Mobile Blogging?

 I have been busy. 

I missed a couple weeks. People have been asking for The Daily Strumpet news letter. This is not really happening. For some readers people that read The Daily Strumpet (Americas favorite irregular newsletter) never transitioned to The Lazy Farmer.

Last week My brother and family were gone to a funeral and I attempted irrigation. I think it would suffice to say that things went wrong.  

I am experimenting with blogging from phone in preparation for upcoming trip. 

My butt goes numb before I can post.

I did flush earlier so smell is not an issue…

It may 

work! 

Smoke in the hay field and an unedited post that rambles about nothing important

I skipped my walk this morning. I kind of feel like crap. My wife thinks it is the smoke. I think it is the sheer volume of things that must be done before September.

The TV says this area currently has the worst air quality in the world. I can smell burning wood all the time. It does not smell like Oregon Powerland, it smells like the baler or stacker is catching on fire. I have had enough fires in my life that I am always just a little on edge.

I have been listening to eatonrapidsjoe's prepandemic book on audible which got me thinking about COVID and working at Linfield University.

During the summer of COVID we had our first big wildfire season. I had to wear a cloth mask while mowing because Linfield was run by idiots. Ten acres and I had to wear a cloth mask. I suggested an N95 which would give actual protections. However, that idea was rejected because the idiots interpreted the CDC call to conserve N95's as a prohibition on N95s.

At the end of the day my cloth mask would be black from smoke. The smoke was so bad that visibility was limited to like one mile. I was told I could double up my cloth masks.

So I found another department head to get me a supply of N95's. It was explained that here was no real safety protocol written for heavy wildfire smoke so no PPE was required and by extension of this, no PPE issued.

The NEXT summer we had training on working on days with heavy smoke from wildfires and we were issued N95 masks when there was a slight haze.

These are the people who train your children...

I need to pull the air filters today and see how black they are

Just counted stacks and I am one block short of a full load. I have heard this before...

 What really irritates me in this smoke is the realization that these fires are the fault of government mismanagement. For the last 40 years I have heard that with the way forests are being managed there were going to be major wildfires. For the last 40 years every timber sale even imagined has been fought in the courts by the crazies. For the last 40 years they have all blathered on about roadless areas and natural cycles and the benefits of wild fire, but the only management done was through regulation and oppression of private landowners.

To add insult to injury, I don't think government run fire services can actually put out fires. I have observed local incidents where not only was the combine lost, the field lost, but there was real danger of houses being lost. All because they set their hoses to stream and not fan. 

I have heard tales from people hauling water and doing contract work for the Forest Service of Fire Bosses shutting down at night and the fire taking off again, of purposely letting the fire go to keep the money and management perks going, of just plain leadership stupidity where people die or get injured.

You always hear the prepper types talking about when society breaks down you will have to fight hordes of city zombies coming after your stuff. This will never happen. The city zombies never get further than city transit. It is the Anthony Fauci types and their accompanying police forces you are going to have to worry about.

They force you to evacuate, burn down your house, make it impossible to rebuild, impose regulation upon regulation, and then raise your taxes.

Its a brave new world... 

And I got to get this pathetic alfalfa harvest over with!

Buy yourself or everyone in your family a sketchbook. 

This is a shameless promotion of my daughter's sketchbook sales attempt

 

We bale straw, it rains, daughter has an Etsy Store where you can buy really nice sketchbooks and journals

My daughter came home to help bale straw. It was just a weekend thing. It was nice.

 

We baled a semi load of straw. Eight blocks at 56 bales per block. We raked alfalfa. We raked more straw. Then it rained.

 She has an Etsy Store where she sells hand made sketch books. Makes the paper covers by hand. Stitches them together by hand. They are made from good quality paper. You can get a little charm to go with them I think. I think everyone should request a Minneapolis-Moline tractor charm. I don't know how to promote Etsy stores. I suspect my readership is not really a market for sketchbooks but you never know...

Click Here for the store 

 

 

 

 

 

Life Work and Balance is BS when you got stuff to do...

  

It is 8 a.m. and I am sitting in my chair trying to come up with a plan for today. I cut hay yesterday. I walked three miles and make five trips up and down the hill behind the house. 

I can't be gone for most of September. It is insane...

