A Headboard and the Dog's Dinner

 A Headboard and the Dog’s Dinner

By Bobby Neal Winters

I believe in capitalism, but we need to be careful.  The purpose of our country should not be to make money: rather it should be to make good people. The details on how to do this are kind of vague at this point, so let me talk about something that I am learning about instead.

I am making a headboard for our bed.  By our bed, I mean the one that belongs to my wife and me.  We have a king size bed and have been using the same headboard for the last 32 years.  It is a pretty headboard, but it is not useful. There are people like that, but I digress.

When I first envisioned the headboard in my brain, it was all in one piece. There was a way that it looked, and it was beautiful.  When I began to think through how to build it, it changed.  To build something that large and make it all “one piece” would require a different sort of building set-up than I have. 

I am still a beginner, and I don’t have a large collection of tools--though my wife might debate me on this.  I am learning through projects, and it is through these projects that we acquire the tools. The game is to get the absolute minimum of new tools that you need for the project at hand.

This is a dynamic process which means that you may have to modify the project as you go along.

Because of my limitations, I had to modify my vision so something I could do in pieces.  This happened a couple of times.  The first step was the decision to make the headboard in three pieces: One tier of a bookshelf along the top and two cupboards to support the bookshelf, one on each end.

During the process, this changed as well.  The bookshelf piece was to be six feet long. That would’ve created possibly insurmountable issues when it came time to glue and clamp, so I decided to make that six-foot bookshelf into two three-foot bookshelves attached in the middle.

When something is broken-down into pieces, you can then concentrate on making each piece the best it can be.  Think about it as a thing in itself while always having in mind that it is going to have to fit into something larger.  This is a balancing act.

In making one of the cabinets to be used as a stanchion, I framed it so as to make it stronger. (And also to make it look less like something a redneck just threw together.) In doing so, the top of the frame stood out a bit proud of the top.  That would be okay were it to be a stand-alone piece, but it may cause problems when I am trying to attach all of the pieces together.

I’ve got a Japanese flush saw which I inherited from my wife’s dad that will come in handy should I decide to make that proud board even with the rest.

Each piece when looked at unto itself is a box.  The cabinet stanchions are boxes that are made of plywood.  I’ve glued four pieces of wood together carefully with dowel pegs.  I’ve put frames around the open ends.  They are four pieces of wood put together with glue and pocket-hole screws. The frames are then glued to the cabinet.

Care is taken with each board; care is taken with each box; care is taken in putting the boxes together.

And it still might all look like the dog’s dinner when you are done.

It strikes me that a large part of the discipline of woodworking is learning techniques to de-dogs-dinnerify whatever mistakes you make along the way.  Hence the existence of the Japanese flush saw.  Even the skilled Japanese make mistakes.

At this point, I am still working on the headboard.  I can be finished sooner or later depending upon how persnickety I decide to be. On one hand, I can create something quite functional in a comparatively short time. On the other hand, if I worry too much about what my grandkids think of me when they look at it after I am dead, it might take rather longer.

But that is an advantage to making things in pieces. I can design it so I can come back later to fix each of the pieces after I am better at this.

Maybe we can make a better country by making better people. Maybe we can work on fixing the parts of our culture that look like the dog's dinner, piece by piece, a little at a time.

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. )

 

Mending Fence

 Mending Fence

By Bobby Neal Winters

“Something there is that doesn’t like a wall,” is what Robert Frost wrote.  He said his neighbor quoted the old saying back to him that “good fences make good neighbors.”

During the winter, the fence on the northwest side of my property got broken.  Old Robert might suggest “Elves” as the culprit.  I wouldn’t eliminate that possibility completely, but having examined it, I would think that the microorganisms causing rot are more likely.  Could it be that they are both just different names for the same thing? I’ve never seen either; they’ve got that in common.

One fence post was broken off evenly with the ground and it was leaning severely to the east.  It was the direction of the lean and not the fact that it was broken by rot--or elves or fairies or pixies for that matter--that was the problem.  The fence forms one side of a narrow alleyway.  It is difficult to mow at the best times.  The fence leaning inward made that almost impossible.  

My first step in the repair was to take it apart. That was revealing.  I kept thinking that this is an angry fence.  There has been a war here.

The fence, which is about 40 feet long, consists of three different styles.  It is all wood, but the fence has three sections and each is different from both of the others.

The posts are of three different types: landscaping timbers, four-by-fours, and four by sixes.  The section nearest the street is supported by landscaping timbers and consists of vertical six-foot long one-by-threes which are pointed on the top end. Farthest from the street, the fence consists of horizontal one-by-tens mounted to the posts.  The only thing the two parts had in common was the boards were placed so close together that neither light nor air could penetrate.

