Friday morning we spread three loads of straw before the wind picked up too much to spread more, personal best for me and I was pretty sore for it. But I sat around the rest of the morning and then went out just before noon to clean bale strings out of the shredder. That went fine, it goes pretty quick if you don't let them build up too much. I was putting it back together, I took my glove off to thread the nut, started tightening it, the wrench slipped and I jammed my left index finger onto one of the shredder blades. To be fair, the nut is under the shredder, so I was working crouched on the ground up over my head (equipment chocked, always always always), but it felt bad. 

The cut is parallel to my fingernail and wraps around the front and went quite deep. I sat on the couch for about an hour after rinsing it and it was still bleeding decently, so I took myself to urgent care. The good news is that they weren't busy at all, so I got seen immediately and it was rinsed and I got a couple stitches in the front of my finger to help stabilize the skin flap. The shot to numb my finger hurt way worse than the actual wound. 

It was bitter cold yesterday morning (3F), but dad and tried to shred straw anyway. However, we are using the Kubota which is the newest tractor and has a very fine mesh fuel filter. And it was so cold that the diesel had thickened and the tractor would start sputtering every time we tried to turn the PTO on. So we gave it up. I went back inside for a few hours. Went to cut some wood and somehow during my cutting ,the chain jumped the track and dinged up the new bar and chain. I think the side nuts loosened up somehow but now the chain won't fit on the track, so I need to see if it can be fixed. Deeply annoying, stupid mistake to not check.

Then I started moving tractors under cover. Even in the afternoon it was so cold and I ended up having to jump the 395 and still need to jump the E this morning. I split a little bit of wood with the 395 while I had it running but there are log chunks so big that I need help rolling them. They're huge. In that time, the wind died down enough and I put the 395 away in the metal shed and headed down to west. It was 11F and the kubota worked fine. We got the last two loads of straw down, working past dark even if I bunged up the final row we did by accidentally dropping two bales off the wagon and being short of what we needed. We were worried about safety after dark with making the step between platform and wagon, but it turns out the hardest part was not seeing the bale strings. Don't recommend, won't be doing that again. 

At some point, I bonked my finger despite my best efforts and reopened it a bit, I think it was the wood splitting or when I whacked it on the railing. Probably not smart to split wood. I have been keeping it wrapped when out working and that's been okay, not too bad to grab bales since I can flex it backwards enough to stay out of the way.

I did drain the downstairs bathroom but I think it froze in the faucet since it was just a trickle that came out once I reopened it. I think I'm going to switch to letting it trickle instead of drain, we are suppose to have overnight temps down around zero all week and it already partially froze. Plus I'm getting tired of having water go down my sleeves when I drain the pipes. And it's annoying to fill the back of the toilet from the kitchen. Toilet line shouldn't freeze since it's closer to the basement. ETA: cleaned the faucet filter and we are back on full blast! going to trickle it at night still

The snow has started here, just about an inch or so but it's coming down fast. The plows went by once already, which is surprising but they are probably going to try and keep on top of it. I haven't seen any vehicles go by, so everyone is staying home if they can which is very good. I need to go pick up the wood I split yesterday and jump the E so we can park it under cover but otherwise we are good. I'm planning to bake today and lay around and do not much useful things