2 June 2020 Tuesday Eighteen more days and the days start becoming shorter. The shortening days increases the tension and pressure to get stuff done before the snow flies. Right now we’re having about 18 hours of daylight. The one thing that has struck me about the long days and short days is the motivation to get out of bed. In the summer there isn’t much reason to jump out of bed because there is so much daylight that there is more daylight than you’ll have the stamina to use. In the winter the same but opposite problem exists. There is no hurry to coming roaring out of bed because it gets daylight only a few hours and that is somewhere around 10:OO AM. Regardless of the season there is little motivation to get out of bed. I’ve always had a problem going to bed even when I needed to get up at 6:00 AM to get to work on time. Now that I’m retired and have fewer responsibilities, I very often find myself going to bed after midnight. The only reason that I wake up relatively early has been Rush Limbaugh. His show comes on at 8:00 AM. I turn on my cell phone to listen at that time. If Rush isn’t on the show, I often roll over and take another short snooze. I’ll be in and out of consciousness for another 30 minutes to an hour. Regardless of the season, I am not highly motivated to get out of my nice warm bed.

Today was an unusually down day for me. I awoke at 7:30 and rolled out of bed about 8:00, as usual. It was a cool, gray morning and I was feeling kinda down. While I am not highly motivated to get out of bed any morning, I am usually ready to get to work after I’ve coffeed up. Today was different. I am attributing the lack of enthusiasm to having worked like a dog for 4 days in a row. My excuse is that I was simply tired. Today I didn’t do a whole lot. Did a sweep up of the kitchen and living room. Got water for the goslings. Loaded the dishwasher. During the midst of these menial chores the computer operated incubator full of goose eggs started making beeping noises. The goose eggs could not be allowed to drop below 99.5F temperature for any length of time. Going colder than that for any length of time will kill the embryos. Each of those embryos hatched is worth $10. A hundred-forty dollars was beeping at me. I was using a hairdryer to keep the temperature up while I searched for the older and even less reliable incubator. When I found the old incubator I set it up and fiddled with it to get it up to temperature whilst continuing to turn the hair dryer off and on. With the temperature stabilized I transferred the eggs to the old incubator ad breathed a sigh of relief. After a couple of hours the new incubator started heating again. No apparent reason. It just began to operate again. The design of the new incubator is supposed to have two 2 liter bottles of water on top to provide the necessary humidity for the eggs. There are misters screwed onto the bottles and connected to the attached computer.The problem is that the flimsy wire support for the bottles will not support the filled water bottles. I decided to attempt to solve this problem. I made a wooden plate to go on top of the incubator to support the bottles. I got a piece of 1/2″ plywood and made the support plate. Once I had manufactured the plate I put it onto the incubator and then found that the misters weren’t working. I couldn’t find the instruction book for this POS and it was then that I gave up and went outside to get a breath of fresh air.

Outside, I went to the new stone surrounded planter and filled in a small gap in the stone surround. I, also, took a look at the travel trailer rear leveling jack as it isn’t operating properly. It was broken when we bought it 3 years ago. Now that I’m going to sell the trailer, I’m going to repair it. That appeared to be too daunting a task in my current funk. I went back inside sat down, reclined my chair and took a nap.

Later, Summer came home. She had two spare misters for the incubator and we changed the misters on the incubator. She, also, had the instruction booklet that she didn’t need to reprogram the incubator computer. We got the incubator working properly but did not move the eggs as we weren’t certain that it would continue to work properly. I’d move the eggs, if it was still working properly in the morning.

We had discussed on Monday evening that we would attempt to repair the bedroom slide out on the travel trailer. When Summer finished with the incubator, we walked down to the trailer. The task of troubleshooting the slide out problem was a two person job. It isn’t possible to operate the slide out and look at it to see what the problem might be. It turned out that it was a simple matter of a loose chain. The noise was the chain was jumping a tooth on the drive gear. The problem was that the motor had slipped slightly and the chin was loose. A 7/16″ wrench and about ten minutes and the problem was solved.

Another trailer problem solved and it was time for some supper and a vodka drink.