Where I have been

I haven't posted for a while, but frankly, it's because I have been exhausted. This heat will wear anyone out, but it's even harder when your job is dealing with everything outside. So, here is a hopefully quick summary of what we have been doing. I'll do a slightly more in depth post on one of those activities, but this one will sum up our life here on the farm trying to beat the heat. I don't have pics of everything, so some things I'll just tell about.

1. Building Dad's office

By now the walls actually have plywood on them and we have a roof on it for storage above it with a railing. This has been in the plans for over a year, so the hot temperatures gave us an excuse to hide inside and get it done finally.

2. Fixing fence...again...and again...and again. The cows aren't thrilled by the dry grass they do have, so they were breaking off fence posts and tearing up our fence to get into the neighbor's corn field...so we just finally moved them to a different pasture ;-)

3. We filled a grain bin at the house with wheat during harvest. These pics are the lovely process of cleaning the bin before we put the wheat in it. Fun stuff. Then after it is filled, someone has to crawl into the top of the bin and level off the top of the wheat. We broke in our hired hand by having him do this ;-)

4. Irrigating and just trying to maintain some sort of crop. My dad is extremely responsible with how he irrigates and I appreciate that so much. He only puts on only what is absolutely necessary to keep our crop growing and alive during this extreme heat. Along with corn, we grew oats on the irrigated land this year. That resulted in a lot of round and square bales which are a HUGE component to keeping our cows healthy throughout the year.

The oats are in the front of the picture and the corn is in the background.

The nozzles are kept low so that less water is not needlessly evaporated. It's all about efficiency. And if you are wondering...they aren't actually on in this picture.

5. I've been having a little fun ;-) I've wanted this motorcycle fixed for years. It finally is! I have a lot of childhood memories of dad using this motorcycle and letting us ride with him or pulling us on a sled. So it's a lot of fun to finally have it working again!

Here's to hoping that you are able to find a little bit of joy during this terrible heat ;-)