Too Lazy to Write

...so you get pictures instead. Tonight, though, I should have plenty of time to whip up a blog post, since the trip to town for work this morning was not so much fun with six inches of new snow. If the wind comes up as predicted (and of all the things the weatherman gets wrong, wind never seems to be one of them) I will not be going home tonight.

In the meantime, you can step out of the house and take your pick of vehicles, depending on just how deep the snow gets:

 

Once you decide what to drive, it's time to commute to work:

Or, you can take the express lane:

The Hazards of Getting Hitched

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Summer has arrived and across the country a familiar scene is playing out in driveways, campgrounds and at boat ramps. Forget money, kids or getting caught eyeballing the woman next door who does yard work in her bikini. Nothing can trigger a good fight quite as effectively as hooking up the trailer.

 Unless you’re lucky enough to own a towing rig with a fancy back-up camera, hooking up a bumper tow trailer has an inherent challenge: the driver can’t see the hitch to line it up with the ball on the vehicle. How does one hit this invisible target? One approach is to take a stab in the dark, stop when you think you’re about right, jump out, and trot back to see how close you are.

Shoot. Three inches too far to the left. Trot back to the truck. Pull forward, then back again. Jump out for another inspection. Dang. Now you’re three inches too far to the right. Back to the truck, pull forward, adjust your position, reverse again. Trot back to inspect. Yes! Lined up perfectly, just need to back up six inches farther.

Back to the truck. Ease into reverse—crap! Foot slipped, jumped back two feet, ramming into the hitch. Inspection reveals that you’ve knocked the hitch sideways, so you’re no longer lined up properly. Back to the truck, pull forward, move left…four inches too far. And so on, and so on….

 If your towing vehicle is a forty foot motorhome, congratulations. You will be fit to run a marathon by the time the jet skis are securely hitched to the bumper.

 The alternative is to get your significant other to help you. The routine is deceptively simple. One spouse climbs behind the wheel. The other takes up a position near the hitch. And the hand gestures commence. Techniques vary widely. Some perform their duties with the precision of the guy at the airport with the orange wands, guiding a 747 into Gate B-43. Others make vague waving motions that could be directions, or maybe they’re batting at mosquitoes. One person I know goes through what appears to be an elaborate Tai Chi routine.

The difficulty of interpreting these instructions is compounded by the fact that the driver is seeing them in the rearview mirror. In other words, it’s all backwards. Husband gestures to the left. Wife cranks the wheel. The rear of the vehicle goes right. Husband waves disgustly, indicating that wife should pull forward. Wife complies, except he only wanted her to go a few feet, and she’s twenty yards away.

His gestures become increasing agitated as he once again guides her into the general vicinity of the hitch. He makes a circular motion to indicate that she should turn the steering wheel to the left. She stops, assuming he must need to crank the jack down a few turns. He plants his hands on his hips and stomps toward the window to provide verbal clarification. She bails out and meets him halfway. Heated words are exchanged. She points angrily at the driver’s seat. He jumps behind the wheel and slams the door. The scenario above is repeated, with positions reversed.

 At some point, whether by luck or skill, hitch and ball will come into alignment. Hopefully before someone slams into the house to divvy up the silverware.

 My husband and I have hooked up thousands of horse trailers over the years. The process rarely generates even a dirty look anymore. For that, we have to get the tractor involved. More precisely, the tractor bucket. 

Last week we had to move the rollers across the coulee so my mother could roll the northernmost fields. Rollers are a new concept to my husband. He grew up in a place where fields have more dirt than rocks. He couldn’t imagine why you would plant your crops then drag a trio of massive steel rollers across them, so he wasn’t especially concerned when a combination of rain and equipment malfunctions kept us from rolling the grain and hay last year. Then he spent a few hundred hours bouncing across rock strewn fields, prying boulders the size of cantaloupes out of swathers and bailers, and repairing what they’d smashed.

His first order of business after harvest was to repair the rollers.

 The purpose of the rollers is to smash the rocks down into the earth, so the equipment can glide semi-smoothly over top. The first roller is hooked onto the hitch of the big, four wheel drive tractor. Two more rollers are hooked to either side of the first, in a triangular alignment. They are held in place by a pin that drops through holes whose orientation must be within an eighth of an inch of perfection. Therefore, you must line up two hitches at once, with zero margin of error.

