June 22, 2011

View of the day-Al gets a shot of Marilyn as she unloads on the go.

When we got back from the field last night, Al had written down the MacDon number, which we needed to find out what we could do to fix the header, in his “palm pilot”…a little note book reinforced with tape. He has gone through several of these over the years and most of them have met with the same demise…the washer…or rather, the dryer after the washer. Al has been careful after each catastrophe, that is why it came as a shock when Marilyn pulled it out of the washer with the clean clothes. At least it missed the complete shredding in the dryer and Marilyn spent the trip out to the field trying to get the pages split apart so they could dry and he could salvage some of the information.

When we got out to the field, we checked out what the MacDon tech had filled us with and found we had some fixing to do on the straight header…a couple of nuts had come loose and fallen off, which put half the header into flex mode. We didn’t have the right nuts, so while Al drove back into Great Bend to the CaseIH dealer to get some new ones, Marilyn did the servicing and windows, then unloaded the cart.

We got going later than we had hoped, but still managed to get 105 acres combined. Marilyn had riders with her most of the day…quite entertaining. We finished the south field about an hour before sunset, then Marilyn took the scenic route over to the next field so she wouldn’t have to take the header off. It added a few miles, but everything had been moved over by the time she got there. Kevin had some experimental plots marked off in the field, so Marilyn let him do the cutting until he had them patched out and the resulting yields noted.

We quit around 10pm and drove back into town. Al went to get fuel and Marilyn threw a pizza on the cooker for supper and jumped in the shower…good news…the smoke detector works. The take and bake pizza from Papa Murphys was so fat that the cheese hit the burners and made big smoke…the pizza was still edible, at least.

So tomorrow is more of the same…ahhh, harvest time…