Random fallness, part 2

Here's our final soybean field as it looked at the time of my walk yesterday morning. Yep, a rather large wet area out there.

Note the water standing in the rows, too:

Here's another section of the same field (look beyond the pasture that I'm standing in). The black areas are where water had stood after the big rain:

The soybeans got combined out there today. The driver of the combine managed to get mighty close to the water, without getting stuck!

Here he goes in that part of the field that had those black areas:

The breeze had nearly died, and the dust was really hanging in the air.

The sun went down as I was taking those pics tonight:

(Click any photo to enlarge.)

And not long after that they finished up the field, and our soybean harvest is complete for this year. The soybeans, BTW, (for all you farmers-at-heart) were extremely dry. It's very rare to hear a farmer complaining about his crop being too dry as it comes out of the field!

Tomorrow on to the rest of the corn (that hasn't already been chopped for silage or combined wet and put in a silo).

Oh, and I believe we hit a record high temperature today.... 87°! Crazy weather!

Random fallness, part 1

Yesterday was an absolutely perfect fall day. In the morning, after I'd fed the cats, I just had to grab my camera and go for a walk. I took... ahem... 142 pictures! After I downloaded them to my computer, I whittled them down to 103. I won't bore you with them all, but I thought I'd give you a sample of what my walk was like, especially for you poor displaced Minnesotans who don't get to experience a great MN fall anymore.

We don't have any trees on our farm that really turn red in the fall (much to my dismay), but we do get a lot of yellows and golds. And some of our trees just lose their leaves before they really turn any color except dried-up brown. But they still make for pretty pics.

Here's round 1 from my photo shoot:

(Click any photo to enlarge.)

Gotta love that blue sky, huh?! And since our deluge of rain, we've had nothing but that blue sky! Harvest is progressing faster than anyone could've imagined it would this year!

Old MacDonald had a...

... well... a son, I guess! Since I didn't have any gray felt, I had to use something different for his hair and whiskers. So he looks a little younger than "Old" MacDonald. Maybe we'll call him "Mac, Jr." Ha!

I gave him overalls instead of the pants that the pattern had. It was just a matter of extending the pattern a little. I also used denim (off of one of Grandpa's old shirts) instead of felt, so I zigzagged the edges so they wouldn't fray. His shirt is flannel.

His beard looks a little weird, doesn't it? Kinda more like a scarf? I found the pattern pieces didn't quite fit on the body like they should have, so I guess I maybe adjusted them in the wrong places or something. Oh, well.

But hey, don't you like the kernels on the corn cob? They were my own addition.

I think this was the putziest of the characters. He took quite a bit longer to make than the kitty. Hopefully the rest will go faster.

I AM on the table!

Shhhhh..... don't tell! She can't see me behind this pile.

If she won't let me help her make Ol' MacDonald, I shall abscond with her scissors!

Rain, rain... went away!

Remember the new lakes from just a week ago? Although there is still plenty of water left standing in other areas, at least these particular "lakes" are gone except for just a bit of water in the ditch.

We've had a string of perfect fall days (well, perfect if you don't count the new crops of mosquitoes, Asian beetles, noseeums, and boxelder bugs... not to mention the "fragrance" that comes with the north breeze from the neighboring dairy lagoon... *sigh*) this week, drying things up quickly.

As you can see in the photo below, the soybeans are being combined. Click the pic to enlarge it, and you can also see that they've had to skip a few, though.

And look below at how dusty the beans are. Yesterday as I took these pics, there was no breeze, so the dust was just hanging in the air.

That's a neighbor's combine. Grandpa and company have managed to get a lot of beans out this week, too... without even getting stuck in the mud. That's progress! And more beautiful harvest days are in the forecast! Hurray!