A little shopping...
Well, as I whined about in the last posting, I didn't get to go to the auction in Swift Current on Tuesday. I did, however, go to Swift Current today to get some stuff I "needed" that was on sale at Canadian Tire. The main item was a heavy-duty "Industrial" battery-charger that can crank out up to 150 Amps for starting an engine. It's an automatic machine, normally putting out 55, 20 or 2 amps depending on the draw from the battery it's connected to. I bought this beastie because I needed a machine capable of turning over the larger engines that one would find on farm machinery. I have a smaller charger that can put out 70 Amps for starting an engine, but while that's fine and dandy for a small (say, 4-cylinder) car engine, it just doesn't cut it for something like a large diesel engine in a combine.
And yes, BTW, I do have a combine; A John-Deere 7700. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with it, but I have one. :)
I also picked up a 15-Watt solar-panel, and some tire-patching supplies. The solar-panel will be for the "fuel-wagon" that I plan to build this summer. Right now, the fuel slip-tank is in the back of my pickup, and it's taking up valuable space. My plan is to build a small trailer for it, thus allowing me to easily move it if required, but also allowing me to leave it stationary otherwise. Since I've found out that the price for fuel from the Co-op is the same regardless of whether they deliver it or I go to town to get it, I can just have them come to the farm and fill the tank for me. A 100-gallon slip-tank is a lot cheaper to fill than a 500-gallon farm-tank! The slip-tank has a 12-Volt fuel-pump on it, so the plan is to put a deep-cycle storage-battery on the trailer as well, and keep it charged using the solar-panel. At 15 Watts, this panel will provide about 1 Amp of current, so it's very much like a trickle-charger than can be left attached indefinitely without risk of damaging the battery.
After that it was across-the-street to Wal*Mart where I picked up some Mother's Day cards, and a DVD of the Tim Burton animated film "9". Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think "9" ever made it to the theatres. I've seen an ad for it here and there, but at least up here it was never shown in a theatre. The DVD was under $10, and what little advertising I had seen intrigued me, so I felt it was worth it.
The final stop of the day was to pick Smokey up from the Vet; he was still a little woozy but overall he seemed to be weathering the day's events pretty well. He's now a Tim Cat, and he's had his first round of vaccinations. I'll have to take him back in a month for his booster shots, and then he'll be good for a year. The Vet commented on how incredibly friendly and calm he was, and also how it was rather amusing that such a large cat had such a soft, almost kitten-like meow. She and her assistant had been trying to figure out where the little cat was that they kept hearing, until they realized that it was Smokey!
My "free" kitty is getting rather expensive. The total after taxes was just a few cents over $200!!! Yeesh! Could be worse; To spay a female costs $200 for the spay operation alone, let alone the cost of any vaccines on top of that. :/ They do give a discount if you have multiple cats to fix, so we'll have to keep that in mind once the kittens are old enough. That's assuming we ever see the kittens; Spooky has disappeared (thanks to Smokey) and we haven't seen her for almost a week. I'm sure she's holed up somewhere, but I'd feel a lot better if I knew where she was hiding.