"No education is ever wasted" was one of my mother's favorite sayings. Good thing I listened to her, or the tractor would still be buried. Have I got a story for you..

Thank you for reading MuseInks. I'm Ami Hendrickson, writer, ghost, and editor in chief of Soul Sparks Press. Each Thursday, I share thoughts for readers, writers, and other fabulous people.

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Musings

"Spring cleaning" has been the name of the game for the past few weeks. Together Rheo and I have cleaned up a staggering amount of scrap that various people felt compelled to leave cluttering up the property over the years.

We rented a big rolloff dumpster and spent several days filling it with stuff that no longer served any purpose. One of those purposeless things was a the remains of an old shed that a former handyman had disassembled and then left in a pile behind the barn, certain he'd get around to salvaging the wood and hardware from it someday.

Spoiler alert: Someday never came.

Though the past month has been a rainy one, when the weather permitted, we put Gromit (the new tractor, so named because the dashboard looks remarkably like Wallace's faithful companion) to work moving the remains of the shed into the rolloff.

"Be careful!" Rheo warned as I drove a bucketful of two by fours and rotting OSB near a duck-pond-sized puddle.

I avoided the puddle, dumped the load, and headed back for more when...

I drove on top of ground that was only solid for about 10 inches or so. Beneath that: water.

Nothing brings a great day of Getting Stuff Done to a standstill faster than driving your tractor into quicksand and burying it up past its axles.

Hoooo boy.

After berating myself for a few minutes (which, unsurprisingly, did very little to get Gromit unstuck), I set about looking for a solution.

For a few long minutes more, no solutions presented themselves. Meanwhile, Gromit continued to sink.

And then...

And then I remembered overhearing something one of the many salesmen we'd encountered had said to my friend Denise while we were tractor shopping. (You don't go tractor shopping with your friends? Weird.)

He'd been demonstrating the joystick for the bucket and mentioned that it had a "Float" function. While I was noodling around getting used to driving a hydrostatic transmission (as opposed to the bull-in-a-china-shop, charge straight ahead transmission in my old 1970's era International 574), he'd explained that you could lower the bucket to the "Float" position and use it to literally boost the front end of the tractor up.

My eavesdropping paid off!

Though it took both my kid and me, along with a veritable lumberyard of scrap 2 x 10s, the "Float" function saved the day. It wasn't fast. It wasn't pretty. But it worked and Gromit was freed.

"No education is ever wasted," my mother told me more times than I can count.

I have to admit: in this, as in most other things, Mom was right.

MuseNews

The killer fox is back. Earlier this week while I was on a video call, the Guinea fowl lost her everloving mind and let the world know that all was not well.

By the time we ran outside, the fox had killed one of our Barred Rock hens. Later in the day it came back for more, but Rheo ran it off.

There's a den of kits somewhere. And the foxes we've seen this spring don't look particularly healthy. While I wouldn't mind if they snacked on the overly fat and cheeky groundhogs we've got around here, I really hope they leave my chicks and ducks alone.

Arts and Crafts

Not gonna lie: The past few weeks have been rather stressful. So this weekend, I decompressed and did a fun arty-crafty project making these little yarn birds. I figure I'll make them tiny mascots for my booth at the antique mall. It was a lovely way to spend a few hours that didn't involve staring at a screen or fielding yet another text message.

What do you do to unwind when stress is clawing at you?

Book Report

I finished Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett, one of my Top 5 Favorite Discworld books (and that's saying something, because I love them all).

On one level, the book is a thinly veiled take on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, but that's just scratching the surface.

The ongoing impact and importance of life choices, what it means to be the best at something, the power of myth and memory, and the necessity of knowing one's history are all part of the plot.

I mean: you can say the story is about evil elves crossing into the world from a sister dimension and wreaking havoc on the poor souls they encounter, but you'd hardly scratch the surface.

Even though this was the 14th book of the series, if you've never read a Discworld book, you could do worse than start with this one.

Next Week:

I've said for years that those of us who have booths at the Great Lakes Antique Mall need have a reality TV show based on the goings-on in our store. I believe the cops would agree with me. Have I got a story for you...

Till next week,

May your days be stress- and fox-free. May you never be short of something interesting to read. And if you happen to get stuck, may you find a way to Float.

I love you all!

Ami

Ami Hendrickson
​Book Coach, Author, Editor, and Corgi Mom
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