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. )

 

The Center of Our Concerns

 The Center of our Concerns

By Bobby Neal Winters

The way we center our lives is different now than it was when I was growing up.  I got to thinking of this when I was out mowing.

I like “The Big Bang Theory.”  In particular, I like Sheldon’s mom.  Whatever the other faults of the show, they got East Texas right.  I know this because East Texas is just a warmer and more humid version of eastern Oklahoma; the people are exactly the same.  They will hang us all on the same tree, as my daddy used to say.

On “Young Sheldon,” which is a spin-off of “The Big Bang Theory,” they are dealing with one of my dad’s favorite teaching issues.  Sheldon’s elder brother gets a young woman pregnant. The series has spent several episodes exploring the familial and cultural ramifications of this.  So far they’ve been true to the culture.

By culture here I mean what are the standard ways that have been developed to deal with the issues of living.

In his “Tiffany Aching” series, Terry Pratchett has described how the country folk in England (well, Discworld, but really England) handled such things. A young man and woman would get together at a fair. A few months later a bump appeared. The girl’s mother would talk to the girl’s dad.  The girl’s dad would talk to the boy’s dad over a pint at the pub, and it would all just be worked out.

This was similar to the way that dad taught. 

Dad was a simple man and he gave simple advice.  If you get a girl pregnant, you are going to marry her.  He did recognize complications could arise, such as maybe the two people involved didn’t like each other.  His response was thought-out ahead of time: If you don’t think that you can live with the girl, then maybe you shouldn’t be having sex with her. He also said it was a lot more fun to get along with your spouse than to fight all the time.

He was a simple man; it was a simple time. 

As I look back on it, I see that his philosophy--this cultural way of doing things that goes way back--was based on the idea that once that little human being came into existence its needs were paramount. 

This was a lecture I heard from Dad more than once. I think he had it playing on a loop somewhere in his head.  It came out whenever we were working in the garden; when we were hunting; when we were fishing.  “When you get married, your loafing days are over.  Don’t spend time out with your buddies. You need to be home with your family. You need to concentrate on putting beans on the table.”

This is very much a blue-collar, working-class philosophy. It is fitting because Dad was very much a blue-collar, working-class man.

He wasn’t speaking out of abstract concerns either. He had plenty of empirical data.  He could name numerous young men, who had faced just this challenge.  They’d made the trip to city hall or the preacher or whatever.  They’d been given a clothes basket full of household items and taken to their new home.  

While this is often referred to as a “Shotgun Wedding,” no shotguns were involved because they didn’t have to be. The young people involved had been raised in this same tradition.  I could name--but I won’t--quite a few grown people with children and grandchildren who are in existence today because of this. It ain’t pretty, but it’s life.

It is a cultural practice that is centered on the child. The idea is a child needs the support of a whole family: mother, father, and grandparents. It works better if the parents are living together and happy about it. That means marriage, de facto if not de jure. 

There was a line from Gordon Lightfoot’s song, “The House You Live in”: “Stay calm in the face / of all common disgraces.” 

I think that “disgrace” is a strong word to use there, but from the moment I heard this to me it has meant reacting in a calm, measured way to something that is, as my dad would always say, “just human nature.”  If there wasn’t something in us that drove us this way, the human race would’ve died out a long time ago.

Times have changed since my dad was bringing up his sons.  Human nature has not.  We are creating new problems and new solutions.  Maybe, just maybe, one principle we can stick with is making our children the center of our concerns.

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. )

 

Spoons, knives, boiled eggs, and beans

 Spoons, knives, boiled eggs, and beans

By Bobby Neal Winters

Consider the spoon. I will wait a moment while you get yourself to thinking spoon-shaped thoughts.  If you are eating your breakfast cereal, you might want to hold it in your hand and look at it.  

The spoon is an incredibly useful thing. We use it to stir milk and sugar into our coffee. (An unconnected aside: After many years of horrible ignorance, I’ve gained a greater insight into T.S. Eliot’s line “I’ve measured my life with coffee spoons. There is such a thing as a coffee spoon instead of a teaspoon. Coffee spoons are incredibly tiny.) We use it to eat cereal, soup, and beans.  One could say that the canonical use of a spoon is to eat liquid or semi-liquid food.

