Newest (Latest?) Addition

        I had about given up.  I placed the ad in the Miles Saver about five weeks ago.  I got three responses.  Two of them I rejected outright, as what they had to offer was close to junk status.  It would have taken lots of work and hard-to-find parts to get them back to usable.

    The ad said, “Wanted: Miller, Flex King, or Calkins chisel-rodweeder, 40 feet width.”  It ran for two weeks.  The three responses came during the second week.

    I drove about forty miles to a farm where there was both a Flex King and a Calkins.  The Flex King was 50 feet wide, a bit too much.  The Calkins would cut a 36-foot swath, with three 12-foot sections.  It was missing a drive shaft, and the tires were all rotted.  Both machines were semi buried in thirty years of dirt and grass.

      Going for either one of those machines was tempting because they were close, and I could get them from there to here with the 1959 Ford 4 X 4.  But either would have to have at least two new tires before I could move them, and once I got them here, I would have lots of work to get them field ready.

     A week went by.  I got a text from a man who was liquidating his mother’s estate, including a Calkins machine about the same one that I had looked at nearby, along with other machinery.  I asked for pictures.  This one was all above ground and had usable tires.

     The Goodwife and I went to take a look.  It was in fair shape but would take some work before it could go to the field.  The drawback, it was 75 miles from the farm, somewhere south and west of Otis, Colorado.

     I was right loathe to set off that far with the 4 X 4.  It uses quite a bit of gas and there aren’t many filling stations on the way.  It doesn’t have air conditioning.  It’s really hot this summer.

     Dave, the estate liquidator, gave me the name of a neighbor who does quite a bit of trucking when he isn’t farming.  I contacted him but he didn’t want much to do with transporting the thing.  He mentioned over-width permits and/or pilot car.  Moving it would cost as much or more than the machine.

      A week or more went by and I pondered how to move the Calkins.  Then Dave texted again.  His part-time hired man also hauls a lot of scrap iron to smelters in Denver and elsewhere.  He was willing to move the thing. 

      I contacted the hired man and we struck a deal.  It took them a few days to ready the machine for transport.  The wings fold up for transport, but when they hooked the tractor to it and began raising the wings, a hydraulic hose broke.  Once they succeeded in getting the wings up, they decided they should remove the tires from the wings in case they needed a spare tire enroute.

     All obstacles were soon overcome and Dave the scrap iron man took off about 7 a.m. on Thursday.  I went out to remove some fence no longer needed.  I thought 10 o’clock would be the earliest he could get there.  I also thought I would be able to see him arrive, but I didn’t.  He arrived before 10 a.m.

     He had unhooked the Calkins from his pickup and was pulling out of the yard as I approached from the east.  I flashed my lights, but he didn’t see me.  I phoned him and he returned. 

     He had made the trip in three hours.  There was, however, a drawback.  He had lost one of the driveshafts along the way. 

     It took us about an hour to hook up to my tractor, let the wings down, and put the tires back on the wings (he made the trip without a tire failure).  The entire time I was thinking how I would replace that driveshaft, a square shaft with a universal joint on one end.

     We went to the house to do the paper work.  I had to sign a bill of sale for the estate.  I had to write two checks, one for the machine and one for transport.  The Goodwife offered Dave her breakfast of peanut butter on toast topped with fresh peaches.  He took her up on her offer.  He said when he arrived and I wasn’t there, he planned to go to Limon to eat breakfast and then come back to finish the deal.  She saved him a trip to Limon.

      Dave left.  About twenty minutes later, he came back.  “Forget something?” I asked.  Without saying anything, he went to the back of his pickup and pulled out the drive shaft.  He found it at the junction of 28 and 3T, about seven miles from the farm.  One less thing to worry about.

     I have put in a few hours trying to get the Calkins ready to go to the field.  I’m not there yet.  There’s really no rush.  If it doesn’t rain, the weeds don’t grow.

 

     

The Latin Teacher

       We passed by the building, which we have done many times in the past few years.  This time, something stimulated a memory of my time student teaching in that building.

