Summertime in Pella

This is the longest stretch I've had without leaving Iowa since I've been here, so I don't have any travel stories to relate, but I figured I better post an update on my doings. It's definitely summer in Pella. With the exception of a day or two around rain storms, it's been unusually dry here, feeling much like Montana.

I've worked in the office on various projects in the last month. I've also been sent out a few times to cut hay for Vermeer employees who own ground but don't own mowers or who offered their hay for testing purposes. One such person happened to be a Vermeer VP, but I didn't actually meet him. An enhancement engineer had me out at his place to run a baler and rake that I hadn't ever run before. I put up all of about five ton of hay in an afternoon, so it wasn't anything very strenuous. I helped a baler engineer move a few cows (four pairs, look out) around Memorial Day weekend, and was nice to be around them again. Similar to Ireland, cattle farmers here are staggered by huge Montana acreages and cattle head counts, and the CX isn't big by Montana standards.

The end of school has brought in a crop of freshly graduated full-time new-hires and interns. Not that I'm terribly high up or anything, but I enjoy no longer being on the dead bottom of the totem pole. I've spent some time with almost all of them so far, and they seem like a fun bunch. One intern is another dealer's son from Oklahoma, and a directional drilling intern is yet another dealer's son, this one from Wyoming.

Lately, I've been trying to get outside as much as possible. The weather has been unbeatable. The apartment complex finally opened its pool, though I've only been in it once. I bought a bike last Sunday and have put about thirty miles on it so far, riding around town and on the trail down to the Des Moines river. There are lots of trails down by the river and dam that I'll be out and about on throughout the summer.

I will be home for the week of the 4th, via Spokane for an anniversary party for Corey and Tiffany McBain the weekend before. ACE will also be home early in the week, so I will be thrilled to see them, along with my parents of course. I will do my best to make my rounds and see as many people as possible, and I won't be happy if it isn't hectic!

MSU Graduation

I haven't had much for adventures lately as far as work goes. I've been in the office for four weeks (I think), doing designery stuff. I've spent some time back in the shop doing this and that as ordered, and an afternoon cutting rye, but most of my time is spent at my desk working on various things in SolidWorks, a modeling/CAD program. This daily grind does indeed begin to grind. I've been here three and a half months and still spend a lot of time trying to not do something stupid. Whether it's legitimate fear or not, I still worry.

My big excitement lately though was my much-too-quick trip back to Bozeman last weekend for MSU graduation, in which my girlfriend Mackenzie walked. I flew in on Friday morning, met Mike and Jami Lee's new baby boy Foster, and met Kenzie's parents, brother, and grandparents. The ceremony was Saturday, and was glad to see some friends from the Flathead, along with more Bozeman friends than I expected. I was genuinely shocked to see Tanya Smith working in Bozeman; the last time I had seen her was as we parted ways in the Auckland, New Zealand airport after flying from San Francisco last winter. I was lucky enough to visit with my aunt and uncle, Chris and Jim, Saturday night for Jim's brother Tom's birthday dinner, after which we played a few tunes.

We met my parents and grandma for dinner on Sunday, then soaked at Norris via the Pony Bar. Throughout the weekend we got a couple good hikes in, and there was the small task of moving her out of her apartment to squeeze in there. I would have loved to have gone to the ranch, but it would have only been for a couple hours. It was a frantic, hectic weekend, but it was a great change from my day-to-day routine. I truly miss the mountains and everyone I know in Montana. I wish I knew when I will be back next. Probably one of the hardest parts about moving to somewhere new is not getting the pleasure of walking around town and running into people you know. I just don't know many people here, and am not very good at approaching strangers to strike up conversation, if that surprises anyone.

And about Kenzie, let's just say I tend to get the ball rolling on such things at the least convenient times, but we'll see what happens.

