Backhoe For Sale

Posts Tagged ‘Life’

Product Description
Diane Marshall knows loads — live loads, dynamic loads, dead loads, all part of life as a construction manager. She’s used to carrying hers, as a woman in a man’s career. After her boyfriend fell hard for someone else, can her private load get any heavier?

In DeBrett, Paul Cameron funds the church renovation, so he’s assigned to co-manage. Diane is stuck with adjusting to small town life and dealing with a widower who apparently wants a memorial to his lost wife. Paul is stuck working with a person who attracts him — the last thing he wants.

Somehow this project will teach them to trust God in a whole new way. Now if they can only figure out how…

Angel With a Backhoe

Some people love working in the garden, mowing the lawn, raising vegetables, fruit trees, and gorgeous flowers, pouring over wholesale garden supplies catalogues, looking for special deals, bulk, cheap closeouts and all the rest. Others of us would rather do just about anything else but look for wholesale garden supplies. It’s not a matter of “green thumbs” or “black thumbs” – a lot of us simply don’t care what kind of thumbs Mother Nature gave us.

Nevertheless, there’s a growing movement that says we should all be doing at least a bit of work with rakes, backhoes, and the like. With economic and environmental issues spurring them on, many occupants of houses all over the country – including the White House – are raising the equivalent of the World War II “victory garden.” The motivations for this are several, ranging from the highly practical, to the idealistic, to the borderline hysterical. Many inner city areas, for example, are well supplied with fast food and convenience stores, but may be miles from the nearest discount supermarket. Growing produce in backyards or community farms is one way of making sure that local residents have easy access to at least one source of fresh cheap wholesale garden supplies and vegetables. Others of these new kinds of gardening enthusiasts include “locavores” and sustainable food advocates, like followers of popular author Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), who want to increase the quality of their food and reduce the carbon footprint of what their eating while saving money at wholesale pricing. At the more apocalyptic end of the scale, we have neo-survivalists, who think their gardens might provide a significant hedge against a coming ecological or economic calamity. (If you ask them how they expect to live on, say, tomatoes, avocados, and watercress alone, the blanket answer is always the same: “barter” and, sometimes, a hen.)

And, of course, some of us just like to raise plants, from petunias to flowering shrubs, from bougainvillea to cacti, from indoor ferns to miniature redwoods, fruit trees and numerous varieties of grasses. From those of us long to escape our deskbound existence and do “real work,” to Thoreauvian transcendentalists who seek to grow closer to nature (whatever that means), to those who, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits of literature and film, associate wholesale gardening with comfort and nesting behavior, there are any number of enthusiasts whose bookshelves includes scores of books on cheap gardening, and where a resource for bulk wholesale garden supplies and closeouts might be at the top of their Internet site bookmarks.

Of course, the selection of plants varies greatly from region to region because of weather conditions, water supplies and the like. Thus cacti (called “succulents” by those in the know) make perfect sense for us here in the Southwest, where desert conditions obviously favor desert plants and where droughts constantly threaten that the days of cheap water in wholesale supply may not be eternal. Conversely, the East coast, with its clearly delineated seasons, is a popular spot for seasonal plants, while more water loving plants like delphiniums and hollyhocks are popular choices in the moist regions, while tropical plants go well with the American South’s warm and moist quasi-tropical climate.

The motivations for why people garden may somewhat evolve over time, the truth is that the practice is never going away, no matter what twists and turns history may take us on over the coming decades. People simply like to do it – whether or not it will help save the planet, the economy, or their lives. And even those of us who hate to garden still like eating the freshest possible fruits and vegetables and looking at a lovely garden. So, whether or not your garden is for a higher cause, for your own pleasure, or simply to keep the neighbors off your back, you might as well get busy figuring out where to buy wholesale garden supplies and learn to love working in your yard. It’s not going anywhere.

This is the real reason why you don’t want to vote for Obama. He just doesn’t understand.

