by Mary Lou
Republic County WIFE

October 1, 2001

Sunday is a busy day for me. Since I still have flowers in the garden, I arranged flowers in the alter vases for our church. It was more difficult than usual since the night before we had a hailstorm and flowers were hard to find that weren't damaged. I found enough, though, by putting in some wild gayfeather flowers that I had dried the week before. The burning bush leaves have turned red, so they made nice filler.

I brought the flowers to church when I went for choir practice. Our church is a country church, which is only three and a half miles from our home. That's convenient. After choir practice, I teach the class of 4th and 5th grade Sunday School kids. We had the story about Moses being called to lead his people out of Egypt and looked up in the Bible all his excuses. We talked about how God has things he chooses us to do too and about the excuses we have. After Sunday School was church and our choir sang. I really enjoy that. 

Since it is a busy farming time, some of our family got busy with milo harvest. Fieldwork isn't usually done on Sunday but there is a big hurry to harvest and plant when the weather is permitting and before winter snows arrive. It was still too wet to plant wheat after a rain but there was a milo field that wasn't rained on so they could cut milo. My son drives the combine. My grandson who is a junior in high school drove the grain cart today to pick up the grain from the combine and dump it in the grain trucks. Our hired man and (some of the time) my daughter-in-law drove the grain trucks to take the milo to the elevator.

We have a pretty neat new elevator where we take most of our grain. It is set up so they can fill 100 train cars with grain at a time and send it on its way so there is room to dump more grain as the farmers harvest.  It's neat the way they manage the trucks as they come in. At the first stop they send a probe down into the truckload of grain and pull up a sample. The sample is transported underground quite a distance to the office where it is dumped down a little chute to the grain testing laboratory where they check to see its quality and how wet it is.  There is a video camera at this stop to help the person controlling the probe from the office get it down in the right place. Once the sample is taken, the truck gets a green light and can drive on around and get in  line to be weighed and then to dump it's load in the elevator. When the grain is dumped, it is quickly elevated into storage so the grain pit can receive more grain.   It doesn't take long to dump and the driver continues to another weigh station that weighs the empty truck. At the next stop, he picks up the ticket that tells him how much grain he dumped, its quality and its moisture content.

My project for the afternoon was to make some meatballs and bake some bread and take it to the family of a friend who had died. In our community, that is one way we can say we care about each other. 

I also watered the new grass I had planted in the yard this fall. The ground needs to be kept wet so the seed  can grow and then so the new little sprouts of grass can keep growing. It is a big project because I have a big yard. Some of my grass was damaged last winter when a cold wind blew and killed it.  Fall is the best time to start new grass.

I have an apple tree and I picked a few apples that had gotten ripe and picked a few from the ground that the birds had pecked holes in. I trimmed the bad spots from the apples and sliced them to make pie.