Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Haulin' Hay

The hubby and I hauled hay the other day.  Which actually means I sat in the tractor and 'supervised.'  Not really.  I sat in the bouncy little sidekick seat and enjoyed some quality time with the devilishly good looking man I married.   

Anywho, this is the proper procedure for haulin' hay...
1) Take your tractor, your hay trailer, and your oh so useful wife out to the baled hay pasture.  This is the trailer we used the other day.


2) Park your hay trailer somewhere and find yourself a lone round bale.  Now spear the heck out of  it! 


3) Take your bale, tractor, and wife back over to the hay trailer and drop off your speared chunk of forage.  But do it carefully or the trailer's gonna tip...this definitely DIDN'T happen...hehe.

Why in the world did I think it was a good idea to snap all these photos from inside the cab??


4) Repeat step 1-3

5) Make you fall in love with meeee! (Name that 90's song!)

5) (For real) The trailer we used could hold six bales, so after loading up six, we speared a seventh with the front bale spike (cause farmers are efficient like that) and hauled everything over to the hay yard. 

6) And unloaded it all from the trailer in nice, straight rows.  I don't know if I can express how bumpy and rutted-up the hay yard was...I think my teeth almost fell out!  I know my badonkadonk left the seat and I'm pretty sure we were airborne on more than one occasion (just kidding).  That's what happens when you have to use a tractor to feed round bales to the cows in the winter time when the ground is half frozen, half mud, and all gross.      



7) Then did the whole thing all over again! And again, and again, and again...

This was actually taken in the early spring.  See all that weird, green stuff on the ground??  Totally a foreign concept right now.
Now these girls will have something to eat come winter time!  Gotta feed the cow so the cow can feed you.  Now go have some beef for dinner, Matthew McConaughey says so!

Monday, July 30, 2012

Why you should always wear pointy toed boots to work

I heard somewhere once that wearing pointy toed shoes automatically classifies a gal as 'high maintenance.'  When I heard these words of wisdom, I'm pretty sure I was about 19 or 20 and about as low maintenance as they come.  Sure, I appreciated a good, no-nonsense toe on my boots (and still do!), but having to buy cereal in a bag, wine in a box, plastic-like cheese packaged in individual wrappers, and beer made from rice during the good ol' college days was just about as far from high maintenance as anyone can get!

Luckily, several years and a big kid job later, I can now offer some well earned words of wisdom on the practicality of pointy toed boots.  Not only are they good for encouraging a sassy horse to mind, pointy toed boots are also excellent tools in pest control.  I'm not just talking about annoying, pesky boy-type pests here...I'm talking about the real deal.  The antennae waving, too many leg having, crunchy sounding real pest-y deal. 


Yep, way too big and crunchy to be allowed.  Barf.  I'm so glad we could share this moment. 

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Beans!

Beans, beans, the magical fruit
The more you eat, the more you...ummm, yeah


This is the bean field that's behind our house.



 Are they the beans from the oh so lovely, above mentioned little jingle my dad used to sing every time we'd have baked beans for dinner growing up?  Not exactly. 


These are soybeans, a pretty common form of row crop here in central Missouri.  Is it our bean field?  Nope.  Our landlord rents this ground out to someone else who decided to plant it in soybeans this year.  Have you ever eaten a soybean straight out of the field at night while road tripping to the river with your girlfriends and a case of beer?  I definitely, positively, absolutely, may or may not have done this.  


One of the quickest ways to pay off land you've just purchased is to plant it in some type of row crop like soybeans.  Corn would work too!  Don't own the uber expensive equipment needed for planting and harvesting?

Do you take checks?

No problem!  A lot of people hire a farmer who already has this equipment to do the planting and harvesting for them.  Profit from the harvest goes right back to making the land payment (minus the expenses of paying someone to plant and harvest, cost of seed, etc.).

Soybeans are good because they are cheap-ish, easy-ish to maintain, and are less-ish demanding on the soil than corn is.  Ish ish ish, ha!  But, if all the cards play out right (aka good growing season, adequate rain fall, good soil quality, etc.) corn may turn a higher profit.

I don't know about the rest of the country, but here in central Missouri, it's been a little dry, toasty, and gross this summer!  I snapped a picture of this poor, sad lil corn field while on a run yesterday morning.  And then I ran faster cause the corn started rustling.  Thank you Mel Gibson for creating the movie Signs and forever scarring me for life.

The end.     

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Chilly

Last I checked, we've already established that it's been real hot lately (melted chocolate chips and all).  Because it's been so stinkin' toasty, because I can't wait for football season, and because I know a few men in my life who are itching to get after this year's crop of bucks, let's revisit some chillier scenes from last year:




Chilly cow crossing a chilly stream.



  Chilly Elliot going for a ride.




Chilly deer hunters

Hope you're all feeling a little more refreshed!  Stay cool out there :)

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Finally!

We live in the country (woohoo, finally!!).  In a farm house (yay!!).  An old, pieced together, shoddily insulated farm house (wait, what?).   A farm house that will likely never pass inspection and has super random outlets that I can't plug my three pronged appliances into (sweeeeet...).  A farm house that is cooled by a grand total of three window units (one of which hasn't worked since we moved in, another makes sounds like a dying lawn mower all night, fingers crossed she makes it through the summer!).  So basically one working window unit.  Needless to say, it's been a liiiittle bit toasty in the ol' homestead lately.

Tonight while I was definitely NOT raiding the entire house looking for anything chocolate, I definitely did NOT decide to eat chocolate chips right out of the bag.  It's hard to tell from this photo, but the below pictured chocolate chips (which I definitely am NOT currently eating) are absolutely melty!     


Ready for cooler weather fo sho!