But a number of years ago, the lady who taught my daughters Home-Ec showed me that you can use a teaspoon to peel an orange or a boiled egg.  Indeed, they are incredibly useful in peeling boiled eggs.

Is that their proper use?  I don’t know if I can say.  There is a hierarchy of usgage.  I am old enough and from a part of the world where we were taught in school it was not proper to eat our beans with a knife.  There is even kind of a poem about it:

 

I eat my peas with honey /

I've done it all my life /

It makes the peas taste funny /

But it keeps them on the knife 

So there is this phenomenon. A tool is created for a purpose, but in using it we find other things we can do with it. The use of a spoon can be expanded to peeling boiled eggs and that is very satisfactory; a knife can be used to eat your pinto beans with which is non-optimal if you have a spoon around, but is better than eating them with your fingers, perhaps. You can also use a spoon to cut cake with, but if there is a knife around, why?

This is a simple idea.  It is a basic idea.  It is an idea that can be used in different ways.

Consider the human body.  “When we are born we are given a body.”  (I originally wrote that without the quotes, but then as I wrote the sentence I decided to add them.  Because there is a question here: Are we given the body or is the body what we are? The first way of thinking presupposes that there are a bunch of souls waiting in line to be rolled into a body; the second does not. Rather than wrestle this one out here, let’s go with the statement in quotes as being at least metaphorically true and marshall on.)

We are given a human body.  And we must figure out what to do with it.  There was a time when we didn’t have to do as much thinking.  You had to walk, run, climb, or swim everywhere that you went, so getting enough exercise wasn’t a problem.  There wasn’t so much around to eat, so you ate when there was food, and you starved when there wasn’t.

Now we have cars and don’t have to walk to get where we are going.  We have machines to help us work, or we work at sedentary jobs, so we have to learn to use our body in different ways. We need to learn the right way to eat in terms of amount and contend.  We need to learn how to maintain fitness by being active outside of work and setting aside time to exercise.

We are given a human mind. (Same discussion as above.) We need to think with that mind and we need to learn the right way to think. The right things to think about.  For example, we need to realize--to really know--that we’ve only got a short term on this globe.  What sort of mark do we want to leave?  We need to look at the end and how we want that end to look, and then we can attempt (an important word there chosen with care) to arrange our actions to get there.

This all sounds hard...and it is.  It is made easier by one thing: Tradition. (Cue up the music from Fiddler on the Roof here.) All of these things have been worked out. Most of them, anyway. When you get married, you can write your own vows, you can design the whole thing.  If you like that then bully for you. But you don’t have to.  The preacher has it in a book. You can just take it from the book.  Easy-peasy. You can now spend your time working on world hunger.

You want to learn to be a better person: Join a religion. You want people to think kindly of you when you pass: Do things for them. These are tools too and you can learn how to use them.

This learning thing never ends.  Until we die, I guess. But then there are different schools of thought on that.

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. )

 

 

 

 Bobby’s Daughter

By Bobby Neal Winters

In Chapter 11 of the Book of Judges, there is a disturbing story about a mighty warrior named Jephthah  who swore a rash oath. You’ve likely never heard it preached on, and I will neglect retelling it here. Those with an interest, I would suggest read it before noon on a bright sunny day by themselves in a room that has a full box of Kleenex and a teddy bear.

It is about a man who rashly swore an oath, and for reasons you will know if you read it, is called “Jephthah’s Daughter.”

When our family dog Charlie died and I buried him--as is my duty as the man of the house--I vowed that I would never love another dog again.

We have to be careful when we vow.  Not because God is vengeful or spiteful.  Because we create a world with our words.  Man was given this ability by God: To create with the Word. 

We create a world around us with our words.  We have to be careful, lest we create a world we don’t want to live in.

At the time I was burying Charlie, we still had a dog named Obidiah.  We’d gotten Obidiah as a companion for Buttercup; then Buttercup passed.  We then got Charlie as a companion for Obidiah.

