Driving a stacker, watching old television, nerf warefare, icecream, all in a day's work down on the farm

My daughter always beats me at Super Mario brothers.
Always...
She is at times somewhat smug about it and says it is because I am old.
Last week I let her drive the stacker.
I told her was just like playing the Wii only a lot more fun.
She found it more difficult then she expected.
You do have to manage the throttle, computer, bale pickup, ground speed, and watch for things to go wrong and you have to steer the stacker to pickup the bale.

In other news...
My wife left Lulu and I alone to watch Grandpa whilst she and her sister went to a concert. All went well. We watched five episodes of "All Creatures Great and Small," on Amazon Prime or Netflix or something similar. I wanted to watch Benny Hill some folks find this offensive.
Lulu and I played Settlers of Catan. This started out fine but soon degenerated into violence when that dagummed duck that has been following me started quacking.
I rightfully claimed elder abuse after receiving an called for assault in the form of a nuggie, which seemed to really upset the duck who then quacked very loudly.
Grandpa found this very amusing and then went to sleep.
The violence continued to escalate and Nerf weapons were called into play.  This continued to the point where Grandpa was caught in crossfire. (Contrary to what you see in the comics, Nerf suction cups do not stick to one's forehead.)
Grandpa gave a very loud harrump! Looked around briefly, and then went back to sleep.
True to our nonresistant background and training, the reconciliation process was then began, this involved chocolate ice cream and all was right with the world.

In other news: I see that Ed Winkle had over 4,000 hits a day to his blog. I had 45... But then again, I think radish is a week and I don't have a John Deere no-till drill.

Also, what is this obsession with Soccer? Real Americans don't follow soccer. While I do root for Pele, I frequently make fun of the annoying neighbor who hails from Austria and whose son plays for the Portland Timber's. I also think it is funny to get supposedly open minded people to laugh at gay jokes and proclaim their hetro-sexualness, and then laugh at them and accuse them of being closed minded.
The country is going to heck in a hand basket. Drinking wine, riding bicycles, hanging out in Portland, playing soccer, getting confused about which team you are supposed to be on....the metric system...

Thanks to the clever big time operator upstream

We can irrigate our flax!

The clever folks in the neighborhood say the drainage ditch is plugged, I say it was never designed to take the overflow from the city of amity water treatment plant and a large irrigation pump running 24 hrs per day.

I would like to dig a pond.

Enough rain to stop hay but not enough to stop the irrigation

What I've been doing...
1. Hay: I've been picking up hay for the neighbor. Mostly on ground that I used to farm, next to ground that I used to farm.
I should have taken a photo. The place I farmed for years and lost every cent of my savings has been transformed. The other neighbor rented it for the same low rent as myself but he tiled it and planted grass seed. Of course the first planting failed, but he had the money to replant.  The tile and lime made all the difference in the world. I drove around in circles wondering how I could have come up with the money to do that with no bank loan....

2. I finished the hay stacking in the rain...

3. My father in law broke his shoulder ball socket. He has come to stay with us. He is deaf and makes sound effects to go with whatever he is doing. He is 91.

4. I have more work to do in the drizzling rain than I had to do when I was doing hay. But... I have a hard time focussing. Yesterday I gave my brother-in-law a farm tour, worked on the tractor a/c. Found out that despite telling my little helper to note which hose was matched to the S on the compressor head and then make sure he connected them back to the S and D on the new compressor, he did not.
The blue cap means low pressure, suction, S, and D means high pressure, (discharge). Sometimes the fittings on the top of the compressor are reversed.
The were...

5. Here is a video which shows what it looks like to follow a baler.

And now, I'm going to go attempt to install an irrigation pump to water some flax...

Reason number 8 why I hate wineries, (well perhaps I'm only mildly annoyed by them)

I wish MuddyValley would have titled his post, "Why I hate wineries," but I will just go ahead and do that myself.
I have wondered if the growth of this so-called "wine culture," in areas like ours is cause or a symptom. Bigger farms, less jobs, government regulations on the timber industry, less jobs, no industrial base, no small stores, no small businesses, everybody is broke, and then the wine industry comes to town.
The wine industry is based on BS, just like the organic food industry. People buy it for the image and pretend it is for the taste.
Anyway, Muddyvalley starts out by talking about elk but gets into one of my favorite gripes. It is a good read.
I have nothing to post about myself. Stacked hay in the rain for my neighbor. My baler broke down. The guy whose hay I'm supposed to be baling is going to be angry cause it is raining. I react poorly to being chastened. I will loose another customer...


