Uncle Pat's Window Seat

Saturday, Kathryn and I took a road trip to Harrah, Oklahoma, with the intention of picking up a load of bulk fresh fruits and vegetables in the morning and taking in a modern dance concert in the evening in OKC, then hooking it back home to Neosho that evening.   OK, got everything on the shopping list ordered, and found we couldn't order the dance concert tickets because they were for 2017 . . . not 2018.  What the heck, we haven't been on the road for a while (well not since we picked up the bus in Indiana a couple of weeks ago) and we could use some alone time in the car together.  No little people asking if we were there yet. One of the two papayas. So we got up early, put the coffee in thermos mugs and hit el camino.  Put a recorded book in the player (PD James' The Private Patient ) and hurtled into the morning.  It was so much more refreshing to listen to English murder than American politics, but that's a topic for another day. ...

Load number ten . . .  couldn't stand to sit any longer, and besides, the temperature is less than ninety outside.  So, since it's almost dark (8:45 PM), I drag out of my chair by the window and go toss the last of the broken concrete from that first slab into the bed of the Ranger.  I could have divided it over the previous loads, but at least I haven't blown a tire or broken a spring or an axle.  The truck was not very nimble, nor was it overly responsive to the throttle.  But it is not broken.  So it's all good. Now, as an homage to my high school math teacher Bob Phillips, who is only nine years older than I am (go figure), here are some computations I ran just for the halibut. I have moved 9.125 tons of concrete 17 miles, physically hoisting it into and out of the bed of the aforementioned Ranger.  That works out to having physically handled 18.25 tons . . . Tennessee Ernie's got nothin' on this boy . . . between Sunday and Friday, not ...

Long day today . . .  I know this load won't break the axle, Started with the eighth load of urbanite from the slab to the acres.  It's starting to feel like the way the Japanese built their Tokyo airport on new land in Tokyo Bay . . .  The a couple of quick trips out to the local auto parts house for a short 18mm impact socket and to the local hardware store for a a replacement cooking pot lid.  I like buying from local people at local franchises rather than at the mega-boxes.  It's so much more personal when you know the names of the owners and the clerks and you can take a couple of minutes laughing at each other's kid stories. Seats loose and pile at either end. Then to the artistic gulag of The Big Blue Bus.  With the new 18mm impact socket and a fresh charge on the drill motor battery I freed every blessed seat from its mountings on the floor and wall.  My physical routine wasn't pretty, but it was olympian, titanic, and sweat-dripp...

I just finished The Brass Ring: A Sort of a Memoir " by Bill Mauldin, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist who came into his own as a combat cartoonist in the European Theater in World War II.  I found the volume on the 'make a donation' shelf at the used book store.  This thing was published in 1971. One of the first books I ever bought was Up Front,  a collection of Mauldin's "Willy and Joe" cartoons, many of which I yet remember and which surface frequently.  I remember a particular one of a GI (Joe) standing in the middle of the road, arms crossed, and a smug expression on his face.  His partner Willy is with everybody else, in the bar ditch saying, "Nice work, Joe!  I heard a muffled scream as he went by."  It made no sense till you turned the page.  A low-flying P-51 was flying away with a bayonet-ed M-1 rifle stuck in its belly.  It took several viewings to understand how the pages should have been laid out, but I d...

Every day The Big Blue Bus gets a little closer to Big Sally II. Today I got the decals off the "passenger side."  Since a bus is normally full of passengers, how can you tell which one that is? And the front.  That one is self-explanatory. Side view without decals Tomorrow morning I'll work on clearing off the driver's side and the rear of the bus. Since the bus is parked facing north, it's easier to work when the targeted side is in the shade. The existing decals.

Well, it's literally high noon - clock time, not solar time .  .  . that happens about an hour from now.  I'm still sitting inside, windows open, ceiling fan turning, not yet either ceiling fan, much less air conditioner.  Trying to puzzle out this word-processor. Looking out the window at the Big Blue Bus.  It's not Big Sally II yet.  Saturday morning I                                                                                  broke up half of one of the three slabs that were under Mr. Moore's Meat Market in the back yard.  It took me four loads in the Ranger to get them all out to our acres on County Highway B outside Goodman.  I was so charged up that I was up till eleven reading a Bill Mauldin autobiography before I slowed down enou...

22 July 2018 Yesterday I picked up an electric jackhammer at Scott's Rental over on the drag, about a mile from the house.  Damn thing's heavy.   I googled it, it weighs sixty three cumbersome pounds and shakes your entire being when you squeeze the handle trigger.  It's too much hassle right now to make the internet tell me how much the chisel adds to the weight, but you could probably use it as an anti-tank round. Saturday I worked in the shade of the neighbor's black walnut tree and broke out twenty feet by four of six-inch concrete.  I say it was six inches thick; it averages between five and seven inches without rhyme or reason.  The contractor had poured it onto tar paper over a sand base.  After I had worked about all my magnificent body could handle, I loaded my Ranger four different times for the thirty-four mile round-trip to our wooded acres to dump the stuff.  Note:  Broken concrete  technically called "urbanite...

This morning I went by the glazier's after laps in the pool and got the driver's window replacement set in train. The Bus has her new window installed and is now parking on the street across from the house because I have started breaking up the old butcher's market slab in the back yard.  I waited till eight in the evening to start, when the weather was down to the middle eighties and the Sun was not beaming directly onto me.  I'll be working by streetlamp. I've been working with my rented jackhammer for forty-five minutes, and I have taken apart maybe a twentieth of the ancient concrete - thank God there's no rebar in the slab; I don't know about the grade beam yet.  It's harder . . .  A buddy of mine said he busted his ass in grad school so he wouldn't have to do sch-tuff like this.  I considered that then, and again now.  The physicality of the world is a really groovy puzzle I get to dork around with. Forty-five minutes on; f...

Big Sally's Driver-side window . . .  Friday morning, up with the sun, crawled three lengths of of the "Y" pool and backstroked another three, with two crossing laps underwater ... one at a time for now.   Went to the Glass Store. The glazier pulled out the driver's window, a double-paned affair which had lost its seal and had loaded itself up with condensate, calcium salts, and etched-in stain.  He and I looked mournfully at the pathetic pane-full thing on his cutting table, and I said, "Just replace the thing; that'll only make me mad every time I turn my head left for the whole time I own this bus." It was going to be fifty bucks; by shelling out three times that today, I will save myself a gaboodle of frustration and anger for the foreseeable future. They'll call. Life is good.

Views from the Windowseat . . . 19 July 2018 First full day back from rescuing Big Sally II from a road margin in a Champaign, Illinois, suburb.  Way suburb. Bought her by maxing out my credit card, literally. On the drive back to Neosho, I discovered, to my thrilled horror. that she would hit eighty miles an hour on a long downhill slice of interstate . . . my eyes were on the traffic ahead of me, not the speedometer.  No rattle, no fuss, just eighty terrifying miles per hour.  And I really needed to get the brakes gone over by a mechanic; they were really stiff. But she's home. She''s not parked on the old butcher's market shop slab in the back yard; she's parked at the local glass company's store four or five ninety-five degree blocks north of the house.  The driver's side window is double-paned.  Who thought up that one?  The vacuum seal has ruptured, and the space between the glass is full of lines of condensate and discoloration.  C...