Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Paradise ponders, missing day edition...

Paradise ponders, missing day edition...  Man, yesterday just slipped right through my fingers.  I got absolutely nothing done that I was planning to.  How did this happen?  Well, it started with some chores: hauling firewood into the house and barn, filling the bird feeders, and so on.  Then we had to run one of our cats (Konani) to the vet, where we discovered that he needed to have a tooth extracted.  We left him.  Then home, got my office fire going, and discovered that Debbie's prescription couldn't be refilled because we changed insurance companies effective January 1st, and we didn't have the new insurance cards yet.  Dang!  Zipped to the Post Office, where we had a letter from the new insurance company – but no cards.  That letter had our ID number, but that was insufficient for the pharmacy; they needed four other numbers.  After two hours on the phone with Regence (our new insurance company), most of it on eterna-hold, I finally got those magic numbers.  Called the pharmacy and took care of that, but that took another half hour.  Then it was time to take off again – ran a couple errands in town, stopped and had a bowl of (delicious!) beef soup at Los Primos, then picked up poor Konani after his surgery.  By that time it was 4 pm and I'd accomplished nothing on my agenda for the day.  Sheesh!

So far today is little better, I'm afraid, though some of it is of our own making.  We took a lovely morning drive up Blacksmith Fork Canyon, figuring this would be our last chance for a while (we have six days of snow in the forecast starting tomorrow).  We saw lots of deer and elk, and a bald eagle flew right over us (and we could gawk through our Model X's windshield as he was right overhead!).  When we got back, we had a phone call from our local Kubota dealer: some parts I had ordered were in.  So we jumped back in the car and zipped up there to get them.  I'm surprised, very pleasantly, by how easy it was to get a couple of obscure proprietary parts for the tractor (a plastic surround for the gear shift levers, and a turn signal assembly).

Now my lovely bride is in the house making us a meal of her homemade chili, which is pretty much guaranteed to make my brains fall out.  I'm drooling just thinking about it.

We're having some more metal fabrication done for us by the same people who built our fireplace door (Lazy K Wrought Iron, in Kalispell, Montana).  We've developed quite a list of projects for them to do for us, but the next one is for a couple of covers for the window wells that open into our new sun room.  We want to avoid having people fall into those holes!  Those covers should be done in a few weeks, and we're planning to drive up there (it's about a 9 hour drive) to get them.  They should fit nicely in the back of the Model X (though I haven't measured to verify this yet), so we're planning to drive that up.  It will be our first test of a long-distance drive using the Tesla “Supercharger” network that will let us charge up our car for free, and quickly.  It should be a pretty drive, no matter what happens – and we'll learn whether we like the experience or not...