Good Morning All. It's partly cloudy and 43° here this morning. Should reach the mid-50's today and tomorrow before returning to the 60's and 70's from Saturday forward. Quite windy from the north this morning.
Another lackluster visit to the primary care physician yesterday, I guess that those are the good ones. Today is the weekly grocery/beer trek.
After returning home, I was able to watch one of my younger neighbors (~53) and his dad round up their cows and calves from their adjoining properties, and load them into someone's trailer. So ended their rather shortened experience in being cattle ranchers. I had researched it years ago, and another neighbor who had real experience both told him in the beginning that it wasn't going to work, but he was stubborn and went ahead anyway. He originally bought nine cows and one bull and put them on about 10 acres of pasture to graze. My research verified by the other neighbor was that each cow required at least 3-5 acres, with additional hay to be purchased in order to be successful. The lack of real meaningful rainfall in the fall, overgrazing and nine new cows (bull was busy) meant that he was purchasing six large round bales of hay a week at $125 each. After 6 months he could have gotten $1500 each for the nine offspring. Whoops! That's already a loss of $4500 without including the veterinarian costs, including castration of the males or any other supplemental feeding! Another business venture bites the dust. At least he realized it before it went too long. Note that when he started and I said that it wasn't enough land for grazing, I offered to let him install an electric fence around six acres of my land that adjoined his dad's land (gate was already installed), but he chose not to. Then the other neighbor (the one with experience) planted hay on that part of my land, eliminating that option.
Out in the train shed, I almost finished up the grain elevator that goes with the Ethanol refinery.
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I just need to paint the handrail on the stairway and apply decals. Weathering will come later after I quit handling it so much.
Model Railroad Inventory - I'm in the middle here. I do have an inventory program that includes photos, maintenance records, costs and many other fields of information. It also has a switching program but that isn't relevant here. It is kept backed up on an external drive, but only because I haven't put it on a thumb drive yet. I have all of the original rolling stock boxes stored in the attic of the train shed. The inventory is primarily for my convenience in keeping the maintenance records. None of my offspring at this point wants anything. I do have a SIL who can and will sell stuff on Ebay. I have showed him the inventory and explained where the boxes are. If he chooses to dispose of it that way, he will get all of the proceeds instead of it going to the estate. Otherwise, I will not care since I will be gone. Although I haven't done it yet, and may never do it, the inventory program has a section for structures and accessories. The train shed itself would be more valuable to a future owner without the layout, as it has a clear span of 20' x 32' x 8' that could easily be some kind of shop. I do not expect my kids to keep the property when I go.
Everybody have a wonderful day.
