Farmerjan's journal - Weather

[murphysranch]

Yet all the employees at SVB got bonus' and the CEO cashed in millions of his stock recently. Infuritating.

Watch First Republic bank go next...their trading was halted today after the stock fell 70+%.

 

[Ridgetop]

Not even joking. Do people REALLY think that a bank of any size, small hometown to massive national, has everyone's deposits sitting in cash in a safe in the back room? In fact there is very little cash in any bank's vaults. Wouldn't take many people coming in wanting all their money in cash before the doors close because there is no cash left.

Think "It's A Wonderful Life" with the cash run on their S & L.

The NY bank - signature? - was heavy into FTX(?) crypto currency. Wasn't that the crypto currency fraud that the guy is going on trial for?

 

[Ridgetop]

I think the GF definitely needs medication for her problem. Not only could she be bi-polar but her recent cancer diagnosis hit her hard emotionally (mine sure threw me into a depression) and she may be having real trouble dealing with that as well her depression. If she is seeing a psychiatrist, he/she can prescribe medication to help her whether she is bi-polar or suffering from a major depression. While your son has tried to show her that he is there for her, people suffering from depression often retreat into themselves have real problems believing they are loved. She needs to understand her problem and get medical help to combat the chemical imbalance affecting her body and mind.

I believe that maybe your son should consider some antidepressants to help him through this too. Between the physical problems he already has from injuries, the stress of his job and boss at VDOT, his work overload, and now the GF running him through the wringer as he tries to hold the family together (the small children that look at him as a father/uncle figure), he is probably dealing with a major depression too. Depression is a real disease, and can result from a chemical imbalance, stress, health issues, and certainly the GF problem - all of which he is experiencing right now. He should check with his doctor and see if he can get some sort of prescription help too. Not tranquilizers which will make his depression worse, but something for depression symptoms that will help him stabilize.

The women in my family have a tendency to depression. We probably a suffer from some genetic chemical imbalance to different extents. I have suffered from depression off and on since I was 24 and had my first miscarriage. I fought my way out of that without any medication, just counseling, but it wasn't easy. Since then I have been very watchful about anything that could throw me into a depression (several subsequent miscarriages, family situations, etc.). I was able to fight myself out of depression episodes either alone or with counseling until I got cancer. That really got me. However, medication as well as counseling was able to stabilize me, and now I only occasionally reach lows which I can pull out of.

Depression is not just feeling sorry for yourself, true depression is horrible. In a real depressive episode, I was not able to see colors, just shades of gray, lost all sense of taste, and was so exhausted i could hardly get out of bed. People affected with depression can also suffer from physical pain and other real medical conditions brought on by the depression.

While I feel sorry for the GF, my concern here is your son who is at risk of suffering a real depressive episode of his own in reaction to everything he is currently going through.

 

[farmerjan]

Well, @Mini Horses is right... we are back to winter time temps. It was 27 earlier, and only up to 32 now; but the wind chill is down to the mid 20's.... Gusts and cold wind all day today... actual temps not getting to 40 and with the wind chill will be in 20's and low 30's. It seems to be more of the norm to get these cold springs now instead of it in Feb when we should be getting it.

DS stopped to give me a check for the couple of steers of mine that were sold in the group Friday so I am going to make a trip to the bank and do a few errands while out. Haven't been anywhere since Friday. I took some bread out of the freezer but it is hard on one side and too soft/soggy on the other side. Good for stuffing or bread pudding but not sandwiches. Guess it has been in there longer than I thought.
Put a sirloin tip in the crock pot since it also is an older piece of meat. It will make a good pot roast. cooked on slow all night with potatoes. They are starting to sprout since I do not have them in a cold enough place to retard the sprouting.

Got to try to recover my email later....

Also have to get a new payment set up for the mtg...my mtg was sold to another company and have all the info now... I get a paper statement from the mtg company so that I KNOW what is being done and not being done... but pay online normally. Print that confirmation out as well... but I do not do automatic payments so that I can be sure that the paycheck or the SS deposit is IN THE ACCOUNT before I make the payment. Got a grace period so I make it work for me. Don't care who holds it, I get to keep that nice low rate under 3%.... not going to pay that off unless I win the lottery... I will be able to save and invest money at a higher rate than that and make the interest I make on other money pay towards the mortgage.

Watching the bank situation very closely... I think that the house of cards this administration has built is about to collapse on its self... sure hope that everyone can survive this as I think that this is a slide into a real bad situation...
I am going to push DS to get the rest of the steers sold and get the heifers sorted through and what he does not commit to the WVa grazing and to taking to VT to the friend, need to be sold unless they are EXCEPTIONAL to keep as a few replacements. Graze fewer for longer this year.....less hay to make with losing that one place; and hopefully less animals to feed out next winter... and less time to feed if they stay on grass longer.
I need a bowl of hot cereal to get me going to face the cold....