Given the furor about “Joe the plumber” I’ve written an open letter to Mr.
Obama myself. I think it is worth the read. Maybe if Americans could take a closer look at what a small businessman is, they wouldn’t want politicians penalizing their success. Feel free to forward it if you want…
Cory

Mr. Obama,
Given the uproar about the simple question asked you by Joe the plumber, and the persecution that has been heaped on him because he dared to question you, I find myself motivated to say a few things to you myself.
While Joe aspires to start a business someday, I already have started not one, but 4 businesses. But first, let me introduce myself. You can call me “Cory the well driller”. I am a 54 year old high school graduate. I didn’t go to college like you, I was too ready to go “conquer the world” when I finished high school. 25 years ago at age 29, I started my own water well drilling business at a time when the economy here in East Texas was in a tailspin from the crash of the early 80′s oil boom. I didn’t get any help from the government, nor did I look for any. I borrowed what I could from my sister, my uncle, and even the pawn shop and managed to scrape together a homemade drill rig and a few tools to do my first job.
My businesses did not start as a result of privilege. They are the result
of my personal drive, personal ambition, self discipline, self reliance,
and a determination to treat my customers fairly. From the very start my business provided one other (than myself) East Texan a full time job. I couldn’t afford a backhoe the first few years (something every well drilling business had), so I and my helper had to dig the mud pits that are necessary for each and every job with hand shovels. I had to use my 10 year old, 1/2 ton pickup truck for my water tank truck (normally a job for at least a 2 ton truck).
A year and a half after I started the business, I scraped together a
20% down payment to get a modest bank loan and bought a (28 year) old, worn out, slightly bigger drilling rig to allow me to drill the deeper water wells in my area. I spent the next few years drilling wells with the rig while simultaneously rebuilding it between jobs. Through these years I never knew from one month to the next if I would have any work or be able to pay the bills. I got behind on my income taxes one year, and spent the next two years paying that back (with penalty and interest) while keeping up with ongoing taxes. I got behind on my water well supply bill 2 different years (way behind the second time… $80,000.00), and spent over a year paying it back (each time) while continuing to pay for ongoing supplies C.O.D.. Of course, the personal stress endured through these experiences and years is hard to measure. I do have a stent in my heart now to memorialize it all.
I spent the next 10 years developing the reputation for being the most
competent and most honest water well driller in East Texas . 2 years along
the way, I hired another full time employee for the drilling business so
that we could provide full time water well pump service as well as the well drilling. Also, 3 years along the path, I bought a water well screen service machine from a friend, starting business # 2. 5 years later I made a business loan for $100,000.00 to build a new, higher production, computer controlled screen service machine. I had designed the machine myself, and it didn’t work out for 3 years so I had to make the loan payments without the benefit of any added income from the new machine. No government program was there to help me with the payments, or to help me sleep at night as I lay awake wondering how I would solve my machine problems or pay
my bills. Finally, after 3 years, I got the screen machine working
properly, and that provided another full time job for an East Texan in the
screen service business.
2 years after that, I made another business loan, this time for
$250,000.00, to buy anot her used drilling rig and all the support equipment needed to run another, larger, drill rig. This provided another 2 full time jobs for East Texans. Again, I spent a couple of years not knowing if I had made a smart move, or a move that would bankrupt me. For the third time in 13 years, I had placed everything I owned on the line, risking everything, in order to build a business.
A couple of years into this, I came up with a bright idea for a new
kind of mud pump, a fundamentally necessary pump used on water well drill rigs. I spent my entire life savings to date (just $30,000.00), building a prototype of the pump and took it to the national water well convention to show it off. Customers immedi

• 60 minutes of action!
• Kids get a close-up look at colossal cranes, dirty dump trucks, more!
• Educational and truckloads of fun!
• Great for kids ages 3-10!
• Great for schools, moms (keep kids busy), or anyone who likes machinery!

Product Description
In this hour long, thrill-packed adventure you’ll not only see more than 40 pieces of construction equiptment on the job, but how they work together on actual construction sites. These monster machines even talk! Kids see bulldozers, cranes, dump trucks, asphalt pavers and drillers, bucket trucks, steam rollers, backhoes, concrete pumpers, forklifts, Mine drillers, blasting with dynamite and so much more!

Real Life Giant Construction Equipment for Kids ~ Deluxe Edition