Moonlighting

My full time job right now is trying to find a full time job, but I did a little moonlighting from the job search job last week and helped out a friend.  My job was a simple one, but quite enjoyable.  It was an absolutely beautiful day.  I had a flannel shirt on to stay warm, but had the windows rolled down to enjoy the fresh air.  I drove his truck south toward Thornwell, Louisiana.  Thornwell is known for its excellent duck and goose hunting.  I tried to capture a photo of them below.  If you enlarge it, you can make out thousands of geese funneling down and landing in the middle of a harvested rice field.

The old truck was one that I've never driven before, but I have lots of experience driving trucks like this.  Anyone who's farmed in South Louisiana is familiar with driving trucks like these.  You hold your breath before starting them and are happy when the engine turns over.  It tops out at about 50 mph. Various things like turn signal blinkers, lights, and windshield wipers work intermittently.  Trucks like these are held together with duct tape, tie wire or bungee cords (like the one below that keeps the passenger door from flying open while you are driving down the road).

It was a great day for getting a little work done.  I arrived at my destination around 8:45 am.  As the photo below shows, there was a pile of stack-burned rice about 8 feet tall and 100 yards long.  It had been sitting out for a long, long time and had basically heated up, cooked and decomposed into some rich material to work into garden soil to add richness and organic matter.  My friend has some big green houses and was using this material to amend his soil.  I just had to get it back to his hoop houses.

Here is the pile that I was to work on.  Fortunately, my friend had a New Holland tractor with a front end loader on it.  This made the job a breeze.

All I had to do was scoop up a big bucketload of the stuff, lift it up, carry it to the truck, and...

Dump it into the bed.  11 scoops filled up the truck, but I had to use the bucket to spread it out and balance the load to be able to get 11 scoops on the truck.  I made little tick marks in the dust on the fender to make sure that I had 11 scoops in the truck bed.

Here's the crazy thing.  You know how compost has bacteria working in it that heats up and "cooks" the pile?  This material, even as long as it has been sitting here, was still cooking.  If you look closely at the top of the pile, you can see steam rising from the pile!

I drove the truck back to his place, peeling and eating a grocery bag of satsumas I had picked and taking in the scenery.  I unloaded the load of material and went back for more.  Overall, it was a nice day of moonlighting and a good change of pace.