July 20, 2009

View of the day-Al gets his grain ticket at the Winner elevator.

Al was up extra early to take the Freight in to unload the wheat from yesterday. At one point the plan was to auger the grain from our tandems into the semi, but he had to haul for someone else so we were left with both trucks and the grain cart full.

The Freightliner out-haulled the General at this stop...two loads to one. After Al came back with the Freight, he unloaded the cart into it, started the General so it would air up and came back to the camper to wake Marilyn up. To get the last loads in, Marilyn got her first grain haul of the season and she got to drive the Freightliner. With no power steering, Al decided to unload the Freight because the corner into the elevator is sharp and narrow. After Marilyn got the truck on the scale and weighed Al took over to get it dumped and she got to weigh the General off and drive it home.

After dumping the trucks we went to fuel up then stopped at McDonalds for a snack before heading back to Hamill. The clouds were threatening and the chance for rain was 50% so it was no surprise that we hit some showers on the road back to the camper. We decided to do a bit of fixing and debated getting everything loaded and hooked up, but before we could do much of anything, the skies let loose.

We had walked over to the trucks so the pickup was a block away at the camper and we weren't going to race over in the rain so we holed up in the shop trailer. Once it let up Marilyn went up the combine ladder to see how much was in the rain gauge from last night and the current shower we had...no sooner had she gotten to the top then the skies gave up another dump, so into the cab she went for a ten minute deluge. When it looked like it wasn't going to let up for some time we decided to take one of the grain trucks over to get the pickup so we could get back to the camper.

Back in the camper we just watched the weather go by...we really missed a lot of the bad stuff as it swung to the SE around us. We still managed to get a couple of tenths out of today's rain. We spent the rest of the afternoon online and relaxing, then the farmer dropped by with a care package from his wife...home made buns and caramel rolls...cinnamon buns for you homers...what a great treat!

Once it appeared the rains had all but finished, we thought we would go load the cart but once we got started it was going so well that we loaded everything and got hooked up, ready to make the move. No yelling, nothing broke and the only thing irritating were the mosquitoes.

While we were loading there was another harvester moving his equipment into the old school yard that we park in. There used to be a huge old school here when we first started coming, but it is now torn down and the hole where it used to be is kind of a pit for old trees and the like. Hamill is having their centennial celebration on August 1 and the tractors and mowers have been going non-stop to get the town in tip-top shape for the festivities...the town really looks great.

The temperature swings were bizarre today...hot and humid this morning, then it cooled off after the rain when the wind changed out of the north, then by the time we were finished loading the wind had disappeared and the humidity had gone back up again...but the rain is done for a while.

We decided to watch an episode of some classic tv online, so Marilyn picked out an episode of the old Battlestar Galactica from the 80's. Apparently the one sentence description of the episode wasn't very clear and about 20 minutes into the show, we realized we had been duped...where the heck were Starbuck and Apollo? This episode must have been the second part of two and very obviously long past the time when the series had Jumped the Shark , the worst part is how mesmerized you can get by watching crap, hoping that it can't possibly be that bad for the whole show...egads, it was...right to the bitter end.

We'll read a more detailed synopsis next time...