[AT] Selling things and hurricanes

[Cecil Monson]

	I was thinking while having my first cup of coffee this morning
that the weather here has been unusually great for June. Absolutely
gorgeous. I played with my tractors yesterday - did some mowing with the
AC D-14 and sickle bar mower. Then got the D-12 out and hooked up to the
Kubota tractor rototiller and went over the garden to keep the weeds
down. We didn't plant anything this year because of my medical condition
but the weeds came up just the same.

	Then as if to jog my memory to remind me things were not always
so great in June, I noticed on the Weather Channel that Hurricane Agnes
came ashore on this date in 1972. My wife and the three kids were all
on vacation in Europe and I was home with the dog. Three days later this
hurricane made it to New York State and flooded the whole area upstate.
I severed a disc in my back while helping sandbag along Seneca Lake
south of Geneva. I was standing in two feet of water when a fireman on
a truck load of sand tossed me a bag of sand. I was forced to catch it
as it would have splashed water on everyone around me and caught it just
the wrong way. I made it thru the summer but in September had to have an
operation to fix it. Luckily with the disc removed my back healed just
fine and I have had no trouble since then.

	I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I had some things to sell
before we moved to the new home site. It is hard to believe but as a
result of my comments, all those things are gone or spoken for. That
reminds me that I have one more thing that has to go. It is a pair of
IHC PTO operated one row potato diggers. One of these works just fine
and the other one is for parts. There are even more bed parts too that
go with them. I dug my potatoes with the one for a number of years and
it works very well. Even the little JD 40 tractor handles it with ease.
If you are not familiar with potato diggers, they scoop up plant and all
including the potatoes underneath, shake the dirt off as they cross
the bed of steel rods. The dirt falls thru on to the  ground and the
potatoes and vines are dropped off the back in a windrow on top of
the ground. If you use a bush hog or rotary mower like the Woods I use,
you can mow the vines off and not have to monkey with them when picking
up the potatoes. It sure is a lot easier picking the potatoes up off
the ground than trying to dig them by hand. At $300 for both of these
machines plus the parts, I don't see how anyone could ever go wrong.
Let me know if you are interested. Mountainville, New York is not
exactly centrally located to anything but at least there are decent
roads in the area.

Cecil