The middle portion of the fence was the part that broke. I spent a couple of hours disassembling it. It was quality time spent with just me and my impact driver that I was using to take out the screws.  I was doing my best to reclaim the wood.  

And there was a lot of wood.  This portion of the fence had originally been like the part that was farthest from the street, i.e. horizontal one-by-tens. But at some point, it must have broken.  Whoever fixed it--and I think I know--did it by nailing one-by-sixes and one-by-tens to it in an alternating fashion which defies concise description, so I am going to let it go. It was heavy, but thick enough to stop a bullet.

The consequence of this was that all of the weight was on the east side, so when the four-by-four rotted even with the ground--damned elves or whatever--it fell east.

When I repair it, I am going to put boards on both sides so that it will be balanced.  This means I will need to stand in the neighbor’s yard.  So I went over and talked to my neighbor.

He is a renter, so he doesn’t care what I do, but I will be standing in his yard, so it is just good manners.  I explained what I would be doing, and he is fine.  I also told him that if his landlord wanted to pay for some of it, I would be okay with that, but I am not holding my breath.

I may be the first person to ever work on this ancient rampart to talk to the neighbor.  In each of the sections, the only thing they had in common--other than being made of wood--was that the fencing was only attached to one side of posts along the section. On one part it was attached to the west side, the other two to the east, but only one side.  Does it look like the dog’s dinner? Yes, yes it does.

Yesterday morning, I made the Home Despot [sic] run.  I got some new posts, new cross-timbers, and some quikrete.  My wife and five-year-old grandson helped me set the posts.

Concrete is magic.  It is mud and then it is rock.  My grandson was fascinated.  He thinks I am some sort of a mage to be able to work with the sacred concrete.  I have no plans to disabuse him of this notion.  I will let him believe it is magic; I will let him think I am a magician; I will teach him how to do it as well, so he can also be a magician.

It is the Way.

My plan today when this is written is to make my way again to the HD folks, who are becoming my second family, and get one-by-sixes sufficient for the purpose of fixing the fence.  It will still be a fence in three parts, but my part will have two sides.

The war ends with me.

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. )

 

 Einstein and Tennessee Williams

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve just been to my school reunion.  At my school, we don’t have a class reunion because the classes just aren’t big enough.  We get the whole high school together every two years. This time it’s been 4 years this time because of COVID, which took a tremendous toll on us.  

You may remember what Einstein and Tennessee Williams said about time: it is the farthest distance between two places.

This is doubly true for the place that I come from.  Time has been painting on a rough canvas, putting one layer atop the next without regard to propriety. 

The Plains Tribes were there first; then the Civilized Tribes; then the ranchers; and then came the oilfield.  Somewhat later after civilization began to recede came the purveyors of wacky-tobacky and methamphetamine.  

Every layer is still there having a strange harmony all its own.

The school, McLish, was named after the layer of sand that the oil was discovered in.  While there are a few things, here and there, named for the Plains Tribes and the Civilized Tribes, nothing has been named for marijuana or meth.  Maybe eventually something will if things keep going the way they are.

These sorts of occasions are odd, to say the least.  When you grow up in a small town or a small rural area, things are different.  There are fewer boundaries.  Everybody knows everything about everybody else, but maybe they know themselves, ourselves, the least of all.

Because of the lack of boundaries, and the transparency of your lives, everybody knows you like family.  Or--if you left at any point--they know the person you were before you left.  Sometimes it is difficult for them to see you as anyone else; or you to see them as anyone else.

But I’ve been gone for 42 years now, and there has been some change.  We’ve all acquired...history. All of our paths taken have trampled the paths not taken.  We’ve gone in opposite directions. Going back to that place we’ve started is hard. The trail is so confused that not even a Comanche could read it.

I met a girl there who’d been in my class; a woman, I guess, as she’s almost 60.  She brought me a hand-crafted artisanal puzzle.  She told me I’d given it to her in high school. It is carved from wood with balls and chambers and links of chain.

I don’t remember it. 

I’ve tried to ferret out the memory, but it’s gone.  

I do remember one time she came by house with a group of high school kids in the back of a pickup truck. She convinced my dad--the most overprotective father on the face of the Earth--to let me ride with them in the back of that pickup truck to go to the drive-in movies.  We went to see “Animal House.”  No seat belts--hell no seats.  How did we even live?

