Some days are better than Christmas. One person’s junk is another’s treasure. Yesterday was like both of those.

In the early afternoon, my farming parner and I were clunking along on what I fondly call "a toad". A "toad" is any vehiclular voyage involving my farming partner, because all such trips take on an air of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland. The only certainties are that the vehicle may or may not perform to standards, and that one cannot know where one might end up. Barely being able to offload our load of gravel at a local airstrip got the afternoon started, and soon we were bouncing along in the International bobtail truck on our way to a Colusa lumberyard….going out of business. The men who ran the yard were wonderful, as in, the more stuff I asked about, the more things ended up in the back of the International. Pressure-treated 4"x4"s for free, 2"x2" redwood cheap, huge redwood timbers cheap, C/D plywood sheets cheap, roofing sheet free, paint brushes cheap, slighly damaged bags of sand free, screen doors cheap…..it only got better with time. However, it seemed like about a half century of dust lay on a lot of the items since as we left clouds swirled off the flatbed of the truck. And that was just the beginning, the next stop was a foreclosed country home in Maxwell. Friends run a business that cleans up properties after bank foreclosures. They invite others to come in and troll for treasure, since anything that gets taken away is one less item they have to clean up. Sheets and sheets of metal roofing were added to my goodie pile…sans the really gigantic rat that had been making a home there. And a huge, heavy doghouse of 2"x6" construction may be obtained another day. So all in all I saved probably $600+ in supplies for building poultry housing as a result of the day’s adventure. And I almost forgot to mention that in the morning, a gift came from some local neighbors who cleaned out a storage area–a brand new stainless steel 3’x’6’x 8" wash table with stand included. After 20 minutes of polishing, it’s out there flaming in the sun, waiting to clean its first batch of vegetables. Yes, Christmas in March, and what a "toad" it was……..