Farm

I went home to help dad this past weekend. I got there thursday night, and went to work around 9am the next morning. I swathed the 40, then just after I finished the last swath, I picked up my header and turned to strattle the winrows at the bottom so I could park the swather and go home to get some lunch, I turned the wheel, something popped, and suddenly I was turning counter closkwise and making myself dizzy. I pulled the speed to N and the throttle down to turtle but I was still turning circles and no matter which way I turned the wheel I still turned counter clockwise. I waited for a few seconds, but the swather wasn't slowing down, and I was starting to get sick, so I turned off the ignition, and the swather slowed down, and then stopped.

SO the steering went out, a whole thing about this metal pole thingy that really is difficult to describe, but I'll try. the pipe/pole was a little smaller than a stand pipe, and at each end it had a bolt that was attached to the pole with a ball and socket. The bolts faced opposite directions so when the one on the right faced up, the other one faced down. This meant that the socket toward the front faced up and the one toward the back faced down. When it broke the bolt/ball on the front fell out of the socket. Daddy fixed it by flipping it end for end, so the pressure from the pole would hold the ball into the socket.

Back to work I went, to swath a new piece, just behind the storage sheds on cedron road. It is in line for construction, but that may not happen for a while, so even though the piece hadn't been watered for two+ years and hadn't been planted for more, I was instructed to cut it. It was the roughest piece of ground I have ever swathed. It was like driving across an endless road of potholes for the entire about 9 hours it took to cut the piece. By the time I finished for the night (I still had 2 1/2 hours left to cut the next day) I was so sore I had a hard time picking up my own shoes off the floor. The muscles along my spine felt (actually still feel) like rocks.

The next day I returned to the torture, finished the piece in time for lunch(it was plugged so we had to unplug it before we could start running it). After lunch I resumed swathing on Arnolds, then moved to Myers'. About 1/3 across the field, I was on my way back down to the bottom, when all of a sudden the swather started bouncing and making really funny noises. Again, I turned the speed to N and the throttle to turtle. This time the swather stopped, but it was still making funny noises, so I turned off the ignition, and called dad. I left a message on his voice mail that went something like "I broke it. Call me back."

It was the steering thing again, and this time the entire ball and bolt was gone. No more swather for Me this weekend. I then went home, talked with mom for a while, then she got called to work, and I went and got milk, and went and talked to Esther, and helped her care for Mel's kids, and then I decided it was to late to come back, so I just stayed the night there, and drove back this morning. What an adventure.