Looking at the old crap we farm with is depressing. When I was my nephew's age in 1987 we were stilling farming with UniCombines and a Minneapolis-Moline M670 and G706. We still have the the tractors and the combines we have now are older than the Uni's were back in 1989.

I gotta get on it. Have feed to sell. More hay to cut. A PTO to rebuild. Straw to rake. Baler to hook up. Ground to work. Timothy to plant.  Sitting in my chair starting at blogs is not going to get the work done..

Nephew is an over achiever. He went from crane truck (RIP crane) to 20ft flatbed with hoist in like two weeks. This is the first load of hay being hauled with his truck. Our farm is the last stop in life for Ford Louisville trucks.

 

I adjust New Holland 1085 clutch, complain about heat, lack of directed rainfall, and just be slightly negative

 The last two days it has been hot. Heat and high humidity is the worst week of an Oregon summer. You are not used to it and there it is. Hopefully it left with the thunderstorm yesterday. Rosco also left yesterday. 

Rosco is not a fan of thunder. Apparently, he decided to go to the Dairy Queen which is like ten miles away and across the river. Over near where the farmer saw the UFO in the 1960's. There may be a connection.

But I digress...

The thunderstorm dumped rain on the outside hay stack, the annual ryegrass that needed to be combined. The slightly dead Massey 750 that has half a tank of seed, and the annual straw that needs to be baled.

It did not rain on the alfalfa that needs irrigation, or the Teff field that is languishing.

It did rain on the straw that I bale on the test plot farm. This goes into 2-tie. It is only 5 acres or so but it is is in little plots. Rain messes everything up as I can't really run a tedder to fluff it up and raking it drags straw into the bare dirt which is a bad thing. (Doesn't pick up well and somehow messes up the test plot.)

Yesterday I had to get my blood pressure checked. It always spikes when I go to the doctor. 

It also spikes when I get my turn off to Salem and find it closed and I didn't see it in town because I turned before seeing the detour sign.  I am sure my wife warned me about this and I forgot. So I had to do a little creative driving, but I was there on time.

The nice nurse who took my blood pressure and heart rate got a high reading right away. Then she started talking to me. Turns out she grew up between Muddy and Gopher Valley and was obviously a local of aforementioned valleys. When she was a kid her driveway was so muddy her dad would wait at the end of the driveway with a bulldozer to give her a ride up the muddy driveway.

All of a sudden she exclaims that she got a good reading, 126/85! I asked her how she did it. She laughed and said she was good at her job. I really agree. Wish she was doing my CDL test.

Her are some photos from my day and my walks. 

This is alfalfa and teff. I planted the two together because I thought the teff would grow faster than the alfalfa and I would get hay, but mostly because it puts down roots to hold the soil and this field goes underwater. Plus it should winter kill so I don't have to worry about it becoming a weed.  This gun run looks awesome. (See next picture)

This is why we really should not be growing Teff or trying to establish grass with irrigation. Our hard hose guns are crap. There is always a problem with the hydraulic drive on the one. Plus it doesn't automatically slow down as the hose reel gets bigger so it always going the wrong speed. This was probably the turbine gun which doesn't reverse reliably and gets stuck shooting out to the side. The Teff and Alfalfa came up fine but the Teff is dead. The Alfalfa will survive but there will be no hay this year. Also, the thundershower very pointedly missed this field and the clover field. The two fields in 600 acres that actually really needed a half inch of rain in 10 minutes.

The Red Clover is getting ready and actually looks pretty good. Last year it was pretty sad. I suspect fertilizer and hay cutting timing as reasons for success. I wish we could irrigate it. That would boost seed yield.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time laying under the stacker adjusting the clutch. The parts under the inspection plate do not agree with the part diagram and instructions in the New Holland manual.

You have to knock the set collar loose and then rotate the sleeve by using a chisel and hammer to hit the notches on the right side next to the throwout bearing and clutch actuator. Of course I went the wrong way to start out. You are shortening the sleeve which doesn't really make sense to me. I set clutch adjustment  by jacking the wheels up and then putting it in drive and standing on the brakes with the transmission in gear. Apparently the brakes also need work as I third was the only gear that would kill the engine. 

 

Disappearing Comments and Invoice frustration

I am supposed to be either taking the truck to the seed plant, combining, or selling feed.

