The Blizzard of ‘21

       “Wolf!  Wolf!

      It would be here on Wednesday evening, “they” said. 

     But Wednesday evening came, and nothing.

     Then “they” said it would be here on Thursday.  Thursday evening, nada.

     On Friday evening, it really did come, in the form of drizzle and mist.  “It” was to be two to four feet of snow.  As of Friday, I was still betting on two to four inches.

      In the story of Worthless William, the little boy who cried “Wolf!”  To break the boredom of keeping sheep on a hillside near a forest, WW decided to yell “wolf” just to get a little company, someone other than the sheep. 

     The first two cries caused the citizens of the village below to drop whatever they were doing, grab cudgels and stones (no second amendment in this story) and head up the hill to protect the sheep from a marauding wolf.  When they got there, they found nothing but Worthless and his sheep.

      Then one day, the wolf really did come.  “Wolf!  Wolf!  W-O-U-LF!”  This time, the villagers really did NOT come.  In some scarier versions of the story, the big bad wolf eschewed mutton and took Worthless William out for dinner.

       Saturday, the rain continued with a few fat flakes falling, hitting, melting.  By dark, some accumulation began to gather. 

     Sunday morning greeted us with more than my predicted four inches.  As I looked out the window, I said, “The wolf really did come.”

      The snowblower started all right.  It was no match for the heavy wet snow.  I went forty or fifty feet and might have kept battling for a while, except the clutch linkage, a bailing wire fix, gave up and so did I.  I used Vice Grips to put the machine in reverse and back it out of the way.

       The snow shovel wasn’t an answer either.  The stuff was heavy and wet.  And with the wind picking up, it was filling in as fast as I could shovel.

      We have snowbirds for neighbors.  Before departing for Florida, Ken bought a powerful two-stage blower and gave it to a neighbor with the understanding that the neighbor would keep Ken's walks clean all winter. 

     The neighbor was out and blew his way to my drive.  I told him not to bother with the drive.  Just get the sidewalk to the post boxes clean, which he did.  The walk would get cleaned two or three more times by Monday noon, once more by snowblower and again a time or two with shovels.

       I retired to the safety of indoors and read the Sunday paper on line.  No way would the newspaper carrier be able to navigate the streets.

 

  Trail to post boxes.  “Trees” are normally six feet or higher.

       On Monday, I repaired the clutch linkage on my blower and tried it again, but the wet snow plugged up the chute.  The helpful neighbor came by again and cleared a path to the front door and in front of the garage doors.  I told him to help the two ladies at the far end of the cul de sac, one of whom who was supposed to get to work.  She didn’t make it.  Nobody did.

      “Tis an ill wind that blows no good,” the saying is.  Everybody in the cul de sac was out shoveling, snowblowing, talking to each other, helping each other.  That’s the first time that has happened in the six years we have lived here.

 

     

     On Tuesday, I attacked the driveway again with the snowblower.  It worked pretty well while it was still below freezing.  The frozen snow was powdery enough to blow without plugging the chute.  When the temperature warmed up, I started plugging up.

      I wasn’t quite done, so I shoveled for a while.  But then, I grew weary, and I had to get to a quartet practice.  One of the guys agreed to pick me up which solved my problem and another one.  The guy who hosted our practice at his house only had room to park one car.

      Ted was able to turn around in the cul de sac with a few backs and forwards.  I waded out to his car and away we went.

      When we came back, he was able to pull into our driveway.  Someone had cleared a ten foot path from where I had quit at the end of my drive, out into the center of the cul de sac.  I could get out now.

 

     I made another discovery after Ted left me.  The door was locked.  I had no key and no garage door opener.  I was locked out.  No problem.

      I rang the doorbell.  Twice.  A third time.  No answer.  Looking in, I could see lights all off.  Had the Goodwife taken advantage of the newly-cleared pathway and gone shopping somewhere?

      No problem.  Call her cell phone.  No answer.  Call again.  No answer.  Ring the doorbell again.  No response.

      There is a key outside.  In the back yard.  I had to slug all along the house in the deep snow.  As I passed the garage, I peered in to see the car still parked there.  Uh oh.  I began to panic a bit.

Pathway to the backyard.

       Fortunately, I left the snow shovel just outside the front door.  With the shovel, I dug enough to free the latched gate.  I managed to get the gate open wide enough for me to sneak through.  I slugged through the drifts to the shed where the key is hidden.

