The Local News

3-17

Well, the 460 is put back together now and after a few more checks to make sure everything was in its proper place, it fired and then died. I’m sure that it’s just going to need a little minor carb adjustment. It starts, runs for a second or two, and dies. All of the carb adjustments are at factory specs, but this thing is over 50 years old, so like me it needs some work. Further tinkering and digging on the internet has shown me that it’s actually a ’62 model and the coil was supposed to have a resistor in line with it and not having one has blown the coil. I still have a coil left over from my hot stock racing days and I may try that on it to see if it will work. It’s almost three times the size of the stock coil and puts out almost twice as much juice.

 The weather has turned a bit cooler, a bit like Indian summer in reverse. Just about the time you are ready to get outside and take care of the some of the odd thousands of things, it’s more like you might want to wait a week, or maybe two. The temps aren’t the worst, but the ever constant wind ( have I told you about the wind here? ) keeps even moderate temps a bit uncomfortable. I’m sure my age and losing 40 or so pounds along with the chemo has made me even more sensitive to the temperature.

 Teresa’s chicks are now 3 weeks old and are about twice their birth size. They’re getting feathers and are quite rowdy now. They currently are in a plastic tub and take up about half of the area of the tub that they are in. They will probably move outside to a small cage we have this week barring any major weather problems. We’ve placed the cage inside of a greenhouse that we have to reduce their exposure to the wind.

3-24

 We have been going to an auction near here for quite a while now. It’s more like a giant yard sale where everything is only a couple of dollars. Most of it would be considered junk by city standards, but you can always find something of interest there. After the yard sale part there is a livestock part where mostly what they sell is goats and sheep, but after that they sell chickens, ducks, geese, pheasant, etc. This evening Teresa came home with, among other things, 110 baby chicks and 4 baby ducks. The first 100 are all males and the plan for them is to raise them to young adult size and sell them. They cost 16 cents apiece and we expect to be able to get around $ 2.00 for them. The other 10 are of unknown sex so we’re hoping for at least a 50-50 mix. At any rate, all of the roosters will eventually be sold and we’ll keep the hens for eggs. One of the ducks didn’t make it. We think that it may have eaten too fast since they all started eating and drinking as soon as we put it down for them. The ducks will be more for pets and are expected to live on our pond and should help with bug control. Of course, we have tried guineas before for bug control, and they seemed rather good at it. What they weren’t good at is hiding from the owls and staying out of the road. The few people that come down our road don’t seem to care about if they hit a bird in the road and guineas aren’t the smartest of birds. We started with 14 and are now down to 1. It runs around here all day from sunup to sundown going “kuk-wack. kuk-wack, kuk-wack”, calling for it’s buddies and attempting to tempt us to just shoot it and put it out of our misery.

3-28

 Today turned out mild and with light wind so we put our efforts into trying to finish the greenhouse. This thing is about 10’ x 12’ with a square tube frame, covered in corrugated clear plastic. Now, you might be thinking, so what. The problem with all of this is that I took it all apart about two years or so ago and it’s been somewhat of a puzzle to put back together. The frame offered the most headaches since there were only a few choice pieces that actually got labeled and from there I had to do trial and error to see what piece fit where without drilling new holes. That way I could be sure that it went back together the way it came apart.  The plastic walls and roof have had to wait for calm days since most of it would go sailing off if you tried it on a windy day. Currently, there are twenty of the chicks in there, which have thankfully been moved out of the downstairs bathroom. They had been in there to keep a close eye on the air temp to keep them warm. The only thing left in the house now is the three ducks that make a noise like a child’s squeak toy. The dog thinks that they are for his entertainment and is constantly trying to get in there with them.

3-30

 Today the first set of ten chicks were put into the chicken house that they will be in for quite a while. The ducks moved outside to the greenhouse with the second set of ten. The ducks didn’t seem too happy at first, but I was a bit happier to not having 3 squeak toys constantly making noise. My only solution was to turn the TV up and Teresa was thinking I was getting more deaf.

