Auction

Just got back from the auction and I am fried. It is a two hour drive from here to Seattle and the auction was another 45 further down the road. Couple that with the fact that the auction preview started at 8:00am today, I had to leave at what is now to me an ungodly hour. When I worked at MSFT, I would get up at 5:30 or so to beat the 520 bridge rush -- take a long lunch (but still be available) and then leave at 4:30 to beat the rush home. Now, I usually get up at 9:30 or so and stay up until midnight or later. Waking up at 6:00am was a bit of a shock to the system... Lots of great stuff. There were a couple largish commercial candle makers there and the proprietary machinery went for a fairly high price. The majority of it was entirely shop built in house and high quality. The office computers went for waaay over value -- old P4 Compaq desktops with 40GB hard disks going for over $300. I would have paid $60 and been happy but nothing over $80. I did buy about 40 feet of roller conveyor for use in handling apple boxes -- most commercial fruit growers pack their apples into large wooden bins (a 4 foot cube) but these require automation to move and we are not growing just one kind of apple. We are planning to use smaller bushel boxes (the kind you see in grocery stores) as these are easy to handle by one person and they are more suited to keeping all the different kinds of apples separate. Plus, our sorter and crusher each have a one bushel capacity for their intake feed chutes. I also got a huge amount of spare parts from the electrician's work area plus the mechanics work area. The electrician was Russian -- all the parts bins are first labeled with Cyrillic characters and then in English. Lots of expensive splash-proof electrical stuff that can be pressure washed and sanitized. I am going back down there tomorrow with the trailer to take it all back home. Overall? Another great Murphy auction.