And back to farming

I got a planting job!
It is 160 acres of rolling hills. I'm planting annual ryegrass. It has been raining for several days and so it is kind of tricky going. I have adjusted my planting depth about 20 times as the press wheels build up mud and then I'm planting shallow.

I've raised up the harrow on the back of the drill as there is some straw on the ground and it is so wet it just balls up. I really hope this works. I suggested baiting for slugs and spraying 32 solution which should provide extra Nitrogen to help the straw break down.

Sometimes I forget what it is like to farm.
I planted 20 acres Friday evening after dark and got the drill set. Everything went great until a coulter bearing went out. I took it off and kept going. The v-openers were actually cutting in nicely. My brother bought me another coulter and so I planted another ten acres.
I got there Saturday morning fairly early so I could listen to the old-time Country Western hour on KBOO and I made one round and another coulter bearing went out. Then I discovered I had left my wrench in the other vehicle.
But it was ok. I needed to turn the coffee off at home.
I was in a hurry. I used a quarter tank of fuel to got to the field and back. It is a Ford F250 with a 460 cu in engine...

Everything went fine aside from me forgetting to turn a valve off before unhooking the fertilizer tank. I got a fertilizer shower at noon. So I was sticky the rest of the day. The next fill up I forgot to shut the pump off and blew the filler lid off the top of the tank and showered the whole drill with liquid 10-34 fertilizer.

Then I filled the diesel tank up after dark and spilled diesel over the whole front of the tractor.
Next I ran out of seed at 8:30 p.m. and did not have the right trailer hitch ball to go get more. Then I broke the shock absorber mount out of the frame of my pickup turning around in a ditch. The bolt was neither 11/16 or 3/4 so I couldn't remove the shock. I used a bungee cord and baler twine to keep it from hitting the tire. That should hold it for six months.

Then I went home and went to bed. Today it is raining. Tomorrow it will be sun but I have to work. I guess we shall see what we shall see. I hate to work all night on Mondays because that makes me fall asleep on the lawn mower on Tuesday. Tuesday I pick up the family at the airport.

Utter idiots destroy a PBY flying boat (link)

The utter incompetence is just amazing. Actually criminal. They should name the salvage company.

https://www.backcountrypilot.org/forum/pby-on-sandbar-17512

The story

http://www.flyingmag.com/news/catalina-pby-beached-during-filming-nicolas-cage-movie

Insurance claim should be denied...

It is a Sunday afternoon. It has rained too much for me to plant. I was going to go fishing or go visit Muddyvalley but then I ended up calling an old friend I had not talked to in a long time.

I put a steak on the BBQ and connected all the stereos in the house together.

I seem to have lost my Tom T Hall collection and Maria McKee and Lone Justice. I am also infested with fruit flies and I don't know why. 

I did all the dishes and took out the compost.

I'm listening to Don Williams and am kind of struck by the lyrics.

I find it disturbing to see history written in terms of the progressive assholes who have ruined our country with their sophomoric view of life. Their total inability to understand that a real person (and perhaps society in general) is made up of contradictions and it is the conflict between those contradictions that gives you a depth of understanding, is very frustrating. I work against it one workstudy student at a time.

"Soooo... I'm a conservative but yet you like me, how do you rationalize that one?" says I.

"but you are different, not what I expected," says they.

"I'll let you run the lawnmower all day long if you wear a Trump hat," says I...

"Nooooooooo," wails they.

For another perspective:

I called an old friend who I have have neglected and we talked about the old days.

I was struck by two things. First the reality that stories are written by the hero. Second, I went sideways, not a hero or an anti-hero.

When I used to do ag shows and sell moisture testers I like to hear from Organic growers who had failed. You don't hear about failure stories you only hear about success.

My friend's uncle was a tail gunner on a B17. He disappeared over Europe and no one knows what happened to him so you don't hear the story. He may have bailed out and survived most of the war in a prison camp but because he didn't make it through the whole war and write a book we don't know.

Ann Frank is a notable exception because her story was found. (or made up, take your pleasure)

I suggest you listen to the Don Willaims song. It is important as song writer remembers his upbringing but he has moved outside of it. He learned to talk like the guy on the 6:00 news. He remembers being told about honor with a Stonewall Jackson picture on the wall but he is not like his friend who self destructed. He escaped to write a song about it and to benefit from it. He is a better person because he rationalized his upbringing with his reality into a way that made him a better person.