4-11

 I looked at the calendar today and then when I started this post and thought where did the time go. In my defense, we have had several visitors here and also making preparations for spring like trying to get a garden put in and planting things. My part in this is mostly area preparation and supervision. ( Yeah, like I supervise my wife) The ducks have moves to their last temporary home before we introduce them to the pond and the first set of ten chicks aren’t chicks anymore. The second set are still in the greenhouse as much because we’re keeping them out of the weather as we are trying to keep some of them contained. Every time Teresa opens the cage to feed and water them, at least one of them flies out and has to be caught back up.

Spring has really sprung here now with grass coming back in and trees filling in and so forth. Early morning temps can still be on the cool side, but by afternoon most people would be wanting to be in a T-shirt.

One of our visitors here was Teresa’s sister’s gentleman friend Henry. He’s 83 if I heard right and has been in farming and ranching since he was a pup, so when he came up I asked him to look at the Farmall of ours. After listening to it attempt to start several times, he started tinkering with the points and after a bit more tinkering found the problem. This tractor started it’s life with a 6 volt system with a generator. Over the years it’s been converted to a 12 volt system with an alternator. On top of that, when they changed it to 12 volt, the coil was changed to 12 volt with a ballast resistor in line with the run circuit. What Henry found, with some crazy good detective work, was that the brand new resistor that I had put on it was broken causing intermittent spark and resulting in what I had---- starts but won’t stay running. After a bit of experimenting we got it running at least long enough to warm it up, tune the carb, and check out the hydraulics. It still needs a few parts to make it a working tractor, but we’re getting there. It’s main job will be to keep a lot of the acreage mowed, but I’m sure we’ll find plenty for it to do.

Another of our visitors were our good friends Terri and Michael. They both like to fish, and when they heard that our pond doesn’t have any decided that that must change and ordered fish from a local hatchery. So, this Friday we’ll be going to a feed store to meet the truck that will have the fish. We’re getting catfish, minnows and a couple of carp. The minnows will be for mosquito control and the carp are for moss and algae control. The pond has stayed mostly full since we have owned the place, so we’re hopeful that they will stock the pond for many years.

Well, it’s that time again, so I’ll try to get this out there today.

Happy Birthday to me

3-2

 Another round of chemo today. I still haven’t been able to see a primary care doctor, but the people at the Ada VA clinic have been really helpful trying to get my records transferred up here to be seen locally. Thankfully the oncologist heard enough of my complaining about being short of breath that he prescribed an inhaler for me to use. I’m not sure if it’s the placebo effect of my just having it, but I haven’t needed it yet. My brother and my son have asthma and now I have a small inkling of what they go through. My brother’s got better as he got older as did my son’s. Hopefully, soon I will be able to get to see a PCP ( Primary Care Physician ) and I’ll have someone that can look at everything.

Like almost everyone else I have good days and bad days. The bad ones are usually weather related. I don’t move as quickly as I used to ( welcome to getting old ) and cold weather really gets to me. However, the weather has been fairly moderate around here lately. We finally got our  ’59 McCormick  460 moved from where it quit last summer to a place where it’s easier to work on. This thing is a bit of a beast, but it makes it easier for me to work on. Almost everything to work on is at eye level to me and at the lowest it’s at waist level.  I’m in the process of rewiring it and I think I’m almost done. Next is to pull off the starter for a quick check. We did try to turn it over, but it wouldn’t make one full revolution. My next step if the starter is good is to pull the plugs and try to hand crank it to see if one or more of the cylinders have fluid in them preventing the cylinder from being able to fully end it’s stroke, then remount the starter. And if this all is successful and we get it running, I still have to find a seat for it. What’s there now is the framework where the seat goes and when we got it, it came with a worn out pillow for a seat. The last seat that I used on it was out of a boat and it was just sitting there to keep me from having to stand up to drive it. This thing is six foot tall at the top of its hood, so me standing from the operators area puts me at almost ten foot and there are way too many low branches for that. There’s no cab on it so every branch is read to slap you in the face or whatever. What I truly need is a Bostrom lowrider seat from an older truck. The frame for the seat is almost the same frame that I remember from some of the first trucks I drove in ’67. (More on my trucking career later in My Life Story, coming to an email near you!) At any rate, when we get this thing motivated it should be able to handle just about anything you can throw at it. Of all of the projects that need attention around here, there are a lot that require horsepower in one form or another and something with as big tires as this thing has will be able to pull quite a load. Things getting stuck here is another recurring theme where I get to practice the recovery scenarios that I’ve learned through the years, not the least of which came from my Army experiences.