When Charlie died, we didn’t get Obidiah yet another companion.  I had made my vow: That was it.

It may seem heartless that we let him remain alone, and perhaps it was, but Obie had gotten to a point where he couldn’t see...or hear.  And he didn’t smell too good either. It’s not clear he ever realized he was all alone.

Then in mid-March, he quietly passed away, and I buried him in the backyard.  (You might expect him to be buried next to his old companion Charlie, but our cat Goldie had died in the interim.  Her final story is so tragic, I don’t think I will ever be able to write it, but let’s go on.)  

So we were dog free.  I could walk across the yard without watching where I placed my feet.  It was wonderful.

But “rash oaths.” 

First my youngest daughter, who now divides her time between Pittsburg and an exurb of Saint Louis, decided she wanted a dog to keep her company as she worked at a distance. (For those who think you know where this is going, I urge you to not jump there yet.) 

When she got the dog (“got” here means paid a lot of money for), she took her new role very seriously.  She was out walking him one day, when she found another dog who didn’t have an owner.

So she brought him home. Not her home in the exurb of Saint Louis, but the one here.  My home.

And it was a nice dog.  A fat dog. A lethargic dog.  A perfect old man’s dog.

The rest of the family were attempting to give him names.  I said, “Come here, Scout!”

And Scout came.

So we’ve got another dog.

Hurray for us.

I will need to watch my step.

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 Beam in Your Eye

By Bobby Neal Winters

This column is overtly religious, so if you are turned off by that, I suggest you go to the political cartoon.

I began this morning by asking myself what would the world look like if everyone followed the teachings of Jesus: Love God with all your heart and all your might; and love your neighbor as you love yourself.

I rolled back from that and asked what if Christians simply followed the teachings of Christ.

At last, I come to the hardest question of all: What if I simply followed the teachings of Jesus?

There! That’s the one. 

And it has been anticipated by Jesus himself.  He was a carpenter and gave some advice that I’ve come to appreciate more since I took up woodworking: Don’t try to get a piece of sawdust out of someone else’s eye when you’ve got a 4 by 6 stuck in your own.

Concentrate first on making yourself holy.  Concentrate first on seeing your own faults.  Before you judge someone else, take a good look at yourself in the mirror.

Then proceed with love.

We are in the midst of a great culture war. They call it a culture war because the culture is losing.

It’s a big mess because the major political parties have split the Christian moral mission between them. They have turned it into an either or, where Christians have to fight against their values, against themselves, regardless of the “side” they choose.

It is a false choice.  It’s a trick.  It’s like being asked by a lawyer, yes or no: Do you still beat your wife?

As long as we seek the realm of politics to fight our battles for us, this will continue to be the case.

In the New Testament, we are warned not to take our disagreements to be settled by the government.  That advice was never better than it is now. Given the current state of our society, even if we win, we lose.

I look at what I’ve written, and see it could be interpreted as a suggestion to withdraw from being engaged in politics.  Let me answer that clearly: No, don’t. But don’t look to politics as a cheap way to bring the Kingdom of Heaven about.  

Given the increased antipathy towards religion, we have to remain engaged with civic life so as to ensure the freedom of religion, whether that religion be Christian or not or even none. 

Beyond that...

Choose to love others. Work to better yourself so as to quietly provide an example. 

And pray.  Pray to be a better person.  Pray for your family. Pray for your country.  Pray.

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. )

From the worlds navel to Pittsburg, Kansas

 From the World’s Navel to Pittsburg, Kansas

By Bobby Neal Winters

As I write this, it is my last day in Paraguay.  I arrived here one week ago, come 11pm tonight.  My flight will leave at 1:10am tomorrow morning, so I will have been here just two hours more than one week.

It has been recognized there are places where God seems closer to us than other places.  Jacob had a dream on a mountain top.  There are fortuitous encounters that happen at water wells.  These are places where the natural setting thins the wall that separates us from the divine.  

Asuncion is like that for me.

