Pick Your Title

The hired man was about 150 yards away and I screamed for him to come over and help me. He jumped in the pickup and come over as I grabbed my water jug and tried to put some of the fire out. He got there and I could see the fire was in the electrical system and knowing I shut everything off, knew I had to disconnect the power to the batteries (yes the tractor has 2 of them) to kill the fire. I grabbed some tools out of the pickup and the hired man's drinking water and told him to run down to the well and dump the gas out of a bucket and fill it with water and bring it back. He was worried about what vehicle to put the gas in. I told him, "This is an $80,000 tractor and that is $10 worth of gas, dump it out and get some water so we can save the tractor."

After he left there I stand, trying to disconnect the battery with one hand, while putting fire out in the harness with my other hand and what little water I had left. A little background information at this point. I have been making a concerted effort to lose weight lately and have been doing a very good job. My pants are way to big for me and I have yet to put any more holes in my belt so I have a hard time getting my pants to stay up. So here I am with my hands very busy with the fire and trying to disconnect the battery cable when what happens? My pants fall to my ankles.

What a comical sight it must have been with me standing there putting fire out and trying to work these tools with his pants around his ankles. I didn't worry about my pants and finally got the cables disconnected to kill the power which then allowed me to finally get the fire out before it spread too much further.

The hired man showed up about then and we used the water to finish cooling down all the hot spots on the tractor. I radioed My Darling Wife and she called the dealer and they were able to get a semi in here to haul the tractor out today to get it worked on. She tells me she had quite an argument with them since they wanted us to drive the tractor to the highway 20 miles away. She finally convinced them after about 20 minutes that the only way we got the fire out was to disconnect the batteries and there wasn't a chance in hell we were hooking them back up.

We used the other tractor and commenced baling hay with it. It's always nice to have a backup but not nice to have to use it.

So it was quite a day yesterday. I sure don't need excitement like that, it ain't a lot of fun.

My luck is so bad that if I bought a cemetery, people would stop dying. Ed Furgol