Morels and Rutledge

The last couple weekends I've gotten in on outings with Ryan Walker, a baler engineer named James, and their buddy Steve from Centerville. James' dad is the dealer in North Carolina whom I mentioned in the previous post. Last weekend, we hunted morel mushrooms in ditches in the Centerville area, which is where Ryan is from. There's a certain skill to spotting the little fungi, which upon spotting seem very spotable, yet are still oddly camouflaged. They're either yellowish or gray, and look like brains. There is neither rhyme nor reason to where they decide to pop up. According to Walker, they had picked morels out of the ditches we looked through that day by the bagful, but those may have been fish stories. After several hours looking in two different places and walking many miles, we had found about half a plastic bagful. It was great day to be out in the woods though, not sitting at a desk or driving for countless miles, and I didn't have to even look at a mower.

This weekend the four of us made a mini road trip to Rutledge, Missouri to see the massive flea market they have there. I wasn't sure what to expect, but this was quite a redneck affair. It was pretty rainy so both the crowds and vendors were sparse, but there were still enough of both to make the day. Imagine the most interesting junk and the most worthless junk you've ever seen at yard sales, gather enough of that to fill a 25-acre field, add some guns, and you've got the Rutledge Flea Market. Until you visit Rutledge, you simply wouldn't believe that someone not only has an old old old clothes washer, complete with wringer rollers for drying, but that they are trying to SELL it. And they have three of them, right next to a stack of recorded VHS videos, next to a Milwaukee Ice pool table light, next to a case full of knives, next to...you get the idea. Classy stuff here.

The only thing I found that I couldn't live without was a ridiculously tiny cast iron pan, in which I planned to cook an egg at a time in for sandwiches. It didn't work that well though, because even with lots of oil, the egg didn't dislodge from the pan easily enough. It's a little too ungainly to be a keychain bobble, but it was only a dollar. I almost bought a plastic child's accordion to mail to my niece unexpectedly, but walked away and it got rained on. Your home will remain accordion-free, Court and Aaron...for now.

We scared up another batch of mushrooms on the way back to fill out the day. Morels are prepared by deep fat frying, and are quite delicious.

To top off the weekend, I swapped a couple tunes with Deanna Smith, who met Riley's sessioneers Will Harmon and Dawn Buckley at an Irish music camp in Portal, Arizona last year. Deanna lives south of Des Moines, and was my connection into the session scene in Des Moines.

Southeastern Mower Campaign

I've been out on a mower cutterbar part recall trip the last ten days. The circumstances and details of the recall would bore just about all of my readers except my dad, but the important thing is that Vermeer is willing to go to the expense of sending out crews to replace critical parts on machines known to be defective instead of waiting until they all blew up during haying season. This hugely impressed dealers and customers alike, some of whom didn't even know we were coming because they hadn't been told about the problem.

I traveled and worked with Ryan Walker, a baler tech. This might seem an odd match, but there are so many of these trips that all the engineering techs, not just the mower tech, were out on at least one mower campaign. We had twenty-one mowers to work on on this trip, in Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Ohio. We also passed through Missouri, Virginia, and West Virginia. Except for two mowers at a dealer in London, Kentucky, all of them were in separate towns, usually at least an hour apart. We were out for ten days, and covered 3630 miles. Ryan asked me if I kept track of such details for posterity, which I do, and I'm curious to see what my yearly totals will be. After nine weeks, I've already driven 6400 miles for work. We worked about 120 hours this trip. Our longest day was 16.5 hours, and on a 14.5 hour day we finished five of the mowers.

There are some odd things to be seen in that end of the world. I've concluded Kentucky is the patron state of horses, tobacca, and looking the other way. At least once every two hours on the road there, we would see something that definitely looked odd, such as a truck meant to haul a car hauling a bulldozer, or an ancient half-ton with three horses loaded into the box in a stock rack, or a skid steer at a dealership being stored six feet in the air on a forklift. After the first few of these occurrences, we'd just look at each other, shake our heads and laugh, and say "oh Kentucky".

