A Brief Respite

I haven't been adding any blog entries lately because it has been an eventful several weeks:

We had two separate arctic freezes come through in recent weeks and, despite taking precautions, we had a frozen water pipe in the house.

With water running constantly (to ostensibly keep pipes from freezing), the pump controller on the well crapped out, necessitating an emergency call to a well service.

The main water line out to the barn froze on the wrong side of the shut-off valve, which means once the line thawed, we discovered the pipe had burst when we found water spraying out of the pipe and creating a large puddle in the feedroom. Add a second emergency call to a plumber.

I got a horrid cold on top of a sinus infection, resulting in an eventual trip to the emergent care center. To add insult to injury, I felt so bad last Sunday that I ended up solely drinking green tea while watching the Super Bowl.

Jack, our 26 year old AQHA gelding, came up lame. Being the difficult old man that he is, he managed to pull not one, but two, sweat wraps off within 24 hours. Alas, after a second farm call from the vet, this one involving X-rays, the diagnosis was changed to a broken navicular bone in right front leg. That means we are looking at therapeutic shoeing and a month of stall rest.

I have to leave tomorrow for a week-long business trip to Guadalajara, Mexico. I hate business travel and my wife isn't too keen about being left behind to take care of our farm.

But, all was not totally bad. After selling some items on EBay, I spent some money at COMC and Sportlots and added about 15 new cards to my Paul Blair collection. And I got these two cards as well (forgive the bad Photoshop crop job):

1978 Topps #201 Batting Leaders


1978 Topps #36 -Eddie Murray Rookie Card



These were the last two cards I needed to finish up my 1978 Topps Baseball set. Next up is 1974. When I get back home in a week, I'll probably blog about some of my favorite 1978 cards.