It was a dark and stormy Morning...

It is the second day of the New Year.
I was reading some creepy science fiction short stories online. I not really sure where they were. I tried to find the site but all I got was storiesonline.com which has naughty stories. I think the whole world has turned to porn. At first it was funny and naughty. It was fun to type in a random web search and see what sort of strange porn sight would appear.
Now it is just annoying.
Try to look up "amateur radio," good grief. All I want to do is find new scanner frequencies, I don't want to see ugly people having sex.
So, I can't find my story site, I read it late at night. It was creepy, about evil forces infiltrating the minds of adults and only the children could see the truth. I am using FireFox which dumps my history after every session so I can't find where I have been anyway. I tend to drift from one site to another and I was looking at blogs so I suppose I could get there again. I am pretty sure it was on a science fiction blogsite.
So, I had these creepy dreams about people chasing me and evil forces lurking around in the bushes.
I don't know why I even started reading the stupid stuff. I wanted to read this book I got for Christmas called "Deeply Rooted" by Lisa M. Hamilton.
It is about smaller farmers and I'm sure everything is going to go to heck for them and I will be more depressed than when I started.
I can see out the sliding glass door from my easy chair. It is nasty out. There is an inch of water on the lawn. I have a fellow coming after hay this morning. I have to go to a funeral this afternoon. I do not want to go to the funeral.
Then I looked at my blog reading list and saw that there is some freaky science fiction stuff on the Aspirations blog. Thanks a lot, now I will spend the day all creeped out. I think I will go listen to the Bailes Brothers, this will clear my head!!!
I looked up my post from last year at this time. There was snow on the ground. I was also kind of depressed.
The question is, have I moved forward or fallen backwards. Not so sure at this point.

Edit: Ok, if you follow me you probably realize I subscribe to the write and forget school of writing. Only not quite. I think about it and then I come back and sign on again and change something. So here it is.
1. Aspirations weblog, I didn't mean to say it was creepy or bad or anything. I'm saying I read some strange SiFi and then ate a bunch of ham and pickles and random stuff out of the fridge really late at night and had dreams about shadowy figures trying to take over everyone's mind, so then I read her blog and she was writing about the same thing.
2. Some while back I found a story repository online that was not porn. I thought it was stories online but I guess not. I did a search for online stories and discovered a lot of disturbing stuff.
3. I have had too much coffee and I'm getting jittery and even more random and now it is coffee time at the farm and my head is going to explode....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
4. I don't want to go to funerals not because I don't like the lady who passed away. I do like her and her son is a good friend of mine. I just don't like funerals...

Planting

Here we go. It is the first Sunny Day in January and the neighbor is ready to plant Oats! My neighbor likes to plant his oats early. That is where I come in as I have the no-till drill that he likes. He called me Saturday and said he wanted to start Monday. I was thinking about the new tires I bought for the drill and not thinking about cleaning out the tractor cab or changing the oil or if I had the right orifice plates for the fertilizer rate he wanted to put on.
When I decided to put liquid fertilizer on my drill I of course had to do something different than anyone else. This was under the pretext of saving money but really I just thought the blue screw together fittings looked really cool. Plus, they were free!















The way this all happened was that my cousin had bought a used International drill with a Blumhardt fertilizer setup. Blumhardt booms are made of individual little sections which screw together. Pretty cool idea really. My uncle was once a dealer and he gave me most of his new old stock. Cousin with the International drill is not the son of the Uncle with the Blumhart fittings. Cousin is kind of a far off cousin, like third or fourth or something...
Anyway free sprayer fittings, well, not so much free as my cousin said I could borrow them and he didn't want to sell them to me. So he said I could use them and he might some day decide to put fertilizer on his drill again. This is not real likely as the pump and all the hoses are pretty much shot.. But, It could happen!
Anyway, here is a nice picture of the colorful Blumharts fittings. Woop! Whoop! As Mayor Budd Clark used to say.


Most of the booms set up around here were not set up for 10gallons per acre at 6 mph so finding the right orifice plates was a bit of a chore. The spray bar on my drill was of course used and had sat outside for years. The plastic was a bit stiff and the temperature today was a bit nippy. Finally I just dumped everything in a bucket of hot water. Then my Uncle pointed out a NOS Blumhart kit. So I just exchanged the red orifice plates for purple and screwed them in, only to discover I was short by three. Then my neighbor brought me a nearly new (well 20 year old but it's been in the shed for a while) 24 row spray bar with the deluxe 10lb anti-drip set up. Wow! Now I'm really stylin!
Then the fellow I'm planting for called and said he had decided NOT to apply liquid fertilizer. He filled up his tank at the Co-op and then thought he would as the price. $6 per gallon for 10-34 so @ 10gal per acre it would be $60 bucks an acre for only 10lbs of N. So he pumped it back out again. Of course I decided to work on the liquid fertilizer first...

After servicing the drill I headed to the field, sometime after noon. Three triangular shaped fields. First thing that went wrong is my population monitor quit. I spent an hour on the phone with Loupe ( www.loupelectronics.com ) only to discover there was a connector inside the frame of the drill which had pulled apart. In the process of discovering this I lost all my special settings in the drill monitor. Of course the Oats I was planting turned out to have a different bushel weight than the last batch of Oats I planted and since I had lost my monitor calibration I manage to plant 10 acres at 135lbs per acre instead of 110lbs and so I ran out of seed at 20 acres with five left to go. I planted till 6:30 p.m. but decided to quit when I realized I was planting through water. Not such a good sign this time of year...








Photo is out my windshield. I'm planting cayuse oats into dead fescue sod. Goal is 110 lbs acre with 1" planting depth. Looks like it is doing a good job.
Next photo is what it looks like out the window when the sun goes down. The point of the photo was to show my low budget GPS at work. FarmerGPS is a program that runs on a PC. The red arrows seen at the bottom of the screen in the dark photo are screaming at me to turn left. The purple lines show where I have been. Somewhere I have a close up.