Keeping it all going

There seems to be a bit of a problem this year with both the PUD and the Water district in keeping things working, and it is causing extra work for our guys. Unit 34 by Papa's house keeps turning off because the Bureau's pumps turn off at random times. It seems mostly to happen mostly at night so that the pivot is off in the morning. Fortunately Papa lives right there and notices it right away when he gets up and restarts it. The cause of that is apparently filters getting clogged; I wonder if the new ditchrider is going to catch on soon -- please clean the filters more often. Or there could be some other issue they have yet to solve...

The other thing that is beginning to really grate on us is when the power goes out. Not for any length of time, mind you, but just for that split second it takes for the computers to blitz out, the clocks to all start blinking, and the pivots to turn off (the ones here by our house and U.34 by Papa's; not sure about U.20 or not). It doesn't take much of a blip to cause trouble. Today when it happened, Lou was grinding corn. Now the augers are clogged, a belt burned up and broke, and I don't know what else, but it may take him several hours to get it working right again. The other day he had *just* started playing a computer game after finally getting it to load (for whatever reason this game takes three or four tries and 10 minutes to load) and blip, do it over. Today I was in town when the power went off/on, but if I had spent the afternoon figuring out Paul's feed bill and just before I was ready to print it the power blitzed, I think I might have made a call to the PUD ... I realize things happen, but 2-4 times each week?

On the upside, with all this practice I am getting pretty good at resetting the clock on the new VCR/DVD player...