New and Old

     For all of those that follow my posts or have the pleasure of knowing us, you should know by now that there is never a dull moment around here- never really a 'down' time.  It seems that there is something always happening with our 'place' or with someone at our place both the 2 legged kind and the 4; not all of 'things' are bad though although more often then not they do seem to be that way.
   This year, so far hasn't been an exception. Again, if you follow these posts or know us you will also know that 'new and furry' critters are a norm around here-this is usually a good thing as far as I'm concerned-Bryan would say otherwise but this is my blog so I will post what I think.  :)

    This is Amy.  She is our 'new', old dog.  She is 13yrs 'young' and has come to live with us; started out as a 'dog-sitting' deal and well, she's not leaving now.  She has adapted well into the daily and normal routine here like she's been here all along. Her herding instincts are still strong and her ability to express her frustrations when 'herding' our other 3 crazy dogs doesn't go well is strong too!!  She is actually quite vocal about it.  But, despite her age and some arthritis, she is my shadow at chore time- Hank is a bit jealous.

    This is right after getting groomed-she felt so good that she just had to roll around!!

       Okay, for all of you faithful followers you should also know that new critters around here are not the only things that happens.  Whats probably just as common as new critters(and this is a scary thought) are the amount of unplanned events that take place-this is getting very old. I'm not talking the little things like a burned out light bulb, a loose screw, etc.......I'm talking about the things that usually end up re-arranging a good part of the day or all the day and they usually seem to revolve around water or the lack there of-this year could be any different.

    Drain back faucets.  They work great when they work right, however, you don't usually know that they are not draining back right during the summer. No, you find this out when the temperature starts getting close to 0 or below and guess what, the water that didn't drain back has now frozen the entire faucet.  In this case, because the valves were not working right the water never shut completely off-unknown to the last person that used it-so of course it was really frozen!!!

  When you go out to feed in the morning and see this, you know that something in not right!!  Thankfully, we were able to fix it which in order to do that we had to dig, chisel ice and then dig, dig, dig, slowly apply heat with torch to melt ice but not split the faucet, then dig some more until we got to the drain back valve.  When we got to the bottom it was obvious that he reason the valve wasn't draining right was to do a lack of gravel around it-water doesn't drain in clay very well-so this was an easy and inexpensive fix!!!!  I was very happy to say the least!!!!