New Year Thoughts: Ashes in a Cedar Box

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’m thinking about life. I’m thinking about joy and suffering. I’m thinking about ways to explain my thoughts. Let’s work our way back to that.

I made a box from cedar for my mother-in-law’s ashes.

This will require some back story, so warm-up your coffee.

Here goes.

Next year is 2025. It has been a quarter of a bleeping century since the year 2000. It has been five years since 2020.

In late December of 2019, we were innocent of COVID-19. We had the dumpster-fire year of 2020 ahead of us. We didn’t know.

We just didn’t know.

Lock-down in March. Working from home. Working in our yards. Door-Dashing from restaurants.

We were always hoping it would just burn itself out, that it would just be over. Finally, we only have embers burning in odd corners, but that’s long after 2020.

Then we came to Christmas of that year. We took our lives in our hands and got together. It was a nice day. 

The next day--in separate events--a friend of mine passed-away from COVID, but before that my mother-in-law fell ill.

Seriously ill.

Because of the lockdown we couldn’t see her, couldn’t be with her.

That was the beginning of a 4-month waking-nightmare that ended with my mother-in-law’s death on May 1, 2021.  

We brought her home in January, so at least we had time with her, but that period marked everyone in the family, from oldest to youngest in a way that is still very present.

Each of us began to change in response to that event, to the interconnected events that occurred during the various dumpster fires associated with COVID. (“Dumpster fire” became part of my working idiom, for one thing.)

I took up wood-working in late 2021 and since then I’ve acquired some nice tools; have built up a nice shop; and have learned how to do hand-tool woodworking to a certain degree.

At some point I acquired a bit of rough-cut, locally-grown cedar.  Then this summer, the summer of 2024, I decided that I would make a box to put my mother-in-law’s ashes in. 

I measured the box the ashes are currently in. I cut and glued up some panels from the rough-cut cedar.

Then I just let them sit.  I had in my head what I wanted to do, but I just could not proceed. The wood panels just laid around my shop taking up space because I could not proceed.

Then Jean and I went to Scotland on a walking tour. This is something we just wouldn’t have done before. There was always time to do it later.

Then I went to Paraguay.

When I got back, Jean and I started talking about vacation for next year, and she said it was time to take Janet’s ashes to the family plot in Indiana.

I began squaring-up the wood for the cedar box right away, and within a week the box was done.

It is beautiful beyond my vision for it. 

It’s not perfect. If it were perfect, then it couldn’t’ve been made by me.

But it is beautiful.

Jean looked at it and said that we’re not burying it in her family’s plot in Indiana. We will keep it here and put some of her mom’s memorabilia in it. We will bury her ashes in something else.

Suffering is a part of life. Maybe we’re supposed to get something out of it; maybe not. It doesn’t matter because the suffering is just there.

You do what you can in response; it’s never enough; but maybe it’s better than not doing anything at all.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Chisels, a cabinet, and the Bobist Way

By Bobby Neal Winters

Buying chisels, especially good chisels, is an addiction. They are useful, they are versatile, and they can be beautiful. I love my chisels, and I believe they love me too, even though they extract blood from me from time to time. I think that might be the way they show love.

I’ve gone from having one or two, to having several, and then to having many. Each has its use; each has its purpose; each is beautiful in its own special way.

Chisels need to be taken care of.  This means you need to keep them sharp; you need to keep them clean; you need to keep an imperceptibly thin coating of oil on them.  You take them out; you use them; you care for them; then you put them away. It is an eternal circle.

You need a place to put them.  This is key.

As my chisel addiction has come upon me gradually, I’ve not been intentional in having storage. First I had them in a drawer, then I bought a canvas roll with pockets, and then another canvas roll.

And then another.

I’m up to three canvas rolls for my chisels, and one or two more for my wood carving knives.  Wood carving knives is also an addiction.

A canvas roll as a means of storage is not completely satisfactory.

The rolls are nice, don’t get me wrong. They are a great place to put your chisels if you need to carry them from one place to the next. The problem comes with normal usage: You have to unroll them every time you use them and then put them back. Then unroll them again, the next time. 

And so on.

With all the rolling and unrolling it becomes easier just to leave them laying out, where they can get lost; where they can get something else put on them; where they can get knocked to the floor and chipped; where some other man might just come along and take them. (I shudder just thinking about it.)

I’m building a cabinet for my chisels.

This has happened by accident.  I bought a book on making tool cabinets with the hope there would be a nice, easy to follow plan in.  

This was not the case.

