Ann and her son Daniel will be traveling to NY, Philly, and DC over the next two weeks, so I will be juggling animals, chores, and managing the completion of 200′ of new walkways. I suspect she will be having much more fun than I! This may also affect updates …

The purpose of the walkways is 1) to reduce the dirt tracked into the bunkhouse, 2) to better marry the bunkhouse and the rest of the buildings together, 3) to make an access path for mowers/UTV from the west of the buildings to the east and 4) to prep the area for the new barn. With the pathways in place, we can then finish up the landscaping of the bunkhouse.

Before the walkways:

Levels found and walkways dug. Forms, gravel bed, and cement to come this weekend.

This coming Saturday, the forms will be layed, rebar positioned, and concrete poured.

On the jeep front, we have decided that the next project will be setting up our corral system. Once that is done, we plan to set aside other property project updates in favor of me working on Biscuit and/or the race jeep starting roughly in early November.

UPDATE: Here is another Drifters Jeep Club jacket for sale on eBay, this time for $60. The name on this one is “Crash”. It is a Large.

The San Gabriel Valley area Drifters Jeep Club still exists. 

View all the information on eBay

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This jacket sold in 2019/2020. It was priced at $199, but when I clicked on the “watch” button I received an offer of $175 from the seller.

UPDATE: Ann’s family descended upon our place this past weekend. We are only catching up with everything now. The property worked great for the family event and should work great for a jeep event, once we get one organized. 

Earlier this week, we managed to collect all the corral panels Ann won at the auction, including the 24′-long heavy metal fence (with an added 12′ foot gate). With the help of a tractor bucket, I was able to carry it home on our 18′ trailer (Dave, we’ve put those straps you’ve sent us to good use!). 

While loading the gate, a man came by in a truck to check on us. It turns out, he is the owner of the auction facility (Mr. Booker of Booker auctions). He asked where we lived and we said Prosser. Given he’s a long time resident of the Tri-Cities, I jokingly asked if he knew the former owner of our property in Prosser, Merlin Brown, as he was a bit notorious around these parts. Sure enough, somehow Mr. Booker had met Merlin while camping one time. Mr. Booker noted, “I thought I was a pretty good bullshitter, but that Merlin, he was over the top”. 

Meanwhile, in “slicer” news … I discovered that when I plugged in the slicer, it didn’t work. After dissembling the power box, I found the power lines weren’t attached to anything (see lower left circle and arrow).  Why didn’t they at least cap or cut the ends?

After some discussions with my uncle, we figured out that the former owner (Walmart) must have disabled/decommissioned before selling it by pulling the wire the power wire between the cord and the board (likely a safety thing). So, after unable to find any schematics online, we made and educated guess and I wired the hot and common wires to the board near that lower arrow on the left. Viola, it now works!

I also discovered one of the foots was an incorrect length (by half an inch see upper right arrow above), making the slicer unstable. It took a while to find at our local ACE store, but I finally found another 4″ metric Phillips bolt to properly adjust the footer to the correct length. 

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Originally Posted Sept 23: Ann’s family will be here this weekend, so the next updates will likely be Monday. So, we’ve been busily tidying up the property, inside and out. However, we did sneak away on Thursday to pickup some items Ann won at a local auction.

The principal purpose was to buy some corral panels (we couldn’t justify buying new ones at $200+ per panel), scoring about 200 feet of 12′ long panels at a great price. But, she also spotted a meat slicer for sale at the auction.

Ever since working at restaurants, I’ve always wanted a quality slicer, but it’s hard to justify the purchase. So, Ann surprised me by winning an auction for a Bizerba GSP HD 13″ slicer! Plus, it came with a stainless steel cart. Priced new (to my surprise) without the cart at between $4k-$7k. Meanwhile, a stainless cart goes for a minimum of $1500 all by itself. So, I was pretty shocked that she snagged the slicer plus a cart for less than $600.  I’d say she scored!