Paloma Dairy has been fantastic! They have been teaching me so much, including how to drive a water truck, which is a shorter version of a semi. I am slowly getting the hang of it. I've never driven a stick shift before so it was quite a day. I had a lot of fun and it was even more fun telling my brothers, haha. I've been able to see nearly every side of their vertically integrated operation. It's a really neat setup and takes a lot to manage. I was down there 4 of my 5 work days, and it is about a 40 mile drive one-way, through the desert. Because Arizona is 2 hours behind the time at home, those miles are often spent calling home and catching up with friends.
Some of the other things I've done while at Paloma have been learning to read an ultrasound during vet checks, how to enter cow data with a new program, and helping with office work. I also helped attach a pipe to the water tank so that it was easier to fill up the water truck. We cut a 6 ft pipe from a scrap pile and attached it to the tank with brass screws. We used brass screws because brass is soft and will easily break if something would happen to run into the pipe while driving under it or past it. The screws would crack before the tank broke, thus preventing water from spraying everywhere with no way to stop it.
I'm getting confident driving tractors; it's really nice to be able to hop on a tractor and know what I'm doing. I've also been learning to back things with trailers up (like the water truck and a tractor with something attached to it.) At one point I was backing up the water truck, and Allan looked at me and said, "Have you ever backed a trailer up before?" My answer was, "Um, kinda.... no, not really, no..." His reply, "Really? 'Cause you look like you know what you're doing." I laughed and admitted to giving myself a crash course in backing up a gooseneck trailer last month but I wasn't sure it worked the same way. I guess experience is experience? It was funny!
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| You can't see it, but that's me! Thanks, Allan, for the pictures! |
I spend one day a week working for a company called Form-A-Feed/TechMix. The past 2 times I've been with them we've been at the warehouse/office in Deer Valley. This week we will going to some dairies in the area to see how the products are working and make sure that everything is being used correctly.
Outside of work, I've been pretty busy. I went to church with some of my friends from work and met a lot of great people. I ended up hanging out with them after night church. It was a lot of fun! My roommates are great, too! They include me in so much that they do and have made me feel so welcome! My roommate Heidi leads a smallgroup on Tuesdays and I went to that with her last week. We had a really great talk on the way there and some great worship time while we were there. We have had visitors for the past two weekends, and it's been fun having them around. People will randomly show up at night to hang out and quite often it turns into praise and worship times. It is so much fun!
I'm loving it down here and looking forward to the possibilities that the next weeks bring!
This past week it was kinda hard to be away from home because I missed both my dad's birthday and Father's Day. Let's just say I called home quite a bit, lol. On top of that, I wanted to find something that I could send my dad so show him how much I love him. I came across this song by Teresa James, called "You're My Hero."
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| Love you, Daddy! |
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