August 12th, 13th, and 14th

This weekend went a lot smoother than the last one. I flew from San Francisco to Reno late Friday afternoon, caught a cab to Arrow Transmission, and quietly finished reading Ben Bova’s novel The Precipice (which is quite good) in their lobby while I waited for them to finish repairing the van. The damage? $1,400: double yippee. There goes the repairs to my Concourse. Anyhow, the van is driving well. I stopped in at The Flag Store on Glendale Ave. in Sparks where I bought a truly wonderful 20' telescoping flag pole and a Nevada “Battle Born” state flag for Midian (I already had a stars and stripes). I put it up as soon as I got out to the ranch and it looks mighty sweet indeed. I feel like a real Nevada man at last.

I spend Saturday working out at Dog Ranch with Ron, which was pretty fun. Ron’s a good guy with an interesting life story that I’m not going to relate out of respect for his privacy. We seem to be birds of a feather in some odd way I can’t quite put my finger on. To our mutual amazement we got Kevin B’s old Frankenstein’s monster of a trencher (its two trenchers held together with wood, bailing wire, chewing gum, and prayers) running fairly well. We even dug a trench across one of Dog Ranch’s roads so that he could run a pipe to the field that he’s planning on keeping horses in.

Back at Midian Ranch I pulled a couple of parts that need replacing out of the Jeep and the Dodge, got the KLR 650 running properly, and stripped a very, very dead battery out of the welding trailer. I also began work on fixing the interior ceiling of the ranch house and replaced the old messed up swamp cooler with a skylight. I have a pretty good idea of how I am going to make the ranch house’s ceiling look nice again but right now it’s all a great big “ify” experiment. I’ll post more on that when I have some pictures