The shed, Fred!

Our 10×22-foot quaker-style timber-frame board-and-batten custom-made shed finally arrived. I got a call yesterday morning from the guy, and he said they could be there in a couple hours. I ran off to the lumberyard to get a plank I would need (more on that later), and blew off all the debris from the concrete pad. Then I went back to work (read slaving over a hot keyboard) and kept one ear open. Presently I heard some very cheerful if tuneless whistling, and the owner of Good's Structures appeared, his truck, trailer, and the shed out at the end of the driveway. We looked the site over, and he decided the task would be a piece of cake. We had to cut down only one tree along the driveway for him to fit through. Well, we cut off a few branches and used a 60-year-old fence stretcher (I remember using it to help set fence when I was a kid, and it wasn't new then) to bend one tree back, and we muscled a couple other trees out of the way. And he clipped some of the stone wall around the island in the driveway, but other than that, he got into position pretty smoothly. As usual, Martin showed up and helped out. That man has a real knack for showing up when he's needed. The Goods are Mennonites, and they have a business relationship with a couple Amish fellows who build the sheds. This is the second shed I got from them. (They built the first one on site, but that's another story.) So I had never seen a shed delivered. He managed to maneuver the trailer until the shed was fairly close to the concrete. He tilted the bed of the trailer and slid the end of the shed onto a couple heavy-duty (schedule 80, he said) 6-foot tubes. He managed to back the trailer until most of the weight of the shed was on the pad. Then he pulled out a remote! He used it to operate a hydraulic tongue that came out the end of the trailer, went under the shed and slid the shed back farther onto the pad. Lots of maneuvering later, the shed was exactly in position, aligned with the right and back edges of the pad—I put that plank between the shed and the bank. It'll be a barrier to keep dirt from washing onto the wall of the shed. He tried to back out to the driveway, but I realized it was going to be almost impossible, so we removed the gum tree stump (we had figured on making it into a birdbath stand, but, hey) and he drove out into the yard and got turned around there in less than a minute. I even remembered to get out the camera before he finished. I'll post a pic or two tomorrow maybe. On another subject, the chicks are doing fine, but the hen seems sick. Not sure what's wrong with her, but I expect she'll be gone in the morning. She was fine yesterday, listless today.