"Maybe it will feel like we got something done today..."

Yes, today was Thursday.  It doesn't matter that we have reached the place we should have been about noon Tuesday, it's still Thursday.  But look on the bright side.  We haven't been to the hospital, no fire runs for us, we've not been the family being comforted at the funeral home, I guess in perspective this week hasn't been so bad.

When it starts out like this a farmer knows he isn't going to be having fun

 Perhaps I need to explain that one.

We've always been able to put dry corn, or almost dry corn, in the old government bins at Gramps, put a fan on the unloading tube, and keep it all winter. This fall we were putting 14.5 to 15% corn in them straight out of the field.

But ... we never tried it with corn 95 degrees out of the field.  So many nights were above 65-70 that it never cooled out.  We were checking the fans a couple weeks ago and noticed a couple of the housings had water in the bottom of them.  That confused us.  The only way we could explain it was the moist air being pulled out of the corn was hitting the cold fan housing and condensing.  So we started watching it more closely.  Late last week we decided maybe it was time to pull a load out of each bin and check it.  We finally got around to it Monday.  That's when we decided it was time to halt fieldwork and move corn.

 Steve can probably look at this and tell you what we were doing.  We had saved back the bean bin at Mom's in case the elevator got full.  Fortunately we didn't need it.  We also saved back one of the dryers at Gramp's for corn from True's.  It came out dry and the elevator had room, so we took it straight to town. That photo is moving corn fom one of the north government bins at Gramp's to one of his dryers.

Eventually you get down to this point:

 The old government bins are beginning to concern us.  They are aluminum ... at least 50 year old aluminum. And the bolts are the same vintage. Dad put stiffeners on them because one started to wrinkle.  When we were cleaning out the last one late Thursday we noticed this:

Daylight shining between the bin sheets.  The Bible tells us everything has a season.  We are wondering if these old bins are nearing the end of their season.

We've also fought dead batteries on 2 tractors and a grain truck (most of them were new or almost new), an unloading auger that just would not work right, broken belts, a funeral I had to attend, on and on and on.  Been a long week.