[AT] test

[Greg Hass]

Too cold here in Michigan to do anything. Went down to 8 below again 
last night.For the past month or two has been below zero two out of 
three nights. Just got fuel for the house and shop; $1500 worth, all 
over and above last year. Haven't done a thing in the shop this year 
even though I keep it 42 degrees at all times to keep things stored 
there from freezing. I have a lot of stuff in the shop that is in my way 
and needs to go into a different building but  the snow between the 
buildings is 3 feet deep and almost 300 feet in between. I have given up 
cleaning snow in front of the shop because every time I do it blows in 
the first night. I no longer have livestock, but the larger farms in the 
county that have manure to haul are taking their big 400 hp tractors 
with 20 foot front blades are angling the blades and plowing the snow 
off of whole fields and making windrows every 40 feet and spreading 
between them. Since i am semi-retired I usually go to the coffee shop 
every day for a couple of hours. A couple of weeks ago, I got about a 
third of a mile from home and the buzzers in my pick-up sounded and the 
dash started to flash saying I had no oil pressure (2010 model) which I 
didn't. I shut it off and restarted it and had some pressure, went 300 
feet and the same thing. I tried it again and got another couple hundred 
feet. This time I figured I had better check the oil. It was fine, but 
looked terrible. By this time 10 minutes had gone by and when I started 
out the oil pressure was fine. I called the dealer to see if I could get 
an emergency oil change which I did. They said the oil looked like milk. 
I only had 1200 miles on the oil change and the computer said I had 71% 
oil life remaining. All I can figure is that each morning I would start 
at below 0, drive 3 miles to the coffee shop, stay a couple of hours 
then drive 3 miles home at 5 above. During these 2 months it just 
happened I had no long distance to drive. Even so, I have never had an 
engine do this but then I can never remember this much cold in a row. I 
just hope that no damage was caused to the engine. I sure hope it warms 
up soon so we can start thinking tractor stuff.
     Greg Hass