Loveland Co.

                         



We spent part of last week traveling to the Denver area. We stayed with Ralph and Char for a few nights. Marilyn was in preparation for her Dad's 90th Birthday party. These pics were taken on our way up to Loveland for the party on Suday last. It was mostly a grass fire and they seem to have it contained.

We made an overnight jaunt into the Palisade, Co area on Friday and Saturday with all 4 of us. I'll get to that and the party, next. The Campbells are always great hosts with a really nice home. I'm guessing they got up this morning to make sure we were still gone then gave a cheer.



"dad...DAD! You Can Run A Forklift?" "Dad I've Never Been Prouder of You.

The boys at the body shop have had to add more compressor power. They bought a new one and built a rack to  get the old and new compressors up off of the floor and the rack will also hold the shops air conditioner.

Here Hudson is watching Dad, (our son Tom) operate a forklift. This handsome little boy idolizes his Dad. This didn't hurt his image of Dad.

Now, you can add your own caption.

Old Joke

My brother who is a crop duster and who is sensitive to pilot jokes  about rough landings, reminded me of an old one last night.
A little old lady shuffled up the aisle of the plane on her way to get off.  She stopped by the pilot at the door, tapped him on the leg with her cane and said, "Sonny, are you the pilot?"  He replied politely and proudly that indeed he was.  She said, "Well then I have a question about our landing,  did you actually land the plane or were we shot down?"

Birthday Party!

I wrote Breathless, 6 years ago. It's a short post that explains the beginnings of the little girl front left in this photo. Her birthday was last month and we had a great time at their house in Lincoln, NE. (notice the good looks of the little girls in the photo. I think they kind of take after me.

Below is our son Dan's Indian Motorcycle that he restored. Here he had just received a trophy for his class in a big car and bike show in Fremont, NE. The birthday girl is clinging to Daddy.

Who's The Boss

For The Midwest Producer Magazine

The 800-pound gorilla in the room for those of us from the eastern parts of Kansas and Nebraska is the Missouri River. We've developed a love/hate relationship with the Ol' Muddy Mo. This year she's been running bank full almost all summer. That in itself is a major cause of problems for those who farm in any region drained by the big ditch. This year, the experts say the Sandhills of Nebraska are saturated and the soils there must release, as runoff, any excess rain they receive. And they, like us, have received a lot of it.
The basins that eventually drain to the Missouri are all, also, running bank full so it's a bottle neck that only time and a lack of rain is going to solve. The big river as I know her is like a spoiled rotten child. Say and do anything you want, but she'll stomp her feet and do as she pleases. There is no controlling her. But isn't that the case with all rivers no matter the size. They can seem so peaceful and sleepy and then in one dark and stormy night turn into an unrecognizable creature.
I suppose I'm a little more sensitive than some to the problems all of these large and small rivers can cause. As a county board member I witness it first hand here in our county, and I have spoken to many officials from across our state about the damage caused by rampaging water. The costs of trying to control water, or at least trying to keep it from bringing commerce to a halt, is overwhelming to most governmental bodies, even on a dry year.
Some of my first remembrances were of the rock trucks that were hauling rock to our portion of the Missouri River as part of the Pick-Sloan Flood Control Act of 1944. Part of that plan was to make the Missouri navigable from Sioux City, Iowa, south. They hauled limestone, truckload after truckload, day after day and month after month to teach the big river a lesson. As if to say these are now your boundaries, stay there. The meandering river eventually was turned into what some folks refer to as an oversized drainage ditch. The river water sped up and cut deeper as the Army Corp of Engineers carried out the plan. They've spent a lot of our tax money trying to mitigate the damage ever since. They continually try to lay claim to more and more property in an attempt to slow it back down and make fishing what it once was.
But the fact remains that years like these demonstrate to the Corp of Engineers and those of us farming along streams and rivers who really is in charge … and it's not us. The river has now reclaimed most of the land it lost back in the 1950s. At least it has for this growing season.
There's been a lot of water under the bridge since all 8 grades of the kids at District 19 were loaded in three cars and taken on a field trip down to the river to tour the big dredge christened the Meriwether Lewis. It was obviously named for the captain of the Corp of Discovery. It was an impressive display of power for all of us impressionable country school kids. But the most memorable fact for all of the little boys on the trip was the sex education thrown in by the captain. He had a picture of his girl friend taped to the back of the door of the bridge. I know he didn't think to take it down before all of us arrived and I'm just assuming it wasn't a picture of his mom.
I went down to the river tonight and sat in my pickup for a bit and watched as the river ran south with all of its incredible power. Nothing is going to stop it. Nothing will control it. But it runs silently like all of the memories it welled up. The water was right up to the road my truck was sitting on, reminding me of the time my dad had to move all of our possessions out of harms way back in 1952.
Having a big river for a neighbor is like having a really strong parent. No one asks, "Who's the boss around here?" We all know.
You can leave a comment here or go to the magazines website and leave it there . My boss needs all the clicks he can get.

