donw on the

Yesterday, I made hay while the sun shone.

It was actually a fairly boring thing to do, and my heart goes out to the farmers and ranchers who actually have to do this for a living. Me, I'm just trying to be a good daughter-in-law, so I went to the in-law's ranch to help out for a day. (I'll go this afternoon as well).

Hay is basically tall grass. Over the last few days they had cut it and raked it into windrows. Yesterday they had a rented bailer hooked up to the tractor; it drives along the windrows, scooping up the loose hay and shitting it out into nicely tied bales.

My job was to drive the pick-up truck slowly along the rows of bales. The truck pulls a big hay trailer, and the trailer has something attached to its left side called an "iron man", which is a bale-picker-upper thingy that scoops up bales, sends them up an elevator, and drops them to the trailer, where one or two people stack the bales until there is a hugely heavy and unstable load to be taken to the barn.

Then we unload the bales and stack them in the barn. Hay bales weigh around 55 lbs each, so it's a pretty physical job, and itchy scratchy hay gets everywhere. I wasn't planning to help with the stacking, but I got bored just waiting around for the next driving run, so I would climb to the top of the pile and pull bales down to the people loading them on the elevator (sort of a conveyor belt thing). A good workout.

Woo woo. I now know more about rural American life than ever before. I think I'll stick to the 'burbs.