Give me a lever long enough and a strong enough fulcrum and I will move the world. . . or at least a wayward tractor.
There is nothing quite so pleasing as a plan that works straightforwardly since plans mostly don't work without a great deal of fussing, if they work at all. The other day my dumb tractor went and got itself stuck over in the sewer easement just before Linda and I needed to get ready to go up to Pottstown to watch the dance demos and then strut our somewhat less impressive waltz, rumba, foxtrot, jitterbug and west coast swing stuff at the Ballroom on High. As a result the tractor spent its first night all alone in the woods in twenty five years, pitched down at about a 40% angle with its front wheels half buried in mud. Why the darn thing let me drive it down that slope is a mystery. It should have known it wouldn't have the traction to pull itself back up that muddy slope.
Anyway, it was the first time I've ever failed to retrieve the thing from its folly on my own. After past incidents I've always managed to get it out of trouble with a mere hour or two, or four, of individual effort, even that time it got itself wedged under. . . well, perhaps I'd best not go into that. . . Linda reads this blog.
Anyway, I went over to Sears while Linda was cooking dinner to get a second come-along. I already have a come-along that's rated at a ton; but that one ton rating presumes a certain amount of arm strength to apply to the 18 inch or so long lever. Back in the old days, when I used to do real pushups instead of sissy from the knee pushups, me and the come-along probably pulled a ton; but now maybe not so much. And I don't have a pipe that will fit over the handle lever. Memo to self - get a 36 inch length of pipe with an inside diameter greater than two inches. Faced with half the arm strength, one must double the lever length. Maybe I ought to look for a 48 inch long pipe. The ability to project future conditions and plan for them is the very height of what makes us human.
Anyway go figure, the Sears Hardware store up on Route 29 no longer sells come-alongs. What good is a hardware store that doesn't sell essential pieces of hardware? They still sell one and two ton car jacks for surprisingly reasonable prices. Even given that I would have also had to buy a second long length of chain to use with the car jack the total would still have been lots less than the cost of hiring someone with a four wheel drive tow truck capable of getting to where the tractor spent the night. But using a car jack in tandem with the come-along would have meant a lot of carrying of stuff out into the woods and a lot of careful fussing with the rigging because of the push rather than pull design of a car jack, and because of its very short working travel. A lot of fussing.
So I bit the bullet and asked Jas to come over on Sunday morning for a try at doing it the straightforward way with the one come-along. By great good luck there was a decent sized tree across the sewer easement directly behind and not more than thirty feet from the rear of the tractor. An easy reach for my existing length of chain and the cable of the come-along.
Lo and behold, with a skeptical Jas working the come-along and me running the tractor after jamming a couple of lengths of rug under its rear wheels, we retrieved the beast from the muck and mire within fifteen minutes or so.
"That's a real lesson in applied physics," Jas commented. When something works cleanly it's really satisfying. We celebrated over coffee and talked of the ballroom dance demos of the night before. Have I mentioned that Jas and Kathy wowed the crowd with their Bolero demo? There were flashier, much more athletic and choreographed pairs; but Jas and Kathy and a few others showed what ordinary people can do if they practice, practice, practice.
Jas and I also talked about our Saturday morning pinochle game with Sam. And we talked about Al R, and Florida home prices, and the news I heard that one of my acquaintances, a seemingly judicious fellow, on the fancy neighborhood side is suddenly facing bankruptcy because he got himself overextended in real estate development, and the upcoming trip to The Villages in late April early May. Sam was meanwhile out on the golf course, no doubt blissfully unaware that the handle of a golf club is nothing but a long lever and all the club heads are wedges of varying pitch.
Later in the day I successfully guided the much chastened and distinctly less adventurous tractor over to the old house on Route 29 where I ran into Dan K. I mentioned to Dan that my third option had been to call him and ask if he has a come-along, which it turns out he does, of course, like any sensible person. How do people get through life without essential tools? What do they do after they pick themselves up and check their extremities and their heart stops pounding to find that the tractor has not been so lucky and is a bit wedged under the tree that perversely fell the wrong way?
Anyway, Dan proudly showed me his growing pile of firewood, maybe ten cords so far. Top quality stuff because he's been cutting big oaks and cherries and chestnuts. He's also been been
patiently splitting, doing real yeoman work, ever since he got laid off a couple of months ago, with the work accelerating since his brother got laid off a couple of weeks ago. He also ripped a few really impressive quarter sawn slabs from the four foot or so in diameter oak at the back of their property. Those slabs should be worth a pretty penny if there is still anyone around here who does real furniture making.