Walker pointed out a few barns painted black to me. These were tobacco curing sheds, and the black absorbed light and made them hot inside. They looked shoddily built, but were made with gaps between the slats in the walls to allow air to pass through. I suspect it was to keep with a certain decorative scheme, but many horse barns and outbuildings were also painted black, which to me does not seem terribly wise.

Tennessee also had a rather, ah, backwoodsy feel to it. This feeling was enhanced by the fact our GPS tended to direct us to our destinations via sometimes quite rugged routes. This began to anger us when we found out from the farmers or from our own cruising around that it had been neither the most direct nor the fastest route. The most vivid example of this happened near Newport, when the GPS insisted we take a long, windy, out of the way, one-lane gravel road to a customer's place, even though a decent paved two-lane led almost right up to it. We could just about "hear the banjo". I almost hit a peacock gamboling about, and Ryan mistook an actual turkey gobbling for his turkey ringtone. On the way out of Newport, we were startled by a busload of kids driving out from under a bridge at 5:30pm. What sort of field trip were they out on? We gathered that even in the best of times, the area wasn't very prosperous, and spent no extra time getting out of there.

Tennessee was pretty though, gotta give it that. I hadn't ever been in the Appalachians before, and though they're cute compared to the Rockies, they're worth seeing. On the way out of them, we were about an hour behind a two-semi, one-car accident. There were no fatalities or injuries as far as we could tell, but one of the semis had lost its trailer and dumped a couple hundred bushels of corn on the highway, which looked like a LOT of corn. It only occurred to me later, but I'm sure scores of deer were hit around there for days afterward.

North Carolina was next, and we practically raced through those three mowers spread across the whole state. The last one was in the northeast corner, at a dealer whose son is a baler engineer (oddly familiar). We went for a quick drive to see a customer's place, which was an experience in itself. I've seen some junk piles, but this was orders of magnitude bigger than anything I'd seen, and I mean junk. I spotted some odd gray lumps hanging in a tobacco shed close to their baler. They had attempted to cure a few hams, but just left them when they didn't cure right. Walker wasn't sure how long they'd been hanging, but had seen them at least a year before.

We passed a sign for a place that read "Jim's Cricket Ranch" in this area. The first things that came to mind...in our best Sam Elliot/Virgil Earp voices:
Walker: "Yup, I'm the biggest cricket rancher in the county."
Me: "I'm up to about a quarter billion head of cricket."

Though we were there on a Friday and it was only an hour away, we didn't get to go to the coast. Most dealers close at noon on Saturday and our nearest ones were 500 miles away in Kentucky, so we raced back that way. This was our 16.5 hour day, and I wasn't thrilled about this rather extreme schedule, but we needed to keep knocking out mowers to finish in time to get back for Easter weekend. We got there in time to work on it, but had a panicky moment when we realized we might get set back by having to order parts on Monday. Our schedule luckily worked out anyway though, with the two mowers in Ohio being at customers' places who didn't mind us working on Sunday. The rest were in Kentucky and everything finished fine once our parts came in. Back to Iowa we went after that, and here I am, yet another round of stories collected.

I had schemed about coming home for Easter, but couldn't quite make it work. Hopefully I'll make it back sometime in May.

First testing trip, northwestern Florida

I got out of an entire week in the office for a testing trip this last week. I had better err on the side of caution when it comes to discussing project details, so forgive me for being a little vague about some things. The 1100 mile drive down south went smoothly; I'm just glad I don't have to foot the bill to drive a loaded one-ton V-10 on regular 1000+ mile trips. Ouch.

The main forage crops in that part of the world are rye grass and corn, and this is the time of year for rye. It's all chopped and bagged for silage, because there's no hope of ever drying it down enough for hay. Right after it's cut, the grass is tedded, or fluffed with a tedder rake. This beats up the stems and helps it dry more evenly. Rotary rakes put it into windrows when it's ready. The fields are worked in straight lines despite the pivots; they just bounce over the tracks every single pass. Forage choppers process the windrows into fine feed which is loaded into trucks. The trucks unload into stuffers, which put the chopped rye into tube bags.

