Sorting Out the Future As I Go...

... life goes on whether we go with it or not... so... just take what comes and do the best with it...

Kind of a last minute thing, I've contracted out my October with the sugar outfit up in Montana again. That job will carry me into the winter well. And those funds will be sorely needed if I'm to keep this "back to horse" goal moving...

Till then, I'll be pulling out of here shortly, now that the latest repairs are done and the first steps of the tribulation of separation have been taken. My current need, to ride along with the beet harvest is to get this book I've been laboring on completed and published. Excuses don't pay the bills and feed my scrawny butt. Time to quit with that and just get it done.

My camera has not seen near as much use lately... The first three are actually from my phone on a lil' unexpected walk I took yesterday...

 

Truck went in the shop Tuesday for several hundred bucks worth of shocks, steering dampers and alignments to correct the tire scrubbing that started to get bad in the last few hundred miles...

Then Friday...

The truck in the past couple months has started getting a lot "warmer" pulling grades. When I got back from Missouri and took that time up to Steamboat it was getting warmer yet. Close inspection revealed a pretty good bug load down in the radiator.

So...  figured to just blow 'em out at the car wash...

Bad choice... turns out, that carwash wand had the power to fold over all the radiator fins it got too close to... That carelessness cost me a few hundred dollars for a new radiator... Maybe.

Buuut first... I dropped the truck off first thing yesterday, thinking it would only be a couple hours that I could kill at a coffee shop and/or people watching... wrong... they'd need it all day.

Since I'd not lined up a ride that left me with that unexpected walk I mentioned. Yep... a 7 1/2 mile stroll!  Dodging trains, trucks and liquor bottles. Seem like somebody does some pretty heavy drinking along those tracks. Every two steps there was one of those lil' "Shooter" bottles of some variety... just my luck of course - they were all empty! :-/

Google maps claimed I should get it done in two and a half hours... took me two hours and forty minutes to hoof it... what a wimp!

But then... when I found a ride back in the afternoon I got informed that the radiator I'd got put in back in 2010 was the wrong one! That was for a gas engine... not my diesel. It was maybe 1/3 less "Thick" so with less fluid and cooling surface... which is a wonder it worked as well as it did for a hundred thousand miles!

But on the way back to the Lakota I captured those three pics above. ;) so all's good.

Those below are just what's been passing by around me in the past few weeks...

He'd been running around and wading in along the shallow bank of this big pond... then came running down that lil' point behind him and jumped high... thinking he'd land in water six inches deep... only to find that there was a hole 'bout six FEET deep right there... he learned to swim right quick.

Talk about "keeping on"... This Plane is something on the order of 70 years+ ... and still flying... Circled over me several times... Makes a guy wonder what action it might have seen... and about the men that flew her...

... Which tends to dwarf our own sorry problems in comparison...

I'll head to that little patch of Arizona dirt I did a deal on in November; as soon as the beet harvest is done... and start putting a winter horse camp together...

That's how it's all laid out just now anyway.

Brian