Millet Sample

     I thought I planned ahead.  I did a Mapquest and a Google map Sunday evening.  Hind sight being twenty-twenty, I could see where I went wrong.

      I painstakingly followed the instructions, “Turn left here, go X number of miles, turn right here for X number of miles, etc.”  The peanut butter jar on the seat beside me contained millet.

     On Sunday, it warmed up enough to trek out to the grain bin with probe and jar in hand.  The sun was shining, but the southeast wind bit wherever it found bare or barely covered skin.
    Gathering a sample took some time.  The old probe has only two holes in the business end, and the ramrod holds about a tablespoon worth of grain.  It took several jabs through the “window” behind the bin door to fill the four-pound peanut butter jar.  It was too cold and icy to even think about trying to get a sample from the lids on top of the grain bin.

      So here I was, Monday, out in the middle of nowhere, some fifteen miles north of Highway 14 a dozen or so miles west of Sterling.  “Turn right, your destination is 1.5 miles on Road 13.”  Road 13 was a cow trail with some snow filling the two wheel tracks.

     For an instant, I thought the GPS would laugh and say “April Fools.”  Complicating matters, the gas gauge was challenging the quarter mark.  Experience told me it goes from a fourth to empty a lot faster than it goes from full to three quarters.   

     Stopped in the middle of the road, I recalculated.  No way was I going down road 13 in my little light-in-the–rear pickup.  Besides, a grain-handling facility should be visible for miles in this flat land, with tall bins and elevator shafts extending above them.  I had been looking for the last five or six miles.  Nothing to see.

      In pilot training, when you are lost, you contact someone on the radio and “confess”.  You outright admit you don’t know where you are or how to get where you are going.  That’s pretty hard for a pilot, that icon of self-confidence and independence, to admit.

     I called Garren.  “I’m trying to find your facility, but I think I’m on a wild-goose chase.”

     “Where are you?”

     “Road 56 and 13, north of Highway 14.”

     “Oh, did you use GPS?”

     “Yes.”

     “Yeah, that happens.  You’re not the first one to be misled.  Somehow, they take you way out of the way.”

      That was comforting.  Misery loves company.  The grain facility was less than a half mile north of Highway 14.  I was at least 15 miles north of 14.  That quiet little voice of memory (getting quieter every year) seemed to say that Rob, former owner of the place, told me he was “just off Highway 14.”  Had I checked the website, I would have got a lot better directions than from Google or Mapquest.

      “Call me again when you get back to 14,” Garren said.  I did.  About six miles further east on 14 brought me to the River.  “Turn north on Road 15 right after you cross the bridge.”

     I did.  I was there in ten minutes from where I made the first wrong turn off of 14.  Garren took my sample and tested it.  It was dry, 9% moisture.  It weighed ok.  The biggest drawback was the wild buckwheat seed in it.  Hard to get out, he said.  Still, he was quite interested.

     He couldn’t take it until summer.  “May, June at the latest?” I asked.  “I need the bin for wheat harvest, if there is one.”  He thought that might be possible.  He’ll get back to me. 

     That’s never good news.  I’ve waited decades for some folks to get back to me. 

     Speaking of bad news, I decided to get to the now-first priority, having delivered the grain sample.  “How far do I have to go to find a gas station?”

      “Sterling is about 12 miles.  It’s the closest.”

     “How far going west?  How far is Fort Collins?”

       “About 80 miles.”  Can’t make that.  “Briggsdale has a fuel place.”  I might be able to make that. 

     Out I set, deciding to head west rather than go another 25 miles out of my way to fuel up.  At Briggsdale, I saw a truck-fueling place, but it didn’t look like it had gasoline.  The yard wasn’t paved.  It was on the brink of freezing, but it was still pretty muddy.

    I checked the gas gauge.  It was still between one-fourth and empty.  The sign said 17 miles to Ault.  On I went.  It was beginning to snow.  I still had three hours of daylight left if I had to walk.

      I stopped in Ault.  I paid $2.59 per gallon for enough regular gas to get me home.  Mission accomplished, sort of.  I made the trip.  I saw a lot of country new to me.  I did not have to take a walk carrying a gas can.

      Maybe I have a market for my millet.     

Band Concert

       We marched in, the three of us, in red graduation robes we had borrowed for the occasion.  The band was seated on the canvas spread over the center of the high school gymnasium. 

