I'm a Bad Blogger

and I know it.

But quite frankly, as crappy as life has been over the last month, I just haven't felt much like talking.

A little update. 

In case you haven't noticed, the economy still sucks major monkey balls.  It is better, but unemployment is up around 10%, markets are still down, and the family business is still losing money.  FY2009 was a $300,000 loss on $950,000 in total revenue.  Then, we had been working since late August on preparing a grant application for ARRA funds to increase our efficiency.  Currently, our recycling center processes 2.5 tons/hour.  Originally, we thought we could find enough material to increase that production by 8-10x's.  A big key to this increase was the city of Peoria starting a curbside recycling program of significance.  That didn't happen.  The program that was selected is nothing more than a warm fuzzies program.  And after that, all the pieces of our program started to fall apart.  By the time we got down to a week before applications were due, we were planning to install a system that could potentially quadruple our through-put but we only could identify sources for a doubling, at best.  Finally, last Monday, we found a short sentance that derailed the whole plan.  Projects were only able to apply for 50% of total project costs, and costs had to be incurred after the middle of February, 2009.  Which for us, meant we only had $200,000 in equipment to put against the total project cost on our half.  This meant we would have to get financing for about $1,400,000.  Not a possibility.  So, we had to abandon applying for the ARRA funds.  This was a major blow to my folks.  First was anxiety, and then depression. 

And on the other side, the weather this fall SUCKS!!  Here were are at the 27th of October and we only have 82 acres of soybeans harvested and fewer than 40 acres of corn.  It rained all night Sunday.  There is more rain in the forecast. We still have over 300 acres of beans to harvest and over 200 acres of corn.  At this pace, we will be lucky to be done by Christmas.  We harvested Sunday, for the first time in a week.

Basically, please pray for my family.  And all the farmers right now.  It is going to be a really rough and long harvest.