As of this afternoon I am officially a divorced man.

Picture of a localish Traction Avant for your time

Also: some sheep for good measure.

sheep show a surprising amount of interest when they see themselves on the phone screen

1736 likes to make it clear how much she enjoys being scritched

she's also my most smiley sheep

Gloria loves having her chin rubbed...
and she can't understand why I would ever stop doing that. (one ear back and one ear forward is sheep body language for confusion or annoyance)

Fancy and Sally want scritches too.

Sally is also demonstrative of her appreciation of the scritches.

Summer is camera shy, but don't let that fool you, she likes scritches too. Also, Sally is a ham. But that's what I get for naming her Sallyford J. Sheepington, Attorney at Baaaa.

In case you forgot, I kinda did... Friend of mine had a breakthrough delta-variant infection... he got covid pneumonia and went to the hospital last Friday because he was having trouble breathing... Now he's being shipped off to the big city hospital because it's gotten worse

I think his heavy pot smoking probably didn't help in keeping the pneumonia at bay, but this is a relatively healthy 50 year old guy who's been vaccinated. Don't forget this shit is still out there.

On a lighter/different note I have decided to keep the house, and some sheep, which has thrown a wrench in the divorce proceedings... I can go into details if you want, but I'll just leave it at "the other party doesn't like this" I looked at the real estate market, and I trawled listings, and I realized that sure, I could sell the place for profit right now, but then I'd have to try to replace it. Both the rental and buyer markets are nutzo, so I'm gonna hang on to it.

As for the sheep, I'm going to forgo attempts at maintaining pure breed and registerable blood lines in the small flock I keep, but here's a reminder video of one of the reasons I've decided to continue having sheep in my life:

This may be the only one I have this year... Gloria might be pregnant, but for now Summer has this one big ram-lamb. More pics and video will come later

So, I've been sitting on this for a while, since the beginning of the year... Through a series of failures in communications on both our parts, mine exacerbated by my seasonal effective disorder/depression and her's by a culture of never talking about problems/avoiding conflict at all costs and being a people pleaser, no doubt "enhanced" by the last four years of living in this country, Mrs. BoostAddict and I seem, at this point, destined to separate. I convinced her we should go to couples counseling, but our previous long standing issues and a lot of built up grudges and resentment have lead to her declaring that she will not ever want to get back together. I bear at least half the blame, and I accept that... I still feel very cought off guard, as I was/am willing to try to work things out, but she's already made up her mind, and basically didn't say anything (in a way I could understand, as I said I am not blameless in this) until she was already done with it. What this means in practical terms in an end to the farm. Neither of us can do it on our own, and though she will no doubt try (I could rant about her killing herself for her work, but that is just glossing over some of our other issues with perceived levels of commitment and acceptance of "the reality" of various things). This will not be an easy or quick process, she has already moved out, but one way or another the sheep are going to be winding down. I do not want this to happen, but I also don't want to try to run things by myself, or deprive her of what she has always said (and I thought I was trying to support, but apparently in the wrong way) was her dream. The most likely outcome is that we will sell our property amd split the proceeds... As she cannot afford it on her own, and as much as I love this location, the house/land is too large and too expensive/much work for one person. Like I said, this will not be a quick and easy resolution, too many details to untangle and iron out, but she has already said she is "not planning to keep the sheep here this coming winter" what that means exactly is still not clear... Our communication has broken down to the point that just figuring out what is expected of me re: sheep and farm operations is a guessing game. I am continuing to make hay this summer, and spent the last week working 8-12 hours every day, plus regular chores to do so... I feel very lost and aimless... I have had a good spring, depression-wise, and this all feels very unfair, but I have to acknowledge that she felt things were unfair before now, and I can only feel the way I feel, not change the past. I've got friends and therapy, but you folks are my internet friends, and I know many of you have enjoyed sheeppost and ranked it highly on the list Oppo positives... So I thought you should be in on this, also it never hurts to have more conversations about what went wrong and how to avoid the same mistakes again... At least that's my feeling. I really do like the sheep, and this lifestyle in general, but it seems it will be coming to an end. /downer post out.

Gloria loves her scritches.

We're in for some real cold tonight here in Northern Vermont, like - 20F with wind cold. But it was nearly 30F over night, so I started my route early (7am) to try to take advantage of the warmth, as it was supposed to drop all day and be at 0F by sunset. All was going well. Totes were dumping without much trouble, roads were clear, still 19F and nearly 2/3rds of the route complete.

When suddenly...

Blew a hydraulic line.

Now, that's bad... But you'll notice the storm drain. And at this point I'm loading compostables from the local hospital.

This is the only other picture I took because I had to do a shit ton of work now...

