August 2010.

I started out August by playing a concert in the park with Not Worthy.

The next day we finished cleaning some PostRock in the morning. Note that the tractor in this picture is only there to run the hydraulic transfer auger.

Looks like I picked the right bin to put it in...

And then it was simply to hot to do anything else but go to the Big Pool.

And then we got Anna's "to-school" shopping done.

I bought another transfer auger, so we could use both semis for cleaning wheat (one for clean wheat and one for dirty wheat.) without shuttling the transfer auger (and the tractor to run it) back and forth.

I had them send the new electric motor with the right size pulley for the big auger, since the pulley on the old motor was a little too big and so made the auger run a mite slow.
So there was some assembly required.

Wheat went up a lot during the first week in August, enough that I decided we had better take what profit we could get from the carryover PostRock we had been saving. If you happen to be reading this Delores, I really wish you had called a week or two earlier, because we could have made you a great deal...

We got a new auger put in bin #7 (formerly known as the North Read Bin, and henceforward known as the Bin of Despair.)


Then we cleaned some more wheat. Aggie got right into the swing of things.

Which I guess made Swheatie jealous enough to start acting out. I still have no idea what this warning means or what I should do about it.

A couple of days before school we took Anna to orientation. I was pretty excited about Anna going to kindergarten in the same classroom that I went in. I was especially excited to see they still had the uber-cool secret coat closet. Here is Anna hanging her backpack on possibly the very same hook which I hung my bag on.

They finally came and spread out the manure so that everyone could stop wondering why I was such a dope every time they drove by the house.

And so after many trips to town for parts and such I finally had both electric augers ready to go. So Swheatie became the clean wheat truck.

While Aggie stuck to dirty wheat.

Success!

Despite the mind numbing heat, it did manage to almost rain almost daily in August.

And then Betsy and Anna were off to school.

I think Anna had a pretty good first day.

And we kept on cleaning wheat. The barn swallows had a big brood this year.

And it continued to almost rain.

I took this picture to mock the almost rain...

...and that night it rained just enough to mock me.

Anna seemed pleased the first day I got to pick her up from school. (It takes ten minutes to go get her from the school 5 miles away, and saves her an hour and a half bus ride.)

I was pretty happy with the first paper she brought home from school.

Chelsea was coming to visit which meant party at Ingleside which meant clean up the yard which meant fire up the weed eater which resulted in a broken patio door.

I went and sprayed the summer fallow the next day. I was not happy about how well the Roundup ready kochia was fairing.
And I got a flat tire.

That night we had a big party with all our friends but Joela was the only person that got photographed.

We got to hang out a little after church the next day too. Hopefully Chelsea and Jim will come back for a longer visit next time...

That afternoon Anna made the classic Rookie mistake of letting papa Marion wiggle her tooth, which he promptly pulled.

And we decided to carry on the inexplicable tradition from my childhood of placing the tooth in a bowl with pepper on it. Because traditions that weird need to be cherished.

Then one day we got a non-mocking amount of rain at the farm. It was the first non-mocking rain since May (At the farm proper , that is. We had managed a couple non-mocking rains Over East and at the Gray Havens. (And I might as well point out that this non-mocking rain on August 24th (again, at the farm proper) remains the only non-mocking rain we have gotten right on up to the date of this post(December 16th (Now THAT is a drought!))))

And so, due to the hot dry summer, it was already time to gear up to cut Rod's dryland corn.

The combine did not want to gear up,though. Dad and I took turns over the course of three hours at the top of the ladder.

Before succeeding in getting this lock collar off.

The corn was quite ready to go.

So the next day I had to skip Tumbleweed to cut corn. The first field I cut looked by far the worst, but yielded by far the best.

Those are some mighty big ears for those little bitty plants to make.

K&S were busy cutting corn for silage that day as well.

On Sunday I got to go to Tumbleweed all day. :) But one hour of Brennen is not nearly enough. :/

Then I was back at it on Monday.


This field (the last one I cut) looked the best, but was by far the worst. Too much water used up in growing those pretty stalks, not enough left for grain.
The next day I had to restart the sprinkler (we were done watering continuously for the summer) and so "got" to walk through the corn a little bit.

Unfortunately, I ended up in a strip in between the BT corn and where the corn got sprayed. It was a good reminder, though, of of just what corn borers can do if given the chance. These plants create two problems-- the first is a straight yield loss because the plant will not be able to fill grain from the top half of the plant. The second is a harvesting headache, as these stalks won't feed through the bottom of the corn header like they are supposed to.

This guy seemed pretty pleased with himself.

I also stopped to look at the soybeans. This part of the field looked really nice, anyway.

And I pulled off 45 pods from a single plant. Not too shabby.

But that evening I return to find a sprinkler in trouble. It's hard to see but there were two different kinks in this sprinkler after I tried to back it up.
!Bum bum bum!