Dog Days

People in these parts try to get their work done and money made so they can vacate the region in January and February. I think this might be misguided thinking. July and August might be better months to bail out. I know it would be some kind of trick for a farmer to be away from the farm this time of year but if possible, it would be a good idea. In my memory we’ve had a couple of ‘delightful’ summers. In those years, the temp only hit 90 degrees a couple of times and of course the corn crop suffered from too much rain and a lack of heating degree days. This year we’ve had too much rain at times but we’ve been into the mid 90’s several days and at the same time the humidity soared making it difficult to draw a breath. I fully expected to hear that someone actually drowned while mowing his lawn. These conditions make it hazardous to open your pickup window while driving because of the immediate fogging up of your glasses.
But there may be other drawbacks to Kansas and Nebraska in July and August. It’s vegetables and what to do with them. We plant tomatoes and cucumbers and just one zucchini plant. (We’ve all learned our lesson there, haven’t we?) Then we wait, and weed, and water and ask our friends if they might have a tomato we might have because ours aren’t ready yet. We operate under the theory that there are just a couple of folks in the county raising tomatoes and everyone else is waiting to hear the words, “Okay, they’re ready, come and get em!” It’s at that point when you realize that there are a lot of folks capable of raising tomatoes and they went ahead and did it. Now, just try putting a 5 gallon pail full of the red beauties in your car and giving them away. “Oh isn’t that nice of you, but Fred left a bushel of them in the back room.” Or they say, “No thanks Cliff, we just got done canning 20 quarts and we didn’t even need to raise any.”
Then there was the year early in our marriage when Marilyn wanted to raise Zucchini squash. I’d never heard of them. We bought a packet of seeds and it planted a row about half the length of a football field. They all came up and flourished. We had enough zucchini for the city of Tekamah. Two days later we had enough pounds of squash for the city of Omaha. I’m surprised that the government doesn’t require some kind of warning on the packets.
Warning: Planting more than two of these seeds may cost you all of your friends. The neighbors lights will suddenly go out when you enter their driveway and worst of all, everyone in town will begin to lock their car doors. And forget about feeding them to the hogs, they don’t like them either. Best if picked at about 8 inches in length and we mean 8 inches. The following day you will need a tractor and loader to harvest.
Our cucumbers are coveted here on our place but we have trouble raising them. The cucumber beetles or blight or bad luck always seem to kill ours just after we pick our first cuke. But not to worry. The same rules apply for cucumbers as they do for tomatoes and we just go get the bushel in some businesses back room in town. The one someone else raised and couldn’t get rid of.
August should be the month to go sit on the bank and see if you can trick a catfish into captivity but alas it’s been almost too hot and sticky for even that. Arizona has been on my mind a lot lately as the perfect vacation spot and maybe those who travel there have the right idea. It’s a dry heat this time of year and it’s a dry 60 degrees in January and February.
It’s okay to dream. Right?

Excuses

Sorry I haven't been keeping up in the blog world. It has been a very busy summer with oppressive heat and humidity as of late. I can smell mold in the air everytime I go ourside. It's been good for growing corn. Well the corn that didn't drown out.
THIS is my latest article (every two weeks) in the Midwest Producer.
The one about The Great Nebraska Tractor Ride that I attended is HERE.

How Much Rain Did You Get?

