Sad Rain

I sat here a week ago talking about how I felt good about my prospects to be done the harvest in short order and that we were looking very optimistically at how things went. Now I'm sitting here to tell a story that is nearly opposite. Things couldn't have gone more poorly. The next day our machine stopped working. No rhyme or reason for it either. Everyone is flabbergasted to what the issue is. We had to leave our last off-site with less than half of what we needed left to wait on us. We missed out on some non-raining conditions to haul it back to the shop and try to fix it. The next day it wasn't great weather but we could have got something done. The next day was the same story. Thursday saw the skies open. I'll back date a separate post for that day and get it up there for you. Friday was meant for things to dry, and for the technician to arrive from Montreal to get to the bottom of this combine issue. He showed up and worked for a couple of hours and then realized that he'd forgotten a major and critical component of what was required to do some pre-work before he even started to try and diagnose our issue. He wanted to update the computer systems to see if that somehow cured the issue. He can't get back to us until next Tuesday. This is not ideal. But he managed to package up the hours as a scheduled visit instead of me paying for his travel too. That saves me $4000, which is pretty good. As luck would have it, a colleague had an issue with her machine and lost a day. On the Thursday, while celebrating ourselves at lunch, as instructed, we came to an arrangement. If we fixed her machine we could use it Saturday as her site was too wet to do. So we picked it up, fixed it and then my guy made an elegant solution for a nagging problem for them too. Yesterday we had a big and productive day. We finished the partially complete site, which means the only corn left is on the farm. Then we tore into the corn at the site and got two of the three blocks we needed for this upcoming week done. We're hoping that there will be a break in the weather and we can get that last couple of hours worth done on Tuesday. Which brings me to the title of this post. It's pouring outside. It's a massive system that has special weather statements issued for it. A crazy monsoon rain is supposed to sweep through. I just hope it isn't as bad as they are saying and we can go Tuesday. The forecast after today is great so if we can catch a break and our machine gets fixed we can succeed. Hope, always seems to come down to hope in this business.