     Perhaps it started when the Goodwife asked about how I knew my way through what to her is an unfamiliar maze of roads and landmarks.  I replied that I had been down that road many a time.  Why?

     Because I did my student teaching there.  Which reminded me that I didn’t do a lot of driving in that experience.  Three of the teachers that taught there lived in Greeley.  Two of them invited me to join their carpool.  Which I did.

      After I drove once or twice, they generously offered to let me off the hook when it came my turn to drive.  After all, they said, they were splitting the duties between the two of them, so it would be no extra cost to have me ride along.  Besides, they said, I was a poverty-stricken  student, and they would be helping me out.

       Which was true.  It might have had something to do with them not wanting to ride in, or be seen in, a doggy old black-and-white ’55 Chevy, too.

      One lady’s husband was a preacher.  I’m not sure why they lived in Greeley.  The other lady’s husband was a student at Colorado State College.  The typical story, wife finding a job within commuting distance to keep the family afloat while hubby works on a degree. 

     The third Greeley resident was a guy who only rode with us once or twice during my nine weeks there.  I don’t remember what he taught, but his duties required  him to  be there early or to stay late, which didn’t work out in a carpooling arrangement.

       As I recalled those days, memories of other faculty members sprang to life.  Two of those faculty folks were a married couple, an old couple.  They were probably in their sixties, ancient in my mind at that time.

      They had to be near the end of their careers, but they were also somewhat victims of the change of retirement systems.  PERA was fairly new and perhaps they didn’t have enough time to qualify for retirement yet.  I don’t really know, but I wonder why they continued to teach if they could have retired.

      I don’t remember what the old gentleman taught.  He was quiet, not terribly outgoing, and seemed content to follow his wife and let her do the interacting with others.  I only saw them in the morning when we all arrived and left coats etc. in the teachers’ lounge.

      One morning early in my tenure there, the old couple came into the lounge and removed their wraps.  The old lady, who was the Latin teacher, proceeded to open her purse and remove a carefully-folded 8 ½ X 11 blue-inked ditto master.

      She moved to the “copy machine”, which in those days was the “spirit duplicator”.  The mere mention of the machine brings to mind the alcohol scented blue-inked pages teachers used to distribute copies to students in those olden days.  (It would be more than a decade before “Xerox machines” would replace the Gestetner ditto duplicator.)

       “What was up with that?” I wondered, as she unfolded the ditto master and clamped it into the drum of the duplicator.  It would take a while, but eventually I got it figured out.  It was in a way a game played by the Latin teacher and her students.

       It seems that the classical teacher would assign her students something to learn every day at the end of the class period, I know not what, but it couldn’t have been a huge assignment.  An assigned spy, some kid who arrived early every day and was there when the teachers arrived, would stand by the door where the old couple entered the building.  He would observe whether she had a ditto master in hand.  If she did, there would be a quiz at the beginning of the class hour.

     The spy would spread the word and the students would hurriedly do their homework  before reporting to class—or make their cheat sheets, perhaps.  Somehow, the old lady caught on to the students’ system.  Thus it was, ditto sheets were borne not in hand, but smuggled into the building in her purse.

      As I reflected on that memory, it occurred to me that teachers in my day were more concerned with students learning than playing gotcha.  Perhaps the well-intentioned Latin teacher should have reacted by carrying a duplicate master in with her every morning, whether it had anything typed on it or not.

     But that is second-guessing.  I, too, found myself having to play gotcha in my day, when students tried to outsmart the system.  I am thinking of one girl who charged $10 for a book report.  She insisted that her customers copy her prose in their own hand.  She sold only one copy so I never got the identical report from two or more students.

       When I switched to multiple choice tests to relace the old book report, I found some enterprising student managed to copy the answers and hand them off to a classmate who happened to be in another section of the same class.  Making cheat sheets for vocabulary tests never went out of vogue.

      In the end, my hat is off to you, old Latin teacher.  I appreciate your effort to defeat human nature!

