The Differences between Men and Women Part n

By Bobby Neal Winters

Men and Women have different approaches to things.  It’s not that one is better than the other, no sir, just different.

When Jean and I moved to Pittsburg in late May of 1989, one of the first purchases we made was that of a dryer.  Our daughter was seventeen months old at the time and still in diapers.  In those days, disposable diapers had been available for quite some time, and we kept a few around, but only for long trips.  

Jean had been a Botany major as an undergrad and then got her master’s degree is plant physiology. As a major in the life sciences she had been immersed in a culture that was very environmentally conscious.  When we had Lora, this manifested itself in the practice of using cloth diapers.  Disposable diapers contain feces and feces in landfills contaminates ground water.  As Lora’s diapers were particularly nasty, it made sense that wringing them out in the toilet and then washing them in the washing machine was the only responsible thing to do.  

We probably saved countless lives.

The drier we bought was so that we could dry them in the winter.  In the summer, it was felt that hanging them in the sunshine on a clothesline did a much better job than the drier.  It’s also cheaper, doesn’t use fossil fuel, it makes clothing smell better, and Jean just liked (and still likes) to go into the out of doors.

We did need a dryer for cold or rainy weather, though, so we bought one on credit and paid it out over six months so we could establish a credit rating.  As an aside, my credit rating is now better than the US government’s;  I am buried every week under mail from people who want me to get credit cards from them. This is all because of having bought a dryer that my wife doesn’t like to use.

Move the clock ahead 22 years.  We’ve had two more daughters with the last coming seven years after the second.  Jean was 40 by that time and the third daughter was in disposable diapers from day one.  I guess her poop isn’t as dangerous as the first one’s.

But even after all these years, Jean still likes to hang out laundry for all of the reasons given above.  There is nothing wrong with that.  It’s one of the things I love most about her.  I don’t understand it, but I love it.

I can’t say for sure, but I think that one of the reasons she picked our house was the nice clothesline in the back yard.  Its poles were made out of 4-inch iron pipe, the cross pieces welded into place by manly men who’d learned to weld in the mines.  The poles were set 30 feet apart and set into the ground with concrete. They had been in place for at least 30 years before we bought the house.

One day in the summer of 2010, there came a great wind which blew limbs from the great walnut tree which dominates the back half of the back yard.  A great limb did break off from the great tree and went down on the clothesline wires.  It was at this point that the leverage--and note this term because it will come up again--of one of the poles did cause it to bend at an angle with the ground.  The pole bent because 50 years worth of rain had rusted it.

I manage to put off fixing this by various stop-gap measures worthy of my forebears in the Southern, Scots-Irish influenced, honor-culture. (It sounds so much more noble than redneck, eh?)   However, during the summer of 2011, it became clear that this was no longer satisfactory, so I removed the old pole, got a new pole, and concreted the new pole into the ground.

It is at this point I need to inform the reader than I didn’t use pipe.  I used a long metal tube such as is use for posts in chain-link fences.  Hit a minor chord on the organ.

One sunny day there were a lot of blue jeans that needed washing.  They were washed and hung out on the line.  Water, as those who think about such things know, is deceptively heavy.  This heaviness combined with the leverage--I told you it would come up again--caused the new pole to bend.

Because the new pole was of such a flimsy metal, there was no making-do.  It needed to be replaced.  Before I could do that, the old one had to be removed from the ground.  The previous post--the one made out of pipe--had come out of the ground with a little “wallering.”  I started “wallering” the current post.  Without budging, it snapped off flush with the concrete in the ground.

I uttered an Anglo-Saxon word that rhymes with a the name of a particular water fowl species.  While you are figuring out why I said, “Noose,” let me continue.

This was a puzzle. I had concreted the post in with 60 pounds of quick-crete.  That isn’t all that heavy but it was under ground.  There was no way to get a hold of it, and the ground itself was as hard as concrete as we had not yet begun to have our fall rains.

We did another stop-gap solution that was worthy of my Scots-Irish cultural forbears.  We replaced the pole with a swing set, and waited for it to rain.

When the rains finally came and I could theoretically get a shovel into the ground, it became a question of finding the time.  All of the stars aligned on Thanksgiving Day.

I went into the backyard with shovel, sledge hammer, adze, work gloves, and rope.  It was a bit coolish when I began so I put on a sweat shirt.  

Then I began.

I dug a conical hole around the cylindrical piece of concrete.  I then took the rope and rapped it many times around the concrete.  I then put the old clothesline pole through a loop in the rope and began to use--you guessed it--leverage to get the concrete out.

Except it didn’t work.  The blasted thing wouldn’t budge.

I took the sledge hammer and swung at it a few times.  I fancied that I saw it move.  I tried the lever thing again.  Nothing.

I swung the sledge some more.