     The key to begin our slow march from the gym doorway to center stage had been an introduction of three VIP college professors, or some other such nonsense.  Part of this was a setup, the band instructor having recruited us to play the role.  We had made a sort of run-through earlier that day during band period. 

     It was the last concert of the year.  The musicians had been to their spring contests.  They had rehearsed and practiced.  They were in peak performance mode.  Being the final performance, a feeling of relaxation and fun replaced the tension of playing before judges with sharp pencils.

    Pomp and Circumstances accompanied our slow step-pause-step entrance.  The song ended before we had reached our place in the percussion section.  Bill and I followed the principal’s lead and continued our slow pace even though the music had ended.

      We took our place among garbage bags filled with inflated balloons, garbage cans with drumsticks and mallets at hand.  We took our time getting the balloons arranged, the hammers close at hand, the garbage cans within reach.

     It wasn’t the first time I had colluded with this band instructor.  On another occasion I played the man-on-the-street (think Don Knots, complete with the nervous shakes to be on camera) selected out of the crowd to accompany a group of singers and players on the piano.  It had to be a simple piece for me to play it, but I did it.

      At another spring concert, three faculty members joined the band in the rhythm section.  I was the “Cymbal-Simon” who had one note to play at the climax of the song, but just couldn’t get it right, until after three or four tries.

      Over the years, I had joined many stage bands, filling in where there was a need or a place, bass guitar, saxophone, rhythm guitar.  No one was particularly surprised to see faculty participation in a concert, particularly the spring concert.

      I think the band played the 1812 Overture.  It called for sounds of war towards the end.  The three faculty members supplied the war noise by popping balloons, hammering garbage cans, etc.  The bass drummer helped out with booms timed much more accurately than our unorganized noise. 

     The script called for us to spread out our balloon popping in order to last through the end of the piece.  But we had planned, the idea of the principal, a little more realistic war noise at the end.  He recruited three track starter pistols, complete with shells that smoke prolifically so the timekeepers can see when the gun fires.

     Our robes provided the perfect camouflage to smuggle in our arms without alerting anyone.  At the right time, we started hammering balloons and garbage cans with abandon.  We popped all the balloons, well ahead of schedule.  At a signal from the principal, Bill and I pulled out our track pistols and all three of us began firing.

      The first crack of a pistol got the band director’s attention, but he caught on quickly and didn’t miss a beat.  Band students, those that could, turned to look at us and the unexpected smoke and noise.

     We ran out of ammunition a bit before the song ended, but it didn’t matter.  We were a big hit with the kids and the audience.  I’m not so sure how big of a hit we were with the band man.

     Unfortunately, I have the opportunity to be reminded of this event far too frequently.  I think of it every time there is a school shooting. 

      What would happen to anyone, let alone a high school principal and two teachers, if they tried to pull a stunt like that now?  Unimaginable. 

      It is easy to say that that was a simpler, more innocent time.  It didn’t seem simple and innocent when we were living it.  Can you imagine a time when what we are going through now will seem simple or innocent?

                       

      

Encounters of the Weird Kind

     It was a Tuesday.  Barbershop day.  Or night.  We usually would meet at 7 p.m.  Four of us were to meet at 6:30 this particular evening.  We were putting together a quartet for Thursday.

     We had to practice, put together a quartet, because our regular baritone retreats to the land of the wiki-wacki every January and doesn’t return until April or May.  Thursday would be February 1.

     Three of us arrived promptly at 6:30.  The fourth guy wasn’t the one we were waiting for.  He was there to attend another meeting.  We were familiar with the other group.  They, too, meet at the same church on Tuesday evening.  They put little yellow arrows on the hallway floor that point the way to their meeting.

      We struck up a conversation with the guy.  He asked us what we were doing there.  Barbershop we told him.  “My brother sings barbershop,” he said.

     Really, where, what’s his name, etc.? We asked.  Missouri, Kansas City, somewhere east of us.  Farrell was the last name.

     Farrell?  The name struck a bell. Any relation to Katie Farrell? I asked. 

     “My mother,” he replied.  Really!  I rummaged through my music and brought out a handwritten arrangement written and arranged by Katie Farrell.  I handed it to the guy.  “Yeah, that’s her.”

      I thought I remembered getting that arrangement in St. Joseph Missouri where the Barbershop Harmony Society used to hold their “Harmony University” for a week every summer on the campus of the college there.  I thought the guy who handed it out said Katie was his stepmother.  I couldn’t remember his name (imagine that) and the guy couldn’t help me clear up my misty recall.

