Sugar Beet Harvest - Day # 16 - Watching mud dry....

And that is literally what we are doing........watching mud dry.....because until it dries out enough we won't be working.  We started off the day with sunshine, no clouds, and no wind.  All good signs that we may get back to work soon.  Although the temp got below freezing last night and as a result the hose froze again, but it's all good.....I just turn on the water pump and use the water in the heated water bay, which isn't frozen.

Based on the employee hotline message from Monday we knew there was a 10 am meeting for the day shift, so we were expecting news about when the harvest will start again, and how many days there are left.

Around 11:30 I took two pairs of our shoes over to the trailer to clean as TLE and I won't be wearing them again at the harvest.  I'll be back in my much warmer, water proof boots when we go back to work, and TLE has a couple of other pairs that aren't muddy.  While I was there some of the folks from the 10 am meeting began returning and I found out they are going to run 2 pilers 24 hours a day until we're done, which means we won't be quite as lonely on the night shift.  But they still did not know when we would begin working again......one guy I talked with said he thought Thursday, or Friday......my immediate thought was "Uggghhh!"

However, as we were ending our conversation the guy said "of course, you know, we get paid for a minimum of 4 hours per day that we can't work due to weather, or conditions".......hmmmm, you know, I had forgotten that........so that means we're making $112 per day sitting at home, so in the last five days we've earned $560.  That makes the pain of doing nothing feel a little more productive.

We were waiting for the updated 4 pm employee hotline message to see when we would begin working again, and finally 4 pm came......the message advised that we would report to work at our normal 7 pm start time on Wednesday.....YAY!

I came across this cool YouTube video of the sugar beet harvest here in Montana.  At the 4:50 mark in the video you will see video of the Factory site where we work....specifically FP4.......the first part is of the Sugar Valley site where we were originally assigned.  With these aerial shots you can get a better idea of the size of the sugar beet piles, and the venting pipe.

Video of Sugar Valley and the Factory sites 

So, at least now we know we will be back to work Wednesday evening with about 4-5 days of the harvest left.....we should be done by the end of the weekend, or shortly thereafter.

As you know, our plan is to head for our home in SoCal after the harvest, arriving there sometime the middle of November.  I've been in contact with the ranger at the park (Rancho Jurupa Regional Park) we were camphosts at for a year before we left on our journey.  I finally heard back today that we do have a position lined up, which comes with a free full hookup spot.  That will make it easy to spend the two months at home that we planned without incurring any additional cost.....very, very good news!

Around 5 pm we headed into town to have dinner at the Cattle-ac restaurant, which is really more of a bar, but has really good food, and draft beer.  I had their chicken fried steak, a baked potato and a couple of Land Shark drafts.  Yelp give them 3.5 stars, and I think that is about right.  If there was a more updated interior I would push the rating to 4 stars, nevertheless, the food was excellent and so was the service.

On a sports side note, the Tigers lost to the Red Sox, and my Dodgers lost to the Cardinals.....no timely hitting again......decent enough pitching, but no offense.

Thanks for stopping by!