Well, I’m a happy camper. I stumbled over B2X Online’s web site advertising fixed line-of-sight wireless broadband internet service and after exchanging some emails and having a site survey done, it turns out I’m in the line of sight of their Grassy Hill tower. Apparently the tower has been on Grassy Hill since 2004. Salem based B2X Online wins my unofficial worst advertised business of the year award  If it took me – one of the world’s most able internet search geeks – this long to find them then they should consider revamping their online advertising strategy. Because it’s broken  For starters, their web site hasn’t been updated since 2004, giving them the appearance of being a defunct operation. Continuing, you can’t find them on Google without getting very specific. An able-minded search engine optimization specialist could spend a day on their web site and after a couple months of search engine re-absorption they could be getting hundreds of new visitors daily and dozens of serious inquiries daily. Instead I think they’re relying on local governments to advertise their service offering, and we all know how effective local governments are at spreading the word on available business services

Establishing proper broadband in my neck of the woods has been a real challenge. And a substantial expense. First, I opted for a T1. I dropped some serious coin on the equipment and then began paying $850/month for a T1 circuit that would fail incrementally every two weeks. After dropping the T1 circuit, I spent $1,000 for Direcway satellite equipment and pay $219/month for a 2.5Mbps/1.2Mbps connection. Direcway has been reliable and the throughput performs as advertised but satellite latency can be maddening for system administration work. For the non-geeks who read this, latency is the term used for the time it takes for your input to make it through your connection to its destination in back. So if I’ve opened up a terminal window and type the letter “A”, on a Direcway satellite connection, that “A” won’t show up for about 0.75 seconds. Cursor movement suffers the same delay. So, needless to say I’m elated that B2X Online’s 1.5Mbps connection – with its very low latency – is available to me. I’ll have more on this later, once service has been installed.

Note to self: soon it will be time to design a more efficient sawdust bunker. This my friends is my storage barn, after the dump truck drops 14 cubic yards of pine sawdust as far back as it can without physically entering the barn. What follows is a 90 minute ritual that begins with me strapping into my JD 3520 and moving the sawdust, bucket load by bucket load, into the sawdust bunker located on the evergreen side of the barn. When the barn was built, I believe the theory was that the dump truck could drive into the barn, back up to the bunker and dump a load straight into the bunker. The reality is that this theory – in practice – is dangerous to both the truck driver and to the barn rafters. Several rafters have visible cosmetic damage from earlier dump truck foibles so I’ve chosen to keep the dump truck out of the barn. So, after I’ve spent 45 minutes moving the sawdust into the bunker with the tractor, I spend another 45 minutes getting the dregs hand shoveled into the bunker. Of course in between muttering curses I’m designing a new sawdust storage system in my head. With a little luck I may have it built before the end of the year

Of course, even dumping sawdust at the pictured location isn’t foolproof. Looking closely at the barn door roller guard (the white strip above the opening) you can see that it’s taken some abuse. This happens when someone raises the dump body without a spotter. The damage didn’t happen on my watch, and for my part I never allow dumping when I’m not spotting the driver. I look forward to making cosmetic improvements this year that include replacing the barn doors!

In other news I’m nearly done the 6×6 post edging underneath all of the stall and hall walls within the stable barn. Pictured at right is the aisle after I set down about 4 more inches of limestone screenings. Two weeks ago I set down another 2” of screenings in the indoor arena and ordered an extra truckload to cover the aisle. This is one more step towards the completion of my barn aisle project which will – come Spring – have me installing a beautiful concrete paver floor in the aisle and wash stall area.

We’ve got a total of four active boarders who regularly ride on the farm now and it’s a pleasure to have their company both for my wife and myself. Even though I’m a bit of a mad scientist I do enjoy good conversation and am pleased to see a horse person community begin to take hold on the farm. In April we’ll have a net gain of two more boarders and we have a growing boarder waiting list. It’s tough to resist building another barn with more stalls but we’ve decided to keep it simple – at least for this year – and maintain a horse population of no more than twelve. If we grow beyond that we’ll be tied down to the farm and taking vacations will be all but impossible without full-time laborers. We are planning to have very regular weekend rider get-togethers, where folks can trailer in their horses for group rides on our trails, so that will be a fun way to share our farm with other riders without getting too big for our britches

On non-farm related news, I’ve been busy getting the underlying source code for my resource guide web sites “refactored” and consolidated. I’ve given myself until the end of the month to publish a large number of individual web sites each catering to a specific niche market – all based on the same code foundation. Much progress has been made and I believe by Friday I’ll have the new code driving my two primary web sites, Marketingtool.com and InspectionZone.com.

