April 29, 2011

Before the big storm, Al gets the combine parked...

April 30, 2011

View of the day-The Freightliner looks like it would seriously like to make the trip south in a hurry...this snow thing is getting old.

Quite a couple of days...yesterday it was overcast and started to rain later on in the day. This eventually turned into snow around 10pm, but the forecast was for more snow to the south, so we weren't too worried. But it was the weekend report so we should have known not to be too complacent.

Al woke up around 3am and took a look out the window...wow...at that time everything was already white and the trees were loaded down with the heavy snow. The wind was blowing hard out of the north, but since we have a pretty good stand of trees protecting us, all the snow did was pile up on the roof and swirl around the front of the house.

Around 4am the power went off and it continued to snow and blow...by now the weather band was stating that we were in a winter blizzard. How can that be when winter has been over for at least a month? The power was out until 8:30am, but since we had no place to go, we just went back to sleep to wait it out...thankfully the temperature wasn't that bad.

Al decided he had to take a trip into town to see if the big consignment auction was a go...the gates were locked and it was postponed until tomorrow. He continued into town to see how things were looking there...not so good, but there were still other people that had ventured out. Too bad they didn't have 4WD, there were a lot of them stuck in snow drifts.

We saw a glimmer of the sun just as it was setting, so it would appear the snow is done and now we will wait for the melt...which shouldn't take too long with the temperatures going up into the 60's later on in the week.

Of course, this won't help the flooding issues...

April 28, 2011

View of the day-Al cranks up the M88 for a ride before parking it.

Time for a quick update...one has to ease into these things...

We have been busy...Al doing taxes at H&R Block and getting down to the wire as cut off is the end of April. Marilyn was busy with work at Staples and also the community theatre group, building a set for a production of Rumor's by Neil Simon with her friend Brenda...the most challenging set to date.

We have had a lot of runoff with all the snow that has been melting, so much so that it has been running across the road to our place, cutting us off from the highway into town. This means doubling the distance to town from 6 to 12 miles...and there is no sign of let up for the next while.

We finally took possesion of the M88 combine we bought at the US harvesters convention. They delivered it to our dealer here in Yorkton and with the help of Jeff's snowmobile trailer, we were able to get it loaded and brought out to the farm. Marilyn got it unloaded and drove it around a bit...somewhat of a task, since it has "armstrong" steering and as soon as you let off on the joystick, it stops dead so you can't use both hands to crank the wheel. Al even got to take it for a spin to show it to the neighbour and see how it would handle on the open road...he was very impressed with the handling.

His last comment was "at least I get to drive one combine"...