Hi all! Not much to report this week. We only had Saturday to work on the land, but it was great to get back out to the land after missing last weekend. I missed it!

I got the broken hydraulic hose swapped out pretty fast in the early morning.  Of course as fate would have it I did not have the right socket size … murphy’s law at its best, can you guess which socket I needed?). 

I do have a coworker that lives up in Eden so I ran and grabbed the socket I needed from him. After replacing the hose I was supposed to do a sniff test to decide which kind of oil I have in my excavator.  I sniffed and I sniffed.. but I couldn’t decide.. The two samples he gave me and the oil from the excavator all seemed to have a very distinct smell.  I am going to take the sample to the shop and ask them to tell me for sure. I don’t want to mix the wrong kind of oil!

Since it was low on oil I didn’t run the excavator. Instead I played with solar!  My inverter can run off of only Solar, no batteries required.   It powered up right away when I hooked it up but the inverter part wouldn’t turn on. So there was only one thing to do…. I “quickly” ran home and grabbed two more solar panels. I spent a lot of time in the car!  I hooked a 5th panel up and ….. viola! I had AC power. And it ran the microwave no problem. That was super fun!   Then I ruined my day by trying to change my mounting strategy so that I could fit all 5 panels up on the top of the trailer. It can fit.. but getting it mounted will be tough. Also trying to move two panels at the same time by myself was a solid workout!  In the end when the sun went down I had to give up (which was probably a good thing to save me from myself :p )  So… I still need to finish out my solar. But it was super cool that I got some AC power out there!   Hopefully next week is a good weekend. It will be our long weekend and the weather looks to not be too insufferable!  Should be a great weekend for a campout!