Eloise is home and working!

Greetings, family, friends and others,

I think I have some inkling of how Cheops must have felt when he capped off his last pyramid. Two weeks ago I finally got the tractor onto the property. But in driving it over from the previous owner's home the fan bearing burned out. So I've been delayed in getting it actually to mow until tonight. I bought a new fan assembly and it arrived at the dealer up near Gettysburg on Thursday (yesterday), we installed it late last night by droplight but it was too late to mow. As we were driving home my wife and I were discussing names for the tractor. I thought "Fanny" would be pretty good. (Replaced the fan, get it? :) ) She didn't think that was very funny, so we settled on Eloise. Nice dignified name for an old gal. The tractor is circa 1950's. I haven't looked up the serial number to peg it precisely, but will one of these days.

I bought an aftermarket accessory for her this week. The original tractor design did not have a water pump in it. Heat from the engine and cooling from the radiator drove the water around a thermosiphon loop. ( I found out today that it consequently tends to overheat when heading down a long hill. The "cool" is below the "hot" so the loop shuts down and she blows a little steam. ) Someone figured out how to add a water pump to the loop without too much difficulty and had one for sale on eBay so I bought it. Should be here next week I hope.

This afternoon after school and after running a few errands, I FINALLY got to mow my yard with the new tractor. It's been almost a month since I bought Eloise but it was worth the wait. I mowed the better part of an acre in less than a half hour. It was magnificent. The place looks totally different.

Afterwards I fired up my "mechanical goat" (Stihl brush cutter) and cut a lot of weeds around the back of the house where the tractor would have hit a lot of rocks. Our ground has a lot of limestone rocks poking up all over the place. I'll be happy when we get some real sheep in there to do the job. Year after next...

All the tasks that I mentioned in my last post remain undone. Water pump, deck, siding, etc. It's been a rough three or four weeks.

First the dog bites proved to be more of an impediment to activity than I'd thought. The bruising was pretty bad and I was more stiff a few days later than I'd thought I'd be.

Then I had three molars scheduled to be pulled the following week, so I went ahead with that. And that was the week it was so unbelievably hot. So between the bites, the molars and the heat I laid by the air conditioner and took pain meds most of that week. :) They really had to cut me up to get the molars out. I could only drink liquids for the longest time and that sapped my strength. I lost ten pounds in two weeks and I'm a scrawny fella who can't afford to do that.

After that it was time to start picking up loose ends around my present home and prepare for the school year ahead. So it's been an uphill fight lately.

I did get the hedges along the driveway trimmed again a week or so ago. I had been afraid that when I cut them the first time they'd just give up and die back, but just the opposite was true. They sprouted and grew all over the place. By early August you couldn't tell that I'd cut them at all in May. Such resilience is heartening.

I have to cut back more of them around the place. The hedge along the upper driveway towards the chicken coop and the forsythia along the road on the south end of the property need to get wacked pretty badly. The path out to the barn needs a good treatment, as does the strip along the east side of the barn. There's a few hours work there...

But the BIG news is that Eloise is up and running and works pretty hard for an old gal! I feel like dancing a jig. :)

I took her for a turn up on the hill behind the house (what I think of as the "back four" because it's just shy of four acres). Eloise and I cut some paths through the briars and brambles where I'd run through with the little backhoe in June. I kept the mower deck raised to avoid the rocks and it worked out pretty well as a light duty brush hog.

I'm going to need another session with the backhoe just to fill in holes and cover rocks around the place though, I can tell.

I have to say, the feeling of cruising up and down that hillside, amongst those trees and fields was almost sublime. I experienced a deep sense of gratitude and accomplishment, all at the same time. A profound sense of "all's right with the world." It was a touchstone with "home" for me. I always enjoyed running the tractor around my folk's place when I was growing up and this was so much like it, it almost took my breath away. Happiness, the deep, profound kind, is a rare thing for me, it only comes in little spurts. However, I've been blessed to have several of those instances at Walnut Hill.

Thanks for celebrating with me.

Doug