Dan told me cured firewood is already up to over $200 per cord. I reiterated that he's welcome to cut at will along the tree line dividing our properties. There are three pretty big trees, one maple, one cherry and one chestnut, up there along the border near Route 29 that are ripe for taking. I suspect he's going to get even more than $200 a cord next year when the wood is cured, maybe a lot more if the government is insane enough to pass some version of cap and trade in the middle of a recession. Cap and trade will drive up electricity, oil and gas prices maybe thirty or forty percent.
Dan has also increased the size of his garden maybe fivefold for this year. He has me wondering whether I should increase the diameter of my garden. The S's who live in Mom and Pop's old house have a pretty good sized pile of horse manure that's there for the taking. Next weekend I'll retrieve a scoop load for my garden and one or two loads to drop off for Dan. Maybe I'll deliver the loads to Dan first. The tractor route across the marshland will get iffy once we start getting spring rains which are late this year. In a pinch I can take the tractor around the long way to Dan's via the roads; which does have the advantage of irritating and shocking the impatient yuppy drivers, especially when one does it with a load like manure which tends to dribble out of the tractor bucket a bit.
Showing posts with label Florida. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Florida. Show all posts
Monday, March 23, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Chimpanzees are eating peoples faces and hands
Chimpanzees are eating people's faces and hands, great horned owls are attacking cross country skiers and Burmese pythons are multiplying in Florida.
But all that is trivial next to the fact that I lost both Scrabble games today over at Jas and Kathy's house. I managed to lose the second game against Kathy even though I scored all seven of my letters on my first turn.
The world is upside down. But at least we don't have eagles this smart living around here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz7FFlFy8eM
Watch the whole thing. The first goat he kills is a little one. Later they show him proving that he can also kill a full sized one. This video will forever change your attitude about hiking on trails near cliffs the way Jas and I did at the Grand Canyon a few years ago and Linda and I did in Canyonlands a couple of years ago.
But all that is trivial next to the fact that I lost both Scrabble games today over at Jas and Kathy's house. I managed to lose the second game against Kathy even though I scored all seven of my letters on my first turn.
The world is upside down. But at least we don't have eagles this smart living around here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz7FFlFy8eM
Watch the whole thing. The first goat he kills is a little one. Later they show him proving that he can also kill a full sized one. This video will forever change your attitude about hiking on trails near cliffs the way Jas and I did at the Grand Canyon a few years ago and Linda and I did in Canyonlands a couple of years ago.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Swinging is as swinging does
Last evening Linda and I practiced the new West Coast Swing moves we learned at our Monday night lesson up at the Ballroom on High. Unlike the heedless young kids who make up much of the class we're serious students. And we've learned in the past that if we don't practice the new dance moves faithfully they'll go in one foot and out the other, and we'll end the five lesson course as clumsy and wrong footed as when we started.
But I'm not here to write about West Coast Swing today. I'm here to write about the South East Coast Swing, or more precisely South East Coast Swingers. All because of a salacious web article that caught the attention of both Linda and my dear sister Marianne on Monday. I missed the article because I was diligently stoking the wood stove between sessions of reading substantive stuff about world affairs and such. The bright sun coming in both direct and by reflection off the snow has the house heated to something like seventy six degrees today; but on Monday it took pretty regular feeding of the stove to keep it in the high sixties.
I would be completely innocent of the latest report of, uh, concupiscence among the geezers down in The Villages if Linda hadn't emailed the article below to me on Monday afternoon. And I probably wouldn't be writing about it if Marianne hadn't called to alert me to it on Monday evening.
Where do the two of them find time for such fluff?
I'm reminded of the time Uncle Mill was visiting Pop and Mom in the 1980's. Me, Sam and Jas successively showed up on a weekday for coffee, and breakfast, and then conversation which stretched to the point at which it made no sense to go elsewhere for lunch, what with Mom right there to make potatoes and eggs. I can never get potatoes and eggs to come exactly the same as Mom could. Sometimes the simplest recipes are the hardest.
Anyway, there was a lot of catching up to do that day in the 1980's. I had met Uncle Mill one time in the early 1970's when I stopped and stayed a night at his house on the way out to Chicago; but I don't believe Sam and Jas had ever met him before at that point. He was a slightly beefier version of Pop. Such a good version of Pop that there is a picture of him driving Pop's golf cart that I wrongly identified as a picture of Pop for a long time until Mom set me straight.
