Easter Sunday 2013

The plan was to finish a grape trellis before meeting my wife Sacha in Rockport to go to her mother’s about an hour away in Arlington for dinner. Before dinner I would use Lynn’s (Sacha’s mom) full size pickup to bring a chicken tractor and a rototiller back to Rockport then return to Arlington. To pull this off, I needed to be in Rockport at 11:30 a.m. The grape trellis was at my mom’s in Marblemount, about 20 minutes drive from Rockport and one and a half hours drive from Arlington.

Our 15 month old daughter woke us up early but still I got a late start. I made good progress though and figured I would have time to feed the cows and get back to Rockport and take care of a few minor chores there. But when I looked at my watch after putting my tools away, it was 11:10 and I still needed to feed the cows.

Then something occurred to me. Either the battery or alternator is going bad in my car so the battery doesn’t hold a very strong charge. I had pulled my car up in the driveway near the garden so I could listen to the radio while I was working on the trellis. On a hunch that the hour or two of radio time had drained the battery enough that the starter wouldn’t work, I tried to start the car. Nothing.

Of course the car was in the middle of the driveway facing the wrong way to jump it with the farm pickup. So I put it in neutral and began pushing it back up the driveway. I soon hit a slight downslope and the car gathered momentum but it was going off course. With a vivid vision of the car running over me, I managed to jump behind the wheel and correct the car’s course. It is not too hard to jump behind the wheel of a vehicle you are pushing forward. I found that it is very hard to jump behind the wheel of a car moving backward.

Rather than use the farm truck and jumper cables, I hooked the car up to a battery charger and set about feeding the cows. By the time the cows were fed, the battery was charged enough to start the car.

I arrived in Rockport half an hour late but was saved by my daughter who had been very hungry and was in the middle of a snack when I arrived.  

I caught a few catnaps on the way to Arlington where we arrived a little late at about 1:00 p.m. Dinner was supposed to be between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m.

The rototiller needed to be running in order to walk it up the loading ramps into the pickup but it hadn’t been run in a year and the gas had not been emptied from the tank. Fearing bad gas might shellac the carburetor, I drained the gas and added new. A few cranks and it fired up. Honda makes good small engines.

With the rototiller loaded, three of us loaded the chicken tractor. It is a small chicken tractor but I wasn’t sure how I was going to get it unloaded at the other end because I didn’t have ready access to a farm tractor with a loader.

I headed out of Arlington at 2:00 p.m. and arrived in Rockport at about 3:00 p.m. With a little manhandling, I managed to get the chicken tractor out by getting one end on the ground then taking the other end and walking it in a semi-circle out of the pickup bed. The rototiller unloaded very easily with the ramps.

I arrived back in Arlington at about 4:00 p.m. Everyone had waited for me so we had dinner shortly after I arrived. It was very good, salad, ham, bean gratin, dilly bread, broccoli, deviled eggs, sweet potatoes, asparagus and lemon mousse with raspberry topping for dessert.

I got a chance to visit a little bit and took a short nap after dinner. Then it was time to go. We got home in time to do a load of dishes and a load of laundry (I often handle the washing of my own work clothes) before it was time for bed.