There were lots of pictures of lots of pretty, homemade tool chests, but not a plan for a single one. Here’s a picture of an acorn; now go and build a house.

So I didn’t have a plan, but I had an idea. Build some trays--some drawers with separators in it--for my chisels. I thought I might need to build two. Do the same for my knives. Then after the drawers were built, then build the cabinet.

There might be some great woodworking guru, some skillful master of tools who says this is the way to do it.

Don’t.

This next bit I am going to write carefully because they might be the most important words I’ve written.  If they ever start a religious order based on one of my writings, it will be about this one, so pay attention.

You are going to mess up. You ought to do everything as carefully as possible. Measure twice, cut once. That’s great. But as careful as you are going to be, you will still mess up from time to time.  Order your work so that when you do mess up you will be able to fix it.

For example, if you are cutting a board, arrange your actions so that if you err you will cut it a little too long instead of a little too short. It’s easier to take off a little more wood than to put it back on.

And again, if you are cutting a mortise and tenon, cut the mortise first and then cut the tenon. It is easier to cut a tenon to fit the mortise than the other way around. You can cut the tenon a little too fat and then slowly shave it to fit the mortise.

And finally, which I have just learned the hard way, when you are making a cabinet to hold drawers, make your cabinet first because it’s easier to make drawers to fit a cabinet than to change the whole cabinet to fit the drawers.  

That’s it. That’s what the Bobists will vow.

As I sit here, the glue is drying. It is probably as square as anything I’ve ever made, but it would be nicer and I would be less stressed out if I had made the cabinet first.

After the glue is dry, I will go out and put it conveniently located in my workspace. I’ll wax the drawers and the drawer runners. And I will rest better knowing my lovely chisels have a place to rest.

But it could’ve been better.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 A Wicked Image

By Bobby Neal Winters

Jean and I went to see “Wicked” on Black Friday. 

For those of you who don’t know, “Wicked” is a reimagining of “The Wizard of Oz” from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. I suppose many of you are like me in that “The Wizard of Oz” was an annual treat for my family while growing up.  They used to show it on the holidays. I most strongly associate it with Easter.

The new offering, “Wicked” is funny; it’s got some great songs; and it will make you think if you are so inclined.

Oddly enough, the main theme in “Wicked” is the same as that of the original “Wizard of Oz”: Image.

There are spoilers ahead so I suggest seeing both “Wicked” and “The Wizard of Oz” before proceeding further.

As you recall, the big reveal in “The Wizard of Oz” was that the wizard wasn’t really a wizard at all.  He was a fast-talking carnaval showman. He’d created the illusion of magic to mislead the simple folk into thinking he was a wizard.

When Dorothy, the Tinman, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow went to him, he first sent them on a quest; when they unexpectedly succeeded, i.e. lived, the Wizard attempted to put them off.  After he was revealed to be a charlatan, the Wizard then gave the Tinman, the Lion, and the Scarecrow visible symbols of what they wanted rather than the things themselves. That is to say, he gave them the sort of “magic” that he did know how to use.

“Wicked” starts in time with the birth of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. She is born green and because of this is despised by her supposed father. I say supposed because it’s hinted that the Wizard is her father.  Because of her green color, she is an outcast.

At an early age, she discovers that she has true magical powers, something which is increasingly rare, even in the merry old land of Oz. Those of you who are interested in such things, take note that this is the textbook start for the classic “hero’s journey.”

Not an accident.

But I digress.

“Wicked” is a study of the importance of “image.” At University, the magically talented but green Elphaba meets the untalented but beautiful and ambitious Galenda (eventually to rename herself Glenda). Glenda is the archetypal popular girl.  She is beautiful, shallow, and un-self aware, serving as a perfect complement to Elphaba.

Glenda is one of those people who we are naturally drawn to love.  Their beauty is such that you must love them--if you can get over wanting to kill them.  Nature or God must have put them among us for a purpose. Whether they are designed by divine plan or by evolution, they are ultimately used by those who really run things to sway the opinion of us normal, homely folk.

One might be tempted to hate them because, but they are only cogs in the machine, just like the rest of us.

Elphaba, it seems, is the first person in Oz after a long, long time, who has any real magical ability at all. She, however, is unaware of this.  She believes that the Great and Powerful Wizard and her mentor at the university have magical power. 

This is not the case, but they carefully maintain the image of having magic.

Elphaba does have magic, but she doesn’t control her image, so it doesn’t matter.  She’s just green, and therefore, wicked.

