Speaking of Weather

We managed to get about 100 acres cut on Wednesday and Thursday of this last week. This is good. Without stopping, I can cut 12 or 13 acres an hour but once you factor in breakdowns and filling Dynacure, it's significantly lower than that. For instance, I broke a bunch of sections on the first lap in the field and that took a good hour to completely fix--and that was with the help of my girlfriend. It's a little ironic that I just mentioned a few days ago that I'd never hit a snapping turtle with the swather because in that same field, I came as close to hitting one as I ever have. He was out wandering from one pool to another when we found him, but I couldn't resist the urge to go screw with him. There's a way to handle them safely: approach from the rear, grab near the end of the tail, and hold him out a foot or so from your body. (Sh/H)e'll still snap at you, but if you keep your arm out, you'll be fine:



On Friday we moved the swather to the next area we were cutting. We got there later in the day, around 7 pm. There were clouds gathering to the north and south, but we'd been hoping they'd move off to the east without bothering us. We cut a couple rows when my girlfriend said that she thought the clouds to the north were getting closer. We snapped a couple pictures of them but the storm was so big that it took two pictures:





I didn't believe her that the storm was coming our way--oops. They definitely were, and they were moving fast. I flagged down my father (who was driving the swather at the time) and we grabbed the two pickups and fled south, away from our house, but the only radio station we could get to work was warning about large hail from the storm, so we were booking it out of there. The whole way it was in and out of the front edge of the storm. Unfortunately, there were no pictures of this. We were just barely staying ahead at 50 to 60 miles per hour. The cross-winds were incredible; we saw huge clouds of dust billowing up away from the storm, sort of shaped like a negative-sloped asymptote. They were spooky, but they weren't rotating, so we continued on past them. The only cars we encountered going the other direction was a caravan of vehicles with antennae sticking out the roofs: storm-chasers, I think. Eventually we made it around the side of the storm and went back up north to our place.

Then another big storm hit Saturday evening. I was out to dinner with my girlfriend, and on the way back, we encountered hail twice. Neither time was large enough to cause damage, thankfully. But it was well under 1/4 mile visibility for several miles, so it was an adventurous trip home! We had gone to church Saturday evening so we could cut Sunday morning but it didn't matter; we were sufficiently rained out after the evening storm. We didn't cut at all on Sunday. We tried to go again today, but managed to get the swather stuck doing so. Too wet still. Hopefully tomorrow we have better luck. We're supposed to have several dry days in a row. It's about time.

Maybe I'll write about Dynacure in my next post.