It is at this point that I will make myself vulnerable and share.  When I swing a sledge hammer, I change.  Lose control of the tone of my voice.  I don’t think as clearly.  I think this is because the use of the sledge hammer stimulates the male hormone man-o-dren and causes blood to flow away from the brain.

On this occasion, I began having visions of my deceased father-in-law, Jim.  Jim and I had one taken out an old porch together with the use of a farm jack.  The farm jack is a marvelous device that is uniquely capable of removing concrete posts from the ground.

I stood up off the ground, walked to the back door, and called to Jean.

The door opened.

“Jean,” I said, “I need someone with a brain.”

“Yes.”

“Where is the farm jack?”

She told me and agreed to come out and help.

Lest you believe that the farm jack is a panacea, I will tell you this is not the case.  It was part of the solution, but not all.  Suffice it to say that after a bit of jacking around, a good bit of “wallering,” and propicious--but appropriate--use of Anglo-Saxon epithets, we were able to make use of leverage to extract the concrete from the ground.

In much less time than it took to extract the old post, I concreted a new one in.

I will now eat lunch and then go to seek symbiosis with the recliner...in a manly way.

Hiking the Appalachian Trail

Hiking the Appalachian Trail

By Bobby Neal Winters

I came home from work last Monday evening, changed clothes, started up the mower, and mowed the front yard.  I got hot and stopped until I cooled off, which happened this Saturday morning.  I try to take care of my lawn and not just when I get those letters the city send out when the neighbors complain. (I know who you are and I know what you did.)  Mowing, as you may recall, is my last chance to get into heaven.  I’ve given up on faith and I’ve given up on works, so a good lawn is the only path left.

This time of year, though, keeping your lawn up can be dangerous.  When you mow out in the heat, you can get overheated before you know it.  This can have dire consequences.  If the city can get on your case for having a pile of brush, what are they going to do for having an unburied body on the front lawn? And it’s not like your kids are going to take care of it either. Your wife would be stuck with the job.  That is if you are not like Mark Sanford, Governor of the great state of South Carolina.

It is my opinion that every man should live his life in such a way so that his wife would give CPR to him if he fell of heat prostration while mowing.  I am thinking that breathing life into her husband’s hot, sweaty body might not be a high priority with her right now.  But then perhaps if the dear governor had been spending more time on his own lawn (wink-wink, nod-nod) he wouldn’t have strayed off on the Appalachian Trail, as it were.

Having mentioned that, I’ve got to wonder how his Argentine girlfriend liked being referred to as the Appalachian Trail.  It’s curvy and beautiful from a distance, but up close it’s full of bugs and a lot of guys have hiked it before you. (Wink-wink, nod-nod.)

It brings me to mind of the wealthy and powerful Eliot Spitzer,  who paid over four-thousand dollars for what our boys in khaki could get for a pair of nylons and a couple of Hershey bars back during WWII. I’ve shared with you before the remarks from the table at Rotary when that story was broken, but they are too precious not to share again.

“Four-thousand dollars an hour?  What do you do for four-thousand dollars?”

“An hour?  What do you do for a whole hour?”

But I digress.

My point is that one of the ways that lawn care gets us into heaven is by keeping us out of such mischief.  If you are pushing a mower, trying to avoid stepping in any of the “presents” left by the family dog, then you are not thinking about “hiking the Appalachian Trail” as it were.  And what is more, if, when you are done with your chore your wife should bring you a tall glass of iced Fresca—on her own without you asking—you couldn’t possibly image straying from the straight-and-narrow road.

But, like I said earlier, you’ve got to be careful when you’re mowing in this hot weather.  Avoid getting over-heated, but when you do stop and take a break.  If you have a large task, break it up into smaller tasks and take a break to cool off between them.  And most importantly, don’t do anything to annoy the person whom might have to give you CPR.

(Bobby Winters is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Mathematics, and Interim Chair of the Department of Chemistry.  It’s a long story. )

Male enhanced mowing

By Bobby Neal Winters

Because I have an extensive network of infiltrators, I am aware my readers in Oklahoma have been mowing for a couple of weeks now, but here in our little corner of Kansas because of our more northerly location, the start of the season comes a little later. After a winter like the one we had, we need to know there’s something good about living up north.

As I write this, it is the Thursday of spring break.  It has been a long tradition that spring break is either the last bitterly cold week of the year or the first rainy week of the year.  This year we followed the second pattern and have received abundant warm rain.  The effect of this has been to bring out the leaves on some of the less conservative trees and to bring up the grass.  As a consequence, the mowing season will soon be upon us, and it is time for those of us who’ve learned the value of preparation to ready ourselves for that eventuality.