While this movie is entertaining and has wonderful songs--though a young man of my acquaintance suggested it could be made a lot shorter by cutting the songs out--I believe we need to pay close attention. We are living in an age that is becoming increasingly “post-truth.” Image and perception are only things that matter. And as I think about it, this has been true for a long, long time.  

We are separated out into groups, set against each other, lied to, given a common enemy to hate.

And it is all laid out before us, in a “light” entertaining musical.

The whole battle plan of the ruling elite is rolled out in front of us in shocking clarity, and the ruling elite lets it happen.

They must not be very afraid of us.

On the lighter side, the movie is entertaining, does have some good songs, and they managed to make the flying monkeys scary again.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 A Four-Digit Word for Fool

By Bobby Neal Winters

Think about the first calculator you owned or your first LED watch, if you had one.  The symbols it used were displayed on a seven-segment LED.  These are somewhat misnamed. They have eight segments, not seven. One of the “segments” is not geometrically a segment; it’s a decimal point.

But the geometrical segments are the important part.  There are two vertical segments on the left; two vertical segments on the right; three horizontal segments up the middle.  Two plus two plus three equals seven, and you don’t even need an electronic calculator for that.

These LEDs are limited as to the symbols they can display. You can do the decimal digits: 0, 1, 2,..., 8, 9.  You have to have those for arithmetic.  You can also do: A, b, C, d, E, and F.  These are important to machine-level programmers who work in hexadecimal, i.e. base 16, arithmetic.  But there are constraints.  Note that even in getting all of the extra hexadecimal digits, I had to go lowercase for b and d.

Such is the skill of the brain of interpreting and reinterpreting that there were games played by nerds back in the 70s in making calculators spell words like bOObIES.

And nerds we were, but rest assured I never used my intelligence for anything that salacious. 

Since the first half of the year, I’ve been devoting a large chunk of my time to learning the details of the Atmega328P microcontroller. I’ve learned enough to add it to the list of things I can be a bore on. (That list is published in three volumes, and each volume is as thick as the Oxford English Dictionary.)

Given that this chip is smaller than a kidney bean, there is a surprising amount written on it.  The basic resources I’ve been using consist of a pair of 250-page technical documents.  Think of the style of writing in these documents being like the IKEA instructions for putting together the Roswell Probe, but without as many helpful pictures.

I’ve done this project in order to teach a class. And it is going to be a good class. But my idea of what I am going to do has changed tremendously as a result of my own learning experience. 

Tremendously.  I didn’t choose that word lightly.

A device like this--and indeed any computer-like device--does three things: it takes in data; it processes that data; it then displays its results. We can call that Input, Process, and Output. 

Of these three parts, we usually spend most of the time on the middle part, Process. This is not because it is so hard, but rather the reverse.  The remainder, Input/Output, is so hard that it has been done for us by others. It has been dealt with and put to the side so that most people can concentrate on the process part.

The thing is that someone has to think about Input/Output. Someone has to work out those details to make it easier for everyone else.

Last night I was at a Computer Science Club meeting. (It was at 6pm on the Friday night before Thanksgiving break; that is hardcore.) Two of the students who presented did so on computer mice they had made and programmed in one of their EET classes. They were amazing.

Computer mice represent input.

For my part, I’ve been working on writing to the seven-segment LED I mentioned at the beginning of this column.  The hardware I am working with (a Freenove project board for those of you who are interested) has a four-digit seven-segment LED.  This will let me display a decimal number between 0 and 9,999. If I use hexadecimal, I can get any number between 0 and 65,535, but only a nerd could read it. 

By the end of September--just before I left for Paraguay--I’d managed to write a program that would output to that four-digit display.  The problem was that I could no longer find anything in that program. It had grown organically as I was in the process of learning what I was doing, and it had gotten away from me.

Since that point, I’ve been going back over the code and basically rewriting it from scratch.

Last night, before the CS Club members gave their presentations, I went in and fiddled with my program just a little.  I’d been having trouble getting it to act predictably, but I had an insight and fixed something. 

I put in my code, pressed run, and there came my output in four seven-segment digits: bOOb.  While this has a salacious interpretation, I mean it as a description of someone who enjoys solving this sort of puzzle as much as I do.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 The Perfect Gift

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve finished the chess set.

Let me take that back.  I may put a coat of wax on the pieces, but, to outside observers, I have finished the chess set.

They are carved.  I’ve stained the hillbilly farmers and have oiled the dairy farmers.  I’ve made a box to keep them in. I’ve put dividers in to keep the pieces in order.

I am only lacking a hook latch to keep the box closed, and that is in the mail.

