Blogs

‘Finish the job’ heart

It was the summer my brother Neal was my main hay bale-throwing helper. He was the only one of us to whom football was important. (This good-sized kid, almost as big as me, was infuriated he was not quite big enough for a serious college football career.)

I was sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop open, completely focused on the information in front of me. We had scheduled a couple of loads of fat cattle to be shipped later that week and, with the razor-thin margins, I was ever so interested in what the market was telling me that morning.

It’s my professional duty to pry.

Quite often, someone will say, “You’ve got to come see my …” – meaning their new invention, their operation, their business model or their product. It runs against my editorial grain to promote any element, so we (as an editorial team) are pretty careful in the writing approach to these “front” stories, as I call them.

Collecting vintage machinery can be a tricky, expensive and time-consuming business or hobby. Sometimes we hear from folks about old machines that have been in a barn for years or just sitting abandoned on a farm somewhere.

From my perspective, I find social media to be, for the most part, a huge waste of time. It can be useful, to be sure, for a variety of reasons – but 10 minutes of productivity somehow usually evaporates into 45 wasted minutes viewing an array of ridiculous political rants, videos and borderline crude GIFs and memes.

I live on a dirt road that comes to a dead end at our house. It’s about a third of a mile off the highway. Directly to the west of where our road and the highway junction meet is a sugar beet dump operated by the regional sugar beet cooperative.