Vehicles

March 2026 Photos

May 31, 2026 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Cats and garden and truck… that covers most of the photos I liked from March! This first one, though, is of the lunar eclipse that month. What a spectacular sight! Elijah had a pair of image-stabilizing binoculars here at the time that he was testing out for his Land Search and Rescue group, and they made the moon amazingly clear. We also got to see the four biggest moons of Jupiter through them. What a thrill! The last time I saw those was with my dad, probably in the 1980s when he was given a telescope.

My girls love books and cats! Little Miss has been reading to Miss Joy a lot.

Mr. Imagination and Elijah with their stack.

The garden was gorgeous at that point. (It’s mostly dead now.) Esther took this picture one day while she was harvesting chamomile. The smell of this area… wonderful!

Sometime in March, Simon bought another Land Rover. This one started out life in 1963 with a different body; this one was put on in the 1980s. It isn’t running, and he plans to junk most of it, but he got it for certain parts that are especially good in that model. Anyway, the price was so low he couldn’t not get it!

And, cats! Goofy cats that rest in odd places and positions.

Boxes are the best.

Even if the box is so small it’s difficult to fit all four feet in!

This picture requires some explanation. One morning, around 11:00, someone saw Grizzly sitting like this in the yard, looking quite unhappy. It had started to rain an hour or so before this; she had been sitting there since 8:30 or so. She was very wet, but didn’t wake up enough to move until I nudged her as I went past, shortly after the picture was taken. Then, she got up, leaving a dry spot on the grass where she had been, and went under cover.

Working on Vehicles

July 1, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

A lot of work was done on vehicles in May. On a Saturday in the beginning of the month, Simon bought a tractor. It was a couple of hours’ drive away, so he, Gayle and Mr. Intellectual drove up there to get it. It’s a Ford Super Dexta, the same as a Fordson 2000, but built in England in the early 1960s.

A week or two after bringing the tractor home, Simon got it running, but, as advertised, the clutch was bad.

After ascertaining that the engine was good, and therefore the tractor was worth fixing, Simon split the tractor in half and got the clutch out. He’s having trouble figuring out what it needs, so the two halves of a tractor are still sitting there in the carport.

Simon also changed the gearbox (transmission) in his Subaru. Fifth gear had gone out, so he pulled the gearbox out, took one out of a car in a junkyard in Taylorville, and put that in. The car works very well now!

By the way, Grandma, the man in the background is the neighbor that one of my boys (you know who) works for. That’s how close his house is to ours; this photo was taken from the living room window.

Traffic

May 11, 2019 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Our house is right on a main highway. I’m thankful that our driveway is attached to a very small street, which in turn goes out to the highway, but there is only an empty quarter-acre section between our house and the main road. That gives us ring-side seats to everything that goes past! We don’t pay a lot of attention most of the time, but sometimes there are unusual sights in the trucking yards across the street that catch our eyes, and when the boys see a pilot vehicle go past with a Wide Load sign on it, they run for the window. Mr. Diligence grabs my camera as he goes, in case there is something very different. Here are some of the things we’ve seen in the past few months.

Traffic jam at the trucking company! What we didn’t get a picture of was the concrete truck that S-L-O-W-L-Y inched its way between these two trucks! He had mere inches to spare on each side.

Look closely—do you see the cow’s heads sticking out of the top of the truck? They were transferring cattle from one truck to the other here.

We frequently see big diggers go past.

One Friday morning, this house went past—and then my crew got to watch it be set down on a foundation in a section a block away from us!

This was the most recent odd load we saw go past—a toilet block!

And then there was this sight. When the ditches were being dug in front of our house for the fibre optic cables, the digger brought up part of the chassis of a vehicle! It appeared that the rest of the vehicle was still down there, rusting away.

One morning early, just after it began to get light, I was out milking and saw a pilot vehicle coming. The driver stopped and waved a lighted wand at a truck going past him down the highway, then went on slowly. Another pilot vehicle came along, and waved a lighted wand to stop someone coming off a side street. I was pretty curious by then, so I watched for the big load. It was the base of a giant crane on tracks! The boom of the crane had been taken off for transport.

The Austin

January 19, 2019 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

Simon’s boss was given a 1953 Austin a month or so ago, and he didn’t want yet another old car to restore, so he gave it to Simon. Such a car must be stored under cover in this climate, so Simon went to town and bought supplies to build a carport for it. He and his brothers have been busily building.

The car came home a day or two later:

The boys played around with it but couldn’t get it going until a friend who loves vintage cars came over one evening. With his help, they got it to start. The next morning, I got a video of Simon starting it himself. Several days after that, the car had to be moved so firewood could be put in our carport (his wasn’t ready yet). The car is so small it would have been easy to push—but no, of course Simon had to start it and see if it would go! He got it to go forward, but can’t get it in reverse yet without stalling it. He also can’t run it more than a couple of minutes because the radiator isn’t hooked up.