Perhaps it is the large number of trees in the city.  Perhaps the Jesuits who brought their missions here so long ago felt something special.  Perhaps the daily close encounters with death on the streets by motorists and pedestrians has worn the wall thin.

Who can say?

Regardless, I’ve sometimes felt God speak to me in his own coded, metaphorical language.

On our first day, we went to the Supermercado Real and bought fruit and crackers to have a picnic in the park that is just a block from our hotel.  We sat and ate among a few pigeons.  When I was close to done, I broke off a piece of cracker and tossed it among our feathered lunchmates.

We no longer had a few lunchmates; suddenly we had entered a Hitchcock movie.  We were surrounded.  I thought briefly about the piranhas in Paraguay River and wondered if pigeons were anything like those.  Would they find a pair of skeletons with US passports in a Paraguayan park?  Would there be YouTube videos 20 years from now pondering the mystery of our disappearance?

But no.  They ignored us.  The cracker occupied their entire attention.

The cracker was a problem for them.  So that you have the whole picture, you should know it wasn’t a saltine.  It was a very thin, very hard cracker with seeds in it.  The piece I had tossed out was too big for them to eat with a bite and too hard for them to break.  

This did not deter them from trying to eat it, however.  Indeed, while they couldn’t eat it, they could fight over it, and they did.

It was through this that God began to speak to me.  There was one telling point in the fight, when one bird had the cracker, another bird began fighting with him for it, and while the two birds were fighting, a third bird came along and stole the cracker piece.

The cracker piece eventually disappeared from view without ever having been usefully subdivided.

This has been bothering me during quiet moments ever since.  I’m bothered not because I have no interpretation, but because I have so many.

Are the pigeons the American people and the cracker corner tiny bits of largess the government tosses out for us to fight over?  Are the pigeons university faculty and the cracker issues that only an academic could care about?

I need a Joseph or a Daniel to unravel this for me, to tell me what this all means.

What it means in this place where I feel so very close to God.

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. )

Bread Crumbs and the Endorphin Rush

 Bread Crumbs and the Endorphin Rush

By Bobby Neal Winters

In my last column, I wrote that we resist learning.  In this one, I would like to continue in that same direction by talking about ways we combat that resistance.

The main perspective I can speak to this from is that of a math teacher.  While the resistance to learning I wrote about last week was with regard to topics other than skills, I do think I can add some value to the conversation.

Most people hate mathematics.  Indeed, it takes an odd breed of duck to love it. But it is useful and it is essential that at least a few people know it.  Within mathematics, our topics separate into two streams: techniques and problem-solving.  By techniques, I mean the mechanics of solving for x.  We call it “plug and chug” amongst ourselves. While most people find it difficult, it is not held in high regard amongst many in the practice of mathematics.

The ability to problem solve is much more prized, and much more difficult to teach.  It is a chicken-and-egg problem: We teach students to problem solve by having them problem solve. The best teachings do this by laying out bread crumbs for the students to follow.  

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the bread crumb metaphor, you should think of a trap having been set for a bird. Say, you have a box propped up by a stick.  You lay out a path of bread crumbs so that the bird will follow the trail and find itself under the box, and then wham! The box falls.

In math, we’ve no boxes and no bread. We have a problem we’ve solved ourselves, and we’ve broken it into pieces.  We then ask the student questions that will lead them to understand the pieces.  The trap slams shut when they put all of the pieces together to see the big picture.

This works because we like to solve puzzles.  Our brain gives us a little chemical reward whenever we solve one; whenever we come to the right conclusion ourselves.  So mathematical traps are nice; a box doesn’t fall on you, but you get an endorphin rush instead.  

Why do you hate us so?

We can learn other things this way as well. That is to say, we can come to it ourselves.

The poets figured this out a long time ago.  The poets, the good ones, visit truths for which they have no precise language, but lead us there anyway.  We spend an amount of time wrestling with their words that we would never spend on something that was written out plain.

If you don’t believe me, think about how much time you spent trying to figure out “The Hotel California” or “Stairway to Heaven.” (Or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” if you didn’t grow up with Rock Music.) There have also been untold thousands of hours spent wrestling with the symbolic language of the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation.