Nothing but a young girl’s charm would’ve convinced him to let me go.  My heart swells to remember this even now. Because for the course of one evening I got to be normal.  Because of her, my heart beats a little faster whenever Supertramp plays on the radio because that was her favorite group.

All on the strength of that act of kindness more that four decades ago.

But I don’t remember me giving her the puzzle.

But she remembered.

There is a certain reciprocity there.

People have laughed at me here because I title my column “The Okie in Exile” and style myself as such.  This is only Kansas; there is only a thin imaginary line that separates us.

But those people just don’t know.  A lot of rivers have been forded on my way here, a lot of fences crossed.  Some distances are greater than the geography would seem to allow for.

But we’ve traversed them to get here, and every once in a while we need to travel them again so we don’t forget who we are.

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 Mathematics of Weight loss

 The Mathematics of Weight loss 

By Bobby Neal Winters

Since Halloween of last year, I have lost just shy of 70 pounds. I’ve used a commercial cell phone app that I am not going to name in print, but if you want to know, and you meet me in the street, I will be happy to tell you.

In the course of losing this weight, I’ve learned something of the mathematics of weight loss, and because I am a math teacher--and that’s the way we are--I would like to share this with you.

Here is the basic working fact: Every pound of fat contains about 3500 calories.  I only have that number from the Internet, so there is probably some error in it, but it’s a nice round number so let’s use it with the understanding that it’s probably not exact.

You lose weight by “burning” more calories through metabolic activity than you take in through eating.  That is just a fact.  So, for the sake of argument, if you burn 500 more calories a day every day than you take in for one week then you will lose one pound of fat.  

That sounds simple but there are some problems.  A big one is that this weight loss can be masked.  You see your body weight is more than just fat.  In addition to the fat you are trying to lose, you have muscle and bone and water and poop.  (I was going to refer to poop as “the contents of your alimentary canal” which is accurate, but it’s just too unwieldy.) The weight of your muscle and bone are going to be more stable; the other two, less so.

When you start eating less, the weight of your poop goes down.  You take in less of it, so it weighs less.  By way of contrast, the amount of water in your body can vary wildly from day to day.  When I started my diet, my weight plummeted because I drastically reduced my carbohydrate intake. Carbs make you retain water and I lost the bloat quickly.

However, as I weighed every stinking day, I noted that my weight would go up and down more quickly than whatever amount of food I was eating would warrant. This was because of eating more salt (which causes water retention) one day than the next or because of eating more soluble fiber which causes your poop to hold more water.

If you are eating only a tiny amount of food and your weight goes up by three pounds overnight it can have a horrible affect on your morale.

In mathematical terms, water weight is a random variable that adds uncertainty to the trend.  You might erroneously believe that drinking less water is the answer, but processing water burns a certain amount of calories, so giving up water is counter productive.

I dealt with this by weighing every day in light of this uncertainty and looking only at the weekly average of my weight. 

There are two main practical issues that arise in connection with this method and they are obvious: Knowing how many calories you are taking in and knowing how many you are burning.  

For the second of these, I’ve got a watch and a cell phone that track my activity and they are in close agreement with each other.  When I do nothing all day long, I burn about 2000 calories a day. On an active day, I burn about 3700. Most days I burn about 3000, give or take.

People think that my walking has caused me to lose weight.  It helps: My daily two-mile walk burns a bit more than 400 calories.  But just “being active” helps more than any particular activity.  Yard work burns a tremendous number of calories.

My cell phone does a wonderful job at tracking my calorie in-take as well. I’ve got an app that has a large database of foods and their associated calories.  I log everything like the obsessive lunatic that I am.

I eat anything I want to, but I keep within a calorie budget of from 1800 to 2000 calories a day. (My app will let me eat more if I move around more; it’s a conspiracy.)  Given this, butter is my enemy.  It tastes good, and I love it, but it has a high ratio of calories for its size.  I limit myself to one or two teaspoons of it (or margarine) a day at most. I don’t remember the last time I put sugar in anything for the same reason.

It works better if you fill yourself up with fruit and veggies. Then you can eat enough protein, fat, and carbs to survive. 

I am now at a point where I am happy with my weight, but it is kind of like riding a tiger.  How do you get off?  In my experience, there is losing weight and gaining weight; there is no maintaining weight.  To do so, you would have to match your calorie intake to your activity, exactly.  Mathematically, the probability of doing this is zero.  This doesn’t mean it can’t be done; it just means you are not going to do it by accident.

So to summarize: Keep track of the number of calories you expend; eat fewer calories than that; don’t let the water-weight fluctuations get you down; fill up on fruit and veggies. 

The result is weight loss.

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. )