We had several incredible volunteers help out today, and we got tons done. Literally. On the trailer is our ace hay-moving crew ... Nate, Amy, Juana and Chris. We moved 11 tons of hay from our neighbor's hay barn over to Scout's Barn, then stacked it clear to the rafters. I took the photo after our first or second load in the morning ... by the end of the day, we didn't look this good! That was 22,000 pounds of hay, and my-oh-my, did we feel it. We stuffed Scout's Barn full, then took most of the remaining bales over to Lena's Barn and stacked the final 10 bales over by the sighted horse corral.
While we were moving hay on a snowy day, our volunteer Kathy was busy scrubbing out the water tanks in the horse corrals and filling them. You can see from this photo just how big these tanks are ... this one is 150 gallons, and we have some that are 300 gallons.
But before Kathy could fill tanks, we had to troubleshoot our barn well, which had failed yesterday. We couldn't track down our well-driller, and by this morning we were beginning to despair. Then Nate and Amy arrived, and I remembered Nate was an engineer. So I asked Nate to see if he could figure out what was wrong with the well. Sure enough, he isolated the problem to a faulty power switch for the pump. We cannibalized a switch from another outlet, he re-wired it, and voila! -- we had water again!
(Every family should have at least one engineer, don't you think? Alayne has a law degree and I have an international relations degree, and as a result neither one of us is any good at this truly useful stuff!)
Thanks to all these wonderful folks who were such a huge help today!
(Click on photos for larger image.)
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