The biggest drawback to being a farmer is the constant worry about the weather, but on the other hand everything we might choose to do in life has worry associated with it. Worry is not something we can easily escape, nor should we try to do away with all of it because it does tend to keep us organized. Nothing matches the year to year and day to day concern of our moisture supply and the temperature as it relates to agriculture. “What if it doesn’t rain?” “Will we get an adequate stand of corn or beans or wheat?” “Okay it rained but now it’s too cold and the seed won’t germinate.” “If it doesn’t rain in the next week we’ll lose everything!” You’ve heard them all haven’t you?
I bring this all up because of something I’ve noticed my entire life. Rural communities are and must be consumed with the weather. It means everything to a farmer and the main street businesses. As an example we had 2 inches of rain yesterday. I had to go to a meeting in town right after the rain and the first discussion topic I had with everyone I came into contact with involved the weather. “Did you get a nice rain?” I think if you lived in the middle of the city you wouldn’t understand the use of the word ‘nice’ when describing rain but it’s pretty simple. We didn’t need much rain right now and what did fall is pooled and likely hurting the young plants by cutting off their oxygen supply. Mostly the plants will survive and it is the middle of June and we could be short of moisture by now so “Yeah we had a nice rain but we won’t need any more for a while.” “Any wind with the rain?” “Did the rain come too fast?”
Rainfall has been used for bragging rights in farm communities for years. When I was young we had an old neighbor named Fred who always got more rain than everyone else when it was dry, and if it had been too wet then he would report less than everyone else. The neighbors would say things like, “Oh I got a Fred half inch” meaning they got a little over a quarter of an inch of rain. On the other hand Fred probably had the right idea of seeing things as he wished them to be.
The weather influences even our children. My two sons live in Lincoln Nebraska and both have rain gauges at their homes and at their body shop. Rainfall is important to them if for no other reason than they grew up aware of the fact that as the weather goes, so goes the family. Their friends from the city don’t have gauges and so probably tend to look at the boys a little funny when they’re able to report the amount of rainfall from last night’s shower. I did mention their body shop so suffice it to say that weather is still important to them in other ways, especially ice and hail storms.
At golf league last night I couldn’t help but notice that it was as though all of us were trying to get enough information to write a book and the one with the best details would be declared the winner. Here’s what I learned by listening. If you lived just south of town you had 2 inches of rain but you already had too much and the gumbo (gumbo isn’t a technical term) soils have begun to hold water on top of the ground, so it wasn’t a nice rain. If you lived further up the Missouri River bottom where it’s been a little dryer, you had 1.75 inches of rain but it was a ‘nice’ rain because it was needed. If you lived south of town and west toward Craig Nebraska then you didn’t need any rain at all because their last ‘nice’ rain came in the form of hail and they all need to replant something at this late date. Now if we give everyone involved a week of hot, dry winds; then we’ll be nearing July 4th and we’ll all be able to use a ‘nice’ two inch rain.
We’re all pretty fickle when it comes to the weather. A perfect scenario for the weather in my mind is different from yours and so the old adage that “He wouldn’t be happy if they hung him with a new rope” really does apply here. Some need rain right now for their corn, but not until tomorrow night after the second cutting of hay is in the shed.
This is also the time of year that area farmers with hail insurance begin praying for rain on certain farms and hail on others. I can tell them that it won’t work. I’ve tried it.
NEXT UP: The Great Nebraska Tractor Ride

This Is Not Good

Farmers dread late June and July and August for one reason. It can quit raining and never start again until fall. That leaves us pretty vulnerable to the hot-hot lazy days of summer when the corn and soybeans are trying to mature. The worst summers are those when we are very short of rain going into June.
Not the case this year. We were almost too wet and cold to plant in April and May but we did get most of the crops planted. Not all of them. I still have about 50 acres of unplanted ground due to water.
To top all of this off, last week we had 2.0 inches of rain at a time when we were waiting for it to get dry enough to finish planting. Exactly 2 inches.
Last Monday night June 7th we had exactly 2 inches again.
Last Wednesday night the 9th we had exactly 1 inch.
Last night the 11th we had another 1 inch exactly.
First, isn't it curious that every rain is on the inch mark exactly?
Second, this is one July we will go into, not being short of moisture.
I have plants, many of them, who are currently holding their breath until the water gets away from their roots. The forecast is for more rain. glub-glub
Suday June 13th: I just dumped exactly 1 more inch.
Monday June 14th: The cycle is broken. I only dumped .75 this morning.

Dance Recital In Lincoln

We recently attended a voice and piano recital here in town for our local Grandaughter. It was a really nice event held in the home of the instructor. We forgot our camera so trust me...it was good.
Then the next deal was in Lincoln where 2 more Grandaughters had their dance recital. They got all painted and purtified and did great. They are pretty good dancers. I think they got my talent for being light on their feet and of course I couldn't help but notice how cute they are and that they obviously got their good looks from me also.
Oh yeah, the last pic is of their Mom. I snapped it in a local eatery after the show. I suppose she could possibly have had something to do with their good looks too.