Oh what a day...

While most of the midwest was coping with disasters in the form of winds and bad weather, we coped with a day disasters here at our little farm too. What began as a good working day turned into an afternoon of frustration.

Mr. Farmer, my hubby, was pushing dead apple trees out of the summer pasture, prepping it for the transfer of donkeys...with his New Holland skid steer. Now he is a whiz at moving things around and I'm pretty much in awe of his skills. There wasn't much I could really do but *supervise*.

One of my supervisory skills however didn't work so well, as he was pushing dead trees towards a ditch ... I flagged him down and told him that there was an old rut that he'd get hung up on if he wasn't careful. Just past the rut was the DROP OFF to the dry run. He gave me a wave that said *Yeah, yeah, I know what I am doing.*
[So you know what is going to happen next, don't you?]


Mr. Farmer gets slightly overzealous and pushes one last time...and I gasp as the skid steer tips forward into the ditch now resting on just the bucket and the front wheels.
Uh-huh. Oh shit.
So what does Mr. Farmer do now? Get on the 'gas' and give 'er hell. You betcha, just get that puppy stuck harder and deeper, dig them wheels in...after about 45 minutes of that, he shuts off the skid steer and gets out to look at the situation.
Being a supervisor and all, I suggest perhaps we get some logging chains and *winch* it out some way.
Mr. Farmer shakes his head no, but gets the tractor and tries to pull it out. After two hours of this scenario, I say again.
*Could you use the come-a-long thing and pull it out?*
Nope.

Now we have a truck attached to the tractor, the tractor attached to the skid steer...[do you see where this is going?] Uh huh. The truck spins its wheels, the tractor spins its wheels, and the skid steer sits happily in the ditch.

Finally Mr. Farmer says. *Take the truck and go get the 4 ton come-a-long, and another logging chain.*
I return and chains are stretched from the frame of the tractor to the skid steer. We put the come-a-long on.
Mr. Farmer then gives me a lesson in *skid steer* operation. Cool. As he yanks the CAL, I give her heck in backing up. Soon we establish a rhythm and the skid steer walks out backwards and up out of the ditch.

So what did I learn? I learned that with patience, a man will come around to reasoning. I learned to operate a little skid steer. I really dug making the bucket go up and down. I love the way you pull on little levers to make it go one way and another.

My reward for helping? Morris and I got to ride in the bucket back home. I think we all had a good laugh over the whole deal. I will learn how to operate the big tractor one of these days. Maybe he'll fix the steering on the little tractor and I can run that eh?
Yep, what a day.