 Teresa has her own project going. We now have 10 (hopefully) female chicks. They currently reside in the downstairs bathroom, cheep, cheep, cheeping their time away. When they get about half grown, or big enough to fly out of the plastic tub they’re now in, they’ll move outside to an enclosure we’ve built for them. The hope here is for a supply of eggs. Current prices for eggs that you can buy from one of the neighbors is $3.00 a dozen. From the store in town it’s closer to $2.00, but the store is also 20 miles away. Heck, I’d have a cow for milk if I knew how to milk one. Years ago when the kids were little, I would go to a local dairy and buy milk from them. We would get about a quart of cream off of each gallon. We even made our own butter once, but decided that the cream was better put to use as homemade ice cream. Of course all of that required that someone do some actual work for the result and children are hard pressed to crank on an ice cream machine when they know that the finished product is waiting for them in the store in a huge variety of flavors. Even I have to admit that if I were making ice cream or butter now, I would find a machine to do it.

3-9

 Two doctor’s appointments today. The first was chemo and the second was to get a PCP. I wound up with a nurse practitioner. It seems that the actual doctors don’t want to have to decipher how to do things on the VA computer in the office so they leave it to someone who has figured out the system. At any rate, she was knowledgeable, even if we did have to go over my family life and health history all over again. Someday maybe I’ll put it all down on a USB key and just hand it all to them. I’m sure HIPA would have a stroke, but I’m sure I don’t care. I left there with another prescription for an antibiotic that will hopefully clear up the congestion in my lungs. She also has placed an order for a nebulizer for the albuterol to help me breathe easier. I have tried the inhaler and it leaves a slight burning in my chest. She said that the nebulizer gives you the same amount of medicine, but over several more minutes and more diluted so as to even out the dose more or less.

Rain, rain

In the past two weeks we’ve gotten around seven inches of rain and that makes for some muddy days around here. We have dug diversionary trenches here, there, and everywhere trying to reroute some of it to keep from having quite so much of it standing around. We may still get a freeze, but spring is a springin’ and the temps are beginning to moderate a bit. The grass is greening up and trees are budding out. We’ve made plans as to where the garden will go in and now all we have to do is plow it up. I say all we have to do like it’s no big deal. We still have to get a tractor or a decent tiller running to be able to accomplish this. The land here was terraced long before I was born to prevent erosion, so there are berms that hold water back that create small ponds of water that tend to keep the water in place. Normally this is a good thing if all you want to do with the land is pasture, but living in the middle of all of this gets a bit mucky. With forty acres you would think that picking a garden site would be easy, but the possibilities are limited to where we can get water to.

Happy Birthday to me 3-15

 I guess this was about as good a birthday as I could have hoped for with two doctors visits and chemo thrown in for good measure. After all of that, we got home and I pretty much goofed off the rest of the day. Teresa made me a Whopper pie and relayed all of the well-wishers from Facebook and I took several calls from the kids and family.

Well, I’m gonna wrap it up and save the rest for the next one.

Continued

2-4

 Had hernia surgery today and had to say it went a bit better than I expected. The vampire nurse ( I know this sounds mean, but it’s what they call themselves ) got me on the first stick, painless, and in the hand. That was a first. They got me settled and after about an hour or so I was in surgery. The Dr. had been in and made a mark on my side to indicate where to start after a joke about why they do that. Seemingly an hour or so later I was in recovery, and another hour or so ( actually a few hours-surgery drugs have a way of distorting time ) I was in a wheelchair to the truck and on my way home.

