Hop Yard

     “I need a bed and breakfast, and I need a farmer.”

     A brief silence was followed by jeers, cheers, catcalls and lots of laughter.  Almost immediately, the boys at the pub’s main table unanimously nominated one Robert Ward from their midst.  He wasn’t the only farmer at the table.  Quite a few were either farmers or retired farmers.  It turned out that Bob was very recently divorced.  What better candidate to handle such a brazen female?

     The rest of our party, including me, joined the Goodwife in the pub as she explained.  We were Yankees (as if they couldn’t tell from her American accent) touring England, we were tired from a long day of rubbernecking, we needed a place to spend the night, and her husband and brother-in-law wished to visit an English farm.

     The Goodwife and I had gone all over the island via a Brit rail pass, but the tracks don’t go everywhere.  This day we had motored to Stonehenge (Uncle Ricky showed his disdain for things archaeological by referring to it as a big pile of rocks) where we were wretchedly disappointed by being able to get only about thirty yards from the site.  Sightseers are now fenced out due to the ignoramuses who think it necessary to write their name on the stones, or chip off a little piece for their personal collection.  

      It had been a long day and we were looking forward to supper and a place to lay our heads.  We were in a rural rea.  Uncle Ricky and I decided it would be a great idea to visit a farm.  As we pulled up to the pub in the village, Uncle Ricky said to the Goodwife, almost as a dare, “Go in and find us a place to stay tonight and a farm we can visit tomorrow.”

      The Goodwife was up to the dare.  Her explanation to the beery boys completed, we found a table, ordered a brew and eventually a meal.  Robert Ward proved to be up to the task to which his fellows had nominated him.  Our meal nearly complete, he approached our table.  He said the boys had selected the perfect bed and breakfast for us, and he would be happy to give us a tour of his farm on the morrow.

      The perfect bed and breakfast was probably 300 years old, a mile or two from the village.  It was a stone house, a pretty good sized one, two story with an uneven stone stairway.  The most memorable feature was the stone fireplace.  The mantle was probably eight feet long and about five feet off the floor.  The grate was centered beneath the oversized mantle. On each side of the grate was a bench, inside the fireplace, called the master’s chair.  A rack by the grate provided a place for the master to put his feet to warm his toes by the fire.

      Having refreshed ourselves with the bed and our breakfast, we departed the stone house in time to get to Bob Ward’s farm by 10 o’clock.  We found nothing surprising about his machinery except his combine.  It was green and said “John Deere” on it, but it was quite different from our combines.  Bob explained it was made in Germany and was indeed different from those manufactured in America.

   The farm crops were quite diversified, with wheat maturing (a beardless variety, as was most of the wheat we saw in England), a barley crop struggling for life in the drought they were having at the time, and a field of hops. 

      The hops grew on vines that attached themselves to wires supported by tall posts, like telephone poles (a phrase probably doomed to extinction in our wireless age) or light poles.  With the posts, wires and vines, the hop yard looked like a big bird sanctuary.

     The farmer gathers the hop flower and takes it to a dryer.  When sufficiently dry, the farmer can sell the hops to a brewer.  The quality of the hop is determined by the acid content, the better flower having more acid.

     In Bob’s operation, nearly everything was done mechanically, from harvest to transport.  Apparently, the farm had been in the hop business for many years.  He showed us the drying floor where in the old days hops were spread to allow them to dry.  Gas or electricity-fired dryers have replaced the drying floor.

    Bob told us a story about harvest in earlier times.  They would go to London and gather up a load of derelicts two or three days before harvest.  They would feed and house them and let them dry out.

    Harvest consisted of putting men in wagons with high sides.  The men stood on the sides of the wagon and manually plucked the hop flowers from the vines beside them and overhead, dropping them into the wagon below them. 

      When the wagon was loaded, it would head for the barn.  The men would throw the hops up onto the drying floor, the second story of the barn, a lot like the hayloft in American barns.  Other hands spread the hops around the floor, making sure the hop flowers weren’t stacked too deeply so they could dry out and not spoil. 

       Harvest finished, the laborers were paid off.  Some drifted off.  Others accepted a ride back to the city to take up where they left off.

     We saw a lot of amazing things in our three-week tour of England, from museums to castles and cathedrals, but the visit to Bob’s farm was one of the most memorable for us farm boys.  It all began in the pub with that brazen hussy’s provocative announcement.

Books I have Read

      There used to be (maybe still is) a program on National Public Radio called “The Radio Reader”.  A fellow named Dick Estelle from the University of Michigan, I think, would read books in 30-minute installments.  It was a bit like the old radio soap operas where you tuned in the same time every day to keep up with the story.