The best teachers won’t just give you the answer. The best teachers will put scaffolding in place and let you come to it on your own.  Give a man a fish; feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish; feed him for a lifetime.  Lead a man to a way to teach himself; and he will be able to eat things besides fish.

I fear for this method of teaching during a time when there are so many tests in school. (Though that trend seems to have abated somewhat.) Those who have money and power will have it for their children, but not so much for those who work in the factories they own.

But I’ve laid this out too plainly.  You won’t believe me.  You’ll not take it up as your own idea. I have failed.

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. )

Die just a bit, grow just a bit

 Die just a bit, grow just a bit

By Bobby Neal Winters

We resist learning.

I wrote that as  my first paragraph because some people say you should begin with an introduction, and I thought I’d give it a try.  I am not sure that it worked, so I will try it again.

We resist learning.

I do have a PhD, but I don’t have a doctorate of education.  This means that, while I’ve had the experience of delving into the Unknown and reducing its frontiers, I don’t know any of the language that describes learning. In spite of being in the field of education for over three decades, I’ve never picked it up. Because...

We resist learning.

Even a blind hen gets a kernel now and then, however.  There are different kinds of learning.  One one level there are skills: Mathematics, computer programming, languages, woodworking, cooking, talking to narcissists.  These are all bankable things. We resist learning these because they are hard.  

But there are other things as well.  There are things that aren’t hard; somebody says them, and it doesn’t take many words; but then they will deny the truth of it.  I am not going to give a specific example here.  If I did, there would be those who would simply deny it.  They would take the other side just to do it.

And some of you have done that very thing just now, which makes my point for me.  Got you!

Have you ever had an argument with someone--perhaps a civil discussion, but one in which there was a disagreement--and you made all of your points; you countered all of theirs; you ended with a QED which any neutral observer would grant that you were correct.  Maybe you even walked off thinking you had won.  And then you heard the same person saying the same things in the same way to other people.

Yes.  He didn’t learn anything...or maybe it was you.

When we change our minds on something we believe to be important, it is a little death.  We give up something of ourselves.

A really smart person told me something once that another really smart but much more famous person said. (Famous, but I can’t remember his name.) Losing an argument is much better than winning one.  If you lose an argument, and someone convinces you that you were wrong, then you have gained more than she has.  She has learned nothing, but you have learned something.  You’ve improved yourself, while she has not. (See, I’ve learned to use gender-inclusive language.)

We improve ourselves at the price of the death of a small part of our former selves.

There are all sorts of psychological/sociological reasons for us humans being so stiff-necked, but a practical reason for our resistance is simple.  We might be right: Every idea not only has to fight to get on the stage, it has to fight to stay there.

I’ve now written almost 500 words on this topic.  There will be those of you who have read this far, but still don’t believe me.  I am okay with that. Fighting the idea is apparently part of the process.

But you’ve made my case. ((Mic drop))

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 Time of Preparation

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are now in late April, and while I’ve already mowed my back yard for the first time, we are still in the time of lawn preparation.

The full value of preparation and planning has been a difficult lesson for me to learn. I suppose this is because of my heritage. When my father was born, his family were sharecroppers. There is an important difference between sharecroppers and farmers which is the ownership of the land. Farmers get to keep the improvements, but sharecroppers not so much.

Regardless of that, my father’s family transitioned from being sharecroppers to being itinerant oilfield workers.  And from that, my dad transitioned to being a truck driver who hauled bulk cement. (WWII was somewhere in there.)

My point being that while each of these modes of existence does require a certain amount of preparation, in the first two, especially, you need to be ready to see all you have prepared simply disappear.  The sharecropper is on the land at the pleasure of the landowner.  The itinerant oilfield worker will, by definition, have to leave very rarely with more than the clothing on his back.

But I get it now.  Preparation is the most important part of the job.  Indeed, with preparation done correctly, the rest of the job simply falls into place: ergo, preparation is the job.

Let’s talk about some examples.

