.

But, that means I am pretty much sequestered on the farm alone most of the week.  It can get pretty quiet out here in the sticks, and while I don’t really care about a lot of company, sometimes I just need OUT for awhile.  So in addition to it being a work horse (It’s a 700 and has some serious guts) I will be able to use it to tool around the farm, which has a mile perimeter.  Also on occasion, I will be putting it on the trailer and taking it up to an area where we used to own some property and tool around on fire roads and national forest trails.  My hunting days are pretty well done, but I’m eager to take the camera and zoom lenses up and just run around in the hills.

So far we have been hauling 50 lb. sacks of feed and innumerable straw and hay bails by hand with wagons.  If you put 6 bags of pig feed on a utility wagon, you are in for some pretty good resistance training.  With this beastie, it will be considerably less work and we have certainly earned something of a reprieve.  Even taking out the trash here is a quarter of a mile round trip.  I can’t begin to tell you how much “project time” has been wasted by having to walk around getting things.  While its not a horse and it does burn gas, we think its for a good cause:  growing our own food, saving our knee joints, and having some fun!  Of course, when you are a couple of finance geeks, we even figured out how to cut enough fluff out of the current budget to keep it cashflow neutral… after all, if someone else’s money is cheap, use it and keep yours!  Now if I can just get it off the truck without flipping it over!