Poured the threshold for the north wing this morning. Jam was having a little trouble mixing the concrete. Fought with her till I got the section finished (9bags). Opened up the motor housing and found that the shaft key was missing and the pulley was no longer firmly attached to the shaft. Stuck a big screw in there and now they are one again....oughta make the next pour go a lot easier.
Just as I finished the pour, some folks stopped by asking how to get to the swimming hole. I gave them simple directions but didn't draw a map - mistake. Removed some fittings under the front end of my truck to make way for a new part. While I was waiting for UPS to show up with it...one of the swimming hole seekers came walking up. They got their truck stuck 4 miles from TFL and 2 miles in the wrong direction from where they wanted to go (and about a mile further south from the spot where I was able to pull out the last folks that got stuck). I drove him back down but there was no way for me to pull them out. Ended up driving them to the Ghost Town to spend the night - Beechie will have to come yank them out tomorrow. At least I got a nice view of Panther Mountain that I hadn't seen.
So....the part I was waiting for was a front hitch for my truck. I have a winch that I got over 2 years ago and thought it was about time to mount it. Still waiting on the winch mount receiver. If they had only waited about a week - I probably could have pulled them out. I hada feelin....46,68,28,0,B
8 comments:
That looks like a Harbor Freight mixer, mine had an issue also but I bought it used at a good price and the fix was cheap.
Just as I finished the pour, some folks stopped by asking how to get to the swimming hole.
Go south about two miles to where the old barn burnt down and ......
Oh hell, never mind. About a month ago I bought a winch at a garage sale for five bucks but it's pretty light duty and isn't likely to get many rigs unstuck.
What you do is get a good flexible tow strap, a bungee cord type, put about ten feet of slack in it and haul ass, yee haa, when you get to the end of that strap that rig is coming out or your bumper is history.
Been there, done that, good booze, good times. :-)
Mr. Floppy would like his name and hoof prints in the walk of fame.
You're a good man John Wells.
The web cam doesn't appear to be working right, unless that pickup is just sitting in the driveway for the heck of it, I haven't seen anyone get out of it for 10 minutes.
Need to make a sign like they did in them olden days of the West. Swimming hole that way -->. Keep them tomfool tourists from interrupting you all the time.
On Panther Mountain and nearby greater Areas...
-----------------
have things changed since ?
posted by jack Hennessy in 2006, see if things have changed ?
----------------------------------
Driving in West Texas and Terlingua Tx
When we first came to this area we asked someone how to get to a certain place. The reply was, "go to the middle of nowhere and take a right, then go even more to the middle of nowhere - you’ll be within a few miles from there".
That was a pretty fair statement at the time. Now, things are closing in a bit. It doesn’t feel so isolated and the distances seem more manageable. That’s one thing about West Texas - the distances. It’s 1.25 hours to get to the nearest hospital (if you can call it that), 3.5 hours to the nearest commercial airport (5 hours to the next nearest), 3.25 hours to reasonable groceries and a real hospital, 7-8 hours to a real city, and only 30 minutes to a bank branch and a post office. All of this is on good straight roads with speed limits of 70-75 miles per hour.
Every so often I’ll drive the 3-3.5 hours to go shopping, spend maybe 3 hours hitting the butcher shop, grocery store, liquor store, pet shop, home center and wholesale grocery and drive back the same day. You need to be very organized to do that run.
Our neighbor who is building a house has to make the trip about once a week and it doesn’t seem to phase him. Texans are used to distance and they usually talk in terms of hours instead of miles, it’s easier because some places aren’t far but they are hard to get to. When we came down to look for a place to buy the realtor put on 250 miles one day just showing us around - pretty usual for her but we were exhausted. Some days that 250 miles yields no sale.
A drive across Texas from El Paso in the northwest to Brownsville in the southeast is a hard two day trip and I’m not talking backroads but interstate highways most of the way. Personally, I’d do it in three days just to get in some quality scenery time.
Texas backroads are a treat. You can drive for miles without seeing a soul on the road. You can pass through very small towns without seeing anyone on the street. Yet you can stop at a farm stall out in absolute nowhere and they’ll have sold out the melons for the day.
It’s interesting. In all this open, deserted country, people are far more observant of speed laws than around cities. You can be driving down a stretch of road that is absolutely straight for 15 miles and no one is doing more than 3-5 miles over the limit and most are right on the limit. Texans don’t seem to mind driving.
So, being so far from anywhere, what do you do in an emergency? Well, you mostly hope that there isn’t one. If there is, the ambulance is 30 miles away or more but usually a Sheriff’s Deputy is only 10-15 miles down or up the road. And, they’re all good at what they do.
They loaded me up in the ambulance one day and trucked me up to our non-hospital. We had to go through a Border Patrol checkpoint on the way and some windy mountainous country. From call-in to delivery was about two hours including a pretty thorough exam at our house prior to leaving. Of course, if I’d been very bad off they’d have transferred me to the real hospital another two hours away. If you have a really serious problem your chances are poor.
If you choose to live out in the boondocks you need a couple of things: good health and a real appreciation for the inside of a motor vehicle, because here you’re "going nowhere in a hurry, fast".
posted by Jack Hennessy 2006
Glad you found the problem with the mixer. Too bad it wasn't sooner.
Very neighborly of you to help those folks out. I hope they bought you dinner at the Starlight.
By the way, nice photo of Panther Mountain. It almost looks like it was taken from a moving vehicle.
Post a Comment