We will start with painting. I thought I knew how to paint until a friend from church taught me how. You gather your supplies with painter’s tape among them.  Then you tape all of your woodwork. Having done that, you go around the edges with your brush and paint a margin round the wall.  This is your preparation phase.  The rest can be done by rollers.  I’d put off painting my dining room for ten years before learning this; after learning it, I painted it in a single morning.

Now, for everyone’s favorite: cleaning the kitchen. To be clear here, I am using the nomenclature “cleaning the kitchen” the activity some call “washing the dishes.” Cleaning the kitchen describes the activity much more accurately. Here I speak from a much more theoretical perspective having seen it done more than doing it myself, but again preparation is the key. 

Everything works much better when you start with an empty trashcan and an empty dishwasher (or an empty dish drainer if you are not there yet). To make the task of washing the dishes easier, it is better if you expand it to “cleaning the kitchen” so as to recognize the preparation as part of the process.

Programming a computer works better if you have thought the process through from beginning to end before you start the project. Here, I must confess, that I still mostly program as I go, but I’ve learned, when I do this, I will probably have to go back to the beginning and do it all over.

In my woodworking, the process is immeasurably more gratifying if I’ve thought the whole project through from beginning to end and have gathered all of my materials to the same place.

My writing--and here I am talking specifically about my mathematical writing--is better when I recognize that it is a process and the initial “putting it down on paper” is just a small part. You must first have something to say. Then you must figure out how to say it to yourself.  This is often done in pieces.  It is easier if you save these pieces on yellow paper in file folders, and keep the file folders in one of those brown folders.  Then you type it all in, but that is just the beginning.  You need to let it get cold and reread it in context and tie it all together.

That last bit might have to be done several times.

But now we come to the most important part: Mowing. Mowing is about to become the center of my universe for the next six months. One must first police the yard, i.e. pick up the stick and other sundry detritus; move all of the lawn chairs out of the way; make sure the battery is charged or the gas tank is filled.  

This year I am seriously contemplating putting weed-eating as a normal part of this.  I may have convinced myself that weed-eating serves the same function in lawn mowing, as painting-in does in painting.  I’ve eschewed it thus far as an activity more fit for the grandson of farmers than the grandson of sharecroppers, but perhaps it is time to throw that off.

We shall see.

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 Place to Make

A Place to Make

By Bobby Neal Winters

In my head I see a video of when I was in grade school.  It might’ve been in kindergarten or first grade, but certainly not later than that. A group of us was taken over across the road from the grade school side of our campus to the high school side.  They led us into the cinderblock building where the shop class was held.

There was a young man there.  (For the benefit of my old friends, he was one of the Reeves boys.  Not Roger, but the handsome one.) He was one of the high school students, the big kids; he was like a god to us. He showed us the equipment they had there in the shop.  I forget almost all of what he showed us.  Indeed, I only remember one piece: the band saw.  He impressed upon us how dangerous it was--how dangerous all the equipment was--and how brave he was for learning to work with it.  

We lapped it up like puppies. 

We looked forward to the day when we would take that class ourselves, and learn to use all of that dangerous equipment.

The day never came.

I don’t know why that was.  In our case, it may have been because that was a period in which the oilfield in which we lived was contracting, our population base was declining, and our school was getting smaller.  Regardless, we were part of a nationwide trend.

Most schools don’t offer shop classes anymore.  I don’t know why. It could be because shop classes are expensive to equip; it might be because shop classes are difficult to staff; it might be because shop classes are inherently dangerous and high school administrators nationwide are risk averse. Undoubtedly, it is a combination of all these things and probably some I didn’t mention.

It’s a shame. Shop classes taught skills that you could go out and earn a living with; skills that sharpen the mind as well as the hand; skills that open the door between the real world and the world of books.  Not only can these skills be applied to making a living, they can be used at home to reduce the expense of home repair and as an entree to a hobby. You can take these manual skills and--if you choose to--become an artisan. 

We could stop here and be regretful that things are getting worse, that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and it’s a handbasket that no one knows how to fix.

Or...

Or we can light a candle.