 

[murphysranch]

I get to keep that nice low rate under 3%.... not going to pay that off unless I win the lottery..

Very very smart. I paid off our mortgage here cus it was 6.3%. But I just opened a 10 mo CD for 4.75% with some of the left over money from the sale of our prior home. Its all a juggling act to stay afloat.

 

[farmerjan]

@murphysranch ... yep, just keep juggling things.

The bank situation is interesting... The 3rd bank teetering has been guaranteed help in the "BILLIONS" from several other banks... I think it was that First Republic.... I am having trouble keeping up with the names as I have only caught bits and pieces.... but now the fed will not be upping the prime rate as much... concession to the "panicking" ... this is like sticking fingers in the dyke..... It will work for a bit....
Stock market came up a bit today... I had put in a buy order on a couple of stocks I have... they had almost hit the low bid I made and then today they went back up some... so I will sit and wait on them... at least the brokerage account with TD Ameritrade pays a little interest on the money if I let it sit there...

Nice day today for a change. 29 this morning, up to mid 60's and the wind laid down today... yesterday it was sunny but there was a bite to the wind, 25 and only up to 50's... it was gusty; but today was calm. The last 2 days I have spent some time at the farm. The place where the owners had new fence put up, where we had to deal with the catch pen taken down and the electric that I had to put up a temp tie-in... all that fencing was piled into the dump trailer... and DS knows the guy (he is the one that is supposed to come by here, but who knows when he will do that...) anyway, when DS found out that it was all going to the dump... including all the T-posts we have put in over the last few years........ he got the guy to bring it to the farm and dump it all... so far 3 or 4 dump trailers.... and I am going through and cutting the wire off the wooden posts, and the T-posts... it is long slow work... it is all mashed together and I am not trying to save any wire that we had put up as it is mashed together and the barbed wire is the high tensile kind and it is all tangled and it just is not worth it to me.... BUT.... at $5-7 a T-post and $10-15 a wooden post... I can salvage $100-300 worth at least....and some of the wood posts that are broken off, I am going to use to define the flower bed in front of the house along the porch... they ought to last a few years since they are treated posts... and it will make it easier for me to be able to put mulch in and have it stay there... once I put some wire over it to keep the chickens out.... nothing fancy... but better than throwing away some of the broken ones... I suspect they broke them off pushing them out with their skid loader...
I already got at least 10-15 wood posts out and nearly 20 T-posts... a few are bent and the wire and anything metal that is no good is going on the trailer for scrap metal.... DS took a trailer load a week or so ago and it was up to $9.00 /100 wt.... he said he got over $700 which was over 4 ton (8,000/lbs).... this flat bed trailer is one we haul some hay on or a vehicle or something so has a good weight limit.....had a couple old freezers, some heavy metal from truck frame, old metal culverts they take out at work... he brings all that to "L's" side of the farm which is a designated dumping site.... and then loads all the metal on the trailer and takes a load when prices are up.... luckily it is an "extra trailer".... so it doesn't hurt it to sit there loaded for awhile....

My back has been telling me that I have not been doing this kind of work in several years.... and I have to be very careful as the knees are not near as stable with walking on and over the posts and uneven ground... and I do not have the arm strength I used to have before I got to hurting so much and started doing less and less... but hope to build it up some doing this sort of stuff....

Told DS that he needed to go through the posts and decide which ones were reusable, and the bent metal ones and piles of wire he could put on the trailer... I needed some of it moved so that I can get back into more... move all the wood posts out of the way so I don't get to slipping on them and hurt the ankle or fall as the knees aren't real steady.... I just need "manuevering room" and didn't want to drag all this out all over, into the driveway....

It is supposed to rain off and on tomorrow so don't know if I will work on it or not. Not on a schedule... but want to stay at it some so that I am not trying to do it in the heat of the summer.... might get him to actually get some fence done here at the house????

Got 2 baby mice (1/2 size of the last few), the other day on a sticky trap and another one yesterday.....something got into the plant again.... ....... I had actually thought I was finally past that.... WRONG.....

This is the 2nd weekend of the Highland Co. Maple Festival..... should be warmer on Sat than last weekend and Sunday temps are supposed to drop like a rock.... 50 maybe Sat and upper 30's on Sunday... might try to go Sat...
DS is going to be putting the new radiator in his dually that we had the trouble with going to NH to parents last year to cleanout the house..... and the little water seep in the radiator finally started to really leak.... he got a new all metal radiator... like $5-600 or something... the ford place had said it would cost $2-3,000 to do it because it has 4 heat sensors and all this other crap..... it is a MAJOR job..... 1 day plus...... well, a friend of his that does mechanic work, that's his job, certified and all that.... says he would help do it, and DS took the truck there last evening and the guy was going to start taking stuff off/out and they will do it on Sat.... he wants this truck to take the heifers to VT..... it will cost him about half for them to do it.... he will pay the guy naturally....but the guy has all the tools and knows what all to do with all this new fangled cooling heat sensors and all that....
Not like the old days with the radiators to take out, and put back in.... and just a pressure cap and a thermostat to deal with.........all this electronic crap......