Clean up the spill, plug the leak, find a shop that makes hoses, install the new hose, refill the resivoir (we use ATF, so it wasn't cheap, but at least you can get it anywhere) pressure test, refit new hose with more Teflon tape, buy a sack of oil dry, drive back to the Hospital, spread oil dry while finally emptying thier totes, then sweep up the oil dry and pretend nothing ever happened. Oh yeah, now I'm actually running late and the temp is dropping.

By the time the route is done it's -3F and the trailer is frozen, not solid, but pain-in-the-ass frozen. Spent about 45 mins with the heated pressure washer and my boss helping to get the trailer empty. Luckily my boss is a good guy and said "I'll finish the clean out, drain, and antifreeze, you go ahead home, your day's been long enough."

Thanks non-sucky boss!

Day was still a PITA.

Also: it's cold as balls.

5:50am 2/25, two black lambs, a girl and a boy born to Border Leicester #113. The barn cam was recording, but i'm having trouble transferring the video for some reason... Here are stills:

The actual birth occured behind the hay feeder, so it's not visible, but the audio recording says 5:50:34 was first cry. All the ewe lambs (who are mostly pregnant, but are going to be first time mothers) swarmed over to see what was up.. Which is why I do want to try to get the video, it's funny. All the ears and heads swivel toward the lamb baas and then they all get up and run over to see...

Edit: added some actual lamb pics...

Here you go! It's been cold as balls here, and I've been busy with divorce hearing prep, but here's some video from the barn cam of silly excited sheep being silly and excited about getting thier minerals today.

So, I don't remember if I told Oppo that we had whole sheep's milk this year, to feed bottle lambs and supplement lambs with inadequate mother-provided-milk as opposed to the usual powdered formula. This is great from a nutritional standpoint, but bad from a usage and storage point.

We bought ~1000lbs (about 120 gallons) of milk from a sheep dairy that had failed it's well inspection and could not sell the milk (or milk products) for human consumption. It came frozen in giant food-service dispenser bags that hold ~5 gallons.

They take roughly three days to thaw in this tray.

As we do not have an appropriate dispenser for these bags, we are transferring the milk to 6-gallon beer bottling buckets for storage in our basement fridge, and dispensing. As I know I have mentioned sheep milk has extremely high fat and protein content, and this is whole, raw milk. Unpasteurized and unhomogenized. It will separate to cream/fat and whey if left still in the bucket.

Each 5 gallons lasts about 3 days, taking the bucket out of the fridge to slosh it and stir it is a PITA, also we only access it every 6 hours, which is plenty of time for separation to have occurred, requiring extensive stirring to recombine the milk, and leading to the formation of unwanted fat globules... The solution is to stir it often... Like a bulk tank agitator....

So I made one.

An arduino nano, a DRV8825 stepper driver, a beefy NEMA 17 stepper, a 1amp 12v wall wart from an old router, a cheap plastic stirring paddle, a 3D-printed arm, a heavy-duty servo pushrod, and a bit of 2x4, some deck screws and ingenuity later and I have a device that stirs the milk for two minutes every half hour without any input from us!

Initial tests look promising. We'll see if it solves our milk separation issue long term over the next couple of days.

@Gabriella despite living in a quite rural location, the twin facts that Vermont residents tend to be more ecologically conscious than the average American, and this area is a vacation/second and retirement home haven makes the percentage of EVs on the local roads much higher than you might otherwise suspect. I know of four Teslas in my town, an Kona EV, an i3, a couple Leafs, and a whole heaping bunch of PHEVs, mostly Toyota Rav4 hybrids, but also several Ford F-150 and Maveric hybrids. Our local Ford dealer also pushed the C-MAX and Fusion hybrids pretty hard years ago, and there are still a few of them around. I know there's a Rivian two towns over, and I just saw my first Lucid Air last week. There is an Audi E-Tron and an I.D4 I see on local roads and at the grocery store too sometimes. There's a Taycan Cross Turismo Turbo S with Massachusetts plates that comes up on weekends and stays for a while in the summer.

@CB Full on FU money for something I don't need, doesn't serve me well and will be a nightmare to own and maintain? Oh, fuck yeah! I know what I'm getting...
one of the 3(?) Alfa Romeo 155 DTM cars converted to street-legal spec by crazy Germans (I believe this basically involves installing compliant lights, a quieter muffler, street-legal tires, and generating/affixing a VIN... Or maybe they get the VIN by splicing in bits of a regular 155?). Sure, it's AWD, but it's got about 1.5 inchs of ground clearance, needs 100 octane race gas, has totally unobtanium engine everything parts, you need to wear a helmet when you drive it (roll cage), entry and exit is a gymnastic event (it may have opening doors, but remember that roll/crash structure?), and it's Italian! I mean, I guess it's not totaly impractical, even though the trunk is full of fuel cell, the space usually occupied by the rear seats is empty, so it should actually accommodate a long trip's worth of luggage or an expedition to Costco...

