Vernor L. Peterson

     His name was Vernor L. Peterson, but no one ever called him anything but Pete.  To us, he was Uncle Pete.

     I learned early on that he didn’t care too much for kids.  He and Aunt Lizzie had no kids, and I think for the most part, they were happy about that.  I remember a conversation between Pete and my mother where she was encouraging him to have children.  Pete said soto voce with a devilish smile, “But Annabel, I’m trying, I’m trying!”

     Nevertheless, we were always happy to have Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Pete visit, which they did every year or two.  Considering that they usually drove from California where they lived in a suburb of San Francisco, Redwood City, their visits were fairly frequent.  Grandma Thistlewood was still going, so Lizzie liked to call on her as often as she could.

     I remember a couple of visits when they were driving a new, at least on the 1957 visit, Ford.  Beside the fact that it was new, it seemed remarkable because it had seat belts! 

      In another visit, they drove a Karmann Ghia with the name “Pete” printed on the left side of the “trunk”, probably the engine hood on that outfit, and “Liz” on the right side.  In retrospect, that couldn’t have been a very comfortable trip.

     Pete was a pilot and he always talked of flying into Stapleton and renting a “small bird” as he called it and flying to Limon.  That excited me since I was fascinated by flying and airplanes., but that trip never happened.

     Pete was a WWII veteran, and I think it was in the service that he and Aunt Lizzie met.  She was in the WACS, I think.  Somewhere we have separate pictures of Pete and Lizzie in military flight caps.  I’m not sure what role Pete played.  I don’t think he was a pilot.

     I do remember a slide show once when we went to Denver to visit them at the Olson household.  I can’t remember much about the slide show because as I often do when things are on the big screen, I went to sleep.  But I do remember one of the slides was a picture of Pete standing by the open door of some kind of military airplane in flight.

    Pete worked at the Hiller Helicopter factory.  He was very handy, knowing a lot about electronics.  I remember him working on our television.  He bravely, in my view, took the back off and started meddling around with wires and tubes.  When he replaced the back, the TV worked great.

     I remember him telling Dad that whenever you were digging around among the tubes and wires, always keep one hand in your hip pocket.  That way, if you did run into 110 volts, it wouldn’t  cross your heart and kill you, maybe. 

     Pete looked askance at any of us who used a pair of pliers on a nut or bolt head.  “Anyone who used a pair of pliers on a nut at Hiller Helicopter would get fired,” he declared.  Well, nobody got fired at the farm.

     Pete was a great jokester, both the teller of jokes and a practical joker.  One of the jokes he told was of a Native American who came home from a hitch in the navy with a bad case of dysentery.  Things hadn’t changed much on the reservation and in the middle of the night when the young man had to visit the outhouse, he had a bad accident due to being unable to see in the dark.  Having been an electrician in the navy, he headed to town the next morning and bought the supplies to bring power to the outhouse.  He installed a light therein.  Thus, he became the first Navajo to wire a head for a reservation.

    That joke is dated, as no one now wires anything.  Cell phones for that job.

    Pete had a favorite liquor store that had jokes on cards, cartoon-like.  I remember two, one showing a deer hunter squatting beside a bush with his pants down around his ankles.  He was squeezing and trying to get  his business done.  On the other side of the bushes was another hunter on full alert.  The caption read, “Shh!  I thought I heard a buck snort!”

     Another one was in four panels.  In the first one, a guy is sitting in a chair holding a newspaper, with alarm and disgust on his face.  His big dog has his leg raised on the front of the couch.  In the next panel he is leading the dog to the park.  In the third panel, the guy, with his back to the viewer, is obviously urinating on a tree in the park. He is gesturing to the dog, this is where you do it.  In the last panel, the guy is once again in his chair with all kinds of alarm on his face.  The dog is standing upright on his back legs, like a man, taking a leak on the couch. 

     On the practical joke side, Pete had a sort of arrow with a U-like wire separating the tip from the feathered end of the shaft.  He could put the U on his body or head and it looked like he was impaled with an arrow.