At the beginning of last year, I was of the opinion that I was at a turning point in my mowing life.  For many years, I had contented myself with a 3.5 horsepower mower, but after much consideration as to whether such a loathsome sinner as me was worthy, I made the move of going to a 4.5 horsepower machine.  It was a honey, let me tell you, and I came to call it Little Darlin’.

Little Darlin’ cut my mowing time by one-third and used less gas in the bargain.  This was because I didn’t have to pickup the youngest child’s toys anymore.  I could just mow over them, and no sign of them would ever be found.

“You’re looking for your soccer ball?  No, I haven’t seen it.”

But I let it go to my head.  I got cocky and forgot the cardinal rule of mowing:  Stumps aren’t toys.  On the very last mowing of the year, I found the stump of a cedar tree I’d cut down several years ago. They say trees aren’t intelligent, and naturally you’d think that stumps were even less so, yet I believe this stump was seeking revenge.  It has done this to me before, so the argument can be made it’s smarter than I am.  Maybe it’s not smart, but something else is true.

I try to live a good life, the way folks on TV tell me, but I keep getting mixed messages.  We are taught we should recycle and repair, and I believe that, yet when I went to my Names and Numbers yellow pages I could only find one lawnmower repair man, Bob by name. I gave Bob a call and all I got was a recording.  Bob, it seems, is no longer in business.  In a world market where the folks in China can make it cheaper than folks in Kansas can fix it, I suppose this is a natural thing, but there just some sort of wrongness about it.

In any case, in spite of all my good intentions, I was forced to buy a new mower for the second straight year.  This was a good time for it because it seems the lawnmower business is undergoing a paradigm shift.  What I mean to say is that last year, everything I looked at was listed by horsepower, but this year there are many models that are only listed by CC. There were 148CC engines, 160CC engines, and so forth.

You must understand that this puts me in a quandary because I don’t really know what any of this technical jargon means.  Even the horsepower thing I only use with the idea that bigger is better with the vague idea that is has something to do with the amount of work a horse could do.  It’s sort of like Smilin’ Bob in all of those male enhancement commercials. (Maybe male enhancement just means he can burp louder than he did before.)  Ego wouldn’t let me take the chance that I might be slipping back a notch on my mower, so I got a machine that was listed with both horsepower and CCs.  It is 6.5 horsepower and 190 CCs.

I am taking a real chance by going up by 2 horses in one year, but my ego needs it having lost my Little Darlin’ so soon.  I think that subconsciously I’m hoping to get a machine powerful enough to do to stumps what Little Darlin’ could do to toys. 

But I get the feeling if I try to find out I will be writing this article again next year.

(Bobby Winters is a Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State University, writer, and speaker.  You may contact him at bwinters1@cox.net. )

The mowing life

By Bobby Neal Winters

My in-laws just got back from the north land where they had been refugees from the Kansas heat during the months of July, August, and part of September.  Upon returning, my mother-in-law inquired as to the health of our mutual friends Bill and Beth.  It seems Bill and Beth’s lawn had not been mown recently, and, upon seeing this, my mother-in-law immediately feared for their well-being.

This is was no idle worry.  I have noticed myself that the one of the first things people do when they die is to give up mowing.  This first occurred to me on a road trip to Oklahoma with the family.  My youngest was pointing out “haunkted” [haunted] houses.  Sure enough each of the houses she pointed out to us had an un-mown lawn, a sign of the unnatural if there ever was one.

My mother-in-law need not have feared as our friends are in good health.  I can’t say it for a fact, but I rather suspect they, like me, are thinking about their mowing end-game for the year.

How and when to finish is an aspect of the sport all but the most serious participants in the sport of mowing completely ignore even though it is the most important part of the mental aspect of the game.  You heard me right.  There is a mental part of mowing that is too often neglected.

It begins at the first of the season with the question of when to begin.  On one hand, there is the natural temptation to put off the first mowing as long as possible.  However, this has a downside in that if you wait too long, it becomes quite a difficult operation.  What is the point in mowing once instead of twice when it takes more than twice the effort to do it?  What all we mowers must keep in mind is that the point is to expend the least amount of effort that is humanly possible within certain constraints as to your lawn’s appearance. We need to husband our strength for more important matters, but we don’t want our neighbors to think we’ve died. (I have to wonder what it would mean “to wife” our strength.  Maybe my wife will tell me if she ever sits down to take a break.)

After that first mowing, the weather here in Kansas guarantees we are pretty much locked into a weekly schedule for a while, or so I thought.  A few years ago my friend Paul—who is an engineer with a practical turn of mind—told me about the 8-day method.  If you mow every 8 days instead of every 7, after 7 weeks you’re one mowing ahead.  The practical mathematics of this appealed to me immediately. If you start mowing before the first of May, then you can get ahead by the 4^th of July. 

