Back from my nice vacation out on the family farm and it only took 6 hours of work to remove the smiles from my face and clobber my inner peace. Spent the entire morning going through about 100 emails, then spent the afternoon doing status, cleaning up problems, and attending meetings. Tis the glamour life, this life of an engineer. Dad and I managed to wrap up all of field work that needed to be done before winter set in. We even were blessed two nice rain storms to really soften the ground up. Things are still pretty dry around here though, we are going to need a rainy month or 2 to catch up on the water defecit. So, in all told, it took us nearly a week to plow down 145 acres of corn ground with the intermittent rain. In the meantime, we planted in 5 arbovidas into the windbreak to replace the ones that died out this year. I also blocked up the firewood for splitting this winter for next year's supply. I'm worried how good my lower back will be when I turn 50 when my back already sings to "Ave Maria" after 30 minutes of blocking with the chainsaw. We also had to replace a small section of fence line that my brother hooked when pulling up the logs for firewood. He claimed that the post was rotten anyways and needed replacing. *laugh* I even managed a day of true vacation on Monday as my parents and I went down to the Mississippi river at Guttenburg for some fishing. It was a beautiful day, low winds, lots of sun, the fall colors fading fast as the leaves are dropping off now. Only down side was that the fish were biting slowly and the Asian beetles were biting faster. At least I managed to hook the biggest fish, approximately 12 in. crappie. After fishing in the morning, we grabbed a pizza and ate it in a park that overlooked the river and then home for a nap. Man, I could use more days off like that! But now, I'm trapped at work with no hope of parole as the coming months will be full of thankless burdens and endless struggles and darkening hours. Shoutout to Ikar.