April 2010 Part II.

Anna was pretty excited about getting this album in her Easter basket. Because nothing says "Jesus Christ has risen from the dead, conquering sin and death," quite like voodoo witchdoctors turning people into frogs.

Jonathan came all the way from Oregon to help everyone plant the potatoes.

Joela helped Betsy celebrate her birthday at the farm.

And Dad and I got ready to plant corn.

The best part of April was getting to meet my niece Erica.

Rod had me plant some dryland corn for him.

It was OK, but not as much fun as hanging out with Erica.


I'm not sure why I decided to get out of the tractor to take this picture, but turned out to be a bad choice.

But I didn't realize why until I wanted to take a picture of Jonathan and had to use my phone because I no longer had a camera with me.

They came out and drilled a(nother) test hole, and this time the news was good.

It even rained a little, but not enough to keep me from finishing up as soon as the sun came out.

I even had a buddy surplus at one point.

Then I had the time to spend some quality time with Eric trying to fix things on the new truck that weren't broken. Then it was time to christen the new truck:
Cephas, meet Aggie.

Then I decided to get my camera back. With a crack team assembled, and searching in specific scientifically determined areas, it really didn't take too long.
Spencer with his find:

Hmmm... The LED screen had seen better days...

But other than that, the camera worked perfectly, as you can see in this photo of my crack search team:

Erica and Jonathan decided to go back to Oregon, but not before Anna and I accompanied them to Texas. We like Anna to get plenty of cousin time.

And Mark showed me around town:

I even got to go to Luke's batting practice.

The irrigated wheat decided to look worse before it would look better. (And I apparently have trouble taking level shots without a screen on the camera.)
And then it was time to plant my corn.

I was pretty happy about planting into all this beautiful stubble.
And pretty proud of myself.

I lost a li'l bushing on one of the fertilizer arms on the planter, so I went ahead and caught up on some fallow spraying.

The next day, while Dad got a new bushing made, I took Aggie in to get his trailer.

We put the planter back together...

And got some more plantin' done.

The next morning I had to stop and take a picture of the pretty new power lines.

And was able to finish up.

Not without admiring my own handiwork again, of course.


With the corn in the ground, I decided to go ahead and get a camera with a working LED screen.

And put some more water on the wheat. Look at the difference in the canopy where I went back over the field to run the rest of the seed out of the drill. It would have been nice to have more seed to put in the ground, but registered seed gets pretty scarce in September, let alone November.
The dryland looked good, though.

Finally, we topped off April by attending Anna's Preschool graduation.

We were awfully proud of our little graduate.

She liked the cupcakes.

Papa Marion even came in for the big ceremony.

And that was April.