July 23, 2013

View of the day-Look at those lunch bags getting along in the tool box.

It wasn't an early morning, the guys took the trucks down to the farm south of town where the combine trailers were parked. Marilyn and Lynn waited back at the campers until Gerry came through town on his way back to the combines.

It had rained a bit out at the field last night, so we knew it wouldn't be an early start to combining, so Gerry did a bit of greasing to kill time until we could start.  The guys had moved the combine trailers over to Gordon, where they will get loaded once we finish over there...but first we have to get done here.

There was green wheat in some of the low areas, so we didn't want to have a whole truck load of wet wheat, but fortunately there was 2/3 of a semi of dry wheat from yesterday. Gerry decided to just fill the semi and wait to find out what it tested before going ahead with any more.

Since the combines were sitting, Marilyn rode into the elevator with Al to see how "the other half" spends the day...a nice change.  We got to the elevator and Al pulled onto the scale to get the load weighed and probed.  We went into the office to see what the moisture was and to find out what the cutoff was for wet wheat.  

We watched as they used a camera on the probe to aim it into the wheat, then they vacuumed the sample into the office and did the testing. It was 13.9% moisture...the cut off was 14%, so we were able to dump.

We drove across town to the huge Cover All building and pulled on to the pit to dump. The elevator guys looked after opening the hoppers, while Al just had to pull ahead when signalled.  

We got dumped and headed back to the elevator to get weighed off, then went back out to the field.

When we got back out, the rest of the crew had gotten back from their ice cream break in town and were ready to get back to work. Marilyn got to pass her "Sparky" nickname on to Lynn as she clipped a power line with the auger...likely the ground wire, because nothing caught on fire.  By the time we got back to the field, the power line crew was there trying to get it back into place.

We started combining again and kept an eye on the sky as the clouds were pretty dark to the north, but seemed to be staying away from us...but that didn't last.  We got everything parked and jumped in the pickup just as the rain hit and on the way back on the highway, the hail hit...it was really coming down hard. Traffic was just crawling, if it moved at all, but by the time we got back to the campground, it was letting up.  So much for combining for the day.

Al had been wanting to get into Chadron for Arby's, so this was our chance to go.  We got there and discovered that Al had left his wallet at the camper and Marilyn had changed out of wet clothes, but forgot to take her cash and cards with her.  We had just enough money to buy supper and refill our water jugs.  No shopping for Marilyn, which made Al happy.

We stopped at the Agco dealer and got to see yet another Harvest Support Truck, before going back to Hay Springs for the night.

Wonder how much it rained out at the field...