"Doesn't anybody work around here?" Uncle Mill finally asked. I won't get into the fact that this was a surprising question from a fellow who left Norristown rather suddenly in the late 1940's and rode the rails for a couple of years before he quietly settled in Ohio to work in the steel mills. All through the fifties and sixties he pretty much laid low, occasionally contacting only Pop to stay in touch; and he never visited until that time in the early 1980's.
Have I ever mentioned that we folks of my generation have a first cousin who grew up in Bridgeport? She would be a second cousin to you younger folks. I forget her name just now, but there are a couple of electronic pictures of her that I believe are correctly labelled. Her existence isn't the only interesting factoid to be discovered in the electronic picture labels by someone who is alert to nuance.
Ah, the naivete' of the young, always believing that everything is new and different. I believe it was Shakespeare who first wrote that "there is nothing new under the sun;" but I may have that wrong. Shakespeare may have been quoting some fellow who composed the Old Testament in 800 or so BC. I'm too lazy to google the phrase. Shakespeare also wrote, this time I'm sure, "lechery, lechery; all wars and lechery, nothing else holds fashion."
And while I'm on the subject of dating conventions and innocence of history, I noticed the other day that Spike Lee mentioned the idea of labelling the years before 2009 as "BO" and the years after 2009 as "AO," or something like that. Talk about clueless chutzpah! Someday I'm going to reacquaint myself with the number of centuries that elapsed after certain events in Jerusalem before the world decided to begin labelling years by the convention"BC" and "AD." "Before Christ" and "Anno Domini," for you folks educated after politically correct idiots began referring to "BCE" - before the Common Era - and "CE" - the Common Era.
I suspect I've completely messed up the punctuation of that last sentence, at least by conventional punctuation rules which bored me almost as much as the diagramming of sentences back in grade school back when they still taught punctuation and the diagramming of sentences; but I'm the author here so I'll use any damn punctuation marks I please.
Anyway, back to the web article that both Linda and Marianne curiously noticed. "Why are you calling me about that?" I asked Marianne, "I'm only an occasional visitor to The Villages. It's your other brothers who bought houses down there."
She said she expected me to write about it. So here goes.
I think the ten to one ratio mentioned in the article is an exaggeration; although I might possibly believe that a given hot spot on a given night might have that ratio. I doubt that the ratio in The Villages as a whole is more than two to one. I'm also considering the reliability of the writer. Sixty plus year old hips may still move somewhat creakily; but they very rarely "gyrate." And, just what does the term "hot spot" means in a community where they turn the streetlights off at 9:00 PM and the loudest noise to be heard by ten is the sound of snoring? I would think that the most frequented hot spots in such a community would be the heating pads in the arthritis pain clinic.
Talk about a mixed up world. I'm just realizing that "PM" stands for "Post Meridiem" and "AM" stands for "Ante Meridiem." These are said to be latin phrases, although I question that "Post" in there. "AD" stands for "Anno Domini" which is certainly a latin phrase. But "BC" stands for "Before Christ" which is definitely an English phrase. So why is the english phrase mixed up with the latin phrases in those usages? Another excellent timewaster for another day.
But back to the article about The Villages. I've noticed during my visits to down there with Sam and Jas that there is a somewhat substantial pool of widows; although I don't think that's why the mailing address is Lady Lake. Who is the lady? Or is it a reference to a lake of ladies?
Finally, I'm very skeptical about most of the folks I've met down there doing anything much more strenuous than sitting on the bench seat of a golf cart. If very many of them are attempting the kind of golf cart hanky panky mentioned in this article I would hate to see the length of the waiting line at the back pain clinic.
Here's the article. If you have questions about it I suggest you address them to Sam and Jas. For myself I have to get going to the monthly meeting of the technical recruiters association to commiserate with the other folks who are out of work in this first year of the age of Obama. Is this the year One or is it the year Zero? I'll need to check out that Spike Lee reference.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,482785,00.html
But I'm not here to write about West Coast Swing today. I'm here to write about the South East Coast Swing, or more precisely South East Coast Swingers. All because of a salacious web article that caught the attention of both Linda and my dear sister Marianne on Monday. I missed the article because I was diligently stoking the wood stove between sessions of reading substantive stuff about world affairs and such. The bright sun coming in both direct and by reflection off the snow has the house heated to something like seventy six degrees today; but on Monday it took pretty regular feeding of the stove to keep it in the high sixties.
I would be completely innocent of the latest report of, uh, concupiscence among the geezers down in The Villages if Linda hadn't emailed the article below to me on Monday afternoon. And I probably wouldn't be writing about it if Marianne hadn't called to alert me to it on Monday evening.