     Many times, we kids were called on to assist him with his practical joke.  I remember one time when he wanted an old, short pencil that was dispensable.  He cut it in two and used adhesive tape, the white kind in the medicine cabinet, to wrap the cut ends.  He got the thickness of the tape just right so that he could stick the taped ends into his ears and keep them there.  It looked like he had a pencil sticking through his head.   

     Another time we assisted him, he asked for a piece of cotton.  He wetted it and tucked it out of sight into the joint of his little finger on his right hand.  He picked on a kid who wasn’t privy to the cotton wad.  He used the first two fingers of his right hand to be a bunny rabbit looking for something.  He crawled up the thumb of the unsuspecting victim, then the index finger, and on, always looking for something but never finding it until it came to the tip of the pinkie.  At that point, he squeezed the cotton wad and heaved a sigh of relief.  The water trickled down the poor kid’s hand and Pete exclaimed that that was what the little bunny was looking for!

    One of the reasons Pete liked to come to Colorado was what he called “Colorado Kool Aid,” a bottle or can of Coors beer.  In those days, Coors was pretty much confined to the state of Colorado.

    I suppose today, Pete would be classified as an alcoholic.  He would drink beer all afternoon and have a Seagram’s 7 & 7 in the evening and never show any signs of inebriation.  In Pete’s defense, it was his vacation when we saw him.

     The last time I saw Pete, we stopped in San Francisco on our way back from visiting Mother-in-Law in Hawaii.  He and Lizzie both had to go to work during the day.  He insisted we drive his brand-new Oldsmobile to do the tourist thing in San Francisco.  I really tried to resist, but I lost.

      I wanted to go ride the street cars around town, but they were out of the service at that time, so we drove around town trying to follow the sea gull signs that marked the tourist routes.  I was terrified that I would put a dent in his new car.  I didn’t, but it wasn’t a whole lot of fun for me.  It included a wrong turn and a trip across the bay to visit Oakland.

     Pete had a bout with colon cancer.  I don’t think he ever fully recovered from that.  His flying and travelling days were over.  We never saw him again.

     I had a lot of “favorite” uncles, and Pete certainly was one.

Three Minutes of . . .

     Was it ecstasy?

      Or was it excruciating pain?

     It was a funeral, or the  more politically correct, Memorial.  I didn’t know the lady well.  She was the wife of one of the older barbershoppers.  I had met her.  After the twenty-five minute eulogy delivered by a granddaughter, I realized I didn’t know her at all.

    She was a music lover, a dedicated member of the local Sweet Adelines chapter.  She planned her own memorial, so it was filled with music.  The ceremony began with “I Believe” sung by her husband’s quartet recorded many years ago.

     That was followed by the church choir singing “Precious Lord.”  Then came the local Sweet Adelines chapter with “What a Wonderful World.”  A quartet from that group sang “Chord Buster’s March”.

     After the pastor’s brief message, a lady from the church choir sang solo, a capella, “His Eye is On the Sparrow.”  Then the granddaughter was up with her eulogy.

     I saw that the last thing on the program was “Jerusalem”, but I never thought any more about that than I had any of the other songs on the program.  The choir director and the young man accompanying him, the same one who played for the church choir, took the stage.

     By this time, we were past one hour for the service.  I was ready for a break.  Our electronics age has conditioned us to expect a new activity every few seconds, and while there had been a good variety, I was ready for it to come to a close.

     The pianist lit into the accompaniment and the soloist sang:

 

Last night as I lay a-sleeping

There came a dream so fair

I stood in old Jerusalem

Beside the temple there . . .

 

     I suspect my hackles arose.  I closed my eyes to stop the tears.  I come from the generation where it’s unmanly to shed tears.

     When I closed my eyes, I immediately had a mental picture.  I saw my mother at the piano.  My dad stood there with a 3 x 5 note card in his hand that he always used when he sang that song because he couldn’t depend  on his memory to get all the words.

     I was taken back 60-70(?) years.  The pianist flawlessly played the catchy lefthand runs throughout the song. 

     The vocalist wasn’t exactly Dad’s voice, but the piano accompaniment was exactly what Mom used to play, or close enough to the same, to keep the painful (or joyful) memory alive in my imagination for the duration.

