Meadow Musings: Misc

Last night we ended up at Price Chopper (currently in the lead of the exciting new reality show, "America's Most Dismal Grocery Store"), and found someone else's shopping list in our cart.  I reprint it here for your pleasure.
This is what I saw first, which intrigued me immediately because Jensales Inc. is in Minnesota, and we were in Vermont.  Jensales sells tractor (and other heavy equipment) manuals.  Not just operation manuals, but parts and service manuals, too, so that you can go about fixin' your own machinery.  Cool.  (I don't know what the " & Toys" is about.  I think it might be something ironical.  They don't mention that on their website.)

Here is the actual shopping list:
Oh man.  It's so classic.  I love it (especially "Tums").

(It is not as good as the Best Found Object Ever, The Molting. But how can you top that?)

Let this serve as notice that we have completed a second wiring project, one that you will not see any pictures of.  "Oh man," you say, "why no pictures?".  Well, my friends, today we re-wired a Schweiss Chicken Plucker.  A friend loaned us his, which he bought off eBay a few months ago.  It works great -- though who knows who the crazy person was who came up with the idea of using rubber fingers in a chicken plucker -- but the motor is old and the wiring was plain-old scary.  As in, exposed wired and bits falling off, and no switch, so you have to plug-and-unplug every time (in the snow, covered with chicken bits).  As a thank-you to the person we borrowed it from, we re-wired it, added a switch, etc.

Let this also serve as notice that we are down to 5 chickens; the other 11 are in the freezers in bags.  The last 5 will be dispatched (some people use the term "harvested", but that sounds a little too soylent green for me) as soon as they run out of food.  The birds are huge -- 7 pounds on average -- and totally delicious. 

Welcome to our blog! We're hoping to use this blog as a place to chat about all manner of things -- technology, renewable energy, life in rural America, chickens, and so on. We'll try to put up some starter posts in each of these categories over the next week or so.

Let us know if you have any questions or great topic ideas!