August 11

View of the day-The apples in our back yard at Tuttle.

What a night! We must have been roused three different times by the thunder shaking the camper. The first round started just after midnight and passed to the north of us, the second round was about 3am and it too went north. The last blast came through around 5am and it pretty much stayed south and ran along the interstate. We ended up with .3 inches of rain here, so we really lucked out.

We had the tractor at the doctor's so we went to see if they had been able to fix it up. We found out they had put on a new alternator, but needed to get a pressure switch for the A/C compressor. We had just left it in front of their shop on the trailer, still hooked up to the freightliner. We were concerned it was too close to the highway and didn't want to cause an accident, so we parked the trailer on the other side of the shop. We then unloaded the tractor and parked it where they could get to it once the part came in.

When we got to talk to the owner of the shop, he told us there was a bit of excitement there this morning. They must have had 6 or more Case tractors parked around where they were working, and they had finished fixing on one 2290 Case when the owner came to pick it up. For some reason it wouldn't start, so he went out to try and jump it on the starter...well apparently, the reason it wouldn't start was that it was in gear! Talk about action!!! Fortunately for the owner of the tractor, it was parked by the building and didn't run him over. It did however run over a garden tractor, run into an old tractor, had one of the big rear tires flattened and was pushing against one of the other tractors when the mechanic was able to get inside and get it out of gear. A bit of carnage, but no loss to life or limb, and our stuff was out of the way.

We did a test around 3pm, it was 15%, so we stopped at the community store and sat in for a pop and a chat with the locals. While sitting there, we noticed some old pictures of the town and some yellowed newspaper clippings posted on the wall, two of which were written by...you guessed it...Tom Isern. What a small world! He was stating the best place to get the tastiest take out Kuchen, was the Community Store in Tuttle...which we did.

We took another test at 6pm which was 13.7%, so we decided to cut a load. Al did the combining while Marilyn went back to the camper to round up the laundry. After he filled the truck, we were off to Steele for the weekly task. After getting that job done, we fueled up the truck and were on our way back to the camper.

Hopefully tomorrow will see the end of the barley, then we will move east to Robinson for the next 200 acres of straight cut wheat.

The weather looks promising for the next few days...