2/18/08 Monday
We got a lot done yesterday. I prepared some beds for the flowers Cherie picked up and she planted many of them. This morning she looked out the window and saw the dogs eating the daffodils. They chomped off all the blooms. That got them put into their room after it was made clear that eating plants is a big “NO, BAD DOG”. Not that that will do any good. I will run into town and pick up some of the inexpensive wire fencing I saw. It’s only about a foot tall so they can easily walk over it but perhaps it can serve as an identifiable barrier they can recognize as a no cross zone. We bought some dog repellant last week but when I put it down it basically just created curiosity. They sniffed with great interest and started to taste it when I yelled “NO”. So much for that. Perhaps that too can be a recognized barrier if I train them that crossing it brings an unpleasant response from us.

I fired up the tiller and it ran well, tilling a fifty foot row before it died. Nuts. It’s a lot of work to hang on to but much less work than tilling three acres of beds by hand will be. I suspect it’s a stuck float or needle valve in the carburetor. At least I hope so for that I can fix, at least temporarily. Building this farm will be hard without the right equipment. The pioneers at least had horses to pull plows with. I’m getting the chairs back out to sit in when I get tired or hurt too much. Today I will work on the tiller some but can’t spend all day doing it. The seed shack is a higher priority and there is much to do there. I started putting in studs to hold the plywood and insulation yesterday. Running electricity out there will be a project for sure.

I tested the compost with the soil test kit we got and was very disappointed to see it was extremely alkaline and has almost no nutritional value at all. So I must mix lots of fertilizer in it but don’t know how much is right. I’m guessing at it and will test a batch of soil I’m going to mix today. Yesterday I just mixed some up and threw it into the flower beds. Kind of hit or miss. Yesterday was another slow day where my ability to calculate or figure things out was hampered and I got lost and confused easily. There is so much to do but I must pick a task and focus on it or nothing gets done.

I took a pain pill this morning but when I did couldn’t remember if I had already done so. This is why I try to tell Cherie every time I take one, otherwise I can forget and take one or two or three, thinking each one was the only one I’d taken. With my seizure medicine I use a pill minder so can look at it and know if I took it or not. The pail pills are “take as needed” so a pill minder doesn’t work. But I can feel it’s effect more than usual so may have screwed up. It’s not a dangerous thing to have taken two instead of one as there was a time I ate this stuff by the handful to get high, but I am careful to not fall into that trap, thus will watch carefully.

This morning we heard a “THUMP” that shook the windows. “What was that” Cherie called from the back room. “I don’t know. Maybe something big just drove by” I replied though it didn’t really match the sound we heard. Cherie went outside to look and there was nothing. I told Cherie that it may have been a blast wave as I’ve experienced a few in my life. If it was I knew it had to have come from a distance for it was soft compared to what I’ve seen. Just a while ago, as I moved the water sprinklers, I noticed this column of smoke rising in the distance. It looks like it may be as far as twenty miles away but that’s just a guess. Whatever it is, it’s huge. If that’s the source of the blast wave there is a major event going on towards Big Spring. We will be watching the news to see.

Alltel is continuing to be a pain when it comes to going online. I’ll try to post this but it may take a while and be quite frustrating.
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I’m not doing good at all. I have a level of anger that is not healthy and am slow. If the two are related or not I don’t know. It started when I went to get one of the stainless steel bowls I use so much and couldn’t find it. I looked and looked but it wasn’t to be found. The more I looked the angrier I got. I had just used it yesterday and the cloth I used to clean it was still on the counter. I can’t remember exactly but think I may have left it on the table where the water spigot is.

To add to the anger I discovered the puppies had chewed through one of the panels I put up in their room to protect the walls. Then they pulled it off the wall and chewed a hole in the wall. Now I’m yelling. This is not good. My paranoia has me imagining someone snuck up here and stole the bowls. There were two of them stuck together. I have spent hours looking for them now and nothing else has gotten done. The anger has drained me and I can’t handle being around the dogs a lot so they are locked in the front area while I rest on this bed. Maybe after I take a nap I’ll settle down.