Tractor Dealings and an Old Friend’s Kids Visit

Wednesday November 29, 2023 Guerneville CA.

Tractor dealings

I’ve been dealing with two dealers for my new equipment for a few days now and today was the day I wanted to close a deal. I was still dealing so I couldn’t close the deal today, but I did get final quotes on price from both guys, so tomorrow I will go down to the winner’s place and close the deal. I saved about nine thousand bucks by playing the game with them.

Actually more than that as they’d already discounted a lot of stuff before we started playing the game between the two dealers and I. I’m not sure how much, but maybe another ten thousand or more. So even though I hate to play the game, it’s worth it for the huge savings. They were both only a couple hundred bucks off each other in the final bid, so I think I did the best I could do.

That all meant I needed to stay by the phone and my computer all day so very little else got done.

Dirt bike mud guard

Since I lowered the height of my dirt bike, the rear tire was rubbing bad on this mud guard and it tore it up and broke it. I found a piece of metal to make a new one. As I was starting to form that piece of metal below a car pulled into my driveway.

Broken plastic mud guard on the left, new metal piece I need to form on the right.

Here’s the rig of the two guys that pulled into my yard.

Two kids

It turned out to be the two kids of an old friend I grew up with that lived up on anther hill top. He was a farmer. We rode our scooters and dirt bikes around the hills and did some stuff together in later years. He has Parkinson’s disease now, so I hadn’t seen him in a long time.

Last time I saw his two kids, they were just little snot nosed kids. We had a good chat.

They asked if I could come up and fix up their roads with the old cat that was up there that was their dads. At least they’d gotten it started after it sat around for a long time. I said sure and I’ll slow you how to fix up the roads to keep them from washing out and teach you how to run that dozer in the hill so you don’t get killed. They both wanted to learn to run it.

It got dark on us so they took off. I went in the house to see what the final quotes were.

Done deal

Since the final bids were so close, I decided I’d gotten the best deal I could from these guys.

I’ll be at the winner’s place tomorrow and really close this deal so I can get the equipment on the way which should take about two weeks for delivery. I’ve already got several jobs for the rig.

Using the old bread machine

A couple of blog writers I read have been talking about making bread with a bread machine. I can make it without a machine, but I have an old machine I never really used so I thought I’d give it a try.

My only real problem is most yeasts age grown on corn, so I don’t use them and make my own yeast with flour and water.

Now that darn machine is made to use the dry yeast so I had to try and figure out how to do this.

I tried a loaf last night and made a mistake and got the machine started to far into the program so I made a real hard loaf.  It tasted good though and I’ve been nibbling on it.

I gave it another try tonight, but misjudged the amount of water as the yeast I make is real wet. To  make it work I had to add about five more cups of flour, added to the four cups already in there. During the kneading process the paddle froze up, so I had to take the unit apart and oil up the drive shift. I broke the seal during the process, but I made it work.

Splitting the dough into two parts, I’m kneading it now and will take it out of the machine and bake it in the oven, which usually bakes the bread better anyway.

I think it might take me a couple more tries before I make a successful loaf of bread. :O)

I certainly made a mess of a lot of flour all over my kitchen.

I’m going to use one half of the bread dough to make doughnuts in my deep fryer.

Nice day.