Willie’s Shed Floor

     Willie Suchanek had some unconventional ideas.  He thought his tractor cab should be big enough to stand up in.  Having been confined to sitting in my tractor cab all summer, I think it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

     I helped Willie out the summer of 1961 I believe it was.  He had a Cockshut tractor, a product of Canada.  It had a six-foot cab that allowed the operator to stand.  It was still a bit primitive as far as cabs go.  The windows didn’t open.  You either had the windows in, or you took them out.

      It got powerful hot with the windows in, so sometime in June, we took the windows out.  The “windows” were really plastic sheets that collected dust and scratched pretty badly when you tried to wipe the dust off in order to see. Getting rid of the plastic-paned window was a good thing.

     The cab was pretty much a sunshade from then on, a sunshade you could stand up under.

     Willie’s cab ideas evolved.  He had sinus problems.  His doctor told him he needed to get out of the dust.  When he traded for a new tractor, the cab was not only big enough to stand up in, had real glass windows, but was also air-conditioned.  Willie’s otolaryngologist was happy. He was out of the dust.

      Willie also liked to store his tractor inside out of the weather during the winter months.  The six-foot cab on top of the tractor created a problem.  A mere eight-foot door wouldn’t work.  The door would have to be at least ten feet if not higher.

     To store his tractor and his pickup, Willie had a pole shed built, which he always called “the shed”.  To accommodate the unusual tractor cab, the shed had a high east side with a tall door.  It looked like someone had taken a normal shed and went up the roof slope until he got high enough to admit the tractor cab, then cut it off at that point.  The east slope of the roof was truncated.  Meanwhile, the west roof sloped down to about six feet above the ground.

     Inside, the floor sloped up so that it was head-bonking territory on the west side of the building where roof and floor sloped towards each other.  When I started helping Willie, the floor was dirt.  That would change.  It would be concrete before the year was done,

      Getting the floor ready for concrete took some time.  One day we called on Johnny Emmerling who had a fresno.  A fresno?  A fresno was a horse-drawn dirt scoop.  It was about five or six feet wide, about three feet front to back with a blade suitable for scraping the dirt, and the capacity to hold maybe a third  of a yard of sand or gravel.  It had a long handle extending out the back of the contraption for the operator.  In its original state, it was meant to be harnessed to a team of horses.

      We loaded the machine into Willie’s Dodge pickup and headed back to the shed.  We unloaded down by the reek south of the shed.  We harnessed the fresno to the pickup with a twenty-foot length of rope.  I drove the pickup with strict instructions to stay well away from the creek bed.

      Willie manned the fresno while I made a series of circles with the pickup.  Willie guided the fresno into the gravel in the creek.  By raising the handle, he could force the fresno to dig into the gravel.  When the scoop was nearly full, he would pull the handle down, and the fresno would scoot along with its load until It was well out of the creek.  Then Willie raised the handle until it was vertical and the fresno dumped its load in a nice compact pile.  My first and only experience with a fresno.

      The gravel piles were for the concrete we would mix to run the shed floor.  After we had a a few piles, we unhooked the fresno and shoveled the piles onto the pickup.  We hauled the gravel up by the shed where it would be handy and made a big sand pile there.   We worked a few days getting enough gravel in the pile.

       The shed had been there a few years, long enough to have collected any building’s quota of junk, oil, grease, antifreeze, spare parts for various pieces of equipment.  That all had to be moved.

       It was while moving that stuff Willie got a cricket in his pants.  Who was to know if it might not be a spider or something poisonous?  Willie dropped the cardboard box he was carrying, jerked down his pants, and started flailing away at the invader.  After several slaps, he muttered, “Got to be out now, bastard.”  I think I didn’t laugh right then, but I have laughed several times since.

       We had to level the dirt and set up some forms, but we maintained the unconventional slope of the floor.  It would rise from east to west at better than an inch per foot.  Willie insisted we wrap the poles with galvanized flashing where the concrete would meet post.  I thought that was entirely unnecessary, but experience has taught me it was a good idea. 

