JHP Homestead’s Journal

[JHP Homestead]

M
i own basically the same tractor the Branson 2910. Same everything they just give a little more fuel to it so it gets 1 more hp then it’s all new and improved.

Funny how they change one little thing and now it’s an “upgrade”.

How do you like yours?

 

[Grant]

I like it. The weight of the Branson let’s me do more work with less horsepower. It doesn’t just spin on the surface.

 

[JHP Homestead]

My rabbit kits are 1 week old now. One of the ones I brought inside died, but all the others are doing well. Most of them are boring white (except one tort! I’m really excited about that) but I took a couple pics anyways.

In other rabbit news, DH butchered 3 growouts that were ready. I think I’m going to make hot dogs with them, since DS has decided he doesn’t like “spicy” stuff and refuses to eat the other sausages and burgers I made.

 

[JHP Homestead]

We haven’t been able to work much on our basement. We bought a new-to-us car in order to save money on gas; driving my Excursion around at 10mpg just to get groceries and go to church is overkill. We also have at least one trip to Illinois this year, and probably one to Virginia too, so we did the math and assuming no major issues with the car (yeah right ) we’d have broken even on the price of the car vs gas savings in less than 2 years.

Enter our new car, an 01 LeSabre. It seemed great when we got it, had new tires and was in good shape. The steering was a little wonky, but that was just due to a loose steering rack, so we got it home and fixed that in less than an hour. Great, now we have a nice car that’ll get more than 2x the gas mileage of the Excursion.

Except now it has some random electrical short affecting about half of the interior electronics, and IT WON’T START!!

So we’ve spent the last week or so tracking down a short among the 8 zillion wires in the car. Last night, we finally (praise the Lord!) found a ground wire that is shorted to voltage somewhere. Now just to take the front seats out, find and fix the short, and Pray that it actually fixes the problem

I can’t wait to get this fixed so we can go back to working on remodeling our basement. It was supposed to be a winter project but at the rate we’re going, winter will be over before the project is

 

[Bruce]

I can't be happy about the car problems and I'm glad you found the problem, electrical problems are a bear. Nice that you weren't paying a mechanic $100/hr to chase it down. But 2x the MPG of the Excursion is "good"?

 

[JHP Homestead]

I can't be happy about the car problems and I'm glad you found the problem, electrical problems are a bear. Nice that you weren't paying a mechanic $100/hr to chase it down. But 2x the MPG of the Excursion is "good"?

Yeah, it wouldn’t take very long before we’d pay more to the mechanic than the car is worth.

2x the mpg of the Excursion still isn’t very good, but it seems like a decent compromise. I used to have a Ford Fiesta, which got 40mpg. That was awesome at the time, because I was driving 45 miles each way to work and we lived in a rental house. After 1 kid, quitting my job, and buying a homestead, the car just became a huge annoyance. With the car seat in it, the front passenger seat was so far forward that DH couldn’t even get in it and I was sitting with my knees in the glove box. An adult couldn’t really sit in the back either. It just made any sort of traveling downright uncomfortable.

So, we swung way in the other direction and sold the Fiesta and got the Excursion. We love it, it’s great for hauling stuff for the farm and for when family visits. The gas mileage is awful though and we do quite a bit of traveling to visit relatives (2.5 hours away) where we don’t need a vehicle that large.

The “new” car is supposed to be a compromise of large enough to make DH happy and comfortable, and small/fuel economical enough to make me happy. And we bought it for a great price, if we can get it running right

 

[Bruce]

Sounds like DH knows his way around cars, it will get running right!

 

[Baymule]

Congrats on the new car. Hope you get everything all fixed up on it and can go on down the road!

 

[JHP Homestead]

Thanks! DH found the problem wire this evening! We didn’t have the wire crimps in order to fix it, but he’ll get some tomorrow, and hopefully that’ll be the only problem.

In animal news, the rabbit kits are 2 weeks old now and mostly doing well. A couple have been getting out of the nesting box already, so I’ll turn the boxes on their sides soon.

 

[JHP Homestead]

So we’re still sorting out car problems. DH fixed the wiring problem under the front seats, but the car still doesn’t start. It looks like maybe we were a little aggressive shoving the test leads into the starter relay holes, so we’re going to try putting in a new fuse/relay block and hopefully that fixes it. That part will be here by Friday, so maybe this weekend we’ll have a running car.

DH and I took advantage of the ground finally freezing up and hauled some dead trees out of the woods. It looks like it’ll be back above freezing during the day in just a week or two, so we’ll be getting as many trees out as we can while the ground is solid. We have a lot of dead standing Ash trees in our woods that are starting to get rotten and fall on their own, so we’re trying to get some of those cleaned up.