I’ve gotten several favorable comments about my “Fantastic Farming Tales.” So, here’s another one:
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A faithful reader emailed: “Milo, while working in my shop yesterday, two tool salesmen show up at the same time. They begin bragging about their products. One salesman said that he had the best penetrating oil on the market. To prove it, he then found a piece of rusted threaded rod about 3 feet long with a nut on each end. He then sprayed the first nut and his oil penetrated the first nut and then traveled the length of the rod and penetrated the nut on the other end. Then he removed both nuts with his bare hands. ‘Beat that,’ he challenged.
“The second salesman said, “that’s pretty good, but let me show you what my penetration oil will do! He then took a can of his oil and sprayed some on the floor. Then he rubbed the rubber sole of his boot in it and proclaimed, ‘Yep, I can taste it already and I can free up any rusty thing I touch.’”
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Another faithful reader, who I assume is a Native American, wrote: “A piece of universal wisdom among Native Americans, passed on from generation to generation, says that
‘When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount and start walking.’
“However, if the horse happens to belong to the government, more advanced and complex strategies are often employed, such as:
1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead
horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included as useful transportation.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed and power.
9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s
performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the
dead horse’s performance.
11. Declaring that because the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less
costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more
to the bottom line of the economy than do live horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
13. And, of course, promoting the dead horse rider to a supervisory position!”
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As I mentioned last week, Claude Hopper, from Pratt, Kan. — my old college buddy from our years at Bea Wilder U — came to spend a long weekend a few days ago. Nevah and a slew of her female kinfolk took in a family get-together in north Texas, so Claude and I had free run of Damphewmore Acres.
Claude came mainly so we could fish. Which we did on Friday and harvested a lot of fish, although not big ones. Around 3-pounds wuz our biggest bass. On Saturday, we got skunked. Nada. The fish just weren’t biting.
But, we ate and drank well. Claude and I went into Emporia and bought ourselves two thick butterfly pork chops and two gigantic porterhouse steaks. We devoured the chops Friday evening and the steaks Saturday evening. Of course, we washed the meat down with refreshing R&R Reserve.
Claude left Sunday morning and I got caught up with my gardening.
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Speaking of gardening, my tomatoes finally hit their peak. We’ve canned 50 quarts of tomato juice, a dozen pints of tomatoes, 18 pints of salsa and we’ve got a plethora of tomatoes to share with friends and neighbors.
Last spring I swore we’d have no fruit to harvest this fall because of the late freezes. But, I wuz wrong a little bit. Some of the blooms got pollinated in spite of the weather. So, this morning Nevah and I picked about 3/4 bushel of a yellow apple variety from a tree that had never produced a single apple. Then we found a dozen pears on the pear tree. Those were the first we ever harvested from that tree. Our red apples are beginning to turn and we’ll have a real sparse crop of them in a couple of weeks.
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Lost another chicken to a varmint last night. It wuz a young chicken that paid a fatal price for getting late to the chickenhouse. It wuz wandering around somewhere in the dusk and I inadvertently shut it out of the safety of the chickenhouse. I’ll have to pay better attention from now on.
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The dove hunting season is open and I’ve got my decoys out and will be ready to go come this weekend. Dove is about all the hunting I can do anymore because I can sit and hunt. Walking far is out of the question.
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Words of wisdom for the week: I’m finally old enuf to do anything I want to do, but I’m too tired to want to do anything. Have a good ‘un.