 Getting over surgery now has gotten a little harder due to age and general physical condition. I know that it’s to be expected, but it doesn’t make it any easier to take. While I may be retired, it’s not a voluntary thing. The need for treatment necessitates being off of work for long periods of time so that you can give both the body and mind time to heal. I had the surgery two days ago. I had a lot of pain the day of and the day after, today not so bad. I took the pain pills that the dr. ordered at least as often as he prescribed, if not a little more.  I no longer have to look forward to a UA every couple of years at least, so I take pain meds at least as much as prescribed. I have a fairly high tolerance for pain, but along with it comes a higher tolerance for pain meds. I understand the need for UA’s for different professions, but I don’t believe that absolutely no meds at all is true for everyone .Almost anyone that would care to can find a vet that might tell you of someone that has put up with incredible, indescribable pain. Be that as it may, at four days after I’m down to one to two pills a day. I still can’t do much, but I can move around with tolerable pain. Not that I move much either. Lately I mostly sit around and watch TV or play solitaire in one form or another. If I get up it’s to either get something to drink or go outside for a short walk to see what the wind has blown around this time. The wind is another recurring theme here. That’s something that does take some getting used to. All of the yard pretties that we had in Texas, wind chimes, bird feeders, etc. haven’t fared as well as we had hoped. The wind chimes sound more like an out of tune calliope or maybe just a bunch of two year olds banging on pots and pans. Until we moved here we hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the wind. If it blew in Granbury, there were an abundance of houses and trees to slow it down before it got to us. Here it’s more like the old joke about nothing between us and the North Pole is a barbed wire fence. It doesn’t blow all of the time, but just when you’re about to be lulled into a sense of calm, your hat blows off and lands about two acres away. In Boise City,Ok. on U.S. 287 when you’re going south through the town, on the right side of the road, there is a mechanic’s shop that has what they call an Oklahoma wind gauge. It consists of a very large chain about ten feet long with a sizeable rock attached to the bottom of it. The gauge is quite old and in the 80’s it read at 4 to 5 inches “ ain’t blowin yet”, at 2 to3 feet “ hold on to yer hat”, and at the point when it would be at right angles to the ground it said “hed fer the shed”. Well, if that gauge were here, it would have read hold on to yer hat a lot.

A short rant

 The price of gasoline has gone down to the point of almost breaking the $1.00 mark around here anyway. To hear a lot of people tell it, this might be the total downfall of the economy. Now, to paraphrase someone much smarter than me, “Those who don’t learn from their history are doomed to repeat it.” We have gone through this mess before and yet our esteemed leaders have still put if not all then a lot of their eggs in one basket. Taxes are down and this state along with many others, have revenue shortfalls that stagger the imagination. Two words come to mind, diversify and invest.

 Now, on top of that, everything that every company blamed their ever soaring prices on fuel costs and jacked their prices up to “cover the costs of fuel” have yet to even hint at bringing the prices down. And while I’m on the soapbox, let’s look at the price of oil in quart bottles. A quart of oil comes from crude that has been refined. Gasoline comes from crude that has been refined even more. So, if a gallon of gas is $1.50 then WHY is a quart of oil $4.00? This can only be explained by an engineer with a doctorate in both physics and math that works for a major oil company. To say this mess is way above my head is putting it very mildly.

 Ok, enough of that. Our life now seems to revolve around doctor’s appointments, mine and Teresa’s. Mine for cancer and hers for physical therapy for a frozen shoulder. How her shoulder got frozen is anybody’s guess. The doctors don’t have any ideas as to how or why this has happened.

2-23

 Started a new chemo today. This stuff is methotrexate. It uses the body’s immune system to fight the cancer and is the least bothersome to me of any of it. I’m not sure why we couldn’t have started with this a little sooner or even a cocktail of this along with other stuff. It seems that oncologists are really big on drug cocktails, or at least their pharmacologists have convinced them of it. I will be on this once a week through the middle of May, assuming that a mid-cycle CT scan doesn’t tell them it’s not that good. I had a CT done the other day, although the results aren’t as easily read by us as the ones from MDA and the CD report takes a heap of doing by nurses that are already over booked and under appreciated, so we have a bit of a hard time asking for much extra.

 I do have to say that the people at Mercy in Ada live up to the name. They are without a doubt the most helpful and compassionate group of healthcare workers I have dealt with. After my hernia surgery the nurse in the surgery unit sent me a get well card .They are truly the best.

3-1

 Well, I have run out of things to say for the moment, and looking at the date I realize that it’s been much too long since I’ve posted. So, adios for now.