lightning

A crack of thunder, simultaneous with a flash of lightning added up to the closest strike I had ever experienced.  It got me bolt upright in bed at 3 AM, out of an exhausted sleep after raking, baling and wrapping thirty acres of complex cover crop amounting to one fourteen hour day and 115 bales give or take.  A heavy crop.  I couldn't sleep after the strike and paced from window to window, watching the buildings for any tell tale wisp of smoke.  There was none.

Later, when I went out to check the farrowing sows at seven, I found the main fence charger dead and on coming back in for breakfast found the lightning had fried one of our phones as well.  My prejudice is that a dead phone is not much of a problem, but what to do about the dead fence?  I had checked the cattle early on and they were all where we left them.  They had been pretty docile this year, not challenging the fence much.  Their pasture's fence was still charged, that is, as much as it ever is after a rainfall.  I thought I was getting away with it until coming back to the yard from feeding the first group of sows, I was met by fifty or sixty of the 150 feeding pigs we had behind an electric wire in one of the winter cattle lots.  It hadn't taken them long to find the dead fence, after the rain had plugged up their feeder, giving them the idea to go exploring, I suppose.

What to do?  I grabbed the fence charger responsible for the north pastures, where the cattle were, hoping they would continue docile about the fence, and used it to replace the other charger, the dead one that had given the pigs their freedom.  When I pulled it apart, I saw that the little one amp fuse on the top had blown.  Without noticing the two other one amp fuses buried deeper in the carcass, I got LeeAnn to run to town to the auto parts for fuses.  She found no one amp fuses but brought home one 2 amp fuse.  In installing it, I noticed the deeper fuses.  Pulling them out, I found one blown, the other good.  So finally giving up good practice and resorting to farmer style fixit, I put the one good one amp fuse on the top, where the stamping said "shutdown" and put the oversized fuse in one of the bottom positions.  Then I took a sickle rivet and hacksawed the head off, leaving just enough shank to replace the other one amp fuse.  Any guesses as to what it would take to blow that "fuse"?  Reminds me of the old farmer cure of putting a penny behind a screw in fuse that wouldn't hold.  I wonder how many houses were burned down that way?

Anyway, the main charger is back in the barn doing its job and the other one is reinstilled on the north line to control the cattle.  And so we have put in another fourteen hour day, this one not on harvest, but on animal control achieved at the cost of making our buildings less safe.  And I have made a solemn promise to pursue real one amp fuses first thing tomorrow morning.  No more lightning tonight, please.