There is something in this country called the Makers Movement.  I’ve become gradually aware of it as I bounced about YouTube, learning about Arduino, Raspberry Pie, table saws, Python, robots, etc.

It’s pretty cool.

Associated with it are places called Maker’s Spaces. They are places that have equipment you can come in and use to make stuff.  They can provide venues for classes.  They can be places where you can bring your grandchildren things their parents don’t have time to because they are too busy earning a living.  Or you can make yourself available to teach other people’s grandchildren.

If only our community had such a place...

Well, it does. My Rotary Club met there a while back.  It’s located in Block 22, and the space is gorgeous. To my mind, we only need a few more things to be put in place before it provides a spark that will transform our community in a positive way.  I am excited.

I can see a day when kindergarten kids and first graders will be taken there and listen to handsome young people or colorful old people tell them about the equipment and how to use it safely for the betterment of their lives.

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. )

Religion, and getting your butt in gear

 Religion, and getting your butt in gear

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve heard some incredibly intelligent people say that they are going to let their children “learn about God on their own.”  For someone who is a believer, this is like saying, “I am going to let them learn about mathematics or their own,” or “I am going to let them learn about dentistry on their own.”

On one hand, we all learn about these things on our own, but on the other, for someone who is new in the world, having a little guidance at the beginning can be really handy.

I find it hard to believe now, but there was a time in my life when I had the leisure to play video games.  One of my favorites was the Civilization series of games. You are dumped into a virtual world in which you know very little and you play the best you can from there.  You move around in the world of the game and as you visit a new place and learn something about it, that place is lit up on your screen.

To me this is a serviceable metaphor for life.  We are dumped into life knowing nothing; our worlds are small; but as we move around we see more, and we know more.

One key difference is that in Civilization you know how many turns you have; in real life, this is not the case. You’ve got a fuzzy estimate at best.

This is where religion comes in. One of the things you learn from religion is that one day you are going to die.  This is harder to learn than you might think.  

When you are young, you think you are going to live forever.  Then, if you have pets, you see them die.  Then, if you have grandparents, you see them die. While you are sad because of this, you think, well animals are different than we are, and grandparents are old.  Old people are supposed to die. (Yes, that hurts, but you know as well I do that’s the way we thought when we were young.) 

Religion teaches this as a basic.  As a young Baptist, I would hear it every Sunday.  The need to walk that aisle and be saved because one day I was going to die.  That was terrifying, but I am not sure I believed it even then.

But if you read through the Bible (and a history book that covers a long period will work too), you see all of these energetic, high-achieving people rise up, and one by one they all die.  Eventually, after hearing the message over and over it sinks in: This is going to happen to me and to everyone I know.

That one bit of knowledge is a powerful principle or organization.  The clock is ticking; if you’ve got things you want to do, you’d better get your butt in gear.

Religion teaches you the message and gives guidelines to make yourself into the kind of person you want to be.  And it may very well be that you reject it. Jesus himself didn’t force it on anyone. We do better in the things that we decide to do ourselves.  That is the truth that the people I mentioned in the first paragraph have grasped.  But...

As parents we try to impart to our children the things we have found value in.  We send them to school; we take them to the doctor; and we drag them to church.

That last sentence was the literal truth for what my mom did to me. She dressed me in a paisley shirt with a nice little bowtie and put shiny black shoes on me.  Then she left black marks on the sidewalk in front of the church as she dragged me in.

Eventually, after I was too big to drag, I stayed at home.  But at some point, I was able to find the front door of another church.

So I go to the dentist; I go to the doctor (and my age more and more of them); and I go to church.  This last part isn’t because I am afraid to die, but because I want to know how to live.

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. )

 Please pass the fried potatoes

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been studying a little Latin.  The verb “tradere” means “to hand over.”  We get a couple of English words from it: one is trade and another is tradition.  Tradition is what our ancestors hand over to us. “It’s all yours now, kid.”

I am thinking about this because I’ve been on a diet.  Let me explain.

My mom’s dad was a carpenter, and when she married Dad, Dad was working in oilfield construction.  Her way of cooking was designed to meet their needs.  She suffered from that as she fought weight all of her life.  And this was the environment into which my brother and I were born.

