A horseshoe in the front yard! Who knew?

Our front yard continues to yield up surprises.

I spent an hour Saturday morning digging targets that my Garrett ACE 300 metal detector found before the long-awaited heat and humidity took me out of my comfort zone. I dug a pull tab some scrap metal and a bottle cap before I hit paydirt with a deeply buried yellow bungee cord. I figured that would be hard to top until I dug a solid 71 signal that turned out to be a horseshoe. It was about three feet away from the sidewalk and about 5 inches down. My initial thought was that it was left over from someone's game of horseshoes. But upon closer examination, I noticed there as still a bent-over nail in it, suggesting it fell off of a horse that was standing in front of the house sometime after it was built in 1903.

The original garage was still standing when we bought the place in December, 2000 and its construction suggested it was built to house a horse and buggy. The original occupants undoubtedly got around in a horse-drawn buggy, since automobiles were still in their infancy at the time.

Gazing out across the lawn, it's hard to imagine what else lies beneath the surface. I've had visions of gold and silver jewelry, but so far it's given up a few pennies, some toy cars, and a lot of trash.

I'm still not very good at spotting the targets in the holes I dig because everything is the same brown clay color. I'd be completely helpless without my Garrett pinpointer to guide me to the target once the hole is dug.

I'd be digging this afternoon were it not for the rain - .85 inches of it since midnight. I refuse to dig in mud. I guess that makes me a fair weather metal detectorist.

Hostage situation grumbling

I feel like I'm being held hostage by the pandemic and the weather and neither is getting better fast enough.

Because I'm pushing 75 and therefore in a high risk group for Covid-19, I have severely curtailed my travels away from home. That got even more restrictive last week when our 2002 Subaru Forester's transmission informed me that I would be lucky to get a block from home before it failed completely. The car has more than 250,000 miles on the odometer and isn't worth the estimated $2,500 it would probably cost to fix the transmission. So it sits deep in the driveway while we decide how to best dispose of it - sell it for scrap or donate it to some charity.

For the last several weeks, I've just used it to go to the post office to check our box. It's only about a 1 mile hike round trip, but this is turning out to be the coldest, most persistently crappy spring I can remember and not the kind of weather that makes me want to go for a longish walk.

Which brings me to my other complaint. The weather has been cold, rainy, and windy more days than not which dampens my enthusiasm for metal detecting in our yard. I know there's still lots of targets out there, but I need sunny calm days in the upper 60s and above to feel comfortable poking around with my Garrett ACE 300 metal detector. So I gaze out the window and curse the weather and the lack of encouragement in the forecast.

And today was especially aggravating because our electrical power failed at 1:41 a.m. and wasn't restored until 9:01 a.m., meaning my morning coffee was postponed and Maria and I had to do our early morning routines in the cold and dark.