Happy Ides of March y’all, or as I like to call it, my birthday (shameless attention seeking). Lori here from bi-polar McDowell County West Virginia.
I’m sure you all have been hit with this crazy sprinter as well, but dang if the 1st of march wasn’t a bad day. Here in the county they had what weather people are refusing to call a tornado, some buildings were torn apart, trees, down, anything not hooked down was flying around, and there is even a trailer down the road from my home that was flipped to it’s roof. Thankfully no one was in it. Next comes nice toasty weather, then cold, then rain then warm, then rain, then warm, then frigid and snowy which brings us to today.
With all that being said, it is with a tear in my eye and a pain in my heart that I let y’all know what we’ve been up to. Oh don’t worry, It’s nothing sad, I just got a bit of the creeping crud that people are passing around and my eyes are watery and my chest hurts from coughing.
Here we go:
We had our first informational meeting on March 6th for returning folks and new families. We have 15 returning so far and 5 new ones. Some couldn’t make it to that one so we are scheduling another for 24th. We have one in Mercer county scheduled for the 21st at a returning participants home, and another to follow for the ones that can’t make it.
March 8th consisted of borrowing a car hauler trailer to run to Williamson to pick up 4 tons of fertilizer. 2 for Big Ugly, and 2 for Logan. Here’s how that went. Scott and I drove ahead of Jeremy and Michael who had the truck and trailer. We got it loaded up and headed to Logan since it would have been on the way to Big Ugly, no need to back track. So here we are rolling up 119, and we lost sight of the truck, mom mode kicked in and I texted Jeremy to see if something happened, he says “You could say that”. Of course I expect the worse, and flip out a little. He said they had a blow out on the trailer. GREAT! Thankfully it was about 2 miles from Walmart and they have a tire center. Of course we don’t have a jack heavy enough to take the weight of a 2 ton trailer with 3 ton of fertilizer on it. Scott and I run to Walmart, bought a 6 ton jack, and lug wrench, went back and got the tire, took the tire back to Walmart, got a new one put on the rim, called Bea in Logan to let her know what was going on, and called Marta at Big Ugly as well. After 35 minutes waiting for the tire to be ready, we went back to the truck to put the new tire on the trailer. Would the jack go high enough to get the tire on? Of course not, so Michael decides to try to disassemble a piece of the guard rail for the wooden block. He’d have put it back afterwards. A state road truck saw us broke down so instead of being a nice human being, he sat across the road to watch, so there went the guardrail block idea. We found an old junky jack in the truck that gave us just enough lift to get us in business. On the road again! We called Bea for directions to her storage unit, and we got totally lost, they had to come lead us. We did get there and get them unloaded. We managed to get to Big Ugly after 5:30 so thankfully a gentleman was waiting to help us unload theirs. We finally got home around 9:30 because we had to get a bite to eat.
March 14th we made another trip to Williamson to pick up 2 tons of fertilizer, 1 went to us and the other went to Athens. That was a pretty uneventful day, other than the guy running the fork lift was afraid he was going to bend the tailgate on our utility trailer. We assured him it would be fine. It of course did bend, it did before, we put a ratchet strap across it and away we went.
That brings us up to today. We kept the ton of fertilizer on the back of the truck to take to Athens today when we pick up the seed potatoes for us and Big Ugly. We got there with out a problem, The guys showed us where to take the fertilizer and how to get back to the tater place. We had a total of 6,450lbs of seed potatoes spread between the trailer and the truck. 4500lbs went to Big Ugly, and the rest came back with us. Surprisingly we made it to Big Ugly with no problems, Jeremy driving the truck with trailer and Scott and I in the pilot car. Since it was so cold and we lifted enough potatoes today, we just unhooked the trailer and left it at Big Ugly and will get it back tomorrow. Now we have a problem. Scott was backing up to turn around and backed right into the light pole. Y’all, he broke the tail ight lens and dented the bumper! Some pilot. Anyway, we stopped in Logan got a bite to eat and got home around 9:30 again.
I got in the house did the quickest hot bath soak ever, tossing taters and fertilizer all day wears my bones out. Got my laptop out and ready to do this blog, and my cookies were deleted so my password was gone. Panic Mode! I did a request new password, followed the link and there was just a loop of forget your password click here. So I went through every email ever sent to me and found the one with the password, Whew! It worked obviously.
We will be doing at least one more fertilizer run, this one will be Friday for High Rocks and Linwood, to be delivered Saturday, weather permitting. Stay tuned to hear how that goes.
I will finish up with a few pictures of what 6450lbs of taters looks like and my poor jeep.
Stay warm folks, and if you need a delivery of fertilizer just let us know.
Oh Lori, I have so missed your blogs! Thanks for the laughs as always! P.S. Happy birthday 🙂
Thanks! The fun is just beginning.
Beware those non-tornado tornadoes! Glad no one was hurt in tumbling mobile homes… Thinking about McDowell County seeing your great perspective of activities and how that complements what was documented in a good article in the Washington Post.