Sugar Beet Harvest - Day # 17 - False Start.....5 yard penalty

Wednesday started out with sun and clear blue skies, but it did not appear throughout the day that after almost 2 days of sun that the mud was any dryer.  A couple of walks over to the trailer confirmed what my eyes were seeing......not much dryer at all.  I think the high for today was in the low 50's, which is why it is not really drying out fast enough.

We saw the people assigned to the Noon to midnight shift leave about 11:30, and were glad we were not with them.  If it is bad here in the RV ghetto I could only imagine how bad it was at the Factory site.

We took at easy all day in anticipation of our 7 pm start.  I took a couple of naps.  TLE went into town for a brief shopping foray around 3 pm.

Around 6:30 we headed over to the Factory site expecting it to be messy, but fully expecting to work our 12 hour shift.  We arrived as it began to sprinkle again.  I could see from the break hut that the field between the us and the pilers was a quagmire.   I decided not to even think about driving the 'Bird out to the piler, so I hitched a ride with Dallas, my piler mate in his four wheel drive Dodge pickup, and even in four wheel drive low we almost got stuck on our way out to FP2.  We were about half way when the day time foreman, Tish, stopped us to say that there would be no trucks after 7 pm as it was just too muddy, and they could not move the pilers back as their wheels were spinning in the mud, so we (Dallas, Joe, Casey and I) were to just clean FP2, 3 and 4, then go home.  

I talked with a few of the people who had gone on duty at Noon and who were leaving at 7 pm, and they said it was a nightmare all day long, and if we thought it was bad at 7 pm we should have seen it at Noon when they started.  It looked like a war zone.  So we bid them farewell as they headed home and started our cleaning chores, and with four of us it took exactly an hour to clean the three pilers,  so once we had finished with FP4 I headed back to the scale house where TLE was.   By the way, cleaning them wasn't quite as bad this time, but maybe that's because I knew we would be done after that.  According to TLE I looked dirtier than I have after 12 hours of doing my regular piler job.

Our night foreman, Amanda, told us we could stay the whole shift, even though there was no work to do, but I was not prepared to spend the whole night sleeping on the floor just to get in 12 hours......I'm talking about spending the remaining 10.5 hours of sleeping on the floor, which didn't appeal to me, so we headed home knowing we would get paid for 4 hours.  

The good news about Wednesday was that my Dodgers managed to win game 5 against the Cardinals, so they are heading back to St. Louis down 2 games to 3, but they have their ace pitcher Clayton Kershaw going on Friday.  The Tigers won game 4 of their series to even it up at 2 games apiece now.

We got home just before 9 pm and watched Survivor (live), Revolution and one of TLE's cooking shows, Top Chef (recorded) before heading off to dreamland.

I'm not sure what will be happening Thursday, or Friday with the new rain tonight, but I'm thinking if it is more of the same that we may bail out and head south.  We need to be out of here by the 21st, or 22nd, and I just don't know if conditions will permit them to finish by then.  If the site wasn't so muddy we could be done by Sunday, but I just don't see it happening right now.

Thursday is another day, and we'll wait to see what it brings......thanks for stopping by!