Friday Evening

Today was interesting.

You may have read my morning post. I may had been a touch frustrated at the time I posted.

While I was waiting for my cousin to drive by I decided to take apart my Fujitsu tablet. I bought it to run FarmerGPS but as I started to install software it died. It does not seem to recognize the hard drive. If this were a Mac I could fix it. It is not a Mac. I would like to fix it with a sledgehammer but I suppose that would be counter productive. I emailed the ebay store I bought it from to see if they could direct me anywhere or send me a restore CD. They extended their offer of a SquareTrade Warranty. So I could my money back from SquareTrade after 60 days. I don't want my money back, it ain't that tough to fix, I just don't know how. I took it apart and looked for loose wires. Nothing as simple as that.

Cousin gave me a ride to 2-135. We looked at his sweet corn and had a nice chat. I felt a bit better.

Drove tractor down to the gun. As I backed down the gun alley I could see down corn. The POS had failed probably 15 minutes after I last checked on it. Didn't even make it 500 feet. I guess it was good luck that the hydraulic drive on the irrigator decided to speed up and reel the gun in a double speed so less corn was knocked down the closer to the gun I got.

So, do I pull it back out and re-water or do I hope the corn comes back up part way and dries out a bit? Got my cousin to come back and give me advice. We decided the corn couldn't get any flatter and since the gun was only shooting 30 feet on either side instead of 90 feet, the rest of that corn did need water. So I pulled it back out.

Bill arrived soon afterwards and we got both the water going and the combine running.

As it looked like rain we also put the truck full of oats in the shed and I drove over to where we stored straw last winter to retrieve the extra tarps so I could cover hay.

Accuweather said it was going to rain around 5 p.m. today. They were wrong.

While I was discussing the fate of farming with the owner of the shed and his friend I get another call. It was pouring at home and Bill ran out of gas with the International tandem on the hill going up to the barn. He said he was too short to get the tarp over the truck and he was a little peeved. I headed for home at high speed.

When i arrived he was putting gas in the truck. He had found a ladder and put the tarp on. He told me he almost got stuck coming out of the field. He had to put the interlocks on the tandem to get out. The water from the blown pipe had backed up into the fescue field and when he turned the truck around he nearly got stuck.

We looked at the damp alfalfa stack and decided there was no point in tarping in the rain. We went for lunch.

At the Amity cafe the nice lady made me a BLT and a bowl of soup. They don't bring us menu's anymore. We just tell them what we want. Kind of funny. May have been there too many times.

Owner asked why we left the alfalfa out in the rain. I told her I baled it too dry so it was kind of like soup concentrate. The rain would make all the leaves come back. I don't think she bought that line. Actually I didn't want to tarp it after it was already wet as it was 75 degrees and the sun was expected to come out. Tarping wet hay is a really good way to get it to mold. Not getting the hay wet to begin with is really the key in this sort of a situation.

As we set there a pair of bicyclists pulled up. They looked like drowned rats. Girl was kind of cute however. Guy was scrawney with those funny tribal earrings. Kind of like something out of National Geographic. Should have had a bone though his nose as well. The waitress looked at his shorts and exclaimed. "It looks like he is wearing speedo's. I hate speedo's they are gross. I'm outta here!"

The owner took their order. They had Garden Burgers.

Only in Amity...

Ed Winkle wants me to guest blog for him. Not sure how to do that. He is one of those smart farmers. I'm the other kind...

Writing someone else's blog is kind of like wearing someone else's underwear.

Well now I'm just getting weird. Think I'll go to bed...