Mini Miracles

      Miracles come in different sizes, maybe.

     One of my miracles involves two or three days of work.  The other involves Mother Nature.

 

      It hasn’t been exactly bone dry, but it has been dry, and what moisture we got through the summer came in small and spotty doses. 

      The biggest storm came in August, at fair time.  If there is rain, it is guaranteed to fall at wheat harvest time or fair time.  We were out of town during the fair, on the western slope visiting friends and picking up some delicious peaches.

      It was up to the daughter and the grandchildren to attend the fair.  In her report, the daughter said we got nearly an inch of rain.  “Great,” I thought.  “I will be able to get wheat up and growing.”

     When we arrived at the farm, there were no mud puddles, no standing water to breed mosquitoes, nothing that would indicate we got an inch of rain.  Dust kicked up as we drove down the lane into the yard.

     Digging around in the summer fallow didn’t show much in the way of moisture, either.  The only indication that it had rained could be found in the garden, where in the shade under the leaves of the pumpkin vines and the tomato plants, I could see some damp soil.

      “Was the tube in the rain gauge nearly full?”  I asked. 

      “Yes, point ninety-seven one-hundreths of an inch,” the daughter replied.

      “Not just a tenth of an inch?” I asked.

      “I know how to read a rain gauge.”

       Par for the course, neighbors north and south reported much lesser amounts.  It was another hit and miss storm, and the moisture didn’t last long.

       In September, I determined to ”dust-in” the wheat seed.  Which I did.  And some of it actually came up!  Miracle!

      Unfortunately, most of it looks like this:

 

      North of us a mile or two, the wheat is up and looks great.  That’s farming on the high plains of Eastern Colorado.

 

      The second miracle:  the old 55 John Deere combine.  It has sat five or six years in the shed.  Time to move it.  What to do with it still to be decided.  First, it has to be awakened from its sleep and backed out of the shed.

     Getting it started proved a little difficult.  Day one:  Fill the cooling system with water.   Somehow, I lost the block drain plug.  After a futile search for a replacement, I whittled a small elm twig and jammed it in the drain.  That worked fairly well.

      Next, install a battery.  I took one out of the old tractors, a six volt one.  By that time, it was quitting time for me, which comes a little earlier every year.  It used to be around 7 p.m.  Now, it’s 5 p.m.  Still plenty of daylight, but not so much energy.

       Day two:  I have electricity, but it needs fuel.  A couple of gallons in the gas tank should suffice.  I had trouble getting any up to the carburetor.  The fuel pump has a lever that allows me to manually pump (try to pump) gas from the tank to the carburetor.

      The pump seemed to be working because it filled the glass bowl that forms the top of the fuel pump.  Time to give it a try.

       A few grinds of the starter produced nothing.  The engine was turning over, thankfully.  It wasn’t frozen by rust or other causes. 

       A little shot of gas in the carburetor throat produced one good kick and I thought I was on the road to success.  Then the starter refused to work.

       I removed and cleaned the battery cables.  Still nothing.  I worked on the starter contacts.  It worked for another round or two, and then it went dormant again.

      My work was then interrupted by the need to water trees before we took a little trip home.  It was four or five days later when I returned to the project.  The starter had to come off.  Which it did. 

      I found a gap in the post that goes into the starter windings.  A judicious use of some copper foil filled the gap and created good contact.  It worked perfectly when I hooked it up to a battery before reinstalling it.

      Reinstalled, the starter worked.  The only “fire” I could get from the engine was from the prime gas I put in the throat of the carburetor.  I tried helping the fuel pump by putting air pressure on the gas tank. 

      The air pressure trick requires an air bubble and the fill stem from an old innertube.  I was able to get enough pressure in the gas tank to make the sides of the tank “clink” as they “oil-canned.” 

      I disconnected the gas line going into the carburetor.  No gas.  I removed the fuel line underneath the tank and put air pressure directly on the line.  That sent gasoline flying.  Unfortunately, I was standing on the ground beside the gas tank.  I got a brief shower of gasoline when the line cleared.

       With the gas line back on the fuel tank and still off at the carburetor, I tried the lever on the fuel pump again.  After two or three pumps, gas flowed out of the line.  The old pump was still working. 

      When I reconnected the line into the carburetor and pulled on the fuel pump lever a few times, I could hear the fuel pulsing into the carburetor.  The carburetor got full and the float shut off the pump.

     It took two more tries shooting a little priming gas into the carburetor, and the old gal was running.  In about a half an hour, I had the 55 backed out of the shed.

 

              The shed stood empty for the first time in quite a few years.

       Well, it felt like a miracle to me.

      I contacted Neighbor Jim to see if he needed to get my “new” combine out of his hair, but he said it was okay to leave it where it is over winter.

     I then put the “new” tractor in the shed.  There was room for the other old John Deere combine, the 95, so I put it into the shed as well.

     The problem now:  what to do with the 55?  Sending it to the “knackers” is like sending an old trusty work horse to the glue factory. 

      Maybe I will find a museum interested in keeping it, if not alive, at least in one piece?

     Maybe it will rain.

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

The RIF Policy

 R.A.P.E.D.      S.C.R.E.W.E.D.      S.H.A.F.T.E.D.

 

     Nobody was saying the three words out loud.  But that is what they read as the paper made its way around the table.

