first day here in the big sky country.

so today, I spent the whole day with my dad, catchin up and moving moving 1500 lbs round bails of hay 7 bails at a time... 10500 lbs a shot... and heres the kicker, the trailer is ballanced so that as soon as you release the handel it dumps itself.... I found that pretty impressive... we moved them to several different places. Once we were done, we decided to go and find dad's neibor who was cutting wheat.. I was going to ride around inthe cab of the harvester to see how it all worked...

Once we found him, I rod with him for about 30 minutes or so, his machine was a $300K john dear, that has more gadgets and gizmos... from gauges that tell him how fast to go to be at the optimal speed for the machine, to presets for the cutter head height, and paddles.. in fact the whoel cutter head runs on 2 wheels supported by air bag suspension to keep the header level with the ground and to keep it from hitting the dirt. Larry, (the gentalman running the harvester) was also quite skilled. I imagine it comes from doing it for so many years.. we ran from the truck up to the end of the field and back and it was perfect for one full load of grain... like as we passed the end of the wheat row, the buzzer for "full bin" went off. he then unloaded the 500 bushals or 14000 lbs of weight into the truck, which was also cool... his new truck was powered by a 8.1 cummins turbo diesel, and an allison automatic... he bought the truck as a trailer truck, had the frame streched to put a grain box and dump bead on the truck... it was actually pretty cool...

Well after that, dad drove home the tractor we were using to load the truck, I drove the truck home. once we were there we unloaded some loose bails we had collected, into the horse corral feeder. we all came in for lunch and watched movies for the rest of the day... I also spend some time thinking today.. I will have to post my thoughts tomarrow.