I hope more than anything else in the whole wide world that my daughter can do that...
Forget Muddyvalley... I'm going fishing...

Living on boiled eggs and ham and getting up early

Yesterday morning I was already dirty by this time.
This morning I woke up early to go to work and I heard rain so I went back to sleep.
It didn't rain that much...

The family left me for England and the Continent last Sunday. My wife left me a laminated checklist of what I should do every day, a ham, a huge container of boiled eggs, and a chocolate cake.
I've pretty much eaten it all. Now I will have to cook for myself. My wife actually left me frozen food that I promised to eat. I can't just bum off of other people as she will know when she gets home.
Although, my brother did bring me several slices of pizza when I was planting last night.
I started out by losing the dry erase pen so I'm not sure what I did yesterday. I'm never all that sure what I did yesterday and frankly, my grip on reality at any one given point is not that strong. So, it is bad that I lost the pen.
The dog seems hungry but then he is a dog and I'm almost positive I feed him. The chinchilla was quite happy to see me, or at least he wiggled his nose and I assumed that meant something. I gave him a raisin and he nibbled away at it.
There are still chickens but I can't find their egg stash.
I am currently out of pants so I'm doing laundry. This is not really a no-pants day. I would get a little chilly, not to mention frighten the horses.
The family appears to be having a good time. I keep getting notices that their balance is declining on their Starbucks card so I know they are caffeinated.

I planted 20 acres of annual ryegrass yesterday on the corn ground. I see the fancy chopper left little white trails. I don't know if it was silage inoculant or the corn was green and it was milk from the grain. I guess it doesn't really matter to me. I should get that field finished today. The rain will make no difference on hard ground.

I borrowed a large roller from my neighbor yesterday. It is 16 foot wide and is extremely heavy. He wanted it back by this morning so when I ran out of seed last night I went back to rolling. It was so dusty on the worked ground that I could not see a thing.
SO I took the roller back at 11 p.m.
Not a car in sight until I get on the narrow gravel road past his farm. Then, out of nowhere a little grey car comes bombing down the road. I head for the ditch. The little car zooms past me, missing the mailbox and never slowing down.
I missed the guy's driveway and had to back up.
It did wake me up...
And now off to work, perhaps I will wear coveralls.

Reflections on working off the farm for one year

One year ago today I started work as a groundskeeper at a small private college in Oregon.

Look! A shrub!

Was it a good idea?
I really don't know...
I applied for the job because the stress of farming was doing me in. My father-in-law lived with us and my father lived with my brother. My father had to move into a nursing home and it looked like it was going to be an expensive proposition.
My father-in-law living with us made it so my wife couldn't work part time so supplement my farm income.
It had also been a very stressful summer. It looked like several of the jobs I do for other people were going to end and I have been finding it difficult to just keep up the pace of doing custom work off the farm to make up for the money we lose actually farming.

Look! A DC-3!

And...
My daughter gets straight A's and wants to go to college.
But mostly it is that farming is changing.
All the good guys are dead.
You can't make it on a handshake agreement anymore.