      Back I went as fast as I could.  I was just ready to insert the key into the door when the Goodwife appeared at the window.  She unlocked the door and I was in.

     “Thank God you’re alive!  Why the heck didn’t you answer the door?  Or your phone?”

      She was in the basement, couldn’t hear the doorbell, the phone in the bedroom, couldn’t hear it either.

       Enough excitement for Tuesday.  As we stood there by the door, a road grader and a frontend loader tractor came and shoved some snow out of the cul de sac.  The loader picked up the snow the grader bladed up and dumped it in a pile on the corners where the cul de sac borders the street.  The piles blocked the sidewalk a bit, and some of the grader’s windrow blocked the path someone (Neighbor Tom it turns out) had cleared from my drive to the center of the cul de sac.

       I finished my day out of doors by shoveling the windrow into two piles and my way was clear again.  We were back to some semblance of normal after the blizzard of ’21.  Icy streets will be around for a week or so.  Snow piles will last longer.  Some of them are huge.

       I am reminded of a snowy cold winter in Kansas, where for entertainment, a group of energetic citizens started a pool to see who could accurately predict how long the huge pile of snow in the center of the street in front of the courthouse would take to completely melt.

       You paid your dollar and entered a day, month, hour, and minute the pile would be gone.  For a while the judges selected to determine a complete melt down, met once a week, then once a day, and finally, they stood around on a warm sunny afternoon and determined when there was only water left.

       The contest wasn’t as close as one might expect, as the snow lasted quite a lot longer than most guesses.  It might be fun to do something like that this year, say in King Soopers’ parking lot.      

       Some people didn’t have enough to keep them busy in the storm's aftermath.  

 

 

         Like a decked, stunned prize fighter, the bushes struggle to rise up after the severe blow.   

                                     

                                                  

     Time will pass.  In years to come, will folks remember the one-two punch of a year of COVID followed by the blizzard of ’21?     

 

Abraham Was Black?

      “Abraham was the father of the white race.” 

     I wouldn’t know it for another 23 hours, but I had just made one of the most controversial statements of my career. 

     A day later, I would hear from one of my students, a girl who hardly ever said anything.  At the beginning of the class hour, she blurted out, “My mom says you are full of. . .”  She stopped appropriately for the classroom of those days, but everyone knew how to fill in the blank.

       I was amused.  I knew her mom rather well.  I had  had her in class.  Her grandmother was an accomplished pianist who accompanied lots and lots of singing groups, including some at school.  I wasn’t insulted.  After all, my comment was rather in jest, not a dogmatic statement.

       Without hesitancy, everyone in class chipped in.  “Yeah, my folks said they didn’t think you’re right.”  Similar comments came from every corner of the room.  It ended with the preacher’s kid.

      “My dad says that the Bible doesn’t actually say that.  Abraham was probably white.”

      “ Then Terah would be the father of the white race.  Abraham was black.  Isaac was the first white man,” I countered, still half jesting, as my original comments a day earlier had been.

       Objections followed and I laughed.  I admitted that none of those things I had said were my idea, but ideas that had been circulated for many years by some who knew a lot more about the Bible than I did.

       We moved on, but I don’t remember what we were working on.  I  just remember that the question a day earlier came out of the blue and had nothing whatsoever to do with what we doing in class.

      The amazing thing was that everyone was listening.  In day-to-day classroom work, the enemy is boredom, ennui, lack of participation, lack of involvement.  To think that they were not only listening, but actually took it home.

         “What did you do at school today?”

       “Oh, nothing.”  No.  Instead,  “The nutty teacher said Adam and Eve were black, that Abraham was the father of the white race.”  I had to laugh.  Delightedly.

        Ashton, we’ll call her, caused the whole thing.  She was a blond, fair, student who, I came to find out wasn’t disinterested.  Just quiet, maybe.  Her question came out of nowhere.  It was uttered seemingly without cause.

     “Where did black people come from?” she asked.  The question had nothing to do with anything we were working on.

 

      Now in those days, there was a guru named Madeline Hunter.  She was beloved by many a principal and superintendent.  She provided a yardstick to actually gauge teacher effectiveness.  She made a principal’s dreaded job of evaluating his charges a little easier.

      She objectified an otherwise subjective job.  A principal could take a checklist of characteristics with him to observe a teacher at work.  He could fill it out and share it with the teacher in the required evaluation conference.  She could even make suggestions of how to improve.  Quite a difference from my evaluations in the early days of my career.

