A brown van will haul a ton of poop

My ugly brown $450 van brought home another load of manure. This is a load of horse manure, a mix of horse apples and sawdust. I don't have much of an estimate but am pretty sure it is in excess of 3000 lbs of material. For Jeff, we'll just round it off to a ton of poop.



Last year I got a five by ten flatbed trailer from a friend. It has stake rack sides, about 36 inches tall. I can hold about five and a half yards if I can handle the weight. That's a lot of poop to pitch by hand, though. Last fall I built a pair of bins on pallets so I could lift the poop out of the trailer with the forks on my tractor. The bins are about 5 x 5 and four feet high. The bins do make unloading the trailer lot easier. But with bins that large, it's not hard to over load the tractor. It's not so much the actual weight as it is the distance of the center of mass from the front axle. The bins allow the center of mass to be a lot further out, giving it more leverage. So there is still a lot of hand work getting enough compost out of the bins so I can safely move the bins with the tractor. It's still worth using the bins because the tractor allows me to stack the compost much higher than I could reasonably by hand.



It is nice having these big bins for materials that I can handle in or near full bins worth. The debarker chips from the saw mill across the way are a good example. But I am toying with making some smaller pallet bins for denser materials. If I cut the bin depth by a third I could handle them with less hand work. But then I would need a place to keep the bins I am not using. And unloading three bins is significantly more difficult than two because it requires a different approach angle. I am waiting for inspiration to hit me.

Friends with Benefits

That's my dependable old Audiovox 9155 cell phone. Well, at least it was old dependable. I got it in 2003, to replace another old Audiovox phone. Audiovox is not exactly a chic brand, but these phones have treated me well. It has a larger battery than most and I think better reception. And I haven't had to sign a contract to get a new phone.

But the point of this is that the most used buttons have started to not function reliably. The button is a typical printed circuit keypad, pushing the button forces a conductive layer down on a parallel set of contacts closing the circuit. Similar to TV remotes and many other devices. I tried cleaning it, but no avail.

I looked at the new phones Verizon would give me for signing a new contract. But I couldn't find one I felt it was worth signing a contract for. Instead, I bought the same model phone off eBay and scavenged parts out of it. That's the donor phone on the right.

I am not much of an electrical engineer. Luckily, someone else did all the engineering on this. I just had to take it apart and replace the offending keypad with the one from the eBay phone. I think it involve five small screws and some snap fit joints.

I am really happy I don't have to get a new phone. Learn how to program it, transfer my numbers, etc. And the phones I would have considered, I think Verizon would have tried to make me up my service level for anyway. I am a little concerned though. There used to be hundreds of auctions on eBay for compatible batteries. Now there are only a few. The next time I need to replace the battery, I may not be able to. But I think I probably have a year and half to three years (depending on how good the battery from the donor phone turns out to be). But then I probably will have to bite the bullet and get a new phone. Till then I guess I am foot loose and fancy free...

And in other news, we got about ten yards of poop.

We need to improve the soil in the backfield. We called around and compost was available for $55 a yard, minimum of 10 yards plus delivery. Luckily, my wife has a friend who found us a source of organic cow manure. And we didn't have to put all ten yards in the van! The friend had access to a small dump truck and we got the bulk of it that way. We got maybe two yards of old, dry, well composted manure into the back of the van (on a tarp) and onto a small trailer a friend loaned us. The rest came in the dump truck. Friends with benefits.


Here are some pictures from our first trip away from the house as a family since we got the goats a year and half ago.