No work today because it's warm...

...so I drove back to civilization in order to get some pictures up for you all. So far I have only worked two full days because of the heat but that is all about to change. Cold air is on its way this coming week. The forecast is for sleet on Tuesday and snow Wednesday. Fine with me though because it means we will be able to work, work, work. I am enjoying the work and don't really think it is that hard. The worst part is cleaning the piling machine but we only do that once a shift so that's not bad. Basically the trucks bring the beets from the fields and dump them into the piler which through a series of conveyor belts seperates the dirt from the beets before sending them up the boom to the top of the pile. The dirt is dumped back into the trucks before it leaves and the next truck pulls in. The piler can unload two trucks at a time. The site I am on has two pilers and we will be making two piles of beets 26 feet high, 240 feet wide and nearly a half a mile long. The crew I work with on my piler is great and we work well together. The lady running the piler has been working beet harvests for 30 years so she knows what she is doing and all the tricks in the book. The ground crew is a young guy Lupe, his mom Irene and me. To give an example of how many trucks come through on Monday, which was our first 12 hour day, we unloaded 246 trucks on our piler. Also on Monday the foreman sent me to a certification class to get licensed for a Bobcat and the front end loader we have at our site. It was a very long day by the time I got done but now I get to run a big old bulldozer so it was worth it. Rumor has it that will get me pay raise as well. We'll see. From talking to the truck drivers as they come through I think that there is at least a couple weeks of harvest left to go. In a way I think starting out with some short days and such has been good for me. Standing for 12 hours and pushing scrapers around to clean up the mud and lifting sample bags which weigh 20 -25 pounds has been good exercise, but has also made me sore so easing into it is good. I will say that I have been eating a ton of food every day. My metabolism which is high to begin with has gone crazy! On the full 12 hour days I eat breakfast, four sandwiches throughout the day, a couple pieces of fruit, a power bar, a honey bun and eat a full dinner. Plus drink two quarts of Gatorade and a couple 12 ounce bottles of juice. It's crazy. Quite a big change for me to say the least. I am going to take advantage of today and restock a little plus get laundry done so I am set if we wind up working full days for the next couple of weeks. I posted a picture of the piler, the pile and some sugar beets. Hope they help you all visualize a little bit what I am doing. I know I did not have any idea what a sugar beet was before this. I am having fun and learning new stuff though so it is definitely worth being up here. Plus I'll put a little money in the bank. Basically every hour I work is 50 miles so that is how I keep it in perpesctive. Hopefully I can get another update done in the next few days but it depends how tired I am and whether or not my fingers are frozen. Take care for now though, Jim