Weathering Harvest

We had another interesting weather day with thunderstorms this morning.  The guys were finally able to start cutting this afternoon.  They tried to cut the lentils here at our house, but they are not quite ready so they moved north a couple of miles to start on the hailed out lentils.  A bit depressing to try to cut it.  We were out all day yesterday with hail insurance adjusters so we have a better idea of what's what.  They took representative samples and counted percentage of lost or broken pods on the mustard and lentils and broken and shattered heads in the wheat to estimate the loss.

M called about 4:30 because he had broken the sickle on his combine and needed the service truck which was at our house.  We started working on the sickle and C came from town to bring the new head.  They welded the sickle together, and we started putting it back together while C went back to town to get a truck.  There was a storm brewing to the north of us.  M kept saying it was going to miss us, but I could heard the thunder and was a bit worried about getting struck by lightning or him getting struck by lightning.  Before long the wind came up and the temperature dropped about 15 degrees, and it started to rain lightly.  I wasn't much help so I headed to the service truck.  It started to rain harder, and it wasn't long before M joined me in the truck.  J was working his way back to to us with his combine in the rain and then hail, some marble size, but thankfully, not much of it.  J eventually made his way to the truck with us.  C was soon back with the truck and the rain stopped so they went back to work on the sickle, but not for long.  Again comes rain so J dumped his combine into the truck.  The rain stopped again so they tried to work again, but the rain started again so they packed up the tools, etc., dumped the lentils from M's combine on the truck, and we headed home.  We heard on the radio that there was a tornado watch for the port of Scobey, some 30 miles to the east.  As we were on our way home we could see clouds that looked like the beginning of a funnel.  Here the hills block our view.  I just looked at the weather service radar, and now it shows a tornado watch for our area.  I'd better go take a look outside.  This is really getting old.