People at Work

It's always interesting to see how much more the eye in conjunction with the brain sees than the camera. This field is on the corner of our road and I thought it looked especially nice dotted with hay bales. By the time I got home, had lunch and walked back down to the corner with my camera, the farmer was at work with his baler. I thought this shot through a fringe of tall roadside weeds would be interesting, but the weeds were more of a screen for the camera than they were for my eye which seemed more capable of editing out the weeds than the camera.

It would be impossible to explain how this particular piece of farm equipment worked other than to say that it could pick up individual bales off the ground where they had been drying and pile them into a neat stack. When the stack reached a certain size, the whole bed of the tractor lifted up and dumped the intact stack into the back as it is doing here.

The whole apparatus was quite noisy with squealing brakes and shrieking machinery. The shrieking and squealing  blended in quite well with the sounds of leaf blowers, weed whackers and fully laden dump trunks rattling up the road to some unknown construction site further up the road behind us. We suspect that somebody is starting a cannabis farm, but, not wishing to come face to face with an enormous double dump truck on the winding, exposed single track road further up the mountain, we have not ventured up there to investigate....

Steve, the young man from the HVAC (heating, ventilation & air conditioning) company showed up today to find out why our AC, which was installed last year, didn't seem to be up to the task of cooling the house during a heat wave. I caught a picture of his legs as they emerged from the attic where he was checking out the fan. The problem, as he showed us on a picture he took with his iPad, was faulty glue on some insulation which had fallen down on the cooling coils. He cut out the offending piece, glued it back on top where it belonged and voilà, problem solved at no charge. He didn't even try to blame the problem on the last guy who worked on it, since that would have been him. I've noticed that these people are now referred to as 'technicians'. I think he lived up to his title with his successful detective work....

If OilMan hadn't cancelled their spring AC maintenance visit, they would have discovered the problem before we needed the air conditioning instead of after.