But, were I to die today.  If I had a coronary between this paragraph and the next one, there would be a tearful moment on Christmas morning when Jean shakily handed one present to my grandsons saying, “Your grandpa loved you. This was the last thing he made.  It was for you boys.”

Kind of makes you want to see the movie, doesn’t it?

This was an incredibly satisfying project.

Those of you who are of a certain age, know what I have in mind with it.  Fifty, sixty, one-hundred years from now, some child yet unborn will be rifling through a closet looking for games to play,come upon this box, and open it.

“What’s this?” the child will ask.

“Your grandfather’s grandfather carved it,” the mother will answer.

We just have to hope that things are going well enough that they don’t decide to use it as firewood.  But if they must, they must, and they have my blessing.

This is the nature of a gift. You give it, and you let go with hope.

I am now in a pleasant period of a good life.  In the 16th Psalm it is written:

Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup;

you make my lot secure./

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;

surely I have a delightful inheritance./

I will praise the Lord, who counsels me;

even at night my heart instructs me.

I don’t have to worry financially. I have time to do things. I’ve got as much health as a 62-year-old could hope for. In other words, the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.

In addition to all of this, I’ve discovered the things that make me happiest, the things that give me the most satisfaction: Giving in secret to those who can’t repay.

If they know it’s me, if they thank me, it makes me uncomfortable. I am an introvert at the end of the day.

It’s nice if they actually appreciate it and if I can see that they do, but that is not necessary.

As much as I support giving money to institutions (the University, the Salvation Army, the Lord’s Diner), the feeling is strongest when whatever I am giving goes to individual people.

The chess set provides a nice metaphor for this.  It provides a connection between me and some people who won’t even know me one-hundred years from now. (Again, barring termites, fire, a family dog that likes to chew, etc.) I can think about the person taking it out, setting it up, and using it without the awkward discomfort of them coming to thank me.

My vision of this is somehow better for me than actually seeing it. That says something about me that I might need to think about, but let’s move on.

I’ve made clear the trouble with giving something like the chess set: These earthly treasures can be destroyed by moths and vermin.  We can give things that are harder to destroy.

When you teach someone how to do something, that can’t be destroyed.  Here I am talking about small, tiny things. Like how to wash a sharp knife. You keep it out of the sink until last, and you never let go of it. My father taught me this; his mother-in-law taught him this.  There might be a chain of learning that goes back to the invention of washing cutlery. 

Acts of kindness work in the same way.  If you treat someone with kindness, you are teaching them how to be kind. We are monkeys after all and monkey-see, monkey-do.

As in the sense of giving a gift, you have no control on what happens next; you have no control on what the person you give it to does with it.  There is just this vision in your mind that, maybe, somewhere down the line someone will get just a tiny bit of happiness out of something you’ve given, something you’ve done.

And they won’t even know it was you, so no awkward discomfort of thanks.

How perfect.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 The Right Words

By Bobby Neal Winters

When you are joining a couple of boards together, there are times when one of the boards sticks up a little bit higher than the other. We say that the board that is sticking up higher than the other is proud.  This is the classical meaning of pride: it sticks up just a bit higher than the rest.

If you are a joiner, what you do is to take your plane and shave the proud board down until it aligns with its partner.  Then everything is nice and even.

As speaking humans, words are our tools just as a plane is a tool to a joiner.  Instead of “speaking humans,” I was going to write “writers,” but every adult human being uses words as tools.  

I hate myself for what I am about to write. No, let me correct myself, I feel humbled for what I am about to write. And that is this: We need to be very, very careful in our use of words.

There are three words/phrases that are often used interchangeably.  I am of the opinion that those who are using these fragments of language believe in their hearts they all mean the same thing. 

No.

No, there are important differences.

What are these phrases?  Have I kept you in suspense long enough?  Okay, they are these:  Pride, Self-Esteem, and Self-Respect.

Consider the situation where someone is looking at a homeless person drunk in the gutter.  They see this person and ask, “Why don’t they have more pride?”

They don’t mean to ask that.  What they mean is, “Why doesn’t that person have more self-respect?”

Before you all go off on me, there are other questions that could be asked: What can I do to help?  What can be done to help? What is the best way to proceed with my life?

And there are all sorts of assumptions that are made in the question.

But that is what they mean to ask. They aren’t asking why the person isn't puffed-up, putting himself above others. They are asking why the person isn’t giving himself respect as a human being, as a child of God?

Respect is a call for mindfulness in the sense you really need to pay attention to something.  You respect a sharp knife; you take care when you are handling it so as not to cut yourself.  But you also keep it sharp and avoid abusing it when you work with it.

