Sliding Sideways

Normally weeknights are usually un-eventful being school nights for the kid and short evenings before heading into work the next day. Our monday night this week took a complete sideways slide. It was really icy with the new snow that had fallen the night before and was our first really yucky dump of 4-8 inches of snow depending on what area you are in. We had upwards of 8 inches by our farm. I was heading home after work and hit a nasty section of glare ice just south of the hwy 19 & 60 intersection south of Devon and the truck spun out on me and landed me in the ditch. Considering that it spun clockwise into the oncoming traffic, completed a 360 back into the south-bound lane and then continued into a 2nd spin narrowly missing a phone pole before stopping with me facing crossways in the ditch, I have no idea how I didn’t hit anything or have anybody else hit me during this as it was during rush hour traffic! At the time I had thankfully been going fairly slowly since the roads had been bad all day so it turned out better than if I had been going the speed limit as if on a dry road. In retrospect I don’t know if the spinout might’ve been prevented or lessened had I been in 4WD, but I was in 2WD at the time. I had tried to steer into the skid but it didn’t seem to help at all. I was able to get the truck started again much to my surprise since it had been having the engine light on for a few days before this happened. I managed to drive it out of the ditch at a flatter spot and limped the truck home at about 40km/h with my 4-ways on.

So now I’m getting the truck looked at to see what’s wrong with it and have gotten a beater to drive in the meantime. It’s a 1980 Chrysler LeBaron station wagon and has got a new engine with less than 2000 km’s on it, good transmission, and brand spankin’ new winter tires I got on it today. I was too scared to drive it with the bald summer tires it came with. So almost all the parts in it are good, but wow is the car ugly! Tomorrow will be the first attempt to drive it into the city since it took awhile to get things together with it today. We still need to install a new thermostat in it since the heater isn’t working and it needs something fixed with the windshield wiper fluid system since it’s not spraying at all. Then there was the small matter of the key breaking off in the driver’s door while trying to unlock it. What a pain that was, but we were lucky the guy at the Home Hardware in Thorsby was able to piece together the key and cut a copy for us. Whew!

Here’s a pic of the new 29 year old beast:

Goat update: In the background of the picture, you can see our hay supply under a white tarp. Since moving the shed into the other field the donkey and sheep happily sleep in it every night, and the goats jumped the fence again and crawled under the hay tarp to bed down at night. I hope they are warm under there! I think Aega went into heat as Billy was incessantly chasing her around the field on monday morning, and Lisa is very much cut down in her milk production this week too. We’re due for some very cold temperatures down to -28C for daytime high forecasted in the next couple weeks so we’ll see how the critters do out there. As for the rabbits, our does are due to kindle in the next couple weeks. Hope they are successful and have their kits inside the nestboxes this time! The fryers all almost all up to butcher weight now and we’ve selected the ones we’re keeping for breeding stock and which ones will goto the freezer and butcher day will soon be coming likely before christmas or maybe the week after during the holidays when things are slow.