Grampa's Day

We finished harvesting the wheat, and considering how wet the spring was, it yielded better than we expected.  Cousin Lee baled our round bales, and we got our double crop soybeans drilled.  They were put in a week later than we would like, so we will see if it was worth it.  I have been hauling liquid manure on the part of the field that didn't plant to soybeans.  We are starting to feel like we are getting caught up after such an abnormal spring.  We are way above normal rainfall so far this year, but July has been so hot and dry that the lawn is turning brown!

Cousin Joyce passed away last week.  She had been waiting for a liver transplant, and a donor (her church Elder!) offered his, but she had a heart attack on the operating table before she received it.  The old farmer's wife spent a lot of time with Joyce in their younger years, and she was in our wedding.  Her passing was a shock to us.  Ed flew in from California for the funeral and spent a few days with us.  We didn't do anything exciting while he was here, so we hope he wasn't too bored.  He did get to see all eight of our grand-kids together at one time at a picnic we had at a park one evening.

Today was the annual Tazewell County Threshing Day at the Vernon Koch farm.  He passed away earlier this year, so the family held perhaps the last one as a memorial to him.  Matt brought Jack, and we picked up Gideon.  We knew he wouldn't last real long, so we were there less than two hours.  It was good to see all the old equipment and processes from the "good old days".  The weather cooperated, so it was a nice day.  My grandpa Metzger owned a threshing machine, as did my great uncles on the Schick side of the family.  They would go from farm to farm in the neighborhood during the threshing runs.

Gideon was mostly interested in sitting on the antique tractors on display.

The sweet corn is just about ready.  The raccoons have gotten started on it before I was ready for them!  I now have a repellent out, along with some traps.  This morning I caught our first one in a trap.  Hopefully, we will keep them from the rest of the corn.

And they came to the threshingfloor of Atad, which is beyond Jordan, and there they mourned with a great and very sore lamentation: and he made a mourning for his father seven days.
Genesis 50:10

Consolidated

It seems like our three months of spring were consolidated into about three weeks this year!  The crops are finally up, the replanting is finished, and the sidedressing is done.

Two weeks ago on a Sunday morning while I was doing chores, the old farmer's wife saw Gus chase a deer out of our front yard!  We don't know where it came from or where it was going, but that was certainly unusual for us.

All four of our kids will have babies within a year.  Three have arrived and one more to go.  Here are the two most recent with their fathers.

We spent four days at the big family vacation at Grand Beach Inn in Michigan.  I did the typical sleeping, reading, eating, and watching grandkids thing.  We also did a little shopping at the Outlet Mall and then toured the Barker Mansion.  The Barkers owned a rail car manufacturing company (eventually sold to the Pullman Company).  When Barker Jr. and his wife both die in 1910, their only child Catherine, age 14, inherited the 60 million dollar family fortune.  In her later years, she donated the house to Purdue University (for as long as they needed it) and then to Michigan City and it is now a museum and event center.  We enjoy touring old mansions!

We took interstates all the way to Michigan thinking traffic around Chicago and Gary would not be bad on a Sunday afternoon.  Wrong!  Along with bumper to bumper stop and go traffic, we hit heavy rain which made traffic worse.  So, on our way home we took two lane highways all the way.  In rural Indiana our highway passed Fair Oaks Farms.  We decided to stop and eat lunch in their restaurant and buy some of their cheese to show them our support.  They have received a lot of negative publicity lately after a manipulated (and perhaps setup) video showing abuse was posted by animal rights activists.  I always wonder why these undercover activists take time to film cruelty instead of immediately intervening or calling their superiors?  Could it be that publicity is more important to them than animal welfare? 

We tried most of this last week to harvest our wheat, but between the daily pop up showers, heavy dews, and high humidity, we were unable to finish.  Hopefully this next week will cooperate with us. 
I had a couple riders during one session.

Saturday afternoon about 4:00, in the heat, I was going to spray water on the pigs in the hoop buildings.  I couldn't get the hydrant to work and then water started bubbling up out of the ground!  Not good timing to find a backhoe.  Fortunately, when I called Curt B. he was already out with his backhoe burying a dead cow for someone and he was able to come as soon as he was finished with the grave.  Brother headed to the local Ace Hardware for a new hydrant, and what could have been a big weekend problem was solved by suppertime.


 In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied, and the travellers walked through byways.
Judges 5:6