     The song finished, I surreptitiously blew my nose and dried my eyes.  The preacher blessed us and released us row-by-row.  We met the soloist in the hall and I stopped him long enough to tell him what his rendition did for (to?) me and thank him.

    How long has it been since I heard the folks sing / play that song?  When was the last time I heard it?  I can’t answer that, but I understand once again why Mom and Dad answered so many requests to perform it at funerals.

    What was mostly a courtesy call to show respect for a fellow barbershopper will probably be a funeral that I will remember for a long time.

     I still don’t know if it’s pain or joy.  Whichever it is, it lingers.

 

 

A U-Tube performance of “The Holy City”:

 

https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=589420358&rlz=1C1SQJL_enUS892US892&tbm=vid&sxsrf=AM9HkKlHSL4WAunibNvEtXUIcgpSgrK8xQ:1702144653091&q=male+vocal+solo+with+piano+accompaniment:+Jerusalem&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjIjJ379oKDAxVMIzQIHdJ9CzQQ8ccDegQIDBAJ&biw=1536&bih=715&dpr=1.25#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:c70c3bd7,vid:EGoCiiSBs-k,st:0

 

 

You Need Your Mouth Washed Out With Soap!

 

       It probably goes without saying, but I never thought it would happen, especially now when training and educating folks has to be done with carrots and not sticks.

     Who can forget poor old Ralphie’s punishment for dropping the F-bomb when he spilled the lug nuts into the snow in “The Christmas Story”? 

      It happened.  I was least expecting it.  I hadn’t said anything to deserve it, at least on this occasion. 

      I will have to blame my association with Dementia Together.  I was trying to follow the route to “contented dementia”.  The Goodwife doesn’t appreciate me hovering over her all her waking hours, so I try to give her latitude whenever I can.

      So it was, I had removed from the kitchen to the dining room to a recliner after supper.  I had a cup of hot tea, a bowl with apple cobbler I had made a day or two prior.  I was sitting there relaxing, watching tv, enjoying my dessert.

     I heard a lot of activity in the kitchen, but I ignored it.  The Goodwife had pretty much washed the dishes to death.  I try to ignore the water that needlessly goes down the drain when pleas to “let the dishwasher do its job” go unnoticed.

     I expected her to sit and enjoy her apple cobbler, which I had dished out and left on the kitchen table for her.  But she didn’t settle down to it.  She was up and around, opening and closing cabinet doors, looking in the refrigerator, pacing around in the kitchen.

     Having finished my cobbler (it was a little heavy on crust and light on apples, I have to admit—haven’t got the recipe down quite yet), I went to the kitchen to find her digging through her cobbler complaining that it had no taste.  She had applied a few peanuts and stirred it up, but that wasn’t helping.

     Then I noticed beside her bowl was a teacup with something floating in cream.  I thought it was more cobbler.  It turned out to be some leftover corn bread.  It looked good.  It had something blue in it.  Had she actually got into the freezer and  dug out some blue berries?

       I couldn’t figure out what would be blue.  I should have figured a bit longer.  I took up the cup and a spoon and took a bite.  It didn’t take long to violate the long-standing rule of don’t spit in the sink.  I spit.  And spit.  And spit some more. 

      Attempts to clear my mouth with water, then a gulp of tea revealed that I had a latent sore throat.  For a while, whatever I swallowed stung my throat a little.

      As soon as I could, I grabbed the cup and dumped the contents into the garbage bucket.  When I rinsed out the cup and dumped it, it foamed.  The contents of the slop bucket began to have some suds.

      It was then I realized that the pretty blue tint was Dawn liquid detergent.

     The second cardinal rule of dealing with a dementia person is “listen to the expert” the expert being the person with dementia since only that person knows what it is like living with dementia.  Realizing that every moment in the dementia world can be a fleeting moment, I couldn’t help myself.  I violated the first cardinal rule:  don’t ask direct questions.

      “Why would you put dishwashing soap in something you’re going to eat?”  No answer.  Possibly didn’t realize that she had put soap in the cup with the cream. 