     A major problem with disciples of Madeline Hunter was that the administrator used that yardstick for purposes other than measuring, purposes that the schoolmaster of old may have used a yardstick for.  Like whapping his charges over the head with it.  Some principals were unable to practice what they preached.  They failed to dignify teacher’s actions when they fell short of the glory of Madeline.

      Madeline Hunter made a career of studying successful teachers.  She sought out those teachers who were successful, who were acclaimed by students, principals, and parents, whose students did well on SAT and ACT tests.  She visited their classrooms, sat in with their individual student conferences, observed their dealing with parents. 

     Then she drew up some characteristics that all these successful teachers demonstrated.  And less successful teachers failed to demonstrate.

 

     It came to pass that Madeline Hunter left her home in fertile California to sojourn in the heart of the Great American Desert for a night and a day, in Colby, Kansas.  And many of the pedagogues of Northwest Kansas gathered on an artificial hillside known as the basketball court of the Colby Community Building to listen to the great teacher of teachers.

     For six hours, three hours before lunch and three hours after lunch (I don’t remember what was for lunch, but it wasn’t fish and loaves) she dwelt on the subject of “Dignifying a Wrong Answer.”

     One of the things good teachers do is establish a personal relationship with their charges.  Jesus and Socrates come to mind. 

      Maintaining a good relationship prohibits embarrassing a student, especially in front of her peers.  So, when a wrong answer appears, you must handle it, without ignoring it, with a response that will allow the incorrect answerer to retain his dignity.

     It’s a form of “Jeopardy.”  When the wrong answer appears, you say something like, “Oh, you must be thinking of . . . .”  Then you supply a question for which the wrong answer is the RIGHT answer! 

      In the last section of her six hour presentation, Madeline answered written questions submitted by teachers, many who had felt the sting of the Madeline Hunter yardstick on their hides.  One question that appeared more than once dealt with the subject of “time-on-task.”  Madeline observed that good teachers spent a lot of their allotted class time engaged with students during the class “period.” 

       So some administrative disciples would actually set a stopwatch to see how long a teacher spent working with students during the class hour.  It meant a teacher needed to be still trying to engage students on a subject at the end of a long hour.  No time to just relax and visit with students.

      Well, Madeline set them straight.  When you’re done, you’re done, she said, in answer to a question she read from a small slip of paper.  No use whipping a dead horse.  She also said that some days, when the students can’t settle down and get to work, you might just as well pack it in and try again tomorrow.  I don’t think the ones who needed to listen to that actually listened to that.

       And now I must say that I was fortunate never to have to work under that kind of pressure or stress.  My principals were all good, as far as I was concerned.  But, we did have some in our system. . . .

       Anyway, we had had six hours of strategies to handle wrong answers from the great lady.  So when Ashton supplied not an incorrect answer, but a totally non sequitur question, my training kicked in.  Not for nothing did I spend six hours on the manufactured hillside attending the great pedagogical guru.

       “Where did black people come from?’

      “Adam and Eve were black.  Abraham was the father of the white race.”

      The question wasn’t where did black people come from.  The question was, where did the mutation known as Isaac come from!

      It wasn’t the first time I made controversial statements, even ridiculous ones, just to see if anyone was listening.  It wouldn’t be the last time either.

     It was the only time I got such a universal and unanimous reaction.

Faucets

     The house was cold when I walked in, 47 degrees.  It was 55 outside.

     I disarmed the security system and glanced around.  Everything seemed in order.  No need to go downstairs for the usual chores of turning on the water heater and turning off the cameras.  I wouldn’t be there long enough to worry about either.

     Next step, check the water.  Nothing at the kitchen faucet.  I was a little surprised.  It was only a week or so since I last checked in.  Probably a dripping faucet or something.

      I grabbed the keys and unlocked the shop.  Then I turned on the pressure pump.  On my way back to the house, I stepped in the shop to turn on the well pump.  I walked back to the house.  I didn’t run.  I probably should have. 

      When I opened the porch door, there was water on the floor in front of me.  There was the ominous hiss coming from the corner beside the washing machine.  (A hiss must be a universal danger signal that puts us mammals into fight or flight mode.) 

      It wasn’t just a broken hose I saw.  There was an open pipe, no shutoff, nothing.  The only way to stop it was to go downstairs and shut off the main valve.  Through the kitchen door, across the kitchen, through the cellar door, down the stairs, around the stairway and to the southeast corner I went as fast as I safely could.

