September 2017 (AKA) Fix the Fence Month

The weather has cooled off a bunch. Perfect weather to try and finish the fence repairs. Finish is not quite the right word as our fences are an ongoing project. Well not exactly what I had planned, but that is the way life goes.

This summer, I had all these plans of finishing the painting on the house. Well that didn’t happen. We went from a rainy spring to a hot-hot summer. My plans had been to paint up as high as I could with an 8 foot ladder then rent a lift and finish it off. I didn’t even finish one 8X8 foot wall. I’m actually trying to figure out how I wasted that time. Can’t remember but I’m sure it was productive.

Anyway what got out attention as I said in a previous post was that April our 20 year-old mare decided she liked what was on the other side of the fence. She had been bending over the field fencing regularly until she got to where with a little effort, she could jump it. Thankfully, my neighbor was outside and got her to stay until we could get her. That was last year.

Lynn assured me that he could put an electric fence wire around it and that would keep her in. It didn’t work and after 3 or 4 more tries, it still didn’t work. Well I know nothing about an electric fence nor do I want to know, other than if it is working it can bite you. After watching her through the windows as she is racing up to the fence and putting on the breaks still touching the fence, I decided that that was just too much stress for me and we needed to move that up on the priorty list of things to do before winter.

Well I told Lynn that she needed to stay in the front pasture where we had a somewhat more secure fence (but not much more).

Then one day when I came home from work and I was driving up the driveway, I saw what looked like a lot of vegetation in the horse’s paddock and I didn’t see the horse. Upon further inspection, a limb broke off the big big tree next to the paddock and April was blocked in the paddock and couldn’t get out.

Well it was easy to see what I was going to be doing before supper that day. After I gather Lynn up from his easy chair watching Gunsmoke, we proceed to try and shore up the other paddock and get her out so she could run in the pasture and get to her water. He wasn’t happy as he wasn’t even aware the limb had broken. A couple hours later we had her out and I was just thrilled that she hadn’t gotten hurt. Though I’m sure she had one heck of a scare.

Now we have to fix the fence in the pasture where it is supposed to be electrified so we can put her in it so someone with a chain saw can cut up the limb and we can begin to repair the paddock where two additional fences were broken. This has to be done before cold weather because that is where April spends her winter in the paddock and front pasture where she can have a little shelter.

My daughter and son-in-law came to visit in July and they repaired the roof on the stable which is attached to the paddock, which was a job we had planned for this summer. I am so thankful that they did that because at the speed we work we may have gotten it done in 2020.

Limb off a very big tree. April was on the other side of the limb.

Two parts of the fence is broken, not counting the front where April had been scratching and broke it before the tree did.

This is where April broke the front of the paddock. She broke the RR Tie by scratching on it.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — These are the fence posts ready for the wire to be installed. Maybe this week.

Back to the field fencing. Yesterday I finished putting in the fence poles, I watered them to compact the soil then used the level to make sure they were straight all around. Now we are ready to put the field fencing up when Lynn goes and get the truck with the field fencing and drives back into the pasture and somehow manages to run over some of the old field fencing I hadn’t picked up. I didn’t know it until he started backing up and I heard the awful noise. Then I saw it. I had him stop and pulled out a big hunk of wire. Thinking that was all, he proceeded to pull forward and back up a little closer. Then I realized there was more fencing under the truck. That wasn’t good.

I spent the next hour-and-a-half crawling under the truck where there was puncture vine and thistle. I don’t know the parts on the under-belly of a truck but this long thing that still had a tag on it said “drive-shaft” and there was this other thing that looked just like what I hear men call a “U-joint,” not sure if that was what it was, but the wire was all wrapped around those two things. Well the wire cutters Lynn gave me were not designed to work in confined spaces so that made it twice as hard. I came out looking like I was on the loosing end of a cat fight.

I believed I created a whole new dirty word vocabulary before I was finished. Then with just a little energy left we muscled the fencing out on the ground and I began unrolling it. I was now into about 4 hours in the dry dusty back pasture and I had to call it quits. I’m too old for this crap.

I gathered up all the tools and decided that before I took a shower, I would hose the front of the house because that, of course, was one of the things on my list to get done this weekend. I had to accomplish something I had planned.

As for Sunday, we had to go grocery shopping because we were almost out of ice-cream. So when we finally made it home, Lynn was too tired to finish the fence, so I decided to wash down the back of the house. We have the installers coming to put in the propane fire stove in the living room and I didn’t want them to have to battle the spiders that decided to cover our house. I don’t know what it is about these hot dry summers but the spiders have all these little webs all over the exterior of the house and you have to hose it down to get rid of them. If someone out there knows some way to keep them from nesting, I would sure like to know. Painting with chemical bug repellant doesn’t work.