Here lately I’ve had heck around the farm. It seems if it can breakdown on me, it has, everything from lawnmowers to tractors has broke down this past week.
This week my lawnmower broke down again, it hasn’t been out of the shop but maybe two weeks. The mowing machine I cut hay with has messed up. It’s so old I can’t get the exact same parts anymore and the new parts are not fitting.
Friday evening I rented a skid steer and dump trailer for the Labor Day weekend. I picked it up Friday evening and I would have it until Tuesday morning. I was going to haul dirt all weekend long. I needed to fill some ruts in my yard, add dirt to some horse stalls and put several loads in our big roping arena.
We moved about ten loads Friday evening. Saturday morning we got started and things were going good, then the skid steer died and wouldn’t start. If it would have been my own equipment I’d have got a code reader and tried to delete the codes, but to be honest I was afraid to mess with it too much. I checked the battery and it was fully charged. I called the rental place and they were out of town for the holiday weekend so they couldn’t come fix it or bring me another skid steer.
I’m impatient I know, but i wanted that dirt moved before the fall rains start, so I got my tractor and went to scooping up dirt.
I have these humps out in the pasture behind the house, I used my bull dozer to blade the grass off and then would push up a good sized pile of dirt. It was simple to use the front end loader on my tractor and load the dump trailer.
Over the weekend I was making progress. We added dirt to the horse stalls, some holes in the yard and we figured we put fifty or sixty loads in the arena. I was wanting to put a hundred loads of dirt in the arena. Then the tie rod on the tractor broke Monday morning. I was almost done too, it seems it never fails.
Monday evening I decided I would shoe a horse in the barn where the big fan could blow on me. I moved all my shoeing stuff out there and was set up to stay cool as a cucumber in the heat. As soon as I started I noticed instead of having the three hoof knives in my shoeing box there was only one. Someone had carried off not one, but two of my hoof knives, once again I couldn’t work because of equipment issues. Sometimes I just can’t catch a break. I guess they call it Labor Day for a reason.
James Lockhart lives near the Kiamichi mountains in southeast Oklahoma. He writes cowboy stories and fools with cows and horses.
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