Weekly Posting of the Conservative Cow Doctor

Stuck in the Trenches

We are restoring the 90-year-old house on our homestead. Chip Gaines of Fixer Upper fame speaks of his love of demo day. I must be doing something wrong because we have been busting up and carting off plaster, lath, and bat guano for two weeks and I have yet to find anything uplifting about the process.

Saturday morning, we removed two large flowering crab trees occupying the slot allocated for the garage. These trees were multiple trunk monstrosities and felling them between two overhead powerlines and the house made this step especially challenging. Using a chainsaw, loader and all the redneck ingenuity we could muster, we successfully dropped all seven trunks, with one missing our pop-up shade shelter by inches. Extracting the root balls was another story. I dug around the roots for an hour with my three-point mounted backhoe before admitting we needed more horsepower. My son, Tyler, called C&K Equipment in Sheridan to rent a Bobcat Mini-Ex. They said they closed at noon but would wait if Tyler hustled to town. He did and they did. The extra power made a huge difference, but it too strained to break the roots free from under a cement slab where they happily lived for 50 years. With the trees cleared, we dug trenches for footings and loaded the Mini-Ex on the flatbed for the 30-mile ride into Sheridan. Even though it was the 4th of July, C&K was open until noon, and this brings me to my first point. Customer friendly businesses like C&K thrive in a free market economy. They profited, I received the requested product and my project moved one step forward. This mutually beneficial exchange does not exist in a government-controlled economy which is my second point.

After setting and grading footing forms, we called to schedule concrete delivery. We expected a bit of a delay because our little pour would be a long way down the bulk plants to-do list. I was wrong. We were not even on the list and never would be due to the nationwide shortage of fly ash, a component used to stretch cement supplies. Our project was stuck with open trenches thanks to President Biden’s embrace of eco-terrorists hell-bent on collapsing America’s Coal-Fired Electricity Generating plants, the primary source of fly ash. When major industries cannot meet the needs of consumers due to restrictions and rationing caused by feel-good-but-do-nothing government regulation you are living in a controlled economy. Biden’s America perfectly mimics the socialist dystopias of Brave New World, 1984 and Atlas Shrugged. Had enough yet?