May 29, 2010

View of the day-Dan from MacDon was out for most of the afternoon tweaking the header for us.

We got to sleep in past 8am...a nice treat...then we were up waiting for the guys from MacDon to show up. They were decent enough to call and let us know they would be tied up until after lunch with another crew with five headers to set up, and since they were down to one pickup out of three they had to travel together. They were running three 2011 Ford 250 diesel pickups and two of them were out of service because they had problems with the urea pump or injector or some such animal...something new and 'improved' to save the planet.

We spent the rest of the morning staying out of the heat until we heard the rest of the neighboring harvest crew arrive. Marilyn went out to see if she had to move the pickup so they could pull their camper in beside us...and she did. After chatting with the neighbor about their trip down, the big new camper they had upgraded to...sure, rub it in... and the new auto positioning satellite dish so she didn't have to feed the mosquitoes trying to get the thing aimed...like a couple of years ago when Marilyn had to do the aiming... Marilyn got the pickup moved so they could get parked and hooked up.

The MacDon guys called to let us know they were on their way to town and were meeting us at the camper so we could show them the way out to the farm, Marilyn led the way and Al brought the General out. Once we got out there Dan, our man from MacDon proceeded to look things over and discovered quite a few things that weren't quite right...not sure if it was the fact that the header had been used for training, or that it was a Friday setup and it was getting close to quitting time.

While he was working on the header with Al, Marilyn decided it was time to install the new time saver on the cordless grease gun...a four foot extension with the trigger right by the end of the nozzle and a holster for the grease gun. Now both hands are free to reach those cursed zerks that are just out of reach of the shorter hose. Mission accomplished...but nothing needs to be greased yet.

Dan was on the phone trying to find out various things that needed adjusting and Al was helping him out as much as he could. Al had a lot of questions...it was a totally new piece of equipment and it was best to find out as much as possible while the expert was there. There was one adjustment that was giving him problems and it was getting late, so he decided to quit for the day and bring another pro in to help him out early tomorrow morning. We didn't argue, it had been another 95º day and the heat had really taken a toll on everyone.

We left for home...a 10 mile trip...Marilyn was hoping to get some pictures of the canola getting combined, but one field was done and there was no sign of a combine. We didn't see any combines going, but when we got back to town, there were trucks going into the elevator...which always makes Al 'happy' to hear them rumbling past when we are not going.

Once we got back to the camper Al got cleaned up and into position in the recliner for the first game of the NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs between the Philadelphia Flyers and the Chicago Black Hawks. The score at this point is 5-5 and Al is depressed because he didn't get one point in his hockey pool out of all those goals.

Tomorrow we do a test...