Monday, February 22, 2010

The History of Honey Hill Farm, Part 6

Saturday we were able to contract a man to come plow out our drive. In the end, it was $500 we spent getting the drive cleared. Steve shoveled a path out of the house to the driveway, 1 shovel wide. We TIED the mailbox back into place.

Sunday we made a tank gauge out of a 11/16 piece of wood trim, 10 feet long--we have about 1/3 of the oil we bought remaining. We moved in some more stuff, enough that we're starting to see empty holes at Steve's old house. And we shopped for tractors.

John Deere. Kubota. New Holland. Massey Ferguson. New. Used. Scams on Craigslist.

Monday (President's Day) we visited 4 tractor stores, and looked at one private sale. There's just one problem:

Steve doesn't fit.

Tractors are sized for "normal" sized people. Steve, at 6'6", is out PAST the 2nd standard deviation on the normal distribution curve. This made buying a house a challenge (YES, the ceilings ARE OVER 8'!!!), makes buying clothes difficult, makes buying cars difficult...but we didn't expect it with tractors. Foolish us.

On Tuesday, Verizon apparently came out and fixed the phone line. Steve had requested notification, which he did not receive, and only found out when he went to check the trouble ticket online Wednesday, only to find it was closed.

That evening, we took over a load of stuff. We plugged in the phone in the house.

Silence.

We went outside to the NID, and plugged the phone in.

Silence.

Whatever Verizon did, they did NOT fix it. And they certainly did not test at the NID; the only tracks in the snow are mine.

We're shopping for heating oil prices; we're shopping for garbage pickup; we're shopping for internet services; we're shopping for tractors. And we've reserved a truck for Saturday--on SUNDAY, we hope to be living there!

Thursday dawned, and Steven opened a new ticket with Verizon. "My service request has NOT been repaired, and phone service is NOT working. Your technician did NOT test at the NID, as there are NO tracks in the snow. My service has NOT worked since it was 'installed', you took 12 days to 'fix' it, and you want 2 MORE?"

Thursday evening, Steven widened the path through the snow to move stuff OUT of his condominium; Friday evening, he widened the path through the snow to move stuff IN to the house at Honey Hill. Verizon, in a rare burst of action, actually FIXED the phone on Thursday evening!

Our first call was a telemarketer.

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