     How many wooden posts have I replaced in fences where a well-meaning person poured concrete around a wooden post?  The post nearly always rots off where it meets the concrete.  Here some fifty years later, Willie’s posts and his shed stand firm, no rotted poles.

      I don’t remember for sure, but I think we actually did the concrete work during teacher’s convention, which would have been a four-day weekend in October.  We worked two or three days, and I know we didn’t work on Sunday.

     Willie borrowed our little cement mixer, which could mix maybe a third of a bag of cement with the right amount of gravel.  An eighty-pound bag of Sack Crete just about fills the mixer.  If such a thing was available then, we didn’t know it.

      There was no electricity at Willie’s shed, so he took the electric motor off and installed his Lawson auger engine, the same one I use today.  auger engine.   He had stockpiled bags of cement.  He also had many buckets of water, which we could refill from a windmill and stock tank near the creek where we got the gravel.

      We set up the mixer and began mixing sand, water, and cement powder.  I think we placed the cement mixer where we could dump it where the concrete was needed, so we didn’t have to wheelbarrow the stuff.  We would slide the mixer left or right and back away from the developing floor.

     Hilbert Korsvold helped the first day.  It was long and grueling.  Each dump of the little cement mixer didn’t make much of a dent in the four-inch floor.  Hilbert had a cold.  He didn’t show up for the second day, so Dad got pressed into service.  After two days, (or was it three?) the north half of the floor was done.  

     I don’t remember doing the south half of the floor.  I must not have been involved.  I was in the shed enough times after that to know that the south floor did get done.

     The tractor could go into the shed door, the front wheels rolling up the incline.  When the back wheels were in far enough to close the door, it was time to stop so the top of the cab didn’t contact the rafters.  It worked fine.

      Willie would go on to have a third tractor with a tall cab.  He would continue to farm into the late seventies when he sold out to the neighbors and retired permanently to Denver.  Some of his unconventional ideas survive him, as does his shed with its cement floor.

       

Customer Service

     “What’s that wire in my yard coming over the fence?” Brian asked.

      “That’s our internet connection,” I replied. 

       “It’s a good thing I asked.  I was thinking to tear it out.”

      “Don’t do that.  I won’t have any internet.”

      “You might want to do something with it.  Mickey would like to get a hold of it.  He can probably chew through it pretty fast.”  Mickey was Brian’s St. Bernard puppy.

      “It’s a temporary line.  They are supposed to come replace it with a permanent line. At least that’s what Carol (the previous owner) told us.”

       Thus began another great adventure with corporate America customer service.  This began in the fall  of 2015 when Mickey was fairly new to the neighborhood.  Several calls to Century Link got little response.  One tech came out, took a look at the setup and said it would be difficult to install a permanent line, Century Link doesn’t do the installation, it’s contracted out.

     That was the last we heard for a few months.  In the meantime, Brian decided Mickey was really too big for his yard and “rehomed” him with a family with an acreage.  We decided that nevertheless, we had better insist Century Link do something about the temporary line. 

     It was a bit of a pain.  It crossed the sidewalk where I nearly always hooked it with a snow shovel when doing the walk.  It was there a trip hazard every week when rolling out the trash container.  I had worked around it where it went up over the shed that I had reroofed when I did the house.  It drooped along the fence to where it crossed over into Brian’s yard, and finally over the other neighbor’s fence to the pedestal in his yard.

       The Goodwife persevered, spending a goodly long time on hold waiting for the next customer representative to answer.  Finally, a tech came out.  He wanted to look into the pedestal.  He and the Goodwife went to the neighbor’s house and rang the bell.  No answer.  His pickup was there and his garage door was open.  She rang again.

      Out came the neighbor buzzing like an angry hornet.  He chewed them out good, saying he was a day sleeper and they had awakened him and he wasn’t at all happy about that.  The tech got into the neighbor's yard and looked into the pedestal. 