Perfect.

@GrindIntoSecond That's basically the Idea. This one even has the tow package with pre-installed wiring for a trailer brake controller, rear disc brakes and factory hitch.

Spent some time poking at the junkyard-rescued amazingly-low-rust 2002 Chevy 1500 standard cab, long bed, V6 2wd.

I still find it hard to believe how little rust this truck has. The shocks even seem good and only one tire leaks air.

Predictably it appears we have a distributor issue. It will take further diagnosis to determine what's actually wrong, but it being a 4.3 I'm betting on either snapped drive or stripped alignment dohicky.

Turns out GM's steering column on these trucks is modular enough that we can steal the parts from the Automatic parts truck to rebuild the manual column. Nice.

We've put power to it, all lights work, not even a blown bulb! We have no driver info display for some reason, So I'll have to hook up the Tech2 to it to read mileage, but based on the pedal pad wear, I'll be surprised if it's much over 140k miles. Actually I won't be surprised if it's nearer to 100k. Engine cranks and has compression (we'll put the guage on it next weekend, probably), oil and coolant look fine. I did not hear the fuel pump, but we haven't even gone through fuses and with the borked distributor it's not gonna start anyway.

It will need new brake lines, but the clutch appears to have a brand new line and slave cylinder, however it's stuck, probably from sitting. We also found a small dent in the driveshaft, probably from being moved by a loader with forks while it was in the yard... But the shaft appears to be straight, so as long as it isn't out of balance I'm gonna ignore that.

It's raining like a sunofabitch so we're done for the day. Sorry about the lack of pictures. Here's a shot of the sheep, they went out on pasture yesterday.

@pip-bip unlocking the steering column was the real issue. Ain't no nickle gonna fix that.

@GrindIntoSecond Never had a Moon Pie. Now, the locally made whoopee pies on the other hand...

@Urambo-Tauro Yeah. I dropped the ball on contacting the dealership, and truck buddy was available right now so I figured I'd take my chances with the pick and drill. I still blame him for the smashed shit. I did a nice, clean core drill and the switch is pristine (even after him smashing it with a 5lb sledge. Those lock mechanisms are pretty god damn durable)

@drVanTraveler hah, I noticed that this morning and then forgot about it until just now

@pos_camaro yeah, the 1997 and up switches are actually quite rugged... Also, did I mention the screw drivers I brought were cheap shit? A good quality driver probably would have popped the anti-drill ring off without issue.

So, I may have mentioned the $350 truck (2002 Chevy 1500 standard cab, long bed, manual, v6 2wd) I bought? My buddy and I went to pick it up yesterday. He has a truck and trailer. In any case, one of the main issues is that it had no key. I came prepared to try to Jimmy the column lock with a jiggler and pick. I am not a skilled picker and after about a half hour I gave up and went for the drill... Anyone familiar with GM ignition knows they have a hardened spinning gate in front of the lock to make drilling them difficult, but it's only held on by a crimp of pot metal. I tried to pry it off with a screwdriver, but the cheap shit drivers I brought with me just bent. Buddy says: "I got this..." and goes back to his truck... I get out to see what he's doing and he comes back with a sledge hammer. I'm like OK, sure, that'll smash the pot metal tab and make it so I can drill out the core... Then he proceeds to wind up and smash it with all his might. One broken steering column bracket and a rebound into the instrument cluster ensue. The ring does come off. I drill the lock core, unlock the steering and we load it onto the trailer and bring it home. It really is remarkably rust free, and all the glass and lights are good. But now it has a broken steering column and instrument cluster. I was very calm in the moment. But I just want to say here: DUDE! WHAT THE FUCK?!

asside from the driver's side fender wrinkle, rusty wheels and peely rubber trim on the bumper this thing is actually quite clean.

We have a 2002 parts truck, but it's an automatic V8, so the column and instrument cluster are different. sigh

I won't complain too much because he'll help me fix it, but it could have been just a new lock cylinder it needed (actually we could have taken the one from the parts truck) but now it's gonna need parts it didn't before.

Rant the 2nd: pulling into my driveway I was watching the geese, who are riled up about nesting season, trying to not run them over as they rushed the car and didn't pay attention to the front of the car. I rolled into a piece of machinery and put a big gouge in my painted bumper skin. FUCK. At least it missed the headlight and intercooler, so I guess that's good.

Argh.