Feed buyers seem to be ghosting me. 

Went after the hay squeeze to load the customer who buys cheap hay. He is coming Monday...

Needed to send an invoice to feed customer who pays via PayPal. It won't send with InvoiceASAP... Trying to sign in to Square. It doesn't recognize my password. (like Baptists don't recognize each other in the liquor store) 

While waiting for a download I checked this blog. I had comments waiting moderation. They were great comments but of course I can't remember what they were.

I clicked on "approve" and the comments disappeared. 

This has happened before with Blogger. Of course it is a dead platform and basically a dead app.

But thanks for the comments. I do live for comments. Somewhat desperate for approval in my small little world.

Annual ryegrass that I combined yesterday and the annual ryegrass I am supposed to be combining today. It has been 15-20 years since I ran a combine and that was a White 8900. I don't think I ever ran the Case/IH 1480. I kind of understood the noises in the White. I think this 1480 doesn't sound right. The White was more comfortable and had a better monitor but was more prone to catastrophic fires.

 

 

 

I walk, make feed, do apparant vandalism, usual mucking about

My exercise program is cutting into my blogging time. I realize that somewhere in China there is a bot farm that misses my updates and I do apologize. 

I am sure that all five of my regular readers and dying for an update on my feed mixing obsession.

 

 

My neighbors are out of the 1/3 alfalfa and 2/3 oats mix so I gave making alfalfa pellets a try. We had some very nice first cutting alfalfa. Actually better than second cutting. I have a ton of pig feed that should be sold(oats/barley/peas/corn/clover and alfalfa hay) but the lady never brings her barrels. This holds up the works as I need to fill her containers and then I can put the leftovers into 50lb bags. I made a 6,000lb batch so I do have plenty.   

My neighbor who goes by Radiant Pony on Facebook marketplace and because of that I will never be able to remember her real name, likes my Weed&Feed mix. After an initial slight over dosage why resulted in her horses craving doritos and Peter Tosh music we have a solid plan. It pelletizes very nicely. My Mexican customers love the fact that it makes the next feed batch reek of chronic. That has boosted sales in the past.

 

I see interesting things on my walks. 

 

I get a little distracted on my walks. I have been pulling annual ryegrass out of the new alfalfa field. Then I started walking down to the river to see if I could shoot a nutria. But I get distracted there as well. No nutria were harmed in this walk.

 

 

Someone was tapping trees for Maple Syrup and forgot about it for a year or two. Aunt Jemimiah would never forget... Uncle Ben would remind her...

 

This target is dead. Looks like three different caliber. Upper right is a nice group of large holes. Someone was pretty accurate on the head. Maybe a little aggression there. Pretty sure the dude did not survive...

 

 

I load my bags of feed on an old truck and park it in my neighbor's barn. I rent his field and his barn. Sort of. He borrows my tractor and stuff and I attempt to pay him rent. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes he won't take money. This really annoys his uncle who apparently is a part owner in the property. Periodically he interrogates my brother on the rental agreement and what happened to the choker cables his dad left in the barn 70 years ago that have been missing for 35 years. Sometimes he corners me. I like to be vague about it. If he really annoys me I ask him if I need to just pay him directly and then he does the whole passive aggressive, "I don't want any money just want to make sure my nephew has money." Then I tell him I think I saw those cables last year and give some vague location. He thinks I stole them. I think he stole our logging tongs.

Part of his passive manipulating bullshite is to have some sort of anchor vehicle in the barn. He had a IH dozer in there for years but his nephew kept using it and so he took it to his house. Now he has this POS GMC Astro Van. It is white, perhaps his plan is to give out candy, I don't know. He says he is going to restore it. Astro Vans are hot collector items I know that for a fact.

I set up wood blocks so when I back into the barn with one dirty mirror in the dark I don't hit his pristine van. Apparently the wood blocks moved... The first time it happened I knew it. I was idling back in low low reverse and I hit it. So I set up the wood blocks. Apologized and all that. However, I have been hitting it on a regular basis. I honestly don't see how I did it. I am so confused I wonder if someone is going into the barn when I am not around and hitting the van. I really did not do this on purpose. This is actually embarrassing. I would rather be a vandal than a bad driver but I suppose I will just have to embrace the latter.