 

     It was in the seventies.  Inflation deluged the country.  (Remember President Gerald Ford’s WIN button—Whip Inflation Now?)

     In 1969 when I began my teaching career, teachers were in demand.  A few years later, changes in population had reversed things.  It was difficult to find a teaching job.

     Because of population losses in rural areas, rural schools began to lose students and needed to reduce the size of their faculties.  That was a difficult problem because faculty members were farmers’ wives and local boys who wanted to live in the community where they grew up.  Thus, the RIF policy, Reduction In Force, was a hot topic of the day.

     Randy (the names have been changed to protect the guilty) was a hometown boy.  He was gung-ho teachers’ organization (it wasn’t referred to as a union yet).

      He was good at filling our mailboxes with flyers, often humorous ones.  One example was a cartoon showing a dying teacher, a nonunion member,  with his wife at his bedside.  “Why do you want the NEA members to be your pall bearers?” she asked.  “They have carried me this far.  They just as well carry me the rest of the way,” the dying man utters.

      Randy was the apple of his mother’s eye.  She put on two or three suppers for Randy’s male teacher friends, a group in which I was fortunate enough to be included.  The main fare was rocky mountain oysters along with pork and beans, coleslaw, carrot sticks as well as a dessert of some kind.  Delicious!

     One time we were talking airplanes, it was my flying days, and Randy’s Mom allowed that we should be talking about education instead of flying.  Afterall, we were all teachers.  Randy assured her it was all right to talk about other things, flying in this case.  Then it was all right with her too.  If Randy said it, it was so. 

       Randy did eventually leave his hometown community.  He got his master’s degree in administration and spent a few years as a principal in a mountain town in Colorado.  Apparently, that was not to his liking, because he returned to his hometown and worked as a seed salesman.

      I seem to remember that he applied for principal jobs with the local district, but I don’t think he ever got one.  He may have rejoined the faculty, because I do remember that he was very, very anti-union.  He wanted nothing to do with the NEA.

    The paper that was making its way around the table was also a Randy handout.  Mervin Bird, the grade school principal, had brought it to the school board meeting.  I was the teacher rep who “got” to attend board meetings.  I don’t remember whether my dislike of any kind of meetings was before that or because of that role. 

     I didn’t get to see the copy that board members were looking at.  It was only for those seated at the table.  It took a while, but I figured out what the paper contained.

     Here is a version of the joke, although not the original:

 

RIF Policy  (Reduction In Force)

 

     As a result of the reduction of money budgeted for the Department areas, we are forced to cut our number of personnel.

     Under the new plan, older employees will be asked to accept early retirement, thus permitting the retention of younger people who represent our future plans.

     Therefore, a program to phase out older personnel by the end of the current fiscal year, via retirement, will be placed in effect immediately. The program will be known as R.A.P.E. (Retire Aged Personnel Early).

     Employees who are R.A.P.E.D. will be given the opportunity to look for other employment outside the company. Provided they are being R.A.P.E.D., they can request a review of the employment records before actual retirement takes place. This phase of the operation will be called S.C.R.E.W. (Survey of Capabilities of retired Early Workers).

     All employees who have been R.A.P.E.D. or S.C.R.E.W.E.D. may file an appeal with upper management. This will be called S.H.A.F.T. (Study by Higher Authority Following Termination). Under the terms of the new policies, employees may be R.A.P.E.D. once, S.C.R.E.W.E.D. twice, but may be S.H.A.F.T.E.D. as many times as the company deems appropriate.

 

      Tension in the room was high.  Would hometown boy Randy get into trouble for putting that flyer into every teacher’s mailbox? 

     The last school board member to look at the paper lowered it and looked around.  He had been a teacher, a coach, a principal, and had retired to make a decent living as, you guessed it, an insurance salesman.  He was a pillar of the community who had served in many ways, as a city councilman, and now as a school board member.

       With a smile he asked, “Well, is this our policy?”

      Everybody laughed.  The tension was broken.

      Well, everybody laughed except Mr. Bird.  Mr. Bird’s near-permanent scowl grew more severe.  He was a pipe smoker.  I think he must have held his pipe in the left side of his mouth because when he was really upset, the left side of his mouth retracted as if to join his left ear.  It moved back and forth, almost a half-smile that couldn’t last.

      Mr. Bird had “retired from farming to teach” one of his teachers said of him.  He was a nice man who really was not a good administrator.  Did he suspect he was about to be RIFFED?  Why did he bring that paper to the board meeting?  Wouldn’t it have been better to bury the thing rather than attract attention to one of his recalcitrant teachers that he had failed to control?  Did he expect the board to discipline Randy, since he didn’t have the guts to do it himself?  Would the board censure Randy for using school paper and copy machine to distribute such stuff?

     At this point, the superintendent, who pretty much controlled the meetings, suggested they move on to another agenda item.  And so they did.

      It was my job to report at the Wednesday morning faculty meeting which followed the monthly Tuesday night board meeting.  I always trod carefully on shaky ground, as my principal and boss was always in attendance, at board meetings, too.  I don’t remember if I reported on that incident or not, but of course the word got out.

       If Randy ever suffered anything for his transgression, I never heard.  Both he and Mr. Bird would eventually leave the district, Mr. Bird to retire, and Randy to become an administrator himself.  Neither was subjected to the RIF policy.

     Here endeth another tail from, “It happened in the Teachers’ Lounge.”