We make a trip to the big city-Whoop! Whoop!

This weekend my lovely wife and I took a weekend away in honor of our anniversary. She found us a good deal at the Governor Hotel in Portland. When we arrived we found that we had been upgraded to the fifth floor high class suite. It was nice. We looked out the balcony and watch the sun go down over the city.

Later we had a dinner at Jake's Grill located in the Hotel. Then we wandered around downtown. We went to Powell's and looked at books for several hours.

Then we caught the Max a few blocks over and had flaming coffee's at Huber's. It was kind of over-rated but I like burning things.

This morning we went to Chinatown and had Dim Sum at Fong Chong's. We usually go to House Of Louie which is a lot better. It was kind of a neat old place anyway.

We saw a brand new building going up. In the close up you can see windmills on top. I suppose someone is making some money off a clever green scam.

How the "professionals" at the Department of Homeland Security (located in the Winston Smith Memorial Building) found the "bomb"

Important clues-
It was marked, "This is not a bomb!" Oh, no wait, that would have worked...
They couldn't help but scrawl "Allah Akbar and death to Israel on it"
The CIA guy who put it on the plane set it down, looked around innocently and then said, "hey look a bomb!" He almost got caught when he had to say it about four times.

But it is nice to know that people in Yemen can't just mail bombs to random Jewish places of worship.
And it is nice to know this is not a "hate crime"

They should have marked it "candy-gram"

The sun came out and I accomplished something!

I spent much of the morning talking to the neighbor I was panting for. I didn't get any good stories. I planted 35 acres today in five different fields. I did a 2.5 acre, a 18 acre, a 12 acre, a five and a 3.5. Somewhere i am missing a 6.3 acre field but perhaps I counted wrong.
The next farmer bought me lunch. He borrowed my pickup to get me lunch and then used it to move the seed truck and the fertilizer truck. He used almost 1/4 tank of gas to do it. I heard him take off one time and I think they were enjoying the fuel-injected 460 with the timing gear out of a 429 and an RV cam. Perhaps a little excessive acceleration.
Here are some photos of my planting miss adventures.

I keep posting these photos of the view out my windshield. That is pretty much what I see for much of the year.

This is what happens when you turn too short with the drill in the ground. This is the second time this year I've done this...

I am planting a few miles away from the interesting farmer's field. This is for the fellow who got me lunch. His uncle is the interesting farmer who is semi-retired.
The farmer who got me lunch has a vintage Ford tractor sign. His father was a ford tractor and truck collector. He has been gone for quite a few years but his wife (lunch getter's mother) often still turns the sign on at night.

 And now it is night...

 In other commentary-
I'm planting near Grand Island which i mentioned in a previous post. I see a few Protect Grand Island.com signs around. I attempted to take a photo of one that was right next to the field I was planting. It said "No Big Trucks." The people have a fruit stand in the summer time. They are right on Wallace road and big trucks go past their house day and night. I'm not sure what a few gravel trucks are going to matter.
Frankly I would rather have gravel trucks going by during business hours than bicyclists and lost city folk who don't know enough to get out of the way. Perhaps i should put up a sign in front of my house. Not sure what it would say. Perhaps, Go Away, or Just keep driving, or No bicyclists.
In other news, I heard about the fake bombing attempt on the news. Good timing on that one. Just in time for elections. I'm glad he put the "professionals" on the job instead of using "amateurs" although I don't know that "volunteer" bomb experts wouldn't do a perfectly fine job.
So someone in Yemen mailed a bomb to a synagogue  in New York? Sounds like a real professional terrorist operation. If it really was a bomb and if it really happened. Not to be skeptical, but this whole sort of war but not really, but now we are at war again, but not with Islamic people, and it could really be just random people doing all this, and oh boy those white christian types are really dangerous.
I wonder if the bottom line is that the government has too much money...

I think I talk too much and don't get my work done...