Where do the two of them find time for such fluff?
I'm reminded of the time Uncle Mill was visiting Pop and Mom in the 1980's. Me, Sam and Jas successively showed up on a weekday for coffee, and breakfast, and then conversation which stretched to the point at which it made no sense to go elsewhere for lunch, what with Mom right there to make potatoes and eggs. I can never get potatoes and eggs to come exactly the same as Mom could. Sometimes the simplest recipes are the hardest.
Anyway, there was a lot of catching up to do that day in the 1980's. I had met Uncle Mill one time in the early 1970's when I stopped and stayed a night at his house on the way out to Chicago; but I don't believe Sam and Jas had ever met him before at that point. He was a slightly beefier version of Pop. Such a good version of Pop that there is a picture of him driving Pop's golf cart that I wrongly identified as a picture of Pop for a long time until Mom set me straight.
"Doesn't anybody work around here?" Uncle Mill finally asked. I won't get into the fact that this was a surprising question from a fellow who left Norristown rather suddenly in the late 1940's and rode the rails for a couple of years before he quietly settled in Ohio to work in the steel mills. All through the fifties and sixties he pretty much laid low, occasionally contacting only Pop to stay in touch; and he never visited until that time in the early 1980's.
Have I ever mentioned that we folks of my generation have a first cousin who grew up in Bridgeport? She would be a second cousin to you younger folks. I forget her name just now, but there are a couple of electronic pictures of her that I believe are correctly labelled. Her existence isn't the only interesting factoid to be discovered in the electronic picture labels by someone who is alert to nuance.
Ah, the naivete' of the young, always believing that everything is new and different. I believe it was Shakespeare who first wrote that "there is nothing new under the sun;" but I may have that wrong. Shakespeare may have been quoting some fellow who composed the Old Testament in 800 or so BC. I'm too lazy to google the phrase. Shakespeare also wrote, this time I'm sure, "lechery, lechery; all wars and lechery, nothing else holds fashion."
And while I'm on the subject of dating conventions and innocence of history, I noticed the other day that Spike Lee mentioned the idea of labelling the years before 2009 as "BO" and the years after 2009 as "AO," or something like that. Talk about clueless chutzpah! Someday I'm going to reacquaint myself with the number of centuries that elapsed after certain events in Jerusalem before the world decided to begin labelling years by the convention"BC" and "AD." "Before Christ" and "Anno Domini," for you folks educated after politically correct idiots began referring to "BCE" - before the Common Era - and "CE" - the Common Era.
I suspect I've completely messed up the punctuation of that last sentence, at least by conventional punctuation rules which bored me almost as much as the diagramming of sentences back in grade school back when they still taught punctuation and the diagramming of sentences; but I'm the author here so I'll use any damn punctuation marks I please.
Anyway, back to the web article that both Linda and Marianne curiously noticed. "Why are you calling me about that?" I asked Marianne, "I'm only an occasional visitor to The Villages. It's your other brothers who bought houses down there."
She said she expected me to write about it. So here goes.
I think the ten to one ratio mentioned in the article is an exaggeration; although I might possibly believe that a given hot spot on a given night might have that ratio. I doubt that the ratio in The Villages as a whole is more than two to one. I'm also considering the reliability of the writer. Sixty plus year old hips may still move somewhat creakily; but they very rarely "gyrate." And, just what does the term "hot spot" means in a community where they turn the streetlights off at 9:00 PM and the loudest noise to be heard by ten is the sound of snoring? I would think that the most frequented hot spots in such a community would be the heating pads in the arthritis pain clinic.
Talk about a mixed up world. I'm just realizing that "PM" stands for "Post Meridiem" and "AM" stands for "Ante Meridiem." These are said to be latin phrases, although I question that "Post" in there. "AD" stands for "Anno Domini" which is certainly a latin phrase. But "BC" stands for "Before Christ" which is definitely an English phrase. So why is the english phrase mixed up with the latin phrases in those usages? Another excellent timewaster for another day.
But back to the article about The Villages. I've noticed during my visits to down there with Sam and Jas that there is a somewhat substantial pool of widows; although I don't think that's why the mailing address is Lady Lake. Who is the lady? Or is it a reference to a lake of ladies?
Finally, I'm very skeptical about most of the folks I've met down there doing anything much more strenuous than sitting on the bench seat of a golf cart. If very many of them are attempting the kind of golf cart hanky panky mentioned in this article I would hate to see the length of the waiting line at the back pain clinic.
