Sunday

Its a Sunday without football.  Not such a bad thing.  Was it only a week ago that Denver laid that egg?

Had the experience this AM of the unanticipated effects of cold weather.  Before even getting to coffee.  The driver's side door of the BEATER wouldn't latch upon closing.  I've had that problem different times this Winter, but had been previously able to get it to work after jockeying with it for a while.  (The PN did have to fix(?) it once.)  Not so much so today.

Plan B was to take the Buick.  Of course, I hadn't driven the Buick since the return from Harvest Path a week ago, so I figured I'd have at least one tire registering as low on the auto-alert system.  Upon departure from my Maplecrest driveway, both front tires had alerts on the dash system.  So I stopped to air-up those tires, first at a station I consider a usually reliable option, but not great.  Not great was the status today.  Second stop was at the 18th Street BP, but that airhead was not producing any pressure today either.

So the third place was the BP across from the Duck Creek Starbucks, which has been the most reliable place in recent times.  The air pumped worked fine, BUT the pressure pin on the inside of the valve stem stuck in the "down" position which slowly released air from the tire!  1st Coffee had become an odyssey!

With the knowledge that I had to act pretty quickly or I would be dealing with a flat tire and an in-operable car, I decided to head back home and park the Buick in my driveway, facing the street so that a tow truck would have easy access.  On that trip home, I thought that maybe a shot of WD 40 oil might un-stick the pressure pin, or that a needle-nose pliers might allow me to pull the pin out.  As it turns out, both of those actions worked and I was able to resolve the mechanical issue just before the tire had gone completely flat.  And I was able to go back to the BP station with the working air pump, and get things back to normal.  Wow!  What a stressful little series of events!

Playing the Glad Game, there were actually two factoids of this exercise that have positive spins as further background to the story.  First, last Sunday when I gassed-up the Buick before leaving Woodbury,  I had added air to the one from tire with the slow leak, and had detected that leak then as well.  But a "flick" of the pressure pin with the end of the measuring gauge had released the pin to stop any release of air.  Lucky.  This morning's problem when the pin wouldn't release, could have happened a week ago, and 2 and I would have had a miserable time getting back from Minnesota.

The second positive is that my oil wasn't really DW 40.   It was the oil that I bought in Salerno, Italy last September when I needed some oil for my bike. The can made it all the way back with my bike gear and has become my go-to resource whenever I need some greasing of the skids.  And it always brings back very good memories of a great adventure.

Sorry for relating all of that.  I always say that no one wants to read blogs of "what I did today", but in this case, there was a lot going on just to get into my day.  And the series of inconveniences was very Seinfeld-esque.

Moving on...

I gotta say, the latest spin from the WH on the poor employment numbers in the context of various social programs like Obamacare, food stamps and unemployment benefits is intuitively disingenuous to any serious entrepreneur.  The suggestion is that the reduction in job seekers is actually a positive sign that people are making "choices" to work more creatively!!  Why wouldn't they?  Paid health care?  Check.  Free food?  Check.  Compensation not to work?  Check.  Froma Harrop willingly touts the WH talking points in her column today.  http://www.creators.com/liberal/froma-harrop.html

Props to the Hawks and the 'Clones for their wins yesterday.  Hard to believe that the Iowa team was the same one that couldn't throw it into the ocean in their last couple of games.  Goes to show ya, if you make the 3-ball, lots of things work.

The star of the day was 1.01.  Suite! 

Moving on further...

I was having a little trouble getting back to sleep a couple nights ago and decided to challenge myself with putting together a list of things that I knew how to do...at least at one point in my life...that would never be passed on to my progeny.  Not really sure how the idea came to me.  And I struggled with establishing a list of any sort.  I mean, whether its sports or work, most of my skill sets are repeatable in some fashion today. 

The one item that came to me was from days on the farm, from one of our common activities:  Haying.  I became an expert at stacking square bales of hay on a hay wagon.  This picture is a bit reminiscent of our operation in Wapello County, Iowa.  But we would have bales stacked maybe three more levels than those shown in this shot. 

We transported the bales from the fields to the barn where we stored 2500-3000 in the Summer and Fall for feeding the cows in the Winter.  It was really the primary work on the farm after considering the daily milking chores.  So we did it a lot, and each aspect of the process had its own little science.

But they don't use these small, square bales much anymore.  You see primarily the large, round bales, or, less frequently, the large, square bales.  The bigger bales are handled by machinery, not farm boys!  So my wagon-stacking expertise will not be one of those things that will get passed to the girls.

The key on stacking was to get those lower two tiers neatly packed with off-setting positions between tiers.  Bales just stacked identically on top of one another would be susceptible to tipping.  There was nothing worse than having a full wagon tip over as we travelled over bumpy spots in the field or paths to the barn.

We would put fewer bales on the upper tiers, tapering those levels in a manner to maintain a center of gravity for the load.

Look for more details on this art in the book on Daddy which is part of my 2014 goals.

All for today.  Good luck with your week.  Thanks for reading.

BCOT