Winter comes to Missed Skeet Farm

Getting ready for winter is a lot of work anywhere. Here it is a sprint to the finish with dismal consequences for things forgotten, ignored or more likely dropped off the list as time ran out. The final buzzer is the first big snow storm and the cold that freezes everything just as it was left. Still we look forward to winter all year and can't wait for it to start. Why? Well, it is a quieter less hectic time. It comes right after the sprint to get ready for it. Everything that isn't done will be there in the spring, but for now, it is on hold and there is no point in thinking about it for months.
Winter brings a wonderful solitude to missed skeet farm. Summer and fall allows people to use the road to reach the properties beyond us. Granted two or three cars a day and the occasional 4-wheeler is all the traffic we ever see. But winter closes in the road and we go weeks without seeing anyone. Aaahhhh.
We spend a lot of time walking. Winter walks are the absolute best. The worse the weather the more likely we will be walking in it. Snowfall is peaceful and we look forward to the storms.

This year getting ready for winter included:
1 Putting the well line into the barn so we would have water in the barn year round
2 Putting in a deep water pump in the well so we wouldn't have to heat the well house.
3 Changing the well house into a shower and sauna
4 Doing the annual road work.

The road work is an annual occurance and takes a lot of effort. We can't afford to put a foot and half of gravel on the whole half mile of road which is what it really needs. So we scrape and drag and cut drains in to move the water off the road where we can but the road is the ditch the water follows. This year Billy Gaspar said we could go get gravel out of his pit. We got 9 loads and the truck wouldn't start the following day. It took a day to get it fixed and by that time the weather had changed and put an end to this bonanza. I tried scraping and crowning the road so the water would drain out of some of the larger puddles and had some success and some notable failures. Failure is very bad in the road business. In this case it means that in the spring we will have some extra weeks of walking. Today we did what we could to make a very bad area less abismal and we are done.
We are now in an exhausted but euphoric state that follows the road work. Winter is here and we are in isolation mode. Wonderful.