Lost my bearings

So last night I dug into the tractor.  I had ordered a replacement front wheel bearing as my axle cap work revealed the wheel was flopping around on the shaft.  When I took the wheel off and was looking at my replacement bearing I originally thought I ordered the wrong part.  The new bearing was too big for the hole it needed to go in.  I needed a visual reference for how it should be so I pulled the axle cap and wheel from the other wheel to take a look.    What I realized is the bearing is made of two sections, an inner bearing and an outer shell.  On the bad side I realized that just the inner bearing had disintegrated, the outer part of the bearing was still in place.

I had to come up with a way to get the remaining part of the old bearing out of the wheel.  I grabbed my big metal centerpunch and a hammer.  After flipping the wheel upside down and giving it a few solid shots the old bearing popped out onto the floor.  Installing the replacement simply required flipping the wheel back over and driving in the new part using a 2×4 to avoid damaging it.  After putting everything back together the front tires both actually pointed in the same direction for the first time in awhile.

I then turned my attention to the deck wheel that had evidently fallen off during last week’s mowing session.  I found the wheel in the yard but not the bolt used to attach it.  I hoped I would be able to find a suitable replacement in my large collection of mismatched fastener hardware but struck out.  That repair will have to wait until I can get another carriage bolt at Home Depot on my way home. If it wasn’t raining lightly I would have considered getting the mowing started but I also had some indoor stuff to get knocked out so I thought better of it.

I had a rough session at the gym yesterday, reaggravating that area on my right side that I first started having problems with a year or two ago doing dragon flags.  It’s a sharp pain that seems to come up during very high exertion movements.  As I said, it first happened doing dragon flags but I also had it happen doing deadlifts.  Yesterday it came on between doing full stack shoulder press reps on a Cybex machine and weighted pull ups.  The pain was enough that I cut the weight training short and just jumped on a cardio machine instead.  Old age is awesome.

Lucy, our oldest chicken has been having an issue with her one wing.  She has been carrying it low for several weeks.  If a chicken carries both wings low that can be a sign of disease but for Lucy it is just the one side and she has been acting normal otherwise, being as nervous and distrustful of us as she always has been.  Cindy felt under the affected wing and said she felt some swelling.  We are worried that she hurt the joint somehow, maybe falling off the perch or something.  We are going to try to get a better look at it to see if there is anything we can do, possibly aspirating the swollen area to give her some relief.  We also have to attend to Pumpkin who has a huge boulder of poop hanging off her back end.  Being a chicken caretaker is a very glamorous profession.

This weekend my major chores are knocking out the mowing and weeding.   We are going to get out to the movies tomorrow night and I hope to get plenty of time to work on my One Wheel skills.    Hopefully rain is only a minor occurrence over that time period.  So far, although we have had standing water, we have had enough breaks in the pounding to allow it to recede back into the ground after a day or so.