     He was having memory issues of his own.  He couldn’t remember the name of his brother’s world champion quartet.  Actually, his brother Fred has been a member of two world champion quartets, “Second Edition” (gold medal in 1989) and “Crossroads” (2009).

      Fred Farrell’s brother and Katie’s son and not in barbershop?  Here he was in our clutches.  He confessed that he used to sing.   We got him to sing a tag with us, but we didn’t do a very good job.  Rex tried to get him to abandon his scheduled meeting and attend ours.  The best we could do was getting him to say he might attend on another Tuesday evening.

     The City of Loveland endeavors to leverage its name, and its nickname, the Valentine City.  Since the 1940’s, you can send a stamped addressed envelope to Loveland in January and the first two weeks of February and have it postmarked with an official “Loveland” stamp.  (I got one from my sweetie way back in 1969.)

      A local Rotary club sells “hearts” to suitors.  For the month of February, lovers can wear their hearts on the lampposts of Loveland.  You give a Rotarian your brief message and a fee.  They paint the message in white on a red heart and mount it on a light post or some other public place, mostly along Highways 34 and 287 that cross each other in the center of town.  All during the month of February, commuters can view the messages of endearment.

      The Valentine City Chorus, the local affiliate of the Barbershop Harmony Society to which I belong, clings to the shirttails of the romantic tide that flows through the city in February.  We sell singing Valentines.  The problem for us is to get our product in front of the public.  Advertising is expensive.  Singing Valentines are our main source of income these days.

      Solution.  Our illustrious leader who has lived in the area all his life (graduated from Longmont in the 50’s) usually gets us into the Chamber of Commerce on the morning of February 1, the kickoff for the envelope-stamping program.   The news media is there with writers and photographers.  This year, and other years, a Channel 9 camera crew filmed the activities.

      In December, the Chamber of Commerce sponsors a Miss Valentine competition.  Miss Valentine gets to say a few words during the February 1 opening ceremonies.  She then cancels the stamps on the first Valentines with the special Loveland imprint.  The first one this year went to California, the second one to Texas.

     Often the mayor or a City counselor addresses the group.  A quartet (our quartet this year) sings a couple of love songs.  Our spokesman reminds everyone that we sell singing Valentines. Cell phones click, cameras flash, the TV camera rolls.  We hope we make it into the newspapers, maybe even on TV news.   It gets our message out.

     Thursday February 1, we were to be at the Chamber offices by 8:45, in time for the 9 o’clock meeting.  I arose, looked out the window, at the three inches of snow that fell unpredictably. 

      We were to meet at IHOP at 7:30 to rehearse our two songs.  We felt the rehearsal necessary because our regular baritone, as already mentioned, translocates to the Land of Leis every winter.  His substitute is a seasoned veteran of thirty some years, but still, there might be TV cameras there.  No room for error.

     Two of us arrived at 7:30, one at 8:00.  Ted was coming from north of Ft. Collins.  Southbound I-25 was closed by the collision of two trucks, one of which was hauling fuel.  The hazmat folks were hard at work.  Ted arrived at 8:55.

       We watched the proceedings for 15 minutes until our turn.  Things went well.  We even got called back to sing a third number after we did our two regulars.  Normally, we would have gone our separate ways, but we had a funeral to sing for on Monday.

       The family requested “Precious Lord”.  We all needed to brush up on that one. We had never sung it with this combination of guys.  There is more than one arrangement of the song.  Back to IHOP we went.

     We asked for a back room so we could sing.  Five guys at another table were ordering their breakfast as we were seated.  We thought we would wait until they were done before we started singing.  Then, an older couple was seated near us, and a single lady soon followed.

      We couldn’t wait all day.  We thought about relocating to someone’s house or the church where we meet on Tuesday nights.  But the roads were lousy and it would take some time.  Ted had an appointment.  We decided to sing and take our chances of getting evicted.

      We ran “Precious Lord” four or five times, with stops and starts throughout to get it right.  We gave it one final run-through, then moved on to “Lord’s Prayer”, which the chorus was asked to sing for Monday’s funeral.

      The single lady who came in after us was the first to leave.  She stopped by our table.  She had tears in her eyes.  Your first thought is that we did such a bad job singing that it made her cry.  We DID do a bad job some of the time.  But she thanked us.

