This has been a good week at Damphewmore Acres for visits from friends far and wide. First visitor wuz my Iowa friend, who overwinters in the Valley of the Sun, ol’ Pegan Ray. He wuz on his way home to Iowegianville and stopped for two days of fishing.
And, they turned out to be good days. We caught around 40 filleting-size bass and crappie each day and Pegan took home close to a couple gallons of fine, fresh fish fillets to share with his Iowa friends and family. My local buddy, Avery Ware, pitched in the first day and caught, and donated, his share.
A bonus wuz that I got to treat several of the ponds we fished with an aquatic weed/green-slime-algae suppressant that makes the fishing much more enjoyable and productive. The treated ponds will be better fishing within a couple of weeks.
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A few hours after Pegan left in the morning, we had a four-hour visit with old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Manny Tripps, from Grove, Okla. The Tripps were in the midst of a unique spring vacation. They are driving U.S. Highway 50 from the east coast to the west coast.
Conveniently, Highway 50 comes within two miles of Damphewmore Acres, so the Tripps stopped by and we had lunch in Emporia and then played cards for a few hours before they resumed their westward ways. It had been several years since we’d seen then.
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Then yesterday evening we began hosting two younger friends of ours from Branson, Mo., and Jackson, Tenn. Each father — Pitch Frizbee and his brother Slingitt — brought one son with them to participate in one of the regular Disc Golf Extravaganza’s headquartered in Emporia with with several neighboring communities chipping in.
Few people outside the disc golf community realize that Emporia is the Uber Apex of Disc Golf. One of the biggest manufacturers is located in Emporia and the region has a plethora of fine disc golf courses, in addition to Emporia — Cottonwood Falls, Council Grove, Olpe, Clover Cliff Ranch.
Every motel room in the vicinity is full, which is why Nevah and I are hosting our younger friends and their sons. The events draws folks from all over the nation and around the world.
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Next visitor? — my old Bea Wilder U. college buddy from Pratt, Kan., ol’ Claude Hopper, is set to arrive tomorrow for two days of fishing. It rained a welcome inch of rain today, so Claude and I will be hoping it woke up the big fish.
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Heard a good, local, true story at our Old Boar’s Breakfast Club this morning (officially the Saffordville Gentle Men’s Club).
It involved a local rancher, ol’ Tippet Tover, and his leather-working, boot-repairing, cowboying buddy, ol’ Sol E. Mender. The two intrepid cowboys had to haul seven big round bales of hay to some cows Tip had penned up waiting for the grass to green up.
They were old, previous year, soggy-bottomed bales that Tip wanted to dispose of by letting the cows sort through the edible parts of the bales. So, Tip used his front-end bale spear to load the stack of seven bales on a self-unloading trailer. The bales on the bottom layer had, of course, the soggy side on the trailer floor.
Well, when they arrived at the cow pen, Tip decided to unload the bales in the dry driveway. But when he activated the self-unloader lever, the trailer bed tipped like it is supposed to, but the wet bales refused to unload. They stuck like glue to the trailer bed.
So, Sol had an idea. Drive forward and let the two right-hand trailer tires fall into the slanting driveway ditch. Good idea? Well, not so much. When they parked the trailer and activated the unloader, all seven bales pitched off the trailer with such force that four of them exploded the bale-wrap net and the boys were facing a mountain of loose hay in the middle of the driveway and into the ditch.
The solution? Tip went home and brought a tractor with a grapple attachment on it and grabbed up all the loose hay and tossed it over the fence to the cows. Did I fail to mention how much fun Tip and Sol had trying to fish the bale wrap from the mountain of soggy loose hay?
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This spring has been the season of change for Nevah and me. First, we changed our television service to DirecTV. And we’re glad we did. Then, yesterday we changed our internet provider to IdeaTec, a company that recently contracted to provide internet service to Chase County. The company provided fiber-optic service to all the towns, and then it erected 15 strategically-located towers on high ground around the county. One tower is only a half-mile from our home. So, we switched. So far our internet service is faster and the monthly charge is cheaper.
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My closing borrowed words of wisdom for the week are political. “When our borders open before our schools, will we realize we’ve been duped?” “There’s no such thing as government-funded. It’s all taxpayer funded.” “We haven’t won the war on homelessness, hunger, or poverty in half a century, but we are going to win the war on climate change?”
Think about it. Have a good ‘un.
