September 25, 2019

View of the day-Combine drivers in training.

It did not rain on Wednesday, but there was a heavy dew and lots of clouds. There was only about 75 acres done, due to the dew and the high moisture of the grain. A short day.

Marilyn took advantage of the down time to try to get her basic pilot license for the drone. Transport Canada had implemented this requirement effective June 2019, and everything was online for it. The test was 35 multiple choice questions and the pass mark was 65%. There were so many vague areas to study up on and since there was only a $10 fee to write the exam and you could take it as many times as needed, she decided to "wing" it and just take the test. This would at least give an idea of what to brush up on. The test results are given directly after completion...Marilyn got 62%. So close.

There was a 24 hour wait until you could retake the exam, which gave enough time to do some actual studying. Even knowing some of the questions, it was kind of tough to find exactly what they were looking for. It didn't help that some of them were regarding things a professional pilot flying at 30,000 ft would need to know. 

After the 24 hour wait, she sat down to rewrite the test, with the help of three technical manuals and old buddy "Mr. Google". Only one of the questions was the same from the first go round, but this time she passed!


Thursday there was heavy fog along with the dew. The sun did come out and the wind picked up...it was looking promising, but the grain would not cooperate...never got below 18.5% moisture. Another day idle.

It rained overnight, so we both went to Yorkton. It was Marilyn's weekend to work and Al needed to do some toy rearranging. He had gotten a shipment which had been dropped at Minute Muffler so with that load and the bunch we had brought back from the North Dakota run, there was some rearranging to do.

The big Red Deer toy show is coming up in November...let's hope we're done combining by then...so we needed to make room in the trailer. We got most of them priced and repacked in the boxes, so Al would be able to work on the trailer on Saturday. He would have time, since it rained again out at the field.

Saturday, Marilyn went to work at Staples and Al finished pricing and loading all the toys into the cargo trailer. We should now be ready to combine to the last minute and just hook up and go. Let's hope that's not what happens.

Sunday, Al went back to Kipling and they got a late start around 4pm, at least it had gotten down to 16.5% moisture. There were only three machines running, but they still were able to go until around 11pm.

Monday, Marilyn had a theatre meeting in the evening, so she stayed in Yorkton and worked and extra day. The rest of the crew were able to start combining around 9:30am and combined straight through until 1am. Finally some action!

Tuesday, Marilyn came back from Yorkton, but not soon enough to get a picture of Al getting stuck. He wasn't the first one of the day, they all took a turn, but it didn't take long to get them out once the cart was unhooked from the tractor. They finally finished the spring wheat.

This brings us up to today. We got an early start by swapping out the headers and getting the straight head loaded on the high speed transport trailer...we're done with it down here...we think. We got the combine serviced and fueled, then waited for the parade to start out to the canola field about 10 miles from the yard.

The first field got all the kinks out...a new crop to get the settings just right. It was also a nice change to just follow the swath and not have to pay attention to the far ends of a 35 ft header.

It was a windy, dusty day...so bad that it was a good thing they could use autosteer when picking up going east. You could hardly see the swath! There was also a threat of rain for the better part of the day and we did get a sprinkle, but not enough to put the brakes on. The worst of it seemed to just brush by us to the south and by 5pm there were hardly any rain clouds in the sky.

Al's brother Jeff came down with his weigh wagon to see the yields of some of the seed he had sold this farmer. Once all the results were all tallied, he jumped in with Al for a catch up session.

The wind dropped ever so slightly, which didn't help the dust situation...now it just hung in the air. No matter, they kept on going, especially since there is rain in the forecast for tomorrow.

And the "S" word for the weekend...that's right...snow...