Paradise ponders: weeds, rakes, and IT problems edition... This morning was a fine, cool morning, so I decided it was a good time to whack all the weeds around my barn. That's a sizable area, equivalent to a rectangle about 80' x 35' – and it was full of every noxious weed you can imagine. I got perhaps 1/4 done when my friend and neighbor Tim D. interrupted me with an unhappy look on his face. It seems his tractor was acting up, and he really needed to get his hay windrows turned over. So he wanted to know if he could borrow my tractor.
Well, of course he could! But there was a bit more to it than that, of course. First we had to disconnect his broken tractor from the rake, and get it out of the way. Then we set about connecting my tractor to the rake. Even though it's a “standard” three-point hitch, the parts didn't fit right. We had to do a little modification with my grinder, which took a half hour or so. Finally we got the darned thing mounted on my tractor (an Italian rake on a Japanese tractor!), and Tim set off to turn over his windrows. I went back to weed whacking.
Then, when I was maybe 1/2 done, a smiling stranger came up to me. This was while I was behind my barn, a most unlikely place for someone to stumble upon me. When I got my hearing protectors off and could talk with the fellow, I discovered that he was here to do the semi-annual maintenance on my backup generators. He'd never been here before, so I had to show him where everything was located. Then I went back to weed whacking again.
This time I was able to finish. By that time I was soaking wet with sweat (it's only 80°F, but I was in full sun) and quite tired. So I went upstairs to my barn office to take a break. Sat down to review my email, and ... no Internet connection. WTF? It took only a few seconds of troubleshooting to figure out that I couldn't even ping my router (which my computer is directly connected to). Bad. Tried rebooting the router, but it didn't make its usual beeps and boops. It's looking dead. Dang it! It's possible that it's just overheated, so I pulled the power and I'm letting it cool. Most likely, it's just fried. I'm not real happy about that...
