Lots of Things

Lots of Things was Originally Posted on June 4, 2011 by

It has been a long few days, involving puppies, weeds, the tractor, electric and trees.

The neutral wire to my house pulled off in a storm. The electric company removed power while I had the trees cut down underneath. I had a crew of two do that, but w left a few trees and I had someone else help me cut the last of them yesterday. HELCO (Hawaiian Electric) is going to visit the farm again today and see if there is any other work that needs doing before restoring service. I am afraid they will make me replace the cable leading from the circuit breaker box to the head (where they attach the overhead wires from their pole). Let’s hope not.

When the trees were cut the first time, we damaged the gutters on one side of the house, took out the main water line (3/4 inch PVC) and broke the fiberglass extension ladder we were using. None of these things was a major disaster, but hiring a profession tree company would have cost many hundreds more than the $150 I spent.

The same guys were due to cut weeds around the coffee trees, but called to say their weed-wacker was broken and because of the holiday, would be delayed 3 or 4 days. I ended up buying a weed-wacker with a blade attachment and did most of the work myself. I have the blisters to prove it. Now I can spray and kill the remaining grass and be done with weed-wacking for quite some time. I have noticed lots of berries forming on the trees and yesterday saw a few red cherries already. It will be time for an official picking soon. That is compared to the previous pickings I have done to clear the trees of smaller amounts of coffee cherry that could have been processed but just wasn’t very productive on the new trees.

While mowing the rows between the trees, I found a broken part of the tractor and had to take it into town for repair. It should be under warrantee but time will tell. It must be fixed for me to continue to mow.

We have shipped three more puppies off-island Thursday and new owners came that same day to pick up another. These are puppies from both the Labrador and the poodle litters. As you may remember, we had 4 litters that all happened at the same time; where we had not had litters for something like 9 months previously. One dog came to us pregnant (she was held on the mainland for quarantine and was bred before being shipped); the moms just all came into season at the same time and I don’t want to see that happen again.

I have been helping groom the poodles before they go to their new homes. I am so glad my labs don’t get groomed. You have to be a dedicated dog owner to groom your animal.

I was browsing one of my favorite websites called WOOT.COM recently and found a good deal on a series 2 Kindle and bought one. Woot offers one deal a day with fixed rate shipping. Some of the items are reconditioned and users chat about whether the deal is a good one or not. Amazon now owns Woot.

I have been having problems with my old computer recognizing USB devices, so it may take a while before I can explore the internals of the Kindle. I should be able to plug it into the computer and drag photos and documents to it, rather than download from Amazon. The Kindle also has text to speech (which seems to work pretty well) and has a web browser that works but is probably best for text sites.

I need to get going so that is all for this posting.