Here's the article. If you have questions about it I suggest you address them to Sam and Jas. For myself I have to get going to the monthly meeting of the technical recruiters association to commiserate with the other folks who are out of work in this first year of the age of Obama. Is this the year One or is it the year Zero? I'll need to check out that Spike Lee reference.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,482785,00.html
Monday, November 3, 2008
This would increase voter turnout at The Villages
At first I thought this headline said "Lady Lake" and I was expecting to get quite a report from Al R when we call him on Saturday. Then I realized it's on the west coast of Florida, so maybe it's Don A who will get a real eye opener some day when he goes to vote.
LAND O' LAKES, Fla. (AP) - A nudist community on Florida's west coast wants to establish the first clothing-optional polling site. The Caliente Resorts, located in Pasco County north of Tampa, has approached election officials about the idea.
Nothing in state law would prohibit it, but the supervisor of elections says he is opposed to creating any new precincts before redistricting in 2010.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Update - Screw the Associated Press and its lawyers. Copyright 2008 Sullysside. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Use in a copyright infringment action is especially forbidden.
LAND O' LAKES, Fla. (AP) - A nudist community on Florida's west coast wants to establish the first clothing-optional polling site. The Caliente Resorts, located in Pasco County north of Tampa, has approached election officials about the idea.
Nothing in state law would prohibit it, but the supervisor of elections says he is opposed to creating any new precincts before redistricting in 2010.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Update - Screw the Associated Press and its lawyers. Copyright 2008 Sullysside. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Use in a copyright infringment action is especially forbidden.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Everything may not be perfect in Pennsylvania
Everything may not be perfect in Pennsylvania, but at least we don't have alligators in the streets. I hope Al and Doris have their dog on a short leash down there.
http://www.local6.com/weather/17244086/detail.html
On the other hand there were also reports of catfish in the streets. Al and Doris may be having fish for dinner.
http://www.local6.com/weather/17244086/detail.html
On the other hand there were also reports of catfish in the streets. Al and Doris may be having fish for dinner.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
I haven't mentioned my garden lately
I haven't mentioned my garden because I've been too busy picking and hauling.
I just picked about twenty pounds of tomatoes, three zucchinis and a bunch of basil. Fortunately Linda took about twenty pounds of tomatoes with her this morning to give to people at her workplace, and Jas and Sam have also taken some. Otherwise we'd be awash in the darn things even though I've been cooking so many of them so many different ways for dinners that Linda is starting to get that look she got earlier in the season when we were eating Swiss Chard every day. We've had baked stuffed tomatoes, bruschetta, tomatoes and zucchini, eggplant from Sam's garden stuffed with tomatoes, tomatoes in salads, etc., etc., etc.
Yesterday I made fresh gravy (that's sauce to you barbarians) from tomatoes, basil, onions, celery and, I'm ashamed to admit, bought meatballs. I put it on those dried cheese tortellinis they sell in the market. The best part is that I finally tried Molto Mario's trick of cooking the tortellinis very al dente and then finishing them for a couple of minutes in a large saucepan with the sauce. Excellent!
Word has it that Al R down in Florida has a garden as well. I heard that the cartoonists and animators who drew the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree show are heading to Lady Lake to take a look at Al's tomato plants. Seems they may pick one of them to star in a new show called Charlie Brown's Tomato Plant.
At least that's what I heard. . .
I just picked about twenty pounds of tomatoes, three zucchinis and a bunch of basil. Fortunately Linda took about twenty pounds of tomatoes with her this morning to give to people at her workplace, and Jas and Sam have also taken some. Otherwise we'd be awash in the darn things even though I've been cooking so many of them so many different ways for dinners that Linda is starting to get that look she got earlier in the season when we were eating Swiss Chard every day. We've had baked stuffed tomatoes, bruschetta, tomatoes and zucchini, eggplant from Sam's garden stuffed with tomatoes, tomatoes in salads, etc., etc., etc.
Yesterday I made fresh gravy (that's sauce to you barbarians) from tomatoes, basil, onions, celery and, I'm ashamed to admit, bought meatballs. I put it on those dried cheese tortellinis they sell in the market. The best part is that I finally tried Molto Mario's trick of cooking the tortellinis very al dente and then finishing them for a couple of minutes in a large saucepan with the sauce. Excellent!
Word has it that Al R down in Florida has a garden as well. I heard that the cartoonists and animators who drew the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree show are heading to Lady Lake to take a look at Al's tomato plants. Seems they may pick one of them to star in a new show called Charlie Brown's Tomato Plant.
At least that's what I heard. . .
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