Inspectionzone.com is now serving over five hundred people daily, barely 12 months after it’s first release. So far I have over one hundred fifty paying customers on InspectionZone.com. This is no small feat considering how limited the home inspection market is. At present activity levels I’m gaining fifteen to twenty new paying customers each week.

Marketingtool.com is now serving nearly twelve thousand visitors during each weekday. This is a 15% increase over last quarter. Not counting search engines – which issue easily over one hundred thousand page requests daily – actual human beings request over two million pages each month from Marketingtool.com. I’ll be transitioning from a dynamic-pricing model to a stable pricing model that I will adjust manually. Presently, rates increase when traffic increases. This would be fine but fees are beginning to grow beyond the budget of a typical small (< 5 employee) business and those are the folks I prefer for philosophical reasons. I’ve lost some smaller customers recently due to these price increases, who have been immediately replaced by larger firms quite willing to pay the higher rate. I’m not sure that this is the direction I want to travel. Even though operating in a free market implies that you set prices according to what the market will bear – I’m still of the opinion that I should set prices according to what a small business can bear.

Mike drove up with our Gator in tow at 11:30am and it was very quickly put to work! Here is the photo of our particular model, equipped with the new OSHA mandated ROP (“Roll-Over-Protection”) bars. There are even seatbelts, an oddity if you’ve ever driven a Gator. It feels a bit too civilized for my tastes, but if OSHA thinks I need the ROP then gosh, I guess I need it, no? You’d have to be absolutely daft to roll one of these to begin with, and if you are indeed that daft…. Well, why not just let Darwin’s theory select you out of the herd

I’ll be beating on the Gator mercilessly over the weekend and will report my impressions!

In about four hours, Mike from Anderson Lawn and Garden will be delivering my brand new 2006 Gator HPX. For those that are unfamiliar with John Deere Gators, it is a mini “truck” with a small dump body. The swiss army knife of a farm or any institution with lots of ground to travel and maintain, a Gator is really essential if you’re looking to maximize productivity. The Gator HPX is the top of the line model with true 4WD and a very capable suspension. The cargo box holds 11 cubic feet and has a payload capacity of 1,100 pounds. I have fond memories of the Gators on my wife’s parents farm in Vermont. Our new Gator will be indispensible for virtually all farm projects including trail clearing and maintenance, hauling small bales to pastures, lugging tools and transporting supplies. Minutes after it rolls off the trailer this morning, our new Gator will be helping me clean up debris left over from recently uprooted vinyl fencing. Until now I’ve been using one of our tractors to haul tools and supplies in a wagon; this has not been an ideal setup because often our wagon is full of tools when I need it for manure or other chores. Moreover, using a tractor as a tool hauler is not ideal – it’s extra unnecessary wear on the tractor – and my spinal column – because a tractor does nothing to smooth out the bumps that inevitably crop up in horse pasture

Having been remiss in tracking the progress of my projects with my camera, I instead present to you a photo taken from the front porch of my Vermont home during January ‘02. A blanket of snow covers my 1985 1/2 Porsche 944. As you may gather, Vermont isn’t the ideal place to enjoy a year round Porsche driving experience. Which is probably why I’m still alive. The mechanically limited top speed of this car was +/– 138mph. I took it to that speed more than once. On desolate Vermont country back roads. This car is still on the farm in Vermont, tucked behind a machine shed and I’ve long since given up sports and muscle cars, primarily because I have an underdeveloped sense of self preservation and would very much like to die of old age.

Well, back to modern day Virginia. The recent winds certainly made an impression. Many things on the farm not rooted or tied down were transported, and a few things were shaken loose  A roll of HVAC insulation left near the front of the storage barn was sent sailing 700 feet down to the outdoor arena. A 3’x6’ panel of ceiling insulation on the south pitch of our horse barn roof was pushed out and landed neatly inside Belle’s horse stall. While Belle was in it. She was dealing well with this when I discovered this on Sunday morning, but the knocked out steel bar and broken bucket latch suggested her immediate reaction was to pitch into the front stall wall. All is well on this Wednesday morning despite another round of rain and wind. I’ll have to make do with some interior barn projects while I wait for our red clay – a soil I like to call Red Lead – to dry out a bit. I hope that so far everyone is enjoying their New Year!

The first two weeks of January have been extremely busy on our burgeoning horse farm. The primary challenge was preparing for the arrival of three additional board horses on Friday the 13th. 