     I offered to try to flavor her apple cobbler, but by then, she had given up on dessert.  That should have been the end of the story, but wait, there’s more!  (Been watching too much commercial tv.)

      The next morning, I decided to see if there was any salvaging the tasteless cobbler she had left in the bowl.  If peanut butter was good on bread, why wouldn’t peanuts be good with the too-crusty apple cobbler?  I tried a bite.  It stung my throat, but then, so did the tea.  The solution to the tea sting was to let it cool down.

     I tried a little jelly with the peanuts  on cobbler, and it wasn’t bad, but two or three bites into it, I tasted the bitterness of the detergent.  Was it imagination?  Memory?  No, it was real.  Somehow, some of the detergent had found its way into the cobbler, too.  Into the garbage bucket with the remnants. 

     I rinsed my mouth again, but the bitterness and stinging of my throat never went completely away for hours.

     Still more!

     A day later, the Goodwife wanted to help with supper, so I set her to cutting up cucumbers for salad.  She peeled the cucumber and I had her put the peelings into the garbage bucket.  Yes, the same bucket containing the soapy cream.  That went okay.

      Then I asked her if she wanted to cut up some mushrooms to go into the soup.  She did.  That didn’t go so well.  She tried to put the sliced mushrooms into the same bucket she had put the cucumber peelings.

    I managed to head that off, but when I turned away, she started to dump the uncut mushrooms left in the container into the garbage bucket.  I wasn’t totally successful at heading that off.  I quickly pulled a few mushrooms from the bucket and began rinsing them off. 
     They only sudsed a little.  I can’t say if my attempt to salvage the mushrooms was successful or not.  I haven’t tried any of them yet.  Maybe the story isn’t over, yet.

    There could be a lot of morals to this story.  Blue isn’t a good color for food.  I don’t care much for blueberries.  I still remember having a blue snow cone many, many years ago at the ice follies.  I insisted on blue and I got blue.  It was pina colada.  It was awful.

     If you believe in karma, then what comes out of your mouth will be balanced by what goes into your mouth, like soap for a foul mouth.  I can’t contest that.

      Clean up my language? It was easier to break the tobacco habit.

     Stow the soap out of sight, at least during meal prep?

     Living with dementia is interesting.

     End of story.

   

Summer’s Over

 

     October 28, 2023  It all came to an end.  A killing frost ended the growing season the first week of October at the farm. 

 

      Frost held off for another two weeks in Loveland.  The result of all the pumpkin vines over the backyard resulted in three good sized pumpkins.  Grandkids took them.  They had to have help carting them off.  I haven’t seen the jack-o-lanterns yet.  Hope they survived the cold weather!    

                                                     The trees put on a show this year.

 

                                                      It was a good tomato year as well.

 

     No time for canning tomatoes yet.  I have been freezing what I couldn’t use, which was the vast majority of them.  Now that winter has arrived, it won’t hurt to heat the place up with boiling water to skin the frozen tomatoes and the canner water.  It might actually feel good.

     It was a good squash year, too.  I must have given away 50 pounds of the yellow crook-neck squash, the product of two plants.  We ate a lot of them, too.  They make good filler for casseroles, even scrambled eggs.

    I put an old ice chest out on the corner with a sign, “Take Some”.  The plants were at the farm, so I brought the squash back and put them in the ice chest.  Most of them got taken by somebody.

     Nobody wanted the big ones, so they got put with the pumpkin excess lining the walk from the driveway to the front door.

       The zucchini produced for a short time, but then backed off.  A few zucchini found their way into the ice chest on the corner and were soon gone.  There was one that couldn’t be harvested.  It grew inside the wire cage and couldn’t be removed without slaughtering it.

 

     I also had six cantaloupe from two plants.  One was good, one was horrible, and four are trying to ripen.    

      The pretty colors are gone, too.  Just white now.  I won’t grieve too much when it disappears.

 

 

Some Pumpkins

       Benign neglect?

      Or is it ”Give it an inch and it’ll take a mile?

     I planted a pumpkin seed last spring.  It was an effort to cut down on yard work.  It covers up a lot of ground and keeps weeds at bay.  Bottom line: less mowing.

