Sitting in the right hand seat

The wind finally let up and I got the equipment working at the Research Station so I’ve had a pretty mellow last few days.  I even managed to take an office day on Thursday to catch up on long overdue paperwork.  I didn’t realize how long overdue some of it was until I started balancing bank accounts from May. 

I’ve been trying to connet with the twins since July.  We were in Montana while they were still combining down there but it never worked out to get together.  Yesterday Marlan and I coordinated our schedules on BB messenger and we finally connected out in the middle of some irrigation pivots in southern Alberta. 

I knew I was in the right place when I arrived because there were four monstrous red combines rapidly chewing up the remains of a durum circle.  The cart was just taking a last dump as I arrived but there wasn’t a truck in sight.  It turned out that both of the twins were in the yard and the reason they were late was because they had to switch bins.  By the time Marlan showed up two of the combines had stopped and one was on it’s way to the edge of the field so it didn’t take long to fill Marlan’s trailer.

I made a trip to the yard with Marlan where we found Michael just finishing up.  By the time Marlan and I got back to the field he had orders to take over one of the combines so I climbed in with Michael for a visit on the way back to the yard. 

When the two of us got back to the field one of the combines was plugged.  I’ve seen lots of plugged combines over the years but never one this big.  The kind of combines I remember unplugging you opened up the front of the cylinder, stuck a crowbar between the rub bars and started hauling on the bar.  Then you stuck your arms in up to the elbows and pulled straw out of the cylinder until eventually you could turn it freely with the bar.  That process really hasn’t changed a whole lot.  The big difference with the newer ones is that they have enough power to break something expensive when you try to unplug them with power.  They only let the smoke out of the drive belt once yesterday and it didn’t fly apart so I guess they won that one, this time anyway.  I think it was New Holland used to have a program where they supplied separator drive belts at no charge.  We had customers who referred to their plugs by how many belts it took to clear one as in “that was a bad one – took 3 belts to clear it”.

While I was off visiting the twins Marilyn was reuniting with a woman she hadn’t seen since college.  Today we’re enjoying a quiet Sunday.  We’ll probably go out for lunch after we get done playing chase the mouse with the idiot cat.