Well I was off again to the farm auction and this time I was looking for a corn head for the combine. Daryl and I checked it out last night and we’ve got a routine down now on how this works. I took down the number of the auction item and was really hoping for the best. So this morning I picked out my farm auction clothes. I decided that the last two times that I’ve gone to this auction I worried too much about what I was wearing. So today, I picked out what I wanted to wear and headed out for the day. The auction started at 9 am and I got there just before it started. I didn’t know when they would be selling the corn heads for the combines, so I didn’t want to take any chances. Well it turned out that I could have stayed home for awhile. It sounded like it was going to be after dinner before they would get to the piece that I was going to bid on. But I’ve gotten so much smarter at this. I brought things along to pass the time. I brought along some finger nail polish remover and spent some time in the car repolishing my toe nails. I had a file and really gave myself a good pedicure while I was waiting. When I told Daryl that I did this when I was waiting, he stopped and looked at me and asked if I was sitting in the crowd when I was polishing my toe nails. Really? Anyway, I said no that I was in the car and he said that this was probably a good thing. But I did think to myself that I was probably the only one there today that was doing this at the auction. 🙂 Since I got there at 9 and had a lot of time to waste, I made friends with the pie ladies. I never seen pies like the ones that they had there, and that would explain why I kept seeing the guys walking around eating pie and bars at 9 am!
The pie and bar lady
Daryl asked what I ate at the auction because he thinks the food at farm auctions are really something to look forward to. I said that I brought my own sandwiches because I didn’t really like the food that they were serving. OK, so now comes the second ‘Oh my God’ look. I told him that I packed a cooler and ate it in the car when my toe nails were drying. I’m pretty sure he is thinking that he hopes that he doesn’t have to go to a farm auction in his whole life with me! After waiting 5 hours – the time finally came for me to get serious and see if I could get the machinery that we wanted to buy. Just then, someone who I knew decided to come up and talk with me. I mean, this guy had 5 hours to chat but he picked a really bad time. Couldn’t he see that I was really intense and focused. I even had a small pad and pen that I was writing down some of the ending bids on the previous machinery. (And I might add -I was looking kind of professional at the time) Anyway, he obviously didn’t know that I was going to start bidding after standing around for 5 hours on the corn head. I finally had to say that I need to watch the next machinery coming up for Daryl. He said OK, and that he was going to head home. Not that I didn’t want to talk to him, but my heart was pounding so hard I didn’t really need any distractions at the time. Since I was the only girl around the auction, I stood up front and thought .. let’s go! I did have the ending bid for awhile and then some other guy jumped in and brought the price up out of what we wanted to spend. I really felt sad and pretty mad that we didn’t get it. For some reason I just expected that I would get it. The prices on EVERYTHING else was going almost dirt cheap and some things they wouldn’t even sell because it was too low of a price. But the corn head – yea… that got sold. Daryl said that maybe we should have had a higher budget, but I said it was good that we had a budget that we did. Otherwise I would just keep bidding against those guys and prove that I could buy it no matter what the cost. Yea – budgets are a good thing for me. So once again I come home from the auction with nothing to show for it. There are a couple of these corn heads around at some dealers that Daryl said he was going to look at, and until then he has the combine just about ready to go into the fields.
Daryl working on the combine tonight