I'm a big fan of watching the weather radar, so I can get an indication if we'll be experiencing any wet weather anytime soon.

If I need to mow the lawn, knowing what is and isn't coming makes it easy to plan my day.

Unfortunately, The Weather Channel doesn't show their "Local on the 8's" forecast as often as they used to, so here and there I have to go online to look into the future.

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Ah, I wish we would have had the Internet and all this available weather information growing up on the farm - it would have been easier to plan out our days.

As it was, we had to rely on intuition, and in my dad's case, experience. Dad always had a sixth sense about incoming weather that would affect whatever operation we were undertaking.

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If I was set to run the tractor that day - plowing up some summerfallow - I'd usually get his weather prediction during breakfast.

"You might only have the morning to get as much done as you can,' he might say, "before something comes through."

Being a teenager, my early years of running the tractor were spent praying for rain, so I could go do something else, or in some cases, nothing else. But as I got older, I realized that there was plenty of work to go around, so you might as well get everything done today that you can.

You know - the farmer's mantra.

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Our place was nestled in a valley that ran from the southwest to the northeast. Usually bad weather would creep over the mountain range to the west, and eventually I could determine how long it would take to get to where I was working, and if it was bad enough, when to make a break for it.

The really bad storms tended to come out of the east, and whenever I saw something that appeared like a thick, white curtain reaching down from the heavens headed my way, it was time to idle down and eventually shut down and head for the house before it got too muddy that I tore up the dirt road trying to get there.

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Any time you saw a dark blue or black curtain headed your way, chances are hail was lurking within. The biggest stones I ever encountered were a little bit bigger than golf ball-sized, but softball-sized hail was not uncommon in central Montana. I was just happy that I never got caught out in the open in a bad hailstorm. Curling up in a ball to protect my head did not seem like a fun way to experience Mother Nature.

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We all felt the stress during around harvest time, when a potent rainstorm could halt the process, and a significant hailstorm could render the process moot.

Once the grain got dry enough to harvest, we wanted to get as much cut and stored in grain bins as fast as possible.

I usually spent my mid-August days (including my birthdays most years) on the seat of a harvest truck, ferrying grain back and forth to our bins or to a grain elevator in town if dad had determined the price was right to sell it as we cut.

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But nowadays, the only cutting I do is through fescue. And I don't have to worry about when to sell the clippings.

Jerry Hitchcock is a copy editor for The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176 Ext. 2017, or via email at jhitchcock@cdapress.com.