The Machines! The Terrible and Tremendous Machines!

Well, good news from the front office. The ratings are making a comeback after a sophomore slump. It seems people need to know the story. Especially people from Uganda, the newest country to come under the sway of Temporary Hermit. I have a strong suspicion that it is Xavier, and that means that at least until now he hasn't been eaten by a tapir in South America or dismembered by Moa birds in New Zealand. So, in celebration, I pour a glass from my cistern of Crown Royal, and relax into my overstuffed armchair in front of the fire to relate to you the story of the machines.

The machines are, quite simply, the number one reason to have a plot of land in the middle of nowhere. You NEED a road into your property, and the only way to build one is with some big, awesomely powerful diesel machinery! Huzzah! As a mentioned before, we used to have to walk in from the main road, but now we have about 3/4 of a mile of our own road,  which we built and maintain.

The first and most basic machine we have is the bulldozer. It was born sometime in the sixties, and it enjoyed some free love and flowers and all that crap before being sent to an island in Alaska, where it was abandoned for many a decade before some random crazy guy with a barge my father is somehow acquainted rescued it and sold it to us. This machine might be my favorite. It is small, there are three levers and two pedals, and it knocks stuff over or pushes it around.

You can stop one track or the other to make it turn left or right, and you can lift the blade up and down. That's it. It's kind of like Playmobil for everyone too old for Playmobil.

Next we have the front end loader, the larger brother of the bulldozer. This one is crazy. It's a lot bigger, and it does a lot more stuff. There is High/Low, forward and reverse lever for EACH track. On top of that each track has its own clutch. And then you have the controls for the bucket, which can go up and down, pivot, and open. The bulldozer was my plaything when I was 10, but the loader was off limits until I was 18. Look at all that crap you can screw up with in this cockpit!

I'm not sure when it was born, but I think sometime in the seventies.

And then we have the dump truck. It is huge, and by far the heaviest thing made by man when it is full. Interestingly, it is exactly as wide as the road itself, and while my dad claims that it did at one time have power steering, any vestige of that is long gone. This thing takes some upper body strength to handle. This is also the machine where things can go the most wrong. Two years ago a couple of my friends and I came out one weekend to do some road work, and my dad very nearly lost the dump truck into the swamp. It was tilting at a crazy angle and the wheels on one side were completely underwater. We had to shovel the bed out by hand (terrifying), and then finagle a way to pull it out with both the loader and the bulldozer at the same time (also terrifying). Notice that there is no bumper on the front. It got ripped off in the struggle to free the damn monstrosity from the grips of a watery grave.

Here we have the last entry. Stump named it Princess Tinky, but I think it should be called Hattori Hanzo or something cool like that. It has a plow on it right now, but in the summer it has a bucket on the front and a backhoe on the back. It does small scale slicing and dicing.

The day today was amazing. Not a cloud anywhere near, and I got the lowest temperature thus far: 7 below. (-21.6 for you foreigners). Went for a ski, and it took some mileage to warm up. Hopefully it won't get too much colder or I'm not going to want to be outside. The moon is back, baby, and it is great! The nighttime is luminescent. The stars aren't what they once were, but I don't even care. The wolves are so much less scary when you can see ten feet!