      

      

Old Phone New Phone

       I got a new phone a couple of weeks ago.  It’s just the third phone I have had since my first cell phone.  Unless you count the smartphone I bought for the Goodwife some four or five years go.  

     She was always complaining that we were out of date, that I didn’t want to try something new.  So I bought her the smart phone. 

     She never figured out how to use it.  She kept going back to her old flip phone.  One evening we dressed up a little to attend an event of some kind, maybe an alumni reunion.  She put the smartphone in her sweater pocket.  There it stayed for months.

      Normally, I could find it by calling it.  But this time, the battery was discharged and it refused to ring.  It lounged in the closet in the sweater pocket for months, until the Goodwife decided to wear that sweater again.  There it was.

     By that time, I had quit paying the bill for the thing. Upon discovering it, I decided if she wasn’t going to use it, maybe I could.  It had one attractive feature for me.  Its driving directions were much better and much more up-to-date than the Magellan (worthless) and the Garmin (somewhat better than worthless) we keep in the car.

      I reupped with Tracfone.  We had to have a new number.  We lost the old one when we quit paying for it.  I used the smartphone when we travel.  It’s handy for finding a motel you can afford or a nice place to eat.

       I really needed to replace the old flip phone.  The smartphone is too bulky to carry when I am working.  Plus, it is subject to breaking when I carry it in a pocket.

     The old flip phone has lost its external speaker.  The environment has to be pretty quiet in order for me to hear it ring.  The hinge on the cover has lost its spring and won’t stay closed.  If there is something besides the phone in my pocket, like my ear plugs, they can find their way between phone screen and cover.  That turns on the light and runs the phone battery down.

    The old phone is so old it doesn’t use the standard charging port.  I had to keep one cord just for that phone.  And one thing I will miss:  the old phone had a charging cradle.  Pop the phone into the cradle correctly and it charges without fumbling around trying to line up port and plug.

      Most of my arguments against having a smartphone have an answer.  There are smartphones that have a cover to keep it from getting broken.  There are smartphones with teeny-tiny screens so they aren’t all that bulky.    

     I held out for an old-fashioned flip phone.  The new one is quite a bit bigger and heavier than the old one.  There are many more features than the old one, too, like a camera, “cloud”, U-Tube, maps, Google, internet, email, FM radio, weather, and other stuff.

     Wait a minute.  This isn’t a smartphone?  It’s certainly smarter than I am. 

     I am making progress in using the new phone.  The old one was a Samsung, the new one a Nokia.  Different systems, different way of doing things.  It takes a few more button punches to get to the phone book, for instance.

     When I changed from my first phone to my second one, the store clerk magically held the two phones head-to-head, said a few voodoo words, and all of the contacts from the old phone magically appeared on the new one.

     This time, the young man who tried to help us couldn’t perform that magic.  He said since my old phone did not have Bluetooth, he couldn’t make the transfer.

     The Goodwife’s old phone did have Bluetooth, but he couldn’t figure out how to make the transfer of contacts form her old phone to her new one (identical to my new one) in one fell swoop.  He showed me how to do it one contact at a time.  So I did it, and it took a little time.  He said his time was worth $30 an hour to make the transfer.  My time wasn’t nearly that valuable, so I did it.

      I had to transfer my contact list one at a time, too.  But I had to type in the names and numbers.  That took a lot of time. 

      The process asked for first name, then last name, then number.  If there was more than one number, I had to punch “Add a Phone”.  After I put in that number, I had to punch “Change Phone Type” and select home, or work, or whatever.

      I discovered that the thing was alphabetizing by first letter of first name.  No, I can’t have that.  I started entering last names in the blank for first names, and the first name where the last name goes.  That didn’t work, either. 

       I go a-hunting (“A hunting I will go”) whenever I have to find someone in my contact list.  I am not sure how it is alphabetized, now.  If all else fails, I start at the beginning and scroll down.  Fortunately, my contact list isn’t that huge. 

     Ah, these time-saving devices.  I have figured out how to set the ringtone (“Nostalgia”—bell sound like an old landline phone) and the volume.  I can hear it now.  And I do know how to answer it.

     Give me a call.