Yesterday and today were spent, in part, with cans of Krylon ™\u00a0 spray paint in the color designated by TX Parks & Wildlife as “NO HUNTING PURPLE”.\u00a0\u00a0 The idea is that instead of posting “No Hunting” signs (where they inevitably get stolen, shot up, mysteriously blown away) , you simply paint the top of your fence posts purple.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Not every fence post but enough that anyone approaching the fence sees the purple warning.\u00a0 We had previously tried “No Hunting” signs with the usual results.<\/p>\n
The problem with spray paint on fence posts is of course the spray.\u00a0 Texas air is very rarely motionless, and fences are long, even on our place (the north fence is a half mile long).\u00a0 Also it doesn’t cover as well as paint from a can, but I couldn’t find a can of NO HUNTING purple paint, just the spray cans.\u00a0 And it’s not just any purple that’s listed in the law, but this particular purple (which, by the way, doesn’t cover brown or green posts well at all.\u00a0\u00a0 Mostly I sprayed T-posts.\u00a0 T-posts (for the uninitiated) are metal posts with a T cross-section, driven into the soil by a “post-driver”, a heavy piece of pipe with a heavy piece of iron over one end and a handle on each side.\u00a0 You put it over the top of the T-post, lift it about a foot, and slam it down until the T-post is in the ground solidly enough.\u00a0 Builds shoulder muscle or destroys the joint, depending.<\/p>\n
Our T-posts consist of a mix of T-post ages and types, because (being savvy country folk) we salvaged the old T-posts of the original fence, now battered, bent, rusty though they be.\u00a0 NEW T-posts are painted white or silver on the top end and the rest green.\u00a0 Old T-posts usually have some remnant green on them, but quickly grow rust here and there, where the wires are fastened into them with thinner wires wrapped around the post.\u00a0\u00a0 Ours are also spaced apart with twisted wire things I can’t recall the name of (it’s not “spacer”)\u00a0 so that cattle are less likely to push their heads through and move the wire around.\u00a0 Cattle are not deterred by barbed wire strands, if they can get their head in and slowly, firmly, lift one of the wires up and step on the one below.\u00a0\u00a0 At any rate, I sprayed the tops of a lot of T-posts, and the pipes R- uses in the line braces along the way\u00a0 (some people in the past foolishly used hackberry in line braves–it rots and then the line or corner brace goes all wonky.\u00a0 Yesterday I did the east part, from the creek most of the way through the dry woods (used up a whole can) and today I did the west end (west of the creek to the NW corner.)<\/p>\n
What I also did yesterday that cheered me up a lot was write a new short story, start a second, and today finished that one.\u00a0 This was s little test to see if NewBook was a fluke, a miracle but one that was only good once.\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 The fiction generating part of my brain is back in order and still working.\u00a0 Hurray.\u00a0 The new stories are both about the young (mid-20s) Kieri Phelan, a long way from becoming king of Lyonya.\u00a0 I was trying to re-write a story I’d written while working on the original Paks (but lost) and instead I got something compoletely new that fit, and something that is, I think, better than the original was (from what I can remember of the original.)<\/p>\n
Tomorrow is another trip to the bank (for case) and feed store (for hay and a sack of horse feed)\u00a0 and another walk around the land, on which I might just be carrying my spear.\u00a0 Purely for exercise, of course.<\/p>\n
But now it’s after midnight, so as Pepys would say “And so to bed.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday and today were spent, in part, with cans of Krylon ™\u00a0 spray paint in the color designated by TX Parks & Wildlife as “NO HUNTING PURPLE”.\u00a0\u00a0 The idea is that instead of posting “No Hunting” signs (where they inevitably get stolen, shot up, mysteriously blown away) , you simply paint the top of your Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,10,1],"tags":[17,7],"class_list":["post-1383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","category-uncategorized","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1383"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1385,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions\/1385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}