Mud season is basically over for the year

 It was a rough one that broke a lot of cars and trucks and resulted in a lot of very stuck vehicles, but mud season is pretty much over.

For a while there our road was impassable to cars and many 2wd trucks unless there was a lot of ground clearance. One afternoon I watched a 4wd F150 struggle to keep going down the straight stretch of road in front of our place. The guy kept the RPMs low and steady and the old Ford slowly progressed by at about a 45 degree angle to the road.

I don't know how many truckloads of rocks and gravel the town dumped into the quagmire, but those guys busted ass for the whole of mud season to keep the road open. It only closed for a couple of days on the southern end of it.

The main road through this part of the county, NH Rt 12, has been washed out since a big rainstorm last summer and the only way around the washout other than going over to Vermont is to travel up the dirt backroads, and ours is one of them. This meant a big increase in through traffic of all kinds which tore up the road even worse than usual as the frozen dirt thawed.

While I still wouldn't want to take a low-slung sports car down the road, it IS passable to a normal passenger vehicle if you just beware of chunky rocks left over from the innumerable truckloads of rock & gravel that were brought in.

We are changing our shop hours

 Instead of opening at 10AM, as of now we are shifting our shop hours to 12 noon to 8PM.

With spring being here it is time to get busy in the woods and around the property opening up the old logging roads, building stuff, improving the range and various homesteading projects.

Opening at 10AM like we did for, well, always, meant doing each of these things in a somewhat half-assed, inefficient manner. By the time we'd get tools set up and spend a little time working on something t would be time to pack it in so that I could get back to the shop by 10AM.

The shop will still be open 40 hours a week, it's just that those hours will be slightly later in the day.

I feel this will finally allow us to get some of our long-range projects done around here, like building campsites, the museum building etc.