      A week or so later, two more techs came out.  This time, the Goodwife left the day-sleeper a note on an 8.5 X 11 sheet of paper taped to his garage door where he couldn’t miss it.  Please call.  No response so the techs went in.

       When they opened up the pedestal, they discovered there was already a permanent line installed.  So they removed the temporary line and hooked us up to the old line.

      It doesn’t take a mental giant to know what happened next.  Our internet service went down the tubes.  Hey boys, there was a reason your company installed the temporary line in the first place.  That old permanent line had a problem.

       We had some service,  but as for speed, it rivaled the old dialup connections.  It worked in the morning, got progressively worse during the day, sometime at night being so poor we couldn’t get connected to the internet at all.  Thus began a series of calls to customer service, with accumulative wait times amounting to over an hour.

       One guy in the Philippines thought he could get us connected from there.  After about thirty minutes of wait time, the Goodwife suffered a dropped call.  Here we go again.  This time, the gal, also in the Philippines, couldn’t make a connection.  “There’s a problem with your line.”  Really?  A tech would call on Tuesday.

      The tech called Tuesday morning.  The internet was working, not real well, but it was working.  It’s your modem, the guy said.  Really, I asked.  Just a coincidence that the modem stopped working when the boys removed the temporary line?

      I asked him to come back late in the afternoon when he might find it not working so well.  He gave us his phone number.  We called three times.  He didn’t show up that afternoon, or any other time. 

     The third time the Goodwife called a few days later, the tech didn’t remember a thing about it.  He didn’t even remember being here.  Anyway, call him after 4 p.m.  The Goodwife called right after 4 p.m. and got a message.  He would be out of the office until August 29, the message said.  He was on vacation.    

       Back to customer service.  This time, the Goodwife set up an appointment for the tech to come in the afternoon when the internet wouldn’t be working very well and I could be there. The appointed day arrived.  I left for Ft. Collins to meet with my quartet at 9:30 a.m.  I wasn’t gone fifteen minutes before the Goodwife called me to say the tech was there.  Tell him to come back in the afternoon.  That didn’t work.

       She called an hour or so later.  Our problem was (no, not the modem) old house wiring.  The house was wired in the ‘90’s and we were losing a lot of signal by having the modem at the far end of the house.  They moved the modem to the other end of the house where it was closer to the telephone box on the outside wall.

      This guy did say he would come back and explain it all to me in the afternoon.  I’ve heard that before.  But this guy, Kelly, did show up.  He went through the old wiring bit, and I agreed the wiring was old.  I explained we had fairly decent service until they removed the temporary line, when our problems began.

      Then he admitted the wire from alley to house wasn’t the best connection.  He changed the wires to what he thought were the best of the bundle of wires in the cable.  Why was the temporary wire installed in the first place?  The old wire needed to be replaced, he finally agreed.  We needed to deal with the neighbor, so the wife put up another note on the neighbor’s garage door with Kelly’s phone number.

     I really figured I would never hear from Kelly again, especially when he explained he was only a part-time Century Link employee, his main job being a fireman in the Denver area, but two days later he called me.  The neighbor had called Kelly and told him to go ahead and do what he needed to do, and asked him not to bother him as he was a day sleeper.  Kelly said to me, I wonder why the neighbor doesn’t put a sign on his door that he is a day-sleeper.  The tech’s respect that.

      Kelly’s solution is to reinstall a temporary line and order a new permanent line.  It will take at least four weeks before the permanent line can be installed.  A contractor has to come out and appraise the situation and strike a deal with Century Link.  So here we are, right about where we were two years ago, or at least we will be when the “temporary” line is reinstalled.

     For my part of the bargain, I have agreed to run a dedicated phone line from the outdoor box on our wall to wherever we want the modem.  I agreed to do that if they would get us off the old permanent line.  We shall see what happens.

     In the meantime, when I think of customer service, I’m reminded of an episode in The Grapes of Wrath.  One of the migrants (can’t say “Okie”, a good friend from Oklahoma bristles when he hears that.  “I am an Oklahoman,” he insists) who thinks he is getting a raw deal at a roadside service station tells the service station guy a story.

