Farmer Math

Way to run up the hit counter, Drew.

Silence!   The units are a little different, but the concept is very familiar.  Observe:

P(Rain) = Q(Uncovered Wood)/Q(All Wood) U “Oh, it’s not going to rain this week.”

This formula illustrates the probability of rain as being equal to the percentage of vulnerable wood you left exposed after saying, “Oh, it’s not going to rain this week.”

But we are not done yet.  Notwithstanding the above:

P(Rain)=0 if TankRefill () = False

This states that no matter what, it will not rain if you don’t refill the water tank.

The Old Man (That’s my dad.  It is an honorific in the family, not an ageist epithet as surmised by the overly nervous) called me from the North Valley this morning.  “Are we roofing Saturday?”

“Yeah,” I replied, “Did you get a better offer?”

“No, I just want to know what we’re doing.  It’s supposed to rain.”

“Fiddlesticks!” I said.  No, I didn’t.  I checked NOAA (I used to fly paragliders.  None of this civilian-grade weather website stuff for us!) and sure enough there was enough junk coming that we could reliably bet on rain.

Now I like rain.  Rain is good.  I live in Pacifica where the summer event is called the Fog Fest.  I’ll slog through the clay fields and sing lively farmer songs.  But mess around on a roof in the rain?  Not gonna happen.

And the rain is gonna happen because we didn’t cover the wood pile when we finished last time, and we didn’t get the roof felt up in time.

But the irrigation system timers are still set for Very Warm Days, so the tank is due to run dry on Monday.  Maybe I’ll get some more time when it rains…?  But it won’t rain if I don’t fill the tank.  And anyway, I can’t control how much rain and it’s kinda thirsty out there now.  So the Old Man is going to go out there and fill the tank back up for us.  That should get us out to next weekend, maybe longer if (Now that the wood is out and the tank will be full) it rains for 7 days straight.

We are eager to finish the field shed.  It will make long-term camping at the farm more viable and support our second season, which will need more than our one or two trips a week to make it happen.  I guess we’ll be at the coast this weekend.  I can still cut plywood for the air barriers on the timbers and do some of our planning and record keeping.  Fun.