One of my favorite mottoes is "Finding Out How That Buck Lost His Antler Can Keep You From Losing Yours!" Here's a few of my thought along those lines: Ivan Morse, our neighbor of many moons ago, hired me and my buddy, Freddy to help him shovel ear corn from his wire crib into an elevator to take into town for grinding feed. We stopped after a while to have a drink of water and Freddy looked amusingly at the old man and asked, "If you don't mind me askin'... how come you got them rubber bands on yer overall legs?" The old fellow screwed that cap back onto his water jug and looked at Freddy for a few moments and replied, "Well, son... You might just figger that out fer yerself directly." We went ahead with our shoveling and finally got down to the concrete floor of the crib and were attacking the last part of the corn with our scoop shovels and we saw several mice run out of the pile and scurry about to find a safer place to hide. About that time a mouse ran up Freddy's pants leg and he grabbed the denim right between his knee and his crotch and squeezed down until we could hear the mouse bones popping. After he'd taken down his pants and removed the remains of the crushed mouse, he looked over at the old man and asked, "Hey, Mister Morse? You got any more o' them rubber bands?" I guess that'd be another reason why us farm kids hated the baggy-butt dungarees that our parents decided for us that we'd wear. All the town kids guys had trim-legged Levis and Wranglers that looked really cool with a sports shirt and penny loafers but we all looked like a bunch of dorks in our dungarees. Sometimes I'd opt to have the folks get me the striped farmer-bib overalls because they weren't as dorky as the dungarees and besides... There's a lot of things that you could use that extra pocket for that was sewn onto the bib. Most of the old guys kept their Red Man or Beech-Nut chawin's in there but I've used mine for everything from a lunch sandwich to baby bunnies that we found in a nest while out combining soy beans. I've got another birthday comin' up and I just ordered myself a present... A $30 mouse trap. At first, I thought that's too much to pay for a Mouse Trap on Amazon but then I thought back on all the money that they've cost me. This guy's video made a believer out of me: Some years ago, a mouse got into the engine shroud of my twin-cylinder riding mower and built a nest. I didn't know that he'd built a nest in there and I went out and started up the mower to cut grass and it wasn't long before the engine began back-firing and losing power. That's when I found the nest. All that stuff that he'd shoved in there amongst the cooling fins under the shroud blocked any cooling air and the engine cooked. I took it apart and discovered that the engine had an aluminum block with hardened steel valve seats. The valve seats had come loose out of the block and were dangling like little rings around the exhaust valves. . That mouse cost me about $500. The next time, here where I'm at now, my gas-pack furnace/air conditioner unit began making noise and then tripped a breaker. There's a squirrel-cage type fan in there that blows the heat / air through the furnace ducts under the house. . It's a rather precision motor/fan design that won't tolerate the weight of a mouse going around on one side of the fan without the out-of-balance destroying the motor mounts and then when the mounts fail, the fan gets lodged and burns up the windings. That mouse cost me another approximately $500. (He got in through the ductwork and went up into the furnace.) . So now I set a whole row of Victor traps under the house and they do work but I need to continually check the traps and reset them if they trip and remove the caught mice and reset those too. If I forget to reset the traps, it might well cost me another $500 plus a week waiting for them to ship me another motor. . Anyway, I'm hoping that this new trap will solve my mouse problems and hopefully keep me from spending another $500 anytime in the future. Back in about 1954 we were putting out 37 acres of tomatoes with a 5-person transplanter setting the plants. . . Several of the neighbor kids had accepted jobs on the transplanter but one of 'em apparently didn't get the proper training and when the tractor made the first turn at the end of the field, there was one whole row of tomato plants with the rooted end sticking UP! . There were four 55-gallon barrels of water on the transplanter to give a squirt of water to the young plants and several of the workers were getting a drink of water from the barrels while the trays of plants were being replenished. We stopped for lunch and drove up to the farmhouse to refill the water barrels and when the left barrel overflowed, a mother mouse and all her babies came floating out of the fill neck... and several kids there began gagging! . I got a job one summer helping the old caretaker mow the local cemetery with a gas-driven reel-type mower. (Those don't do worth a darn on buckhorn.) Along about noon, old Eldon says to me, "Son? Why don't we take a break for a bit while this sun's up high and go down to the house for a drink of water? . So we shut off the mowers and walked down to his house where there were a couple of tin cans hanging on the side of the pump and we pumped the bucket full and dipped our tin cans into the cool, refreshing water. . As we sat there in the shade enjoying the view of that hot, summer day, old Eldon began talking. "We've got that back section about filled up there in the cemetery and I figger that when we sell them last 4 graves up there, I'll open a new section further back o' them. I dunno why it is, but ever time we put in a new grave up there in that one part, the taste o' my water changes."
At first I thought he was just poking fun but then when I realized that he was SERIOUS, I about gagged. I took my own water with me after that day!
Edited by Dax 4/24/2021 18:10
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Experience is a Good Teacher