      The story involves the custom of the neighbors bringing a cow or heifer to the one neighbor who has a bull for breeding purposes.  In the story, Little Willy Feely takes his dad’s heifer to be bred.  When he gets there, the only one home is the bull owner’s teenage daughter.  They both know the routine, so they turn the heifer into the corral with the bull.  Then they climb up on the fence to watch the action.

     When the action gets hot and heavy with the bull and the heifer, Willy starts squirming around on the fence.  He says, “Boy, I sure wish I was doing that,” indicating the action in the corral.

      “Why don’t ya, Willy?” the girl replies.  “It’s your heifer.”

     The migrant then tells the service station guy, “Every time I see the sign ‘Service Station’, I wonder who’s getting screwed.”

      Anyone who has dealt with corporate America’s customer service department has to wonder the same thing, I think.

          

Jehovah’s Witnesses

       We were taking it easy, putting off my return to the August heat outdoors where I was doing some dental work on the Farmhand hay fork (that would be repairing teeth I broke off the previous afternoon) visiting after our lunch, when Jeri said, “Oh there’s someone at the door.  They’re dressed like. . . .“

       Maybe like they were motoring in an old ragtop with the top down.  He was a young fellow wearing what we used to call an Ivy League hat, short billed where the top front of the hat snaps to the front of the short bill.

        I went to the screen door and didn’t offer to open it.  Actually, I was ready to grab the door handle should the lad try to open it.  He wasn’t going to get in.

      He asked my name.  I gave him my first name.  Sure enough, he whipped out his Bible and asked to share a little scripture with me.  I was ok with that, particularly because his  chosen verse was from Ecclesiastes.

     It was a short text.  His homily was equally brief, something about how we should attempt to make our world a better place and work on improving ourselves.  Couldn’t argue with that.  Sometimes they feel the need to read a whole chapter to you and engage you in a conversation about religion. 

      Then he asked to share a tract with me.  I cracked the screen door wide enough to accept the paper.  I was fully prepared to hand it back if he asked for a donation.  He didn’t.  He wished me a good day and I returned the wish for him and his companion, a young black fellow who apparently was along only to observe.

      They passed back through the hedge and got into new-looking small red car of some kind, definitely not an old ragtop.  A quick glance at the paper and it became part of the pile in the corner destined for the recycle bin.

      The young guys were but young in deed, not knowing how to get their feet in the door or keep me engaged.  This time the encounter was brief and tolerable, without the need for rudeness to dispatch the unwanted visitors.

      Some years ago, the Goodwife had a good friend who also happened to be a Jehovah’s Witness.  They really got along well together, but of course the subject of religion came up.  Jan had her read a book about world religions and what was wrong with them.

      “Jan,” the Goodwife said, “this book is so biased and so full of misinformation that I really thought about destroying it.”  This from a book-lover and a champion of freedom of speech.

   Their friendship was a Kansas friendship, but Jan did a lot of proselyting in other areas, other states, including the area around the farm.  She personally knew the folks calling on us at the farm. 

      Before they agreed to stay off the subject of religion, the Goodwife expressed her discontent with dealing with the Jehovah’s Witnesses who called on us at the farm.  Jan informed her that she could request that we be put on the “do not call on” list, and they would honor it.  The Goodwife asked Jan to take care of that, and she did.  For years we had no Jehovah’s Witnesses callers, no pamphlets jammed into the screen door during our absence.

     We must have fallen off the do-not-call list.  I thought to myself that I should have requested those young fellows to put me back on.  I’ll probably get another chance to make that request.

       Once upon a time, Josh and I were helping Tisha with installing new kitchen cabinets.  There were a couple of problems with the new cabinets.  One cabinet had obviously been stabbed by a forklift or something as the sidewall was caved in and cracked. Another was poorly constructed, not square. 