The good life: deer, elk, and fences: In an interesting article from the AP, we learn that : " Deer still balk at crossing the border with Germany even though the physica...

Swarm of Bees in the Raspberry patch

Yesterday my wife discovered a swarm of bees in her garden.

Muddyvalley came to the rescue

Stanley helped.

By nightfall the bees were in their new home.

I am an excellent businessman

I thought I had too much hay to do this year, So for that and other reasons I don't want to get into right now, I gave 12 acres to my neighbor.

I told them I didn't want to stack it.

I stacked It anyway,

Here it is. $7000 worth of hay. I heard they are getting $225 per ton.

My stacking charge for the whole field was $275.

They even had special stacking requests.

It would appear that using speak text with your  iPhone whilst stacking angrily produces somewhat of a cryptic blog. To be polite about it.

Hay raking

I had a plan to sell this rake. I took a video to show that it works. Then I realized how bad the tractor pulling the rake looked.
Lulu is now 13 years of age. She actually wants to work.
Unlike myself.
She is not a lazy farmer...

For those who are interested.
This is a double rake. It puts two windrows together. It has a right and left hand basket. They are extended by hydraulic cylinders. The baskets swing out as the cylinders are extended. You can extend one side at a time for turning single windrows.
And now I must go to work...
I have one of the only bale stackers in the neighborhood. This means I do everyone else's hay before our own.

Good Reading Material and a hay photo

Muddy Valley sent me this, Click Here

It is supposed to rain tonight. I raked the hay into a tight windrow so it doesn't all bleach. This is what it looked like at 5 p.m.
Tomorrow I suppose it will be white.

I start reading my archives and start to question my write and forget policy

Does anyone ever read my previous postings?
I found this quite interesting.
I have written the whole story somewhere but i can't find it.
Also, Mr. Cook was telling about his war experiences and I wrote that down at well. And how my uncle got his sharpshooter award even though he never hit the target.
I have a number of half started journals and a few outlines of stories I've been told that I never finished. These are mixed in with designs for projects I never started, cryptic wiring diagrams for projects I don't understand, and lists of things to do, and sketches of robots. I have a number of sketch books and spiral notebooks which I have written in over the years. It is very tedious and boring to go through them but I sometimes find gems. I think they mostly get throw away or the fill up and are left in a tractor or pickup truck till they get wet and are thrown out.
Memories only last two generations and then it is just moss on a tombstone.

Irrigation and comments on blogging

There are things that make you say, "oh fiddle!" especially when you see them at 8 p.m. and it is a bit chilly and you know this will end with you getting wet.

In other unrelated commentary...
1. For reasons which are too mundane to explain I am watching a Tom Hanks movie, "Nothing in common," or something like that. Movie screen writers are morons or perhaps it is the studio heads or perhaps it is a combination.
I always identify with the grumpy old guys who are sexist and kind of rude. I end up being moderately offended by main character with whom I am suppose to feel empathy with. I sort of hope that when they have the ubiquitous misunderstanding that they will never get back together and the main character's life will spiral into alcoholism and end in suicide.
My favorite part of Saving Private Ryan was when Tom Hanks died.
This is a stupid movie.

2. I hate greeting card holidays. I don't want my family to do anything for me on father's day. Sitting in my chair is just fine. I don't want to go sit awkwardly with my father because it is father's day, when he is coming home Wednesday.

3. Blogging... I keep getting encouragement to monetize my blog. I get 350 hits per day. Half of them are returning readers. That is not a huge following. I could promote the blog more. However, I see a somewhat limited audience.
I just read a blog written by a copywriter who will write blog and facebook copy with maximum keywords for adsense. I really hate those BS blogs that show up when you do google searches for things like replacing the pump in your washing machine.

So here is what I wonder about regarding blogging:
1. I wonder if anyone who regularly reads this blog has actually successfully monetized their blog. Please comment if you have. (I see Ohiofarmgirl as done so.)