The 4^th of July is an important date in the mowing game just as it is in other sports.  In this part of the country, there are some years in which you can switch from a weekly schedule to a biweekly schedule at that time.

Let me tell you what, if you can switch into that biweekly schedule, you are in the clover, as it were.

That did not happen this year, and I personally blame it on the shifting in weather patterns that is due to global warming. (It is my belief that our president didn’t sign the Kyoto Treaty because he is in the back pocket of Briggs and Stratton.)

When you get into the month of September, you really have to start watching your game.  Regardless of the year, you can pretty well count on the fact that you are going to have to mow twice in September, but the strategy is to place your mowings so that (a) you only have to mow once in October and (b) that one mowing is at the optimal time.

If it’s too early, then that makes the first mowing in the spring more difficult.  If it’s too late, you might get caught by rains and have to postpone your last mowing until November, which is a time when the pros have gone on to other things like Autumn-League Leaf Raking.

Bill, the mutual friend of me and my in-laws, is a real pro.  Those of us who take our mowing seriously watch him closely for hints.  If his lawn looks a little scraggledy now, you can be dang sure there is a good reason for it.  He has some strategy that will rock the mowing world.

You can count on it.

(Bobby Winters is a professor of mathematics, writer, and speaker.  You may contact him at bobby@okieinexile.com or visit his website at www.okieinexile.com.)

Mowing your way to heaven

By Bobby Neal Winters

As some of you may recall, I started off my mowing season this year with great hope.  I’d replaced my 3.5 horse power mower with a 4.5 horse power model.  If I’d known the difference it would make I’d’ve done it sooner because it took 50 percent off my mowing time.  It used to take over an hour and a half to mow my lawn, and this summer it has averaged one hour. 

Now I could be persuaded that some of the increased efficiency is because I’ve gotten better at nudging toys out of the way with my foot, but most of it is because of the higher horsepower in that I can more readily mow over the toys instead. If you have a mulching mower, the kids will never even miss them.

The upshot is I’ve spent a good deal less time mowing this summer on account of that.

Now you have to understand that this is not an undiluted blessing because I have given up on getting to heaven by good works and instead I am making my case by the amount of time I spend working on my lawn.  I am trying to mow my way to heaven.

This sounds strange, but there are a lot of men just like me who’ve given up on all of the usual theologies and are trying to avoid the eternal flames by virtue of their lawn.  Like any religion, there are various sub-theologies within it. 

There are some who think that you have to have a perfect lawn with all of the grass of the same species and at exactly the same height.  Within that group, there are the ones who favor a particular kind of grass.  These are the ones who’d be sitting on a mountain top living on cold water and parched corn if they were affiliated with a traditional religion.

Others believe that you aren’t required to have a perfect lawn, but you really need to be trying for a perfect lawn.  The creed is that a perfect lawn is not to be obtained in this life, but that during a period of time after death, the imperfections of one’s lawn will be taken away.

I’ve belonged to each of these sects in my time, but I now follow another way.  I believe our lawns make us righteous through suffering.

Initially I believed in the manner of the first group, but I discovered I’d have to kill all of my old lawn and sod it in completely new, and that was simply beyond my ability.  Then I moved to the second sect, and, after a while, I discovered difficult that was.  Even though you know you can’t have a perfect lawn, you still have to try, and trying is the hard part. 

So I decided to quit trying and now go directly to suffering without the intervening effort.

The new 4.5 horse power machine is not the only thing that’s cut into my mowing time this summer. That hot, dry spell we had did its part too.  Usually I start the year with a one-week rotation and switch off to a two-week rotation around the Fourth of July.  This year I did that, and mowed at the beginning of July and again at the middle, but then the grass stayed basically the same height until the end of August, turning ultimately into a toasty brown.

From a theological point of view, this worries me.  Is God working against me?  And at the same time is he telling me what I’m in for?

Now I could have watered, but then you come up against the sprinkling versus total immersion schools of thought, and, besides, that puts us back into the position of trying to have a perfect lawn.  If I water, I might as well go back to my old religion.

If this wasn’t already hard enough, you’ve got folks like the Organist.  She lives a block or two away from me, depending on how you count block, and I caught her out edging her walk the other day. Edging, mind you. This is totally unacceptable.  She’s gumming up the works whatever way you look at it.  On one hand, she’s opened herself to charges of perfectionism, and on the other, she’s upped the bar on suffering.

And she’s a woman.  Women don’t get into heaven through yard work but through housekeeping.

As if things weren’t hard enough, this kind of piety has been known to start revivals.  You’ve got to keep a lid on it and never give an inch.

Anyway, she’s lives a couple of blocks away.  I’m hoping it’ll dampen out before it gets here.

(Bobby Winters is a Professor of Mathematics, writer, and speaker.  You may contact him at bwinters1@cox.net or visit his website at www.okieinexile.com. )