I planted for a neighbor today. He is one of those older fellows who I have known all my life but have never really talked to. We had to load the drill with 50lbs bags of wheat and we got to talking.
I asked him how he knew my family and if he was from the Camp Adair area or if they all went to church together.
Camp Adair was an Army training facility during WWII that covered a huge area. People who lived and farmed in the area had their farms purchased or taken for a nominal sum by the US Government and were forced to relocated.
He got to talking about the reunions and how they started out with a huge gathering and are now pretty much a thing of the past.
Then he got into a commentary about how quickly they had to leave and how difficult it was to harvest the crops.
One of their neighbors was a large farm with many acres of grain and  filberts (hazelnuts). After Pearl Harbor government agents came and took him away to an internment camp because he was of recent German extraction. (I didn't hear what happened to his family and if they were sent away as well. I asked the old folks here at coffee time if they remembered it. There only memory was that he had a large farm and that his daughters were quite attractive and that they rode the bus with them.)
When the man's crops were nearly ready he came back with two FBI agents who gave him a day to find someone to harvest his crops. He asked my neighbor's father to take care of them for him as he had no one else. They did not really have time to do it as they had their crops and they had a dead line to move out.
My neighbor's two sisters came back to help and they harvested the grain. They had a 6 foot combine and the farmer had a 6 foot combine. There was something like 800 acres to do.
My neighbor talked about driving 8 miles around to work at the fellow's farm. It was right next door but the Army had removed the bridge so he had to drive around. Every day he would pass a state patrolman and the patrolman would wave at him. He said he was only 10 years old and driving a farm truck.
When they replaced the bridge later in the summer the approach to the bridge was large loose rock. Sometimes he would have to crawl under the front of the truck and move rocks that the front axle was pushing and stopping the truck.
I guess his neighbor got out of the containment camp and must have got his farm back. He was spraying peaches with one of the early chemicals and he didn't wear a respirator. The chemical filled up his lungs and he died two years later.
I would like to have heard more of the story but I also had to get his field planted. I think I'll try to get him talking tomorrow. I don't really have the names and chronology of events straight.
I don't really know who had the huge BBQ which was attended by the governor and perhaps 1000 people. The roasted a pig, a cow, and a sheep. Was this the guy that ended up in the concentration camp? (sorry, internment camp)
Was this the same fellow who died of chemical poisoning later?
What happened to the cute girls who road the school bus?
How many acres did he harvest for the man?
He told another story about their farm. They had filberts but after getting a number of extensions to stay and harvest their crops they still were unable to pick their filberts. Sometime later they got a call from the local sheriff's office that they needed to go to Monmouth. The sheriff had picked up a drifter for stealing their filberts. The same filberts they were not allow to harvest. They were called in to see if they wanted to press charges. This did not make them very happy and they did not press charges.
He also told about the government's interest in production for the war effort. Even though they had been kicked off their farms the government still wanted them to harvest the crops. A fellow would come around in a new government car and he had a clipboard and he wanted to know how much they got done that day. One day he came out and my neighbor's mom was mending feed sacks. When he asked her what they had accomplished that day she told him they would get a lot more done if he would put that clipboard down and help out a little. He didn't come back for a few days.
Anyway, I planted 16.7 acres and then I got rained out and lost my daylight. I have something like two acres left to plant in a little odd shaped field. Not a real productive day.

An interesting link to an article about US POW camps and internment camps during WWII.

Why you should never trust the government

Up to my elbows in grease-what I did last night

I got the steering line change in the 2-155. That was quite the exercise. It was successful as the tractor leaks much less oil than it ever has.

I even planted 22.4 acres today.
I could have done a few more if I would not have spent so much time doing pointless things to my no-till drill.
All I really needed to do was to put two new tires on it. ($150 bucks each) But, I also lowered the fertilizer pump so I can suck fertilizer out of a low tank, and I added a valve doubler so I could run the markers up and down separately of the drill going up and down. So I didn't get started until after three.
I was no-tilling wheat into pea stubble and it worked much better than I expected. Despite over two inches of rain the ground is still pretty solid. It started raining on me again on my last round.
I've got a 10 and a 15 acre field close by and then another 20 five miles away and perhaps 70 acres 15 miles away. I need another 300-400 acres to make my payments. Or I need to sell a few truckloads of hay or get paid for all the grass straw I baled, or win the lottery.
No one has any money and after three years it is starting to really get painful. Good thing we have some really smart people in charge of things in the government. Don't know what we would do without them!

Another Good Screwing of the Family Farmer By AGCO

Here is another post detailing my love for AGCO. I suppose they have been funding their drive to acquire companies instead of developing their own products by raising parts prices. Well, to be fair, I would think they just add a flat percentage price increase when ever the clever folks in the business office decide to do so. Sometimes that price increase gets a bit out of hand.
Here is a photo of a $150 hose. I called my local dealer to see if they had one in stock (fat chance of that) and to see what the price was. I laughed when he said $150 for a power steering hose. I said nothing personal as I know you don't set prices, but I think I have a lot of room for other fabrication solutions on a $150 one foot length of hose.
He did tell me that it was JIC on one end and a Female flared tubing on the other end. I don't really know the difference but both ends looked the same to me. I would have made it myself but i don't trust our hose crimper on 2400 psi steering lines. When the blow the hydraulic fluid is atomized and it is kind of a frightening sensation when you smell the hydraulic vapor hitting the turbo.
So I took it to our local parts repair store and they made me a new hose for $25.
Why doesn't some at AGCO figure out that charging outrageous prices for parts doesn't really bring in new customers. I've come really close to buying a new Hesston Disc mower when hay prices were high and I really hate to go back to New Holland. I think I will just not buy a new one.  Of course there is no more Hesston brand anyway so what difference does it make.

Computer issues

My iBook is dying. The wireless unexpectedly fails and the battery suddenly runs out of juice. This really messes up my preferred means of posting and writing which is in a little room with a kind of uncomfortable seat. I always feel better after leaving the little room. I guess it does have a GFI so I could be plugged in...