Ed Soehnel

Yesterday was one of the few days I wore slacks and ironed my polo short to the office. Had a rare meeting where I needed to look respectable. Its normally shorts and t-shirt. The dogs were looking at me funny and the Greyhound was seriously keeping her distance.

I dug a 4 foot deep hole (using the tractor) to expose this pipe that was leaking and coming up to the surface. I was a bit dismayed that it was poly tubing, not PVC or steel pipe. That means that in the future at some point, this pipe will be likely to fail in other places before a PVC or steel pipe would. It currently feeds a faucet located near the upper barn. I think I will just have to dig a new trench at some point back to the well and install a new line entirely. At least the digging was easy.

From 2010_Misc

The seeding we did back in May has paid off. This first picture is the west-side of the house that was part of the driveway. We tilled it up, threw seed down and watered. I re-seeded parts of it a few weeks ago and it has filled in nicely. I’ll be doing a lot of this in the next few years to re-vegetate other parts of the property. Second picture is the driveway before seeding.

From 2010_Misc

From 2009_02_Perry_Park_Property

I’m taking off work tomorrow and will be enjoying the long weekend. Weather should be good. I love these long hot summer days.

Mobile phone video of the two playing.  Berin marks and we can’t find our doggy diaper, so instead have a makeshift one using an old t-shirt.

Sue is out all day at meeting for her dog trainers network. I am home taking care of the rug rats.  We have an additional guest with us this week and next, Berin, an Entlenrucker, which is a shorter version of a Greater Swiss.  I’ll post an image later.

90+ for us this weekend…that is toasty when you live at 6200 feet elevation.  Its been an abnormally dry summer for us.  I have been watering the grass we planted in the spring quite a bit and dragging the hose around to all the trees we have.  Not much planned this weekend…hope its a lazy one.  Some work for Sue and the dog business, some chores and that is about all.

Lightening seems to find us at home more than we like. We were hit twice last year and so far, twice this year (that we know of…could be more, if we are not around when a storm rolls through). I think it is because we have a huge copper top on our chimney that is built all the way up with stone rocks (there is metal in rocks). It attracts lightening. In addition, we have a large number of very tall evergrees around us in a valley that is traditionally void of tall trees.

This last strike definitely hit our lightening rod on the house, but must have also split off (we think) and hit the big maple tree we have in front. Both Sue and I were home. The tree has a little split in the main trunk and bark was blown off. The lightening must have traveled in the ground from the tree to electrical conduit under the garage, went up and fried our garage door opener, but continued in the ground to somehow find the well pump electrical. It fried the well pump and the associated electrical box for it. We replaced the well pump and electrical (some video and pictures below), will replace the garage door opener and hopefully the tree was not too badly hit so we can leave it (assuming it lives…we have a tree expert coming next week).

From 2010_Misc

From 2010_Misc

From 2010_Misc

Sunday afternoon I was sitting on the back deck looking east and spotted a funnel cloud coming down from a storm that was gathering east to us. It was a ways off and a ways up. I snapped it with my cell phone, so image is not the best. We see funnel clouds about once a year and I was lucky to have grabbed a picture of it as this particular one fizzled after only a few minutes.

From 2010_Misc