My intense frustration started that Spring silage season.
We have been chopping silage for a few neighbors and the dairy down the road from us. Our equipment is old and I haven't been keeping up with painting stuff.
We have a 160 hp tractor and a pull-type silage chopper. I get a couple friends to help haul and so it takes a week or two to get it all done.
I've been a little frustrated as it is hard to get our own crops done and the silage chopper is expensive to run. I had to buy a tractor to pull it, repairs are very expensive, we have to have a truck and a driver. But, it brings in good money.
However, everyone else has 600hp choppers and they haul the silage and pack it for the dairy and do in a day what it takes me a week to do.
So I'm working my little heart out and I blow up my tractor and get another tractor hooked up and I don't even lose a day, and I hire a guy to come out and rake the clover that the farmer put in a row too wide for the chopper to pick up (for the fifth year in a row) and all I hear is how the other guy has a new chopper and gets a lot more done than I do. And we get the dairy to chop his grass and all I hear is how that other guy can chop it all in a day and will pack it for him and I'm out there working my little heart out and I wear out my disk mower and truck and bend the cylinder on the dump box and I lose $40 a ton on my hay cause I'm chopping for people that apparently are just giving me the job due to charity.
And then I start stacking and all the bales are crap and the people making the bales don't really care and I kind of forget how much money this all brings in to run our farm.
And then we start chopping our corn silage and all I hear is how this other guy will chop it and put it in the pit and pack it and how he will do the dairy guy's farming for practically free and so I figure screw it...
So I take this job and I figure I that I can do a lot after work and if I make it a year I'll have more vacation time and I can take time off work and still get stuff done and I probably exaggerated all my frustrations any way and people will still trust me cause I've always got their stuff planted and chopped and stacked.
And I have one customer left.
I got all his bales stacked. However, I don't think that is going to be enough to make my tractor payment and that money was supposed to go to supplement my personal income.
All said and done... I'm in worse financial shape than a year ago, but I do get an hourly wage and have my daughter's college tuition taken care of and Monday something like 20 percent of my measly income will go into a retirement account.
On the other hand I'm up at three a.m. because I can't sleep.
I think I will go work some ground before it rains so that we can plant a crop which we won't be able to afford to fertilize and will probably fail anyway...
Monday I'll go back to work and when the loan comes due I'll just have another mini nervous breakdown and perhaps something will work out or it won't.
Whatever...
But, worst of all... The dairy guy will come over and tell me what I nice guy I am and how he sure hated to take the job away from me but he thought it would rain and boy they sure got it done in a hurry.

Look! A $1,100 tire with a split in it and corn in the background which would have paid for the repair!

Why I became a groundskeeper reason number 25 or I take three days off work don't go to England so I can chop silage and the neighbor hires someone else at The last minute

Well my entire blog post was in the title so I have nothing really more to say.

I'm going to take my two days off to plant our own crops which always get neglected in favor of helping other people. So far doing work for other people has given us worn out equipment and we have neglected our own crops. If we don't go broke this year I'm kind of thinking about stopping the whole work for your neighbor program. They don't appreciate you anyway.

So screw em.

Used New Holland silage chopper with three row corn head and wide grass pick up is going to go on craigslist this afternoon...

Your blog this morning was angrily brought to you by apples wonderful speech to text program on the iPhone.

Largely unedited.

My family leaves me for an adventure in London and Paris and randomthoughts

I dropped my family off at the airport this afternoon...
My wife got a small inheritance from her father and she has always wanted to go to England and to Paris.
I told her that Paris has a lot of dog poop, people are really not that friendly, and the Eiffel Tower is kind of small.
I pointed out that people in England talk funny and you can't understand them and that they charge you money for bog paper in public restrooms.
This proved to be ineffectual as it was pointed out that I am just kind of negative in general.
I was invited but opted to stay home and work.
Great decision on my part....(sarcasm)
My wife says she will actually go to the "motorcycle breakers' and find me a fairing and mounting brackets for a red Honda VT500E.
I insisted that they take a roll of the best double layer plush toilet paper available. I think they ignored me. When I went to Europe many years ago the two things I that I appreciated the most was the roll of good toilet paper and the roll of electrical tape.
We were able to to convert the our Citroen 2CV from a 1-CV back to a 2CV and drive slightly below traffic speed on the M-1 using that electrical tape on a leaky spark plug wire.
But, I digress..
For lunch we had Dim Sum at the House of Louie in downtown Portland. Click here for a really good commentary on how Portland has changed. I hate modern liberals...and Hilary Supporters. Oh wait... one and the same.
I never thought it would come to this but give me a corrupt republican over a Hilarycrat any day of the week...

But, I digress...again...

The lady at House of Louie asked us if we wanted Calamari and Baby Bok Choi right away. In fact she seemed to already know what we wanted off the Dim Sum cart.
The first time I went to House of Louie was in 1984. My wife and I have been going there since 1985 or so when we first met. I suspect we went there separately when we were not dating. And we have gone there off and on since we were married and have taken Lulu a couple times a year since she was born.
Is it possible that the waitress remembers us???
It does not seem likely to me.

Now, I have to go look at a field to plant and if I were worth a crap I'd finish working some ground for annual ryegrass. I kind of want to just not do anything...