     I must have planted a pumpkin somewhere in the past, but I don’t remember specifically.  I knew that a pumpkin vine would spread faster than bindweed and prevent weed growth.  Unlike bindweed, it will be gone when it freezes.

     Where did I get that idea if I hadn’t planted a pumpkin in the past?  Maybe from Nathaniel Hawthorne.

     From The Scarlet Letter:

            “But the proprietor appeared already to have relinquished, as hopeless, the effort to perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in a hard soil and amid the close struggle for subsistence, the native English taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbages grew in plain sight; and a pumpkin vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products directly beneath the hall-window; as if to warn the Governor that this great lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament as New England earth would offer him.”

 

     My pumpkin vine has taken over much of the strawberry patch.

 

                                      It’s currently attempting a coup of the roses.

     If it defeats the roses, I won’t grieve.  Roses are pretty, but caring for them is like trying to help a wild animal.  Weeding or trimming results in lots of painful pricks and snags, the reward for caring. 

     I inherited the roses from a previous owner.  There were nearly twenty.  I’m down to a dozen or so.  An attempt to move three of the biggest bushes to the front of the house resulted in one fatality and two never-blooms.  Obviously, I’m not a rose person.

     The pumpkin has invaded the mint patch, but is doomed to lose that war.  I have prevented it from covering up the cantaloupe vine.   

    Pumpkin trivia:  The comic strips used to include one called “Some Punkins.”  A World War II bomber was named “Some Punkins”, maybe after the comic strip.

     At the junction of Colorado State Highways 71 and 94 lies a settlement called Punkin Center.  Farm broadcaster / pilot Evan Slack liked to point out that the place was listed as “Pumpkin Junction” on air charts (maps).

     As October approaches, the pumpkin will get its share of the limelight.  Soon I will be able to sing, “Hey there Country Bumpkin, How’s the frost out on the pumpkin?”

     Harvest will take a strong back (volunteers wanted).  Want a huge jack-o-lantern?  Roasted pumpkin seeds?  Maybe homemade pie filling?  Apply in person at the patch.

     Then there will be all those vines to dispose of, the tradeoff for not having to mow all summer.

     It will be okay if Mother Nature doesn’t send us a killing frost for a while.

 

     

  

    

Auger Down!

     Sheets of water splashed against the north windows. Looking out the west windows, I could see water not just falling, but coming in waves that oscillated up and down as they fell to earth.

     I hadn’t seen anything like that since experiencing the tornado in Limon.  I began looking out the windows for a funnel cloud.  I hurried from window to window where the wind-driven waves attacked mainly the north and east sides of the house.

     No funnel cloud and the blast lasted less than five minutes.  I checked the north windows for leaks.  Water was running through the yard. 

      I could see the west combine shed doors sticking out at the bottom, waving in the receding east wind.  Uh oh.  We forgot to shut the east doors.  We forgot to pin the bottoms of the west door.  We were in for some door repairs.  Thankfully, the roof stayed on the shed.

      It took an hour or so for me to think of the auger.

 

     It was Thursday July 20.  Early morning showers dictated there would be no harvesting wheat this day.  We had started harvesting Wednesday, putting nearly a thousand bushels of wheat in the grain bin.  Typical harvest weather!

    We spent time working on the “off-site” bin, putting the finishing touches to alterations we had made to unloading access and attempts to plug water leaks around the base of the bin.  We would be ready to move to the ”off-site” bin when the farm bin got full.

     We had relaxed a little from the pre-harvest hurry, getting ready for ripe wheat.  We had let down too much.  Failure to shut the east shed doors, to pin the base of the west doors.

     Brother Dave asked as he left if we shouldn't chain the auger to the bin roof.  Nah, not necessary, we thought.

 

 

     Maybe we should have chained the auger to the bin roof.  However, Brother John found as he researched ideas for dealing with an overturned auger on the internet, that one man reported complete destruction of an auger chained to the bin, which got flopped and whipped around in the wind.

     When I finally thought about the auger, it was nearly dark.  From an upstairs window, I can see the bin top.  I trudged upstairs and looked out the window.  There was the bin top all right.

