This post is long over due. I don’t know where time went, how did it get to be over a month since I last did anything here? I have to document the start of corn and wheat harvest every year. We often look back to see when we did things last year and this is the easiest place to do so.

So it’s started. They started on the neighbors and it’s going pretty good. After rats destroyed the combine over the winter it’s amazing that it’s going at all. I can never mention enough how awesome my husband is. He spent the spring and early summer coming home from work a little early, disappearing into the quanset where he clean and deconstructed the combine cab entirely. On weekends he spent all day in there, soaked in sweat from the heat. Crammed into that tight little cab with the filth and stink of the rats, until he got every drop of the wiring carefully pulled out.

He took the entire wiring harness into work at his real job and carefully reconstructed it. Many trips down to the giant tractor junk yard were required for parts. We went along and explored as he sweated away inside the cab of a wrecked combine digging out the needed parts. Using the new/old parts to piece together the original the rebuild required countless hours, an office that now smells like rat poop, and approximately one hundred and seventy five connectors. After finishing the careful meticulous job of finding every single chewed through wire, finding the matching end of the wire, and reconnecting them he hauled the entire wiring harness back home to the tractor.

There he continued his cleaning while he hooked back up every piece of electronics in the entire tractor, turn signals, lights, sensors, and controls. There was some flickering but after tightening the ground wires everything worked on the first try! Only a few new parts were required, such as the seat, and he brought the rebuild in under what insurance paid and WAY under what just a new wiring harness cost alone much less after adding the labor to have someone fix it. He saved his dad a fortune.

The much loved combine is back up and going. Small children are once again riding around in a cab that didn’t look as though it would ever go again much less be safe and clean enough for the kids. Have I mentioned that my husband is awesome?

Literally.

My poor husband loves the combine. He keeps it scrubbed clean, well oiled, and tucked away safely for the winter in the back of the Quonset. It was pure chance that anyone happened to look in. Usually it stays sleeping and ignored until nearly harvest. But look in they did and found, much to everyones horror, that rats had eaten the combine.

Not mice, mice we can handle. They usually get in and cause a few problems. They are nothing compared to this. The seat is unstuffed, the stench unbearable, the wiring chewed through. When the key is turned, nothing happens. No lights, no starting, no buzzing, the cab is dead. My poor husband is sad. He loves the combine, the destruction is sickening and he is not looking forward to the, very expensive, repairs.