I finished two fencelines, completely enclosing three pastures and installed two-way gates. Now I can finish the upper section of our primary turnout area without having to work my way around curious horses

A spare stall that had been used as a store room for grain and sundry was emptied out and I set up a storage room in the adjoining storage barn. Three stalls were bedded down and I installed or repaired hardware to hang water and feed buckets.

Since those three horses would be ridden daily by an area Dressage trainer, it seemed a good idea to make further improvements to the indoor arena. The 90 tons of limestone screenings that I spread and leveled in the indoor arena back during the summer had been compacted into the clay sub-base – as expected – and another layer of limestone screenings was required. So on Friday morning K.B. Goad  delivered five loads of “dust” and in short order I had spread and leveled 1” of new footing in the arena. I used about 80 tons of “dust” and have another 30 tons remaining for the next phase of my barn aisle project, set to begin this week.

Oh yes, and we also decided to buy more land. We accepted the last in a series of counter offers, and accepted their most recent counter after successfully negotiating downward 16% from the original asking price. So if all goes well from this point onward we should own the adjoining 35 acres come February. More later – it’s time to feed the horses!

Sophie was brought to the animal shelter of Franklin County, and we’re picking her up this morning!!

On Saturday Sophie, our two year old Great Dane, went out on a jaunt in the woods and never came back. She’s always been adventurous and for six months has taken advantage of the many hundreds of acres of unbroken land around our home. Even though she never hunted woodland animals, if it had four legs she was happy chasing it through the woods until, inevitably, her quarry vanished over the next ridge. This weekend was different, however. There were very many hunters out below our land in the valley calling out for wild turkeys and I believe she may have gone down to investigate. On Sunday, while I was deliberately hiking a zig zag pattern from 9am to 1pm on and around our 38 acres, Nancy and the girls were postering our side of the county with LOST flyers. I wanted to rule out the possibility that Sophie was shot by one of these hunters, or otherwise injured and helpless, and after covering enough ground I suppose I have ruled those possibilities out. The next possibility is that she was taken by one of the hunters who was under the assumption that she was a stray dog. Either they’ve taken her and will claim her, or have taken her with the goal of finding her owners through the traditional channels. I hold out hope for the latter scenario. If the former has transpired, it’s best that they pray I never discover the thievery. Because if I do, there will be a world of hell to pay and I’ll be damned certain to collect on that debt…. and the only currency I’ll be accepting will be shattered teeth and bone.

For the eight days after Christmas our house was filled with the voices of up to eleven visitors. Friends and family converged on our farm and we stretched Christmas out just a bit further. While visiting, my brother in-law Matthew and my father in-law Paul helped me grade the floor of a 28×14 shed next to our stable barn, lay down rubber mats and install two temporary modular 12×12 horse stalls. This gives us the two overflow stalls we’ll need when a local Dressage trainer brings four horses to board here at our farm. With one of the only (if not the only) indoor riding arenas within a 30 minute drive we’ll help her get her training season started on time.

Brian and April - friends of the family – traveled from Alexandria to visit along with their three children. We enjoyed their company and look forward to the summer when I can put him to work again on our farm  

This week has been busy for this mad scientist. After enjoying over a week off from heavy duty farm work, I began the week with some office work and slowly returned to the daily out-of-doors grind. I finished another fenceline and have two more to complete. I’ll be installing water and electric supply this month to the five newly created pastures once we get a dozer out here to push off some excess, uh, topsoil built up on 0.40 acres that were once four 0.10 paddocks. Previous owners let manure build up to the point where the paddocks would turn to soup in the wet, so that topsoil will be put to good use on a nearby ridge where I plan to grow a substantial wildflower garden.

We have deposits from two other boarders, so more are on the way once the trainer leaves with her four horses. Our vision for the farm has changed slightly and we’ve decided to build another barn. The future barn will provide up to ten additional stalls, a large wash stall, a large tack room, a large office, substantial lounge space with a viewing area of the indoor arena, and living quarters for a farm worker. Our farm is currently 38 acres. There is an adjoining 36 acres on the market consisting of +/– 10 acres of open pasture and 26 acres of wooded ridgeland. Since it looks as though our goal is to have up to fifteen boarders, it would be nice to acquire that parcel and secure additional trails. The ridgeland has two hollows that offer a gradual slope around a knob so it looks to have good trail potential. So, we’ve decided to acquire that parcel and have begun the negotiating process. We don’t need the parcel but it would be nice to have. So if all goes well we’ll be a 74 acre farm come Springtime.