      She said her husband, 20 years older than she is, was in the hospital waiting for a place in a rehab facility to open up so he could leave the hospital.  She was going through a difficult time in her life.  Our singing had given her a lift and encouragement.  She actually enjoyed her breakfast, she said.

     The older couple exited soon after the single lady.  The older woman went on out to pay the bill.  The old guy, about 5’6” and probably close to 300 pounds stopped by the table. He told us he was an American Indian (he didn’t say Native American), a Ute, he told us when we asked.  He started life in Taos, New Mexico and moved to Timnath with his parents.

       He spent five minutes telling us about his life and giving us a mini sermon.  He had lost a brother recently.  He, too, appreciated our singing, a breakfast concert he called it.  He thanked us for being brave enough to sing songs of faith publicly.  He told us that he used to hate people, until he saw the light.  He told us how important it was to tell people you love that you do love them, to ask for forgiveness while you are still alive, because “when you’re gone, you’re gone.”  It will be too late when you are dead.  

      It wasn’t eleven o’clock in the morning yet.  What a day we had already had.  No one asked us to cease and desist.  We left IHOP without an invitation to do so.           

Snow Blower

      I pulled the rope.  Nothing happened.  So I pulled three or four more times and nothing happened.  I rechecked everything, switch on, choke lever pulled out.  A couple of more pulls convinced me I needed to do something else.

    You know, “insanity, doing the same thing and expecting different results.”  It had always started before.  It started the first time I laid eyes on it in the parking lot of the senior citizens center in Brighton.  Ralph backed his pickup tailgate-to-tailgate to mine.  We both clambered up into the pickup beds.  Ralph grabbed the starter rope, gave it a pull, and the old gal started right up.

       There was a story behind the snow blower.  I forget the details, but somebody gave Ralph the machine because it didn’t run.  Ralph, the ultimate mechanic, tinkered with it and it ran perfectly.  He had bought a new bigger model and had no need for this one.

      I backed the blower out of his pickup, across the tailgates, into mine.  I handed Ralph $25, and I had a snow blower. 

      It started many times after that.  It started the time I took it to Colorado for the ill fated “quilt retreat” when I had to get those lawyer gals to the airport in Denver after a blizzard.  It started fine when we moved to Colorado.  It started just fine after sitting for over a year in the farmyard when I loaded it up and brought it to Loveland.

      It started last spring when I decided the snow season was over and I moved it out of sight in the back yard.  Here came January.  It was the last day of a nice three-day warm spell.  We had to be in Niwot at 1 p.m. 

     I had plenty of time to crank it up and move it back around to the front of the house, hiding in the landscape bushes out of sight from the street.  There it would be ready when the warm spell ended later that night with four to eight inches of snow forecast for Loveland.

      “Doing something different” mainly meant pulling the spark plug and dropping a few drops of gasoline  in the spark plug hole of the Briggs and Stratton engine.  Grabbing the spark plug socket and a filling a syringe with gas  took a few minutes.  Again I pulled the rope.  Nothing.

      A few more pulls and I had “Old Man River” running through my mind:  “Pulling them ropes, getting no rest ‘til the judgment day.”  No more of that insanity.  Again I pulled the spark plug.  This time, I carefully held the spark plug grounded against the aluminum head.  Gingerly, I held the plug wire in my right hand to keep the plug grounded.  I pulled the rope with my left hand.

      Gingerly, because I have substituted for the spark plug sometimes trying this maneuver.  The old magneto can give you a pretty good shock if you provide a more suitable circuit than a faulty spark plug.

      It was a sunny day.  With both hands occupied, I had to lean down to get close enough to see if a spark arced across the plug gap.  Several pulls later, I was pretty sure there was no spark. I saw no arc.  I  heard no snap of electricity jumping a gap.  I was in little danger of getting a shock.

      Checking out the ignition system on a Briggs and Stratton engine requires minor surgery. You have to pull the flywheel off to locate the breaker points.  No time for that.  Niwot awaited.

     I had to admit defeat.  I surrendered my sword by locking the gate I had unlocked before I ever tried to start the engine.  There was my fatal mistake.  By unlocking the gate, I had assumed success in moving the machine to the front yard.  Always a mistake to make such assumptions.  Murphy’s Law, the joy of the  gods thwarting human endeavor, whatever.  It happened again.     