I got to ride in a forage chopper for about an hour while it was running, and it was one of the most impressive pieces of machinery I had ever been around. This particular dairy ran two, a Claas 970 and a Claas 980. They chop both rye and corn, so they are running most of the year. They're powered by two Mercedes inline-6 diesels which supply 860 horsepower. The operator monitors the machine with one screen; he can detect foreign material in the pickup and chopper, check the engines, and resharpen the blades among other things. I was very impressed.

That dairy cuts and silages about 3000 acres twice a year, and milks just under 5000 cows. They had many five- and six-span pivots, all high-pressure with half-inch nozzle sprinkler heads on top instead of the drop-type seen in Montana. I pointed out to Eric, the other mower man, that the water coming out looked really rank. He laughed and told me that it's because they pump manure through the pivots before they farm the ground again. Your only hope is to stay upwind.

We wouldn't have been able to get anything done at the dairy Friday before having to leave for the airport, so we headed for Sanford Thursday night, which is where we flew out of. We had a few spare hours Friday morning, so we saw the beach. This also meant I'd driven from the northwest corner of the country to the southeast corner of the country, coast to coast, in the last eight months, most of it in the last six weeks.

Luckily, we got to fly back to Iowa. Pella's spring-like 50s and 60s were sadly a bit of a letdown after Florida's tropical 80s. I'm proud to say my farmer's tan is well underway already.

Settling in

The last couple weeks I've been at the office in Pella, so I haven't really had any adventures. I've done little things here and there for the current mower project, but I'm still largely in the dark about it. Perhaps my favorite part of this job is the fact that Vermeer's engineers, especially the ag engineers, spend so much time in and around the equipment, not just in front of a computer. I haven't had much to do up front in the office, so I've been back in the shop, puttering, visiting with techs and other engineers, learning where things are, working on equipment, and generally keeping my hands dirty, which is how I prefer them.

It looks like tornado season has started in the midwest, after Kansas and Indiana got nailed this week. Nothing has happened in Iowa yet (knock on wood).

The other mower engineer and I are leaving for a testing trip in northwestern Florida tomorrow and we'll split the driving over two days. We'll be down there until the end of the week, then fly back. Hopefully it's nice and warm, and dry enough to cut. Stories forthcoming.

National Farm Machinery Show - Louisville, Kentucky

My first outing as a part of Vermeer was a trip to Louisville last week, to take in the National Farm Machinery Show. I rode with five other engineers for the nine hour drive. We stopped in Indianapolis to tour Rexnord, a primary bearing supplier to Vermeer. Louisville has the largest UPS sorting facility in the world, so we toured that as well. The action starts there at about 11pm, so that's when the tours are. We were lucky enough to also get to try out their flight simulators. To give you an idea of how realistic they are, UPS pilots never touch a real plane during their training, and are completely ready for action when they are done with the several-month training. Granted, UPS only hires veteran pilots, but these trainers are exactly like the real thing. This tour took us around the 5.2 million square foot (120 acres under one roof!) facility. All sorting is automated, and most packages go from plane to plane in less than twenty minutes. Very impressive. This was very late on Valentines day, and someone noticed that there were many upset wives and girlfriends out there: about every tenth package was from Pro Flowers.

Sales and marketing people manned Vermeer's booth at the show, and the engineers were there to walk the show and look at the competition's technology up close. The NFMS is the biggest of its kind in the country. It's possible to see everything in one day, but I was a little stunned by everything and really just glazed over everything the first day. I dug deeper into the forage equipment the next day with a product guy and an enhancement engineer, who together gave me deep insight into details about Vermeer and the competition that I wouldn't have gotten by myself or from just looking at the equipment.

Aside from all I learned about equipment, this was a very good chance to get to know some of my coworkers. I'm looking forward to more travel.