Respect is a good word.

But we can also get into trouble with the use of the word “respect.”  There is a persistent, and dare I say respectable, cohort of the human race that says, respect must be earned. It carries the sense that you save your respect for something better.

I think about this on and off.  I will think about it some more.

We now come to the phrase “self-esteem” because it is also problematic.  This is to say, it rubs some people the wrong way. In particular, the teaching of self-esteem in the public schools is considered suspect in some quarters.  Is too much self-esteem really healthy?  

I see why there are problems with this, but I also see the attraction of teaching self-esteem. That is, I see why some would say it is a good thing.

Maybe we are trying to get a word or two to do too much work.

The question--it seems to me--is less about the particular words, and more about the actions we take.

We need to look at ourselves to see who we really are. This may be the hardest part, and it might very well be spread over a period of years.  To do this, you have to look at yourself from a distance.  

This is hard. 

As Robert Burns said: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as ithers see us!”

Then, like you were looking at something that has value but needs help, you go to work fixing it.

The phrase we often use in a situation like this is, “This needs a little love.”

That four-letter word is a bit over-burdened itself, but maybe it is the one I am looking for.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Rockets, Fanny Hill, Computer Programming

By Bobby Neal Winters

Rules can be frustrating, but they can free us.

One of my favorite science communicators, Scott Manley, did a YouTube video recently about the engineering reasons for the shape of Blue Origin’s rocket. If you don’t know what I am talking about, I suggest you google this very carefully and you will be enlightened. In order to prevent being too--direct--in describing “the shape,” Manley makes use of quotations from “Fanny Hill: The memoirs of a woman of pleasure” by John Cleland.  

My understanding--I’ve never read it--is that “Fanny Hill” (written in the 1700s) is a work of pornography.  Because of the times, Cleland had to be very careful about avoiding direct language. Because of this, he was forced into the world of colorful euphemism.  For similar reasons, Manley makes use of the reservoir of creative description from “Fanny Hill” in his video on the unfortunate shape of Blue Origin’s rocket.

I found it to be hilarious. Perhaps that is a sign of my fallen nature.

But there is a point to be made here: Constraints foster creativity.  Having rules in place to avoid direct description of vulgar objects, forced Cleland to be creative in his euphemisms. 

While goodness knows we don’t have the same sort of constraints in place now that they did in the 1700s, there is quite a tradition of being roundabout in language for the sake of preserving the innocence of children, a noble cause. This tradition has produced quite a bit of very good art.

I faced this myself recently while carving some chess pieces for  my grandsons. (Please, please, if you run into them, don’t let on.) Each of the main pieces was carved from a piece of bass wood that was one-inch square and 4 inches tall.

As you may recall from a previous column, this is a non-traditional chess set.  Instead of a king and queen, there are farm couples.  Instead of knights, one side has dogs and the other has cats. Instead of bishops, one side has priests and the other has preachers. 

There were lots and lots of different ways the carving could have gone, but the size constraint made of a lot of my decisions for me.  There were things that I simply could not have done--with my small skillset--in that space.

Art is not the only place where this phenomena occurs. I’ve run into it in computer programming.  (Indeed, I owe the notion to the computer programming guru Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin.) For the past several months, I’ve been learning assembly language programming.  Those of you who have been loyal sufferers of this space, may recall that I went through a period of learning Python programming.  

What is the difference between these two? By analogy, Python is London where you have subways,taxis, Ubers, and trains.  Assembly language is the Amazon where if you want to get anywhere, you need to first make a dugout canoe, but before you do that you need to make an ax, but before you do that, you need to learn to smelt iron, etc.

This comparison goes further.  Python, like London, has a lot of laws; by way of contrast, there may be laws in the Amazon, but who is there to enforce them?

Assembly language is wide open; there are very few constraints. Which means it can be hard to do, but there is a trick to make it easier: you put the constraints on yourself.  Arrange your code like you arrange your workshop.  Force some structure on yourself.

This will require some creativity on your part, but it will make what you write easier to read.  The time you save may be your own.

None of this is new. Members of religions have been putting constraints on themselves for thousands of years. (Or God, has.)  THOU SHALT NOT! 

Monastic orders impose rules upon themselves. Times of prayer throughout the day, throughout the year.  Times for restricting the intake of food; times for feasting! Rules to be followed.

We do have to be careful.  Too many rules will try us down like the Lilliputians tied down Gulliver. But--as a friend told me once--if a kite doesn’t have a string on it, it can’t fly.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.