     About seven that evening, we returned from Niwot.  It was still a warm (for January) night.  It would be no trick at all to see a spark now.  I grabbed a wrench, removed the plug, grounded it, gave the rope a good pull, not needing to bend over now to see.  Two or three pulls later and the diagnosis was confirmed:  no spark.

      A week or two later, a warm day came with many other obnoxious jobs I could avoid by spending some time outdoors.  The predicted snowstorm had come, with less than four inches.  It was melting but not gone.

     I lifted up the right wheel of the snow blower and kicked a big garbage bag under it.  During the teardown, some parts inevitably escape and fall to the ground.  It’s easier to hunt for them on a garbage bag than in the slushy snow.  (I managed to lose a screw, even with the precaution.)

     Two cowlings have to be removed on this particular Briggs and Stratton, one covering the fuel system including the carburetor (no air filter on this machine, the cowling serving to protect the air intake from inhaling snow or other impurities in the air).

     The second cowling covers the finned flywheel and holds the recoil starter.  They came off, no problems.  I couldn’t remember exactly how to get the flywheel “nut” off.  I seemed to remember it was left-handed threads.  ( I recalled an incident in ancient history when I had cracked a neighbor’s lawnmower flywheel trying to pull it off with a gear puller, without taking the nut off.)

     Can’t remember?  No problem.  U-Tube to the rescue.  A guy with two fancy flywheel wrenches installed one with levers into the fins of the flywheel to keep it from turning.  The second one slipped over the starter clutch and fit the odd-shaped nut perfectly.  Off came the nut, right handed threads.

     Two big screwdrivers substituted for one of the wrenches.  One screwdriver wedged against the fuel tank.  The other I held with my left hand.  I big old pipe wrench opened wide enough to fit the nut.  With the leverage  of the big pipe wrench, the flywheel nut succumbed easily. 

     I didn’t have a gear puller.  Back to U-Tube.  This time, the guy put a special sleeve over the end of the  crankshaft.  With two chisels between the engine body and the flywheel, he tapped the special sleeve with a hammer.  Off came the flywheel.  “Be careful not to lose the special washer and the key holding the flywheel in place on the crankshaft,” he cautioned.  He put them on the magnetic section of the flywheel so as not to lose them.

       The two big screwdrivers in place, I gave them a gentle pull and the flywheel popped off.  No need to tap the end of the shaft with a hammer.  One more cover to go and I would arrive at the breaker points.

      There they were, in pretty good shape, but not opening very wide.  A piece of emery cloth run between the rocker arm and the base of the points, a little alcohol to clean any oil or debris left over from the shining process, and there was but one thing to do:  gap the points correctly.

     What is correct?  Back to the internet.  Answer: .020”.  On this model, you loosen the screw and clamp holding the condenser.  Slide the condenser one way to widen the gap, the other to close the gap.

     The hard part of that was kneeling down on the garbage bag over the slushy snow while I loosened the screw just enough to let the condenser move.  A gentle tap with a hammer. Woops!  Too much.  The gap is more like .025”.  A few taps first this way then that way, and finally, I was at .020” as checked with the feeler gauge.  Tighten screw, replace flywheel with key in the notches on the flywheel and the crankshaft (can’t get it on wrong if you get the key in there) replace the flywheel nut, tighten securely.

     With the flywheel in place, time to check for spark.  Pull the plug, ground it against the engine head, and turn the engine over by flipping the flywheel fins.  It took a few turns to get enough speed to make a spark, but it worked.  In the sunlight, I saw, and heard, the spark jump.  Things were looking up.

      The two cowlings went back on fairly easy.  On the second pull, the old girl took off.  But there was this terrible screeching noise.  All was not well.  It turned out that the flywheel or the starter recoil clutch was getting rubbed by the flywheel somewhere.

     It took a few tries to get the cowling adjusted, but it happened.  The thing runs again.  I left it in the back yard. 

     It snowed, unexpectedly.  The weather people only said a chance for rain, maybe turning to snow, no accumulation.  I got up Thursday morning, pulled the blind, to see three inches of snow and mounting. 

      I had to be at IHOP by 7:30.  No time to fool with the snow blower.  By the time I returned, the snow was melting, not exactly the best thing for a snow blower.  One more time, I shoveled the walks and the driveway.

      I will get the snow blower around to the front yard, today, maybe.  (Not counting my chickens this time.)  When I do, that will be the end of the snowstorms for this year, Punxsutawney Phil notwithstanding.  Guaranteed.  It’s Murphy’s Law.