 No marriage is that strong. Instead, we backed the tractor and first roller close to the second two hitches. Then my husband climbed onto the loader tractor to use the bucket to lift and shove the hitches into position one at a time. I thought my hand gestures were perfectly clear. Wave forward to drive forward, palm out for the classic stop gesture, wave back for reverse. Thumbs up for lift the bucket, thumbs down for drop the bucket, and a rocking motion of the hand to indicate tilt.

Except I got confused and gave the thumbs up to indicate that the position was just right, and my husband lifted the bucket, and I threw up a palm to indicate stop but he thought I meant back up, and then I waved back and forth to say “Stop, dang it!” and he thought I meant tilt and the hitch slid off the bucket and dropped to the ground two feet farther from the target than where we started. My husband jammed the tractor into park and bailed out to look for himself.

 “You aren’t doing what I tell you!” I protested.

 “I would, if I could figure out who’s in charge,” he shot back.

 I looked left. Sure enough, my mother was standing beside me, going through an entire set of hand gestures of her own. Which really shouldn't be a problem. When given direct orders by both his wife and his mother-in-law, any intelligent man knows exactly who he should listen to. Right, honey?

Tractor Crazy

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Some day spring may come, and when it does the cattle will take a back seat to farming for a bit. My brother and I would have made good partners in this split operation. He has always loved anything mechanical. I'm an animal person. In his opinion, a cow is a thousand pounds of mobile aggravation in leather pants. I consider a day on the tractor slightly less tedious than counting the grains in a fifty pound bag of rice. \

Unless it's wild rice. That might put it over the top.

 The topic is fresh on my mind because I dragged pastures today. In other words, I drove a tractor around in circles for two hours, busting up cow turds with a harrow. My MP3 player was no help. Forget those businessmen trying to sleep on a noisy airplane. This is the real reason they invented noise cancelling headphones.

Luckily, the tractor did its best to keep me entertained. If I went more than two miles an hours, it immediately hit a badger hole hard enough to launch me out of my seat. And every fifty yards or so, for no particular reason, the door popped open. No big deal until the wind freshened and starting driving pellets of semi-frozen rain into my face as I attempted to steer with one hand while leaning out to drag the door shut with the other. 

Man, I love farming.

Maybe I would like it more if I was gliding along in one of those deluxe tractors with a temperature controlled, sound-proof cab, ergonomically designed seat, Bose stereo and a GPS system designed to eliminate all need for thought on my part.

 Wow. That sounds really dull.

 Old equipment does add a certain edge to farming. Can I make this one last round before the clutch goes completely? The answer is no. It will disentegrate when you've only got five acres left to seed and a three day rain settling in. The tractor I was driving today has a history of personality quirks. One year, during harvest, my sister was using it to bale straw. I was ahead of her on one combine and our hired man was on the other. Mom was in a field a mile away, swathing barley. Dad was in the fuel pick-up, roaring from one machine to the other, fixing them almost as fast as we could break them.

 I can't recall exactly what was wrong with the tractor, but every time my sister shifted gears the front end popped off the ground. She bounded down the rows like a bronc buster on a rearing colt. I had problems of my own. The slightest pressure on the brake pedal caused the combine wheels to lock up. At the end of every row it lurched to a stop, nose-diving, butt flying in the air.

It was a real rodeo out there, I tell you. Her tractor rearing, my combine bucking, and Dad racing around picking up the pieces that flew off.

 Like the people on this ranch, our tractors are getting to the age when they require a little extra encouragement to get going in the morning. Each is equipped with the same basic tool kit: wrenches, screwdrivers, and a blue can of starting fluid.

We hadn't realized how often we had to pump ether into carburetors until one chilly morning when Mom and I and my three-year-old son climbed into one of the diesel pick-ups. It is notoriously cold-blooded and we had forgotten to plug in the block heater. My mom turned the engine over and over, hoping against hope that it would start anyway.

 My son tapped her on the shoulder, full of male superiority. "You know, Grandma, it won't go unless you use the blue can."

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