Tough spring for CEO

Spring, what a wonderful time of the year. Spring on the farm starts a whole new set of adventures in motion.
From the first calves to hit the ground, to the roaring of tractors making their way to the fields to plant this year’s crops. Well, that’s what is supposed to happen. This spring has been a very trying, not to mention frustrating and infuriating time of year.
I was getting to the point where I was afraid to ask the CEO how the planting season was going. If I did dare mention the weather and the copious amounts of rain that continued to fall, I would be met by nothing short of a snarl and a grunt. The weather was becoming a taboo subject in our house.
The weather isn’t the only challenge when it comes to farming. You no sooner get a great stretch of weather when a key piece of machinery will decide to break down… you can just imagine the CEO and the spew of graphic language that comes out of his cake hole.
All I can do is offer my most sincere condolences at his most inopportune loss of time and effort. I have offered to help out with driving a tractor but am usually told that “no, you can’t do that” well, the offer was there and who am I to argue? I have gone out and helped needle, sort and generally be the dog’s body in chasing cattle for sorting. I don’t mind doing that work at all. The thing with helping when it comes to machinery is that there are looks and gestures that only someone who is giving the gestures knows what they actually mean. The stern look usually means, “What were you thinking?,” the slight cock of the head (don’t blink you might miss it) means good, and the hand up and then pushed in a forward motion means, well, something else that I have not yet been able to decipher. Farmers like doctors have their own terminology for the work that they do. There are never any timetables that are written in stone, but more seasonal suggestions. April, spread manure and cultivate, May is planting month, June is hay cutting and into July is also haying. August sees the harvest begin, first barley, then the corn into September or even October. Hopefully the weather and the machinery have cooperated and all the work is done. November brings the snow and another side of the CEO, the happy side, he loves the winter and all the challenges that freezing weather brings. Farming is a tough industry with no constant variables except that anything you thought was going to happen probably isn’t.