 

[farmerjan]

Hit the wrong button again..... anyway... Got the forester battery charged back up after I left the key on and ran it down... have driven it a couple times so it is good. Also put the charger on the ranger to see if I could charge up the battery that DS put in it when mine wouldn't hold a charge... he said the battery was good but it was too weak to start the truck when we had that real cold single digit temps.... put it on trickle charge and left it for a couple days as I got busy. It is starting fine now.... I took it to the dumpster and emptied all the stuff I had in the back and had it at the farm today and loaded some of the shorter broken posts to bring home for the garden along the front porch....

Windshield is in the forester, muffler is done on the outback.... as well as the brakes/rotors and new tires. So hopefully all the planned vehicle work is done except for oil change/lubes on the ranger and the forester. Inspections in April....going to do both cars then so it is easy to remember them.... and the explorer is also April since that is when I brought it home from NH..... and then put tags on the forester.....
Quit advertising the explorer I bought from the estate since after I got all this finally done with the title, and all that, and waited for the GF sister to get it advertised, and then didn't get it sold right away... the ford place said with the economy this winter and this spring being so much worse... they wouldn't be able to give me what I paid for it.... all the salt/rust underneath hurts it terribly down here... now if I were to sell it up north might be able to do quite a bit better since that is common up there.... so for now, I guess I will just have to sit on it. I will pay that off as soon as is practical..... not what I wanted...

So that is about it.... Need a shower and wash my hair from all the dirt/dust etc at the farm the last 2 days....

 

[Ridgetop]

What a shame about getting so delayed on the car you bought from the estate. And you don't like it for yourself either so that is a downer.

Good job saving the fencing posts before they went to the dump! Those T-posts are crazy expensive now and so are the wood posts. It is a lot of work to remove the wire, but if you can do it while sitting down and over a period of time it will be worth it. We are going to try to salvage all the existing fence posts as we put in new fencing at the Yantis place. We are putting in higher fencing so will need to replace the fence posts. Once we have some perimeters up, we can use the short T-posts for interior pens. Not concerned about the dogs going over those fences. Those posts will be useful to use for that. We still need to apply for the conservation fencing program once we get to Texas.

 

[Baymule]

I keep getting advice to just hire a bulldozer to clean my fence rows. It’s fast and will get it done—and leave me with a big ball of mess. Solution? Set fire to it! Then load all the unburnables on a trailer and haul to the junkyard. Uhhhh…. Nope

If I cut out all the brush, I can burn it as I go and save the T-posts.

 

[farmerjan]

I want a bulldozer to come in and clean out the fence row here... nice wide open to put the fence... big pile and burn it. New fence up and DONE....but there is no old fence here.
I am not unhappy with this mess to work on and it is all in one place to do it. You can't afford to pay fencing guys to take it down slow and methodically like you as the landowner can do. It is the waste of material that just gets to me... especially since at least half of the T-posts are ours that we put in this fence over the years as we did patching,repairs. Why they wanted to take out all the woven wire fence along the road and all when it was in very good shape I will never know... guess they needed to have farm expense write offs or something....I think that the fence just didn't look "nice enough"....the piece up along the woods needed replacing that I fully could see....
I would rather have this all here at the farm to work on... although there is something to be said for being able to take the fence off the posts first... my knees would not have done those very steep hills and gullies very good there right now... the only other plus to it is that there is added weight to the trailer to go to scrap with the wire and old bent t-posts.
No sitting here to work on it... I am constantly climbing over to get to wire that is catching somewhere and cutting it... will have to work on taking some of the staples out of the wood posts but it is not practical to try to pry them out with the posts "moving" as I try to get them untangled from the wire. Alot easier to just cut the wire and pull it from under the staples on the wood posts in order to get them free... and cut the "clips" on the t-posts to be able to slide them out of the tangled wire.... Still a job.....

Cloudy with a little bit of wet this morning... then going to pass through and another wave late this afternoon.

Only got down to 47 last night... 20 degrees warmer than the night before.... CRAZY temp swings. Supposed to be alot colder this weekend...

Got several texts out for testing... expect next week to be pretty busy. Might take a ride down by the co-op and see how busy they are and maybe get the forester or the ranger's oil change/lube done.