      Josh and I were on the floor doing something when the doorbell rang.  Tisha had gone somewhere and wasn’t home.  Josh rose up enough to see a guy standing at the front door wearing a necktie and carrying a handful of papers and a notebook.

     “Jehovah’s Witness,” was all he said.  He got back down and we went right on working.  We failed to respond to the second doorbell chime.

      Not too long after the second chime, the door opened and the guy had the chutzpah to walk into the house and into the kitchen where we were down on the floor working.

      “I saw you guys working so I knew somebody had to be home,” he said.  Well yes, and we saw you, too, but we really didn’t want you in here, neither of us said, though that is what we thought.      

      “Tisha called and said there was a problem with some of the cabinets,” he said.  “I need to take a look at them.”

      I’m not sure of the exact order of events following that statement, whether Josh and I looked at each other and burst out laughing, or whether we contained ourselves with the help of our embarrassment and Tisha later informed the cabinet salesman of his mistaken identity, I don’t remember, but in the end, we all got a good laugh out of it, even the salesman.

     A handful of papers and a necktie are probably not the best accoutrements when you ring our doorbell.

      

       

Ketchup

So the big tomato and the little tomato are walking down the sidewalk.  The little tomato keeps falling behind the big one, who has to stop and wait for his smaller cousin.  Finally, the big tomato loses all patience, turns and stomps the little tomato into smithereens on the sidewalk.

      Then the big tomato says, “Now catchup!”

      An inch of rain has allowed me to play a little “ketchup”.  The golf cart, which went down a day or two before harvest began, has been returned to service.  Under stress, a battery post melted down, the threaded connection coming completely out of the battery post. 

      After internet consultation, I drilled a hole a half inch deep into the post and tapped it out for a 5/16’s bolt.  I learned something in this exercise.  A drill bit index tells you what size hole to drill for each bolt tap size.  Most of those hole sizes are in fractions of an inch, but for 5/16”, it calls for an “F” bit.  “F”?

      I called on my local ACE Hardware guy, and for a moment he was stumped.  We searched the racks.  Then he went to a little case on the bottom shelf, and it contained all kinds of odd size bits, including an “F” bit.  I now own an “F” bit and can do 5/16’s threads.

      I tried to solder the brass bolt to the lead post, but that didn’t work.  I couldn’t get the post hot enough without melting the plastic battery top.  Shaky hands and impaired eyesight didn’t help with that project.  So that post is hanging on threads, so to speak, but it works great.

      A good cleansing of all battery straps and posts with a soda rinse have put the old cart into pretty good shape again.  My Fitbit (if I had one) has taken a hit as once again I can use the cart to run between buildings and around the farmyard.

      The Versatile swather that was reluctant to start when I had to get it out of the way of the combine had a temporary fix with an electric fuel pump.  Like a lot of the equipment here on the farm, the swather has a positive ground electrical system.  The only fuel pumps readily available are negative ground. 

       The negative ground fuel pump has to be isolated from the machine frame.  Otherwise, the fuel pump, essentially hooked up backwards, will think it’s a piece of beef and fry itself for dinner.  A piece of PVC pipe works as an insulator.  To get the swather out of the way of the combine, I mounted the pump to the PVC and used a piece of wire to suspend it roughly in place.

      The ground wire of the fuel pump runs to the ignition switch, which is negative on a positive ground system.  I ran the power wire from the fuel pump to the positive battery post.  Temporarily, the wire to the switch was an alligator clip.  With the catch-up time, I ran the negative wire to the ignition coil.  Now, when the switch is on, the fuel pump runs.

      I also mounted the PVC pipe to the swather frame with a quarter inch bolt.  No more dangly bailing-wired fuel pump.  I put in an inline fuel filter, and the old feller is good to go, I think.

      Then, there was the yard, neglected since the first of June.

 

     Much cooler weather made mowing a little more palatable.

        The swather did its part.

     The farmyard has reappeared from under the sea of grass.  Now what to do with the hay?  A bailer does not reside on the farm.

     Therefore, next on the agenda, get the “G” with Farmhand running.