      When our local NPR station stopped carrying “The Radio Reader”, Dick was a few days into a book, Pompeii by Robert Harris.  The fictional story takes place a day or two before and during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.  I was hooked, but only recently did I check out Pompeii from the local library.

      In the story, the hero is put in charge of the aqueduct that supplies water to Pompeii and other communities.  The old overseer of many years has mysteriously disappeared.  The aqueduct breaks down and the new “Aquarius”, the overseer, has to find the problem.  In the process, he stumbles across corrupt politicians and a scheme by a former slave who has established himself as a power broker and the richest landowner in Pompeii. 

      The former slave bribed the former Aquarius so that his many holdings, including swimming pools and baths, pay little or nothing for their water.  Repairing the aqueduct takes the Aquarius to, you guessed it, Mount Vesuvius.  Having restored the aqueduct to service, he releases his crew and heads for the summit of Mount Vesuvius to try to find the cause of the aqueduct failure.

      He finds in a pit on the summit the weeks-old-dead former Aquarius.  The fumes from the pit nearly do the new Aquarius in.  The fumes do get the assassin hired by the ex-slave to kill the new Aquarius.  The Aquarius is an hour or so down the hill when Vesuvius begins its eruption.  Will he make it?  I don’t know.  I haven’t read that far.  Sorry.

     The book I just finished was a page-turner that was difficult for me to read.  QB VII by Leon Uris has two heroes, the first a Polish doctor who was imprisoned by the Nazis in a concentration camp.  Upon being released from the concentration camp by the Russians, he relocates to England.  He marries and has an infant son when Poland, now under communist rule, tries to extradite him to be tried for war crimes.  He is accused of helping the Nazis carry out medical experiments on Jewish prisoners. 

      Having spent three years in the concentration camp, he now spends two years in a British prison awaiting the results of his extradition hearings.  He maintains the accusations are all a communist plot to do away with everyone who opposed the communists.  When a witness who was sterilized by the Nazis fails to pick the doctor out of a lineup, and when confronted face-to-face with the doctor, the witness maintains that the doctor wasn’t the man who castrated him, the good doctor is finally released from prison, extradition denied.

    The doctor takes his wife and two-year-old son he has never seen and heads for deepest, darkest Borneo where he can practice medicine out of the limelight and underneath the radar of the Nazi hunters.  There he manages to discredit the witch doctor and convert the natives to modern medicine and modern sanitation methods. 

     His son is not interested in medicine at all, but the son of a Scotsman also living in the jungle, is interested and attaches himself to the doctor, becoming an adopted son and apprentice.  The doctor rises in the ranks, becomes the head of all the jungle hospitals and medicine in general in the area.  Eventually he is knighted for his work.  He returns to England with the adopted son while his own son moves to America to complete his education.  The adopted son attends medical school in England.

      The second protagonist is a Jewish kid in America.  He and his older brother hang out at an airport near their home.  The brother learns to fly and joins a foreign air force (not sure which one) when World War II breaks out and American is not involved.  The younger brother also learns to fly, but is too young to fight.  He leans towards journalism, writing. 

      The older brother is killed in combat.  The younger brother bides his time until he is old enough to join the army.  He becomes a fighter pilot and is badly wounded in combat.  He is temporarily blinded.  He is befriended by a British lass and they fall in love.  She disappears when the bandages come off his eyes, thinking he will find her ugly.

     The writer’s friend, also his publisher, arranges for a “blind date” to help the writer forget his lost girl.  Of course, the blind date is the missing girlfriend.  They get married and have a son and daughter, but they don’t live happily ever after.  The British lass isn’t happy away from her England home, even though they live in some luxury near Hollywood where the writer makes a good living prostituting himself to the movie industry.

      Goaded by his friend and publisher, the writer decides to write the good work he is capable of.  To do so, he must forsake Hollywood.  His chosen subject, the Holocaust, becomes the title of his book.

   The two stories come together when the doctor’s adopted son and understudy reads the book and finds a paragraph, only one paragraph, where the writer accuses the doctor, by name, of collaborating with the Nazis on medical experiments on Jewish victims, specifically, sterilizing them.  The adopted son confronts the doctor who denies the charge.  The adopted son convinces him he shouldn’t put up with the false accusation.

