Still not much of a house

We arrived back in Buchanan last night just before dark.  We would have been here a little earlier but the rainstorms have closed some local highways.  When we came up from Melville on Friday there was water running over the pavement about 3 miles south of Buchanan.  I knew it was risky coming that way again but I gave it a shot anyway.  And we likely would have got through if we had arrived even 1/2 an hour earlier than we did.

As we rolled up to the grid 6 miles south of Buchanan there was a Dept of Holidays truck sitting in the middle of the road and the highways goof was just pounding in the Road Closed sign.  He already had the barricade set up in the middle of the road.  After he got done pounding he came over to the ticket window and told me how dangerous the road was.  I doubt it was really all that dangerous but it didn’t much matter – it was closed and he was there so there wasn’t even any chance of ducking around the barricade.  We ended up going about 6 or 8 miles east to the Tiny grid and then north to Highway 5 where we could backtrack to Buchanan.  I suppose in theory there was some risk of travelling on a highway with water flowing over it – the grade could have been undermined and we do weigh a lot so it could have ended badly. 

At the time I was 3/4 pissed off though because I hate travelling on gravel roads.  We picked up two new stone chips last week on our cross Saskatchewan adventure and I don’t want any more.  One of the new chips promptly turned itself into a 10” crack before I even knew it was there.  I drilled three holes at the end of the expanding crack before finally getting deep enough to stop it.  The other one was a bullseye and I managed to get to it before it grew so it is pretty well invisible now.

There’s a lot of  water around this part of the world.  The trip north from Melville to here goes through a lot of unseeded ground.  In fact I’d say there’s significantly more unseeded than seeded along that route.  On the other hand, we’ve driven most of Saskatchewan in the last week and that is absolutely the only area where we saw that kind of unseeded ground.  There was one other stretch that I thought was bad – it must have been north of Watson but right now I can’t remember precisely where.  In general though I can’t remember ever seeing such good crops.  I know the following statement will piss off any farmers in the drowned regions but you can quote me on this:

Year in and year out, water is our most limiting nutrient.  Having a surplus of water may be a regional inconvenience but overall it is a good thing for the prairies.

They have a lot of underfed mosquitoes in this town.   I fed some of them last night while I was setting up the internet dish but I gave up when I tried to set up the TV dish.  They don’t seem to like the sunshine so I was able to get the TV dish set up this morning.