2. Why do you read blogs? To give you my story, I read blogs because I find other people's lives interesting. I like my blog and would find my bad luck quite amusing if it were not me. I like to keep up with the guy who doesn't have a job, the fellow from the wrong side of the Charles, Gorge and his chicken, and Ralph, and Muddy Valley and OMFG, and what Kev is building, my daily probverb reading, and generally anyone on my blog list. I wish Frank James would tell us what he is doing now.

3. I have been posting with my iPhone and I haven't figured out how to respond to comments. Do you think short posts with photos work the best or do you enjoy the long rambling commentaries?  I have found that posting every day results in a higher average readership. However, writing commentary occasionally will result in a link from a high profile blogger and then the hit rate goes through the roof.  However, that does not really affect the average daily readership. Very few of those readers stay.
I think most people don't find my life that interesting. You have to have experienced life on a small to medium farm to really get it.

4. My readership is cheap, grumpy, somewhat conservative, and they have owned International Pickup trucks. They don't spend money. Is it worthwhile to write a blog that panders to a more free spending and happy crowd or should blog writing be a refuge from the people who bug the crap out of me all the time.  Example, I just accepted 18 people as friends on my real facebook page. Two of those people I actually like. People that I really want to talk to (with three exceptions) do not have facebook pages. I kind of hate facebook.  Now that I have people I have always disliked as facebook friends I think I will have to revert back to the Buddeshepherd facebook page.

5. People I know have found my blog. This makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Should I care? They never stay as longterm readers. Perhaps I should just not worry about it. I never use their names when I make fun of local people. Should I care if people are offended?

What I found in a barn

I am picking up over bales for my neighbor. I took a peek in his barn.

People have interesting old junk in their barns.

This was high-technology in 1935.

A corn photo

Look! Corn convergence!

A blog written using speak text with my iPhone

My iPhone has speech text it's supposed to be really cool. 

I'm using it right now.

Hi am multitasking 

I mostly use speak text to get the computer to type out slightly rude words or words that used to be bad when I was a kid like Heinie I said Hiney!

Speak text is a pain in the bottom to edit because the iPhone has no arrow keys. 

The iPhone is probably the most popular smartphone because the other smart phones probably really suck.

I don't think it's popular because it's really really good mostly because it's just not terrible and you can actually use it most of the time. 

I want with my iPhone because I am too busy to use my MacBook and because the MacBook battery is dying and Apple in their great wisdom made the MacBook with a non-user serviceable battery. 

So this is an unedited blog post using speech to text.

I think it is mostly readable and sort of makes sense. 

And now back to what I mostly use speech to text for

Heinie butt big baby but Wenas flat you late didactic dispensationalism wiener

And a selfie I'm doing a selfie

I am so totally yesterday rather than last generation previous century yesterday is good for me

What a way to make a living

Thought I was overcharging at eight bucks for an 82 pound 14 x 18 hay bale and my wife saw the at wilco farm store for sixteen. 

Have 600 of them left to stack plus 20 acres for the neighbor and another five acres of three string bales for us and more to bale before the rain Thursday.

Got a call at 11 pm. Neighbor girl is having heart rythm problems while stacking and had to quit. 

Knocked bales out of my stack, had anger management isses and decided to give up and go to bed. 

Now I hear the siren for the volunteer fire department. Guess I will be getting up early to stack for the neighbor girl. 

Why you need to teach your children to lie

The New World Order is a little difficult for us honest folk. We were taught, and we teach or children to never tell a lie, to confess mistakes/rule violations, and to respect authority.
This puts us at a huge disadvantage since idiots run the world.
Click here to read about a child doing the right thing...
Look how much trouble he got into.
All he had to do toss the gun in a trash can and deny, deny, deny, and then not remember.
"Never admit, if in doubt forget..."
Slogans to teach your children!

The view out my window this morning

I'm officially an old fart. No stereo in the stacker but I just bought an air ride seat. Tired of having a sore back for the past 15  years.

Note to faithful comment leavers. I talk  to you but the blogger phone app is crap and most of the time I lose the comments. 

The first corn photo of the season

My brother got the seed right in the moisture and he put down lime. Perhaps it will be a good year.