      The doctor sues the writer for libel.  The trial takes up the second half of the book.  It is conducted by the most famous lawyers in London.  The writer’s lawyers dig up many former concentration camp victims.  They are hard to find because most of them, having discovered after their release from their prisons that their families are all dead, they have moved to a new country and have changed their names in an attempt to  forget the past and start a new life.  It is very painful for them to dredge up the past and to recall what they have tried to forget.

     Another difficulty in reading the story is the knowledge that one of our heroes will lose.  In the end, there are no winners.  The jury finds in favor of the doctor, but in light of some very damaging testimony, they award him one half penny in damages.   The writer’s son, a pilot in the Israeli air force is shot down and killed in the six-day war shortly after the trial ends.

     So why did I read that book?  Leon Uris has a way of making you understand someone else’s point of view. The best example of that would be Trinity, a book about Northern Ireland and the conflict between protestant and Catholic.  I never understood the Irish Republican Army and its tactics until I read that book.

     QB VII gives you another look at the Nazis, the Nazi hunters, and the post-World War II era.  It will take tour mind off your own troubles.   

Load of Hay

     I opened the hood on the blue Ford pickup.  The tractor driver turned his machine my way, but I waved him off.  The snow blew in wisps around my feet in the millet stubble.

    It was another Uncle Ricky adventure. His father-in-law needed hay for his cattle.  Ricky arranged with Ed to get a load of bales on that weekend.  It was Sunday afternoon and we were about out of weekend.  The weather was rotten.

     It had snowed earlier.  The snowfall was done, but the wind and the drifting wasn’t.  The hay bales were still in the field.  They were in bunches where the bale sled had dumped them, six to a bunch.

     Ed had a Case tractor with a frontend loader equipped with a hayfork.  We had removed he grain sides from the old Chevy truck.  With its tandem axle, it wasn’t very mobile in the stubble field with small drifts of snow. 

     Ed’s tractor could easily handle one of the stacks of six bales, two stacks if conditions were right, but conditions weren’t right.  The bottom three bales of many of the stacks were frozen to the ground.  The tractor had trouble freeing the stack without destroying the bottom bales.  The tractor would deliver the bales to the truck where three or four of us would stack them on the truck. 

       It seems nothing went right.  We restacked more than once to get the load distributed evenly on the truck bed.  The nasty north wind made sure we got faces and eyes full of snow, dirt, and millet hay.  Since the truck couldn’t move very well, the tractor had to haul the bales farther as the loading progressed.  In the back of our minds was the thought that if Mother Nature turned on the snow spigot, it would really get nasty.  We were quite vulnerable out in the middle of the hay field on the flat old plain.

     Getting the truck loaded was the last thingto do on our weekend, and we decided to leave for home directly from the hayfield when the loading was accomplished.  We had driven our Ford pickup to the field with the truck.  Another car sat beside the pickup.

      The loading took probably twice as long as it would have in fairer weather.  But eventually we had the eleven or twelve layers of bales on the twenty-one foot bed.  Ropes had been webbed over the load and secured.  But the poor old truck wouldn’t move. 

     Ed chained the tractor to the front end of the truck and tugged it along to the field edge where the truck could get enough traction to move itself.  The truck moved onto the county road where it had a fifty-mile journey to get the bales to their destination.  It was getting late.  Uncle Ricky had to deliver the bales and return to Nebraska.  I didn’t envy him his journeys. It would probably be early Monday morning before he got home.

      The rest of us returned to our vehicles.  The car took off and exited the hayfield.  I tried to start the Ford pickup.  It wouldn’t start.

      Ed was beginning to load his own truck with bales for his own cattle.  Once more out in the biting wind, I popped open the hood.  I had been down this road before.  Moisture would build up inside the distributor cap and short out the ignition.

      When Ed turned to come to my rescue, I waved him off.  I was pretty sure I could handle this problem.  I popped off the distributor cap, which on the 390 engine was on the front left, very accessible.  With a dry rag, I wiped out the beads of moisture and replaced the cap.  I knew better than to close the hood before the engine was running.

     This time when I hit the starter, the engine took off.  I closed the hood and we were off, over the drifting, wisping snow in the millet stubble, down the path to the county road, over the county road to the paved state highway. 

    We reached I-70 without further incident.  I thought about Uncle Ricky and his trip.  I thought about Ed in the hayfield now alone loading his own truck.  Not much good thinking about what you have no control over.  About fifteen miles east on I-70, we ran out of the ground blizzard.  We fought the north wind for the entire 170 miles, but the wind didn’t seem so threatening without the snow.       

     We reached home safely and reported to work Monday morning as usual.  The weekend adventure didn’t do a thing to improve my opinion of hay handling.      

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.