For all you other newbies out there on the internet, here are some things I learned on my farm the hard way. Hope you can learn the easy way:
1) If you turn on the cold water at your sink in Texas but your pex pipe is sitting on the top of the ground outside during an 111F day, you will burn your hands.
2) You can get heat stroke simply checking your 6 trail cams during July in Texas. The deer are still growing their horns and you won't be able to tell anything, anyway. Buy long-lasting batteries and wait till September to bother.
3) If you walk out on your cabin porch at 8:00 p.m. and feel like everything has cooled off remarkably but then look at your thermometer and it's still 98F, don't plan on working the next day. Again, heat stroke.
4) Chainsaw chains come loose A LOT. Carry your chainsaw tools with you or you'll spend 45 minutes going back to the cabin.
5) If you use improper tree-cutting techniques, your chainsaw blade will get stuck in the tree. It will take another chainsaw to get it unstuck.
6) Don't stand under a tree branch when you are cutting it.
7) Don't touch the muffler of a chainsaw that you have been running nonstop for one hour with your bare hands.
8) If you don't wear bug repellant:
a) You will have to get up at 1:00 a.m. in the morning to take a Clorox bath to kill your new-found chigger friends.
b) Fire ants like to bore trough the wooden floors in old cabins and make nests under the Clorox bottle containing the Clorox you need to use to kill your new-found chigger friends.
c) A combination of Clorox and wasp spray WILL NOT effectively kill fire ants, but it will piss them off enough to make them run up the side of the old bathtub in your fire-ant-infested-100-year-old Texas cabin, climb into the Clorox water you are using to kill your new-found chigger friends, and bite your A#$ with a vengeance, even at 1 a.m. in the morning!
d) That same combination of Clorox and wasp spray WILL produce an abundance of toxic, carcinogenic fumes.
God Bless and may you all learn the easy way! (But I imagine, knowing my fellow Texans, not many of you will
.