September 2010, Part I.

September began with sprinkler repair.
Specifically 2 burnt out motors in the corn.

I was hoping this would be the last round.

The next morning while checking the sprinkler I took a gander at the milo Over East. It looked really good where it had managed to come up through the stubble drifts. What a difference a little rain makes...

Then I took Aggie up to get some TAM 111 from Boots's.

I forgot to bring a book. :(

Between loads I checked the sprinkler again. It wasn't good.

So I had Dad call the professionals while I went and got another load of wheat.

It went much better with a book.

And that evening I turned the water back on. Apparently I had pinched a wire on one of my motor installs. :/

The next day was not windy so I decided to spray some volunteer wheat over at the Gray Havens. One nice thing about it not raining is you don't have to spray for weeds. A family of mice took the opportunity to make their home on the spray trailer. And how bold of them to use a snakeskin!


There wasn't much there worth spraying, but just enough volunteer wheat to make it worthwhile.

And the milo at the Gray Havens looked like it had been confused all summer as to whether it was going to rain or not. The red heads would have "headed out" on schedule while the green heads had waited for rain.

Some Reeses came to visit over Labor day weekend. And when I wasn't sulking or offending them or insulting them it was kind of fun. One night we went bowling. They were out of lanes with the automatic bumpers for Anna. I made a video:




And then it was back to hauling wheat the next week.
There was a lot to haul, since we hadn't certified any TAM 111 down south.

I managed to bring Anna up to see her cousins on one trip.

Team trucking is a lot more fun.

Then I made the first of several phone call related special deliveries. There was a lot of construction. This happens to be the third flagman which I got stopped at on this trip.

The next day I took off from truckin' because we had some important pictures to take that afternoon. I spent the morning getting the corn header ready to cut irrigated corn.

Then we got to see "Tummy" for the first time:

You didn't miss August's big announcement did you?

And then Anna picked out some yarn for her little sibling's blanket.

And the next day it was back to special deliveries. I didn't really take any pictures, as I thought I probably wouldn't ever want to talk about it, and let's face it I still don't, but I did think this little homemade auger hopper was pretty nifty, and it worked perfectly with my side chutes.

It almost rained several times in September too.

And we went ahead and started the whole crazy seed wheat thing over again, as Jim came down to get the seed he was planting for us.

On a different random day, I was up at Boots's and decided to try to start the red tandem truck (which had started working only to break down again a couple of times throughout the summer.) It wanted to run, so we went ahead and unloaded it while we could, and I hauled the wheat screenings to the elevator while Chris and Dad towed the red truck to town to get worked on. (By the way, it barely made it home from the mechanic's and hasn't moved since... maybe next year.)

And we got some mocking rain.

And I performed a task which I had been meaning to do for about 4 years. When I bought my little soybean header, all of the fingers had been chopped short by the sickle bar. I finally took the time to set the reel height correctly.

And then the panel on the sprinkler at home quit just in time for the last round of the season, so we had to get a new one. Now the sprinkler has to "boot up." Nothing like progress...