Stormy Saturday

It's been pouring down rain all day.  For the first time I can remember, a major Mardi Gras krewe has cancelled it's scheduled parade on Saturday night and moved it to Sunday.  The Krewe of Endymion parade will now take place in New Orleans after the Krewe of Bacchus parade on Sunday evening so it'll definitely be a BIG Sunday night in New Orleans tomorrow! 

As for me, one of my bosses has a patent application that has to be filed before Friday that contains a few dozen DNA sequences and some figures that need redrawn.  I started trying to handle them a number of times at the office, only to be repeatedly interrupted, so I finally decided to just download the sequence software from the Patent Office web site and do them here at home where I will not be interrupted.  So much for this evening.  But I actually enjoy that work, so doing it at home really isn't that bad a thing.

Mark has gone down to Sacs at the moment to pick up a few more bales of that "predigested" Chaffhay for Ladybug.  She LOVES the stuff! 

The weather is supposed to clear up overnight tonight, so Jerry will be coming over tomorrow and he and Mark are going to go to work on the back perimeter fence.  It's going to be a 5-strand electrified fence made from that really large Ramm Fence wire.

Unlike the picture above, our wire and the tubular insulators are both going to be black - as are our wood posts.  (None of our horses are likely to be running wild at night so they don't need to be able to see the fence from a distance.)  And even if they did run into it, the wire strands are big enough, close enough together, and resilient enough that they wouldn't be hurt anyway.  Mark is going to be spending the rest of this evening cutting those insulators that the wire slides through.  It comes in long rolls and you have to cut it into those pieces shown under those giant staples in the picture above.   They make putting up that fencing a bit more complicated than the kind of insulators that attach to the posts instead of sliding onto the wire, but they're a lot more secure so they're worth the trouble.  That coated wire comes in VERY heavy 500-foot rolls.  You have to feed each strand of the wire through enough insulators to attach it to those 60 or so posts before you can start attaching it to the posts.  Tricky. 

Okay - I better get on with that application, I guess . . .  I don't want to spend tomorrow at it, too.