     With the main valve shut off, I grabbed a mop and went back to the porch.  Well, it wasn’t exactly an open pipe that I saw.  There was a piece of brass still attached to the galvanized iron pipe.  I could see threads where the rest of the shutoff valve should have been.

      But where was the rest of the valve?  And how on earth did it get unthreaded from the adapter still fastened to the galvanized pipe?

     The rest of the valved was still attached to the washing machine hose.  It didn’t take long to answer that question.  How did it come loose?  It took a while to answer that one.

     A couple of trips to the garage and then my pickup got the right tools.  I removed the brass fitting from the pipe.  I took the valve off the washing machine hose.  I began the process of putting the two parts of the valve together.

      Then I saw it.  There was a big crack in the bottom of the valve body, the piece attached to the washing machine hose.  It must have frozen.  The ice split the valve body.  When it got warm enough to thaw out, the water pressure must have blown the valve body apart.

     That brought on a few more questions.  I had been there since the great freeze.  It was a warm day when I was there.  It wasn’t leaking then.  I had used the water and even run the pressure pump up to its maximum of fifty-some pounds.  Why had it had a delayed reaction?  The pump was off as usual when no one is there.

      Oh well.  Ours is not to reason why.  I set about repairing the damage.  A half inch plug would stop the leak so I could turn on the water again.  I thought about making a run to town for a new valve.  Then I realized that there were three valves in the cluster that supplied water to the washing machine, a spare one in case someone need to attach a garden hose. 

       I took off the spare and put it where the damaged one had been.  I put the plug where the spare valve had been.  As common sense began to take over after the panic, I realized I would not have had to make the change of valve and plug.  I could have simply put the washing machine hose on the valve where it was.  Oh well.  I had already done the work.  No need to redo it. 

      I turned on the water and checked for leaks.  All was well.  Now the process of bleeding pipes.  Loss of water pressure usually means a lot of flushing to get the air out of the pipes, and then a lot of faucet screen cleaning because the old iron pipes have a certain degree of rust and even some sand in them. 

     When a faucet is turned on, the air escapes not with a whimper, but with bang.  The bang jars stuff loose inside the pipes. 

       I started the process in the upstairs bathroom.  Air likes to go up, I think.  When I opened the lavatory cold water faucet, I got the usual boom and pop, some rust, and some sand.  But then it wouldn’t shut off entirely.  There was a prodigious drip I could not stop.

       Of course, there are no stops under the lavatory counter.  Back down two flights of stairs to shut off the main valve again.  I thought the problem with the lavatory faucet was the friction between stem and stem body made it difficult to turn all the way off.  I had been having some problems with it last fall.

      As I was in the process of greasing the valve stem, I noticed the screw holding the faucet washer to the stem was loose, so loose it wouldn’t let the seat washer close on the seat.  The screw head hit the seat and stopped the washer from going all the way down.

     That problem was easily solved with a screw driver, which was handy since I had to have it to take the  handle off the valve stem.  I reassembled the faucet and took the two flights of stairs down to turn on the water.  Then back up the stairs to check for leaks.

     Aha!  There were none.  The faucet now shut off and held, no drips. 

     I cleaned up and put away the tools.  The rest of my trip was routine.  Check this, check that.  Everything seemed ok. 

      Home again, I thought about being able to solve the plumbing problems in an hour or less.  Actually, I was a bit proud of myself for the day’s work.  Then I drew some water from the kitchen sink at home.  Dang!  It takes special attention to get it to shut off and not drip.

      That wasn’t a new discovery, either.  It has been that way since Christmas.  I just never get around to doing anything about it.  Well, ok.  I did have a hip replacement and carpal tunnel surgery.  I gave myself a little break.

      But the aggravation didn’t go away.  This kitchen faucet has only been in a little over two years, and this will be the second time I have had to operate on it. 

      I had a Franke faucet there, one where the main head is on a hose that comes out of the faucet spout and can be used either as spray or stream.  It leaked where the handheld part connected to the hose.  The water dripped down underneath the sink and made a mess. 

     Try as I might, I could find no repair part for a Franke faucet.  I checked with Lowes who sell the Franke brand.  Nothing.  I went to Ace Hardware.  The helpful Ace guy referred me to a local plumbing shop.  I could buy hose, spout and all for $150 or something ridiculous.

     So I bought a Delta faucet, thinking I would be able to buy parts.  Which I can, but I thought I might get a little more than a year or two out of it before I had to buy parts.

      I'll get to the kitchen faucet one of these days.

      And so it goes.