I had several projects that I needed to get around to this past weekend, but I only managed to get to work on a few of them.

I started off on Friday by buying and immediately selling a washer and dryer, all within a period of an hour. I also sold a large freezer that probably won't be needed any more this year. I hope to replace it with a smaller freezer, perhaps something with about half the space to the six-foot long behemoth I sold.

I harvested my tommy toe plant, which ended up being about as big as any tomato plant that I have ever seen. I picked a full bushel of little tomatoes off of it. I do wish I had one plant with half that many big tomatoes on it, but I have found the tommy toe plants do twice as well for some odd reason.

If you want to know what my secret fertilizer was, it was rabbit manure. The plant was a volunteer, which may have actually helped it be stronger. I have always found volunteer plants are more hardy than ones I plant myself. But maybe that's just me. My regular tomato plants in the garden only turned out a sparse harvest this year, leaving much to be desired. Of course, the wet spring that started shooting up out of the ground in the middle of the garden most likely had some negative affects.

A good part of my day Saturday was ‘wasted' with a friend who was visiting from Charlotte. However, between just sitting around and having a chat, I feel that it was time well spent.

He also brought up some of his toys to trade on, which included some things that I have been wanting to add to my own collection. Here again is one of my favorite things about trading. I would never have purchased some of these things, even though I might have wanted them. For starters, he had a new rotary tool still in the box. Those always looked like one of the most useful things a man could buy to me, but I never had used one before. I have a good friend who does a lot of wood carving and, as far as I know, he does about 90 percent of it with a rotary tool. Of course, this one wasn't exactly the same as the very expensive one my friend uses to carve with, but it also didn't come with the same price tag.

When I opened the box, I saw a long line of attachments of all sorts. Sharp ones, flat ones, round ones, metal ones, stone ones and sandpaper covered ones. I could figure what about 30 percent of them were for, but the rest was pretty much a mystery.

I tried sharpening a hand scythe for practice and ended up eating one of the little stone ones just about completely up. Maybe I better call my other friend for a few pointers before I get too carried away. Another useful item he brought along was an engraver. My uncle had an engraver and, before he died, he gave me a screwdriver with his initials carved into the handle.

After he retired from the army, he often took jobs working as a handyman and evidently wanted to make sure his tools didn't walk off. I managed to engrave my initials on a tool I had laying on my work bench, realizing that this too requires skills I have yet to develop. Live and learn, that's what I always say.

The engraver itself might be useful only for a limited time, but it might help me make my mark on the world. In fact, I plan to engrave all of my tools as soon as I get around to it. We've already talked about that whole thing, haven't we?

He also had a number of odds and ends that I was interested in but really had no immediate need for, like a pencil torch, a set of hole saws, a set of remote speakers for a surround sound system and too many other do-dads to mention.

He also brought me a folding pair of pliers with lots of accessories inside the handles and a small metal flashlight with a belt case, both of which I often have needed in the past.

I swapped off a .22 pistol that I probably didn't need laying around and he threw in some money and an old .22 rifle that he had laying around.

It is always nice when two people can get rid of things they don't need or want and end up with things that they really do need or want. Pistols are something that I generally don't keep around very long. I am more of a rifle type, myself.

In my experience, pistols have proven more useful for sport or personal protection. I use most of the weapons I have for hunting, with a little target practice thrown in for good measure. Pistols can be used for hunting, but I like the feel of a rifle, the increased accuracy and range and the safety of having a longer barrel.

Not to give the impression that I don't like pistols at all — I do occasionally glance in the direction of a big frame revolver or a nice slide-action automatic and think about purchasing it. Its more of a want thing versus a need thing. In a similar vein of thought, I also glance longingly at the new trucks on the car lots but I can't see buying one of them either.

Somehow I always end up trading for things and then trading those things for other things and on and on, sometimes wondering what I might end up with next.

It's always good to trade with new people so I can introduce things into my stock that other people might not have seen before. It's hard to keep trading the same pocketknife back and forth for ever, you know.

My brother-in-law and a few of my friends did that once with a 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass with t-tops. We all owned it at least twice, sometimes only having it for a period of hours before trading it off again.

All told, the car was probably swapped around six times or more before it finally found its way into a friend's junkyard.

It still sits there today and more than once I have had the thought of fixing it up cross my mind, only to cross it out before I get too far along. After all, I have already owned it on three different occasions. You have to draw the line somewhere.

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