Phone Problems, Potatoes, Moving Dirt and a Broken Dirt Bike

Tuesday July 25, 2023 Guerneville CA.

Phone trouble

I was talking on the phone today and the voice was getting garbled on and off, so I called and made an appointment with the phone company for Thursday to see about getting it fixed.

Potatoes

My brother Tom said he had some extra red seed potatoes and I should plant some. I went over and got some and planted these. I think I should get some more and plant them too.

But at least I got these planted so far.

Dirt

I needed some dirt to fill a low spot around my house foundation so I loaded up the dump truck with dirt from this pile.

And wheeled it over to this spot where the low spot was.

I dumped it and spread it out. Another job done.

Firecracker bush

My next task was to cut some of this bush back as it’s getting  hard to get the car past it.

I think they call this bush a firecracker bush. I trimmed it all back a ways and hauled the brush to the brush pile.

Phone guy

I was taking a nap when there was a knock at the door. It was the phone guy, two days early. I explained the problem and also the internet problem I’ve been having with drop outs for over a year now that they couldn’t get fixed for all that time. He checked everything out and it all looked good. The problem has been intermittent all along which makes these kinds of problems hard to fix. It’s still not fixed. He thinks it is likely back at the office in some equipment, so passed the information along to them.  I thought he did a good job, just the same.

Trail cam

I needed something to do so I rode on up to this spring where I’d put a trail cam a couple days ago, up on the hillside.

From the looks of things, I put it up too high.

See, too high, and all I got was the beak of a raven. I’ll have to go back up there and adjust it. With the water there making a lot of noise, I think I’ll eventually get some good pictures of the wild life around here.

Ridge top

From there I rode the bike on up to the ridge top for a break.

Bit of a problem

When I went to leave, I tried to start the dirt bike but nothing happened. It was all downhill to home from there so I was able to start it on compression as this bike doesn’t have a kick starter.

I got the tools out and checked the battery and it was good, so I looked at the spot where the wire had broken when this happened before, a couple months ago.

The same wire had broken off again. But this time it was too close to the socket so I didn’t have any wire to solder the broken wire back on to. I had to run a jumper wire around the socket and solder it on to fix it.

I’ll need a new ignition switch with the socket to fix it better. I looked online, and a new switch was over a hundred bucks so maybe I’ll live with my fix.

Nice day.