      No auger.  Ouch!

      We took a quick trip out to the bin.  We inspected and found no damage to under-carriage or auger tube.  The tube was straight, with no visible kinks in it.  We wouldn’t know for sure until we got the tube off the ground and could see what was the underside as it lay on the ground like a dead, bloated, 2-legged aardvark.

      Well, there would be more to do on Friday than merely wait for the wheat to dry out.  It took a couple of hours to get the door back to some semblance of normalcy, repairing the broken frame, and forcing the door back into it’s regular pathway.

 

 

        Then came the real chore of getting the auger up and checking for damage.  We decided it would be better to repair any damage with the auger on its side rather than up in the air after we uprighted it.

     The front-end loader on the 4010 easily raised the auger tube.  Three 50-gallon barrels supported the tube and the repair process began.

 

 

      The tube was undamaged.  Two frames that supported cables used to raise the auger to bin height were damaged, both bent and one broken.

      By Friday evening, the frames were straightened to a reasonable semblance of normalcy.  Welding the broken piece got stalled because the welder cables weren’t long enough to reach the vice where the broken piece was held firmly to the brace.  Friday ended with the construction of a 220-volt extension cord.

       Saturday was upright-the-auger day.  The engineers on the project decided we need two pulling points, one on the north to pull the auger up onto its two wheels, and one on the south to prevent the auger from crashing down once gravity took over the process.    

 

 

    The Ford tractor was nominated to do the north pull.  It was connected with a length of chain and a nylon rope to be sure there was plenty of distance between the auger and the Ford tractor operator in the event the auger decided to flop over on its other side to the north.

     The old Dodge pickup got the nod for holding the auger back as it descended for a landing on its north wheel.  Pickup and auger were connected with the “well rope”, the rope used to lower a man, usually Dad, down into the 90-foot domestic well when there had to be work done on the well bottom.

      We hooked both rope and chain to the same wheel so accelerator and brake were at the same point.  The engineers decided a third “hold-back” point should be used to insure that the upper end of the auger didn’t swing wildly and slam into the grain bin as it went over center on its way back to its wheels.  There was enough well rope to tie both auger points to the Dodge.

      The actual uprighting was rather anti-climactic.  The Ford tractor had no trouble pulling the auger up, and when it started down, the Dodge brakes made the touchdown a soft landing.  There was a moment of panic when I thought the Ford was going to let the auger crash back to the earth on the south, but everything went according to plan. 

     The auger was restored to its place and we were ready to try cutting wheat.  A 5:30 sample tested 14% moisture, a little too wet to bin. 

      Sunday would find us back to harvesting wheat.  The auger worked just fine, thank you.

     I have never played the "Farm Game" and have played the Money Game only once.  I think I know of a setback or penalty suited for those lifelike games at the  hands of Mother Nature.  And maybe some neglect on the part of a player?  

  

      

Boyd Lake: Ebb & Flow

      Ebb and Flow sounds like a comic strip.  At least it does to old guys who remember Eb & Flo.  If you don’t remember, never mind.  It’s a footnote you don’t have to read.

    It’s really the wet spring that is featured here on the shores of Boyd Lake.  The early pictures were taken April 2, 2023, the later ones on June 5.

 

 

 

     All the lakes are filled to overflowing.

 

     Connection between Heinricy Lake and Boyd Lake.  In April, you could easily walk across the neck where the swimmer is.  The water is probably 8 or 10 feet deep now.  July 2.

 

     Connection between Heinricy Lake and Horseshoe Lake.  The water hasn’t quite reached the high-water mark.

 

       The south end of Horseshoe Lake near the outlet to Heinricy Lake.

 

              The outlet of Heinricy Lake to Westerdoll Lake.

 

      The dock floats.  In April, it was downhill to get to it.  It’s almost level with the sidewalk now.

 

The pelicans and herons liked the high water.  The pelicans have flown, probably getting too warm for the big-billed buggers.

        There’s still plenty of snow in them thar hills, too.

 

 

         The beginning of July, a good time to pause and smell the roses.

 

     And the sunflowers.

 

    And whatever they are.