My brother and I have both fought weight issues all of our lives, and have lost and gained hundreds of pounds.  I am not blaming my mother for this because she did the best she knew. I am saying this because during the course of my diet, it has occurred to me that because we as humans have drifted so far from nature that our instincts are no longer a good guide for us in eating.

We eat because we need food to live and to work.  That is why my mom made such huge, calorie-rich meals.  You need a lot of calories to swing a hammer like her father did or to push rod-and-tubing down an oil well like my dad did.  Little did she know that her sons would be a teacher on one hand and a college professor on the other.  

My grandfather needed calories to raise houses; my dad needed calories to raise oil derricks. You don’t need that many calories to raise your voice to a class of teenagers; you don’t need that many calories to raise a question in a committee meeting.

But it is hard to break from what you learned so young.

Because humans are social creatures and food is such a basic need, it is tied up in the fabric of society.  It is tied up in our basic memories.

At Thanksgiving, I insist on canned cranberry sauce.  The kind you slice into hockey pucks with marks from the can still on the sides.  Does it taste better than the wonderful sauce my eldest daughter makes? No.  It reminds me of my mother because that is the way she did it.  It’s the way you do it when you are cooking for construction workers.

But I am not a construction worker.  My needs are different.

This year I turn sixty.  While we are taught about the traditional three-score and ten, the times they are a-changin’. I might live to be 80.  My endocrinologist scared me by telling me I might live into my 90s. If I do, I need to learn a new way to eat.

And I am trying.

But the training of my youth is strong.  The memories of my mother’s cooking are powerful.  While it would be easy to blame tradition, tradition might be a way to skip my potatoes fried in bacon grease and to eat them too.  We don’t eat like Thanksgiving every day.  We set a time for it.

Perhaps I can set times to eat the foods my mom made and have them only then.  We eat to live; we eat to work; but we also eat to remember and love.

If I learn to do that, maybe that is something I can hand over to my children and grandchildren.

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. )

 It must be spring

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am looking out my window at a scene and I’ve a feeling I’ve seen it all before. It is as if I am riding on a merry go round and I see the golden ring circling by.

There is a bright red cardinal sitting and singing on a branch of the oak tree out my window.  There is snow on the ground so white as to hurt your eyes.  The sky--not a cloud in it--is a shade of blue that words are insufficient to convey.

And it is 15 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

It must be spring.

The fans of science fiction talk about time travel.  Theoretical physicists will talk of time dilation in the theory of relativity, both special and general.  The poet will say “You can’t go home again.”

But people of a certain age know that time travel is possible.  We call it memory.

During the course of the last year, Jean’s mother has passed away.  Jean has dealt with probate, with the cleaning of her mother’s house, with the disposal of belongings from ancestors unmet and unknown.  She has dealt with a lifetime of detritus. But close your eyes, and it was just a moment ago.

We don’t remember a continuous stream of things.  We remember events.  We remember certain events because they were joyful or--more likely--painful. We revisit them for the same reason.  They are things that don’t obey normal arithmetic.

Jean’s mother passed away on May 1.  Blink and that will be here. Yet--in some strange way--that event seems closer than Christmas.  The portion of time from July 4 until now seems to have lasted ten years, but Janet died only a minute ago.

We go on.

When our parents are alive, we pull away from them in rebellion.  We must do this to assert our own individuality, to be our own beings.  But when they pass away, we don’t have to do that any longer.  We gain freedom to become more like them because we are not in danger of getting lost within them.  We can be more like them and still be ourselves.

It’s complicated.  My father has been dead for more than 35 years, but I’ve only caught myself being more like him recently. 

It started a while back, I am sure, but I’ve only been seeing it truly manifest recently. I suppose this is because with the death of the last of Jean’s and my parents we’ve only now truly become the adults in the room.

We’ve no one to defer to; we’ve no one to seek for a final opinion; we are alone and in charge.

It is terrifying.

Then you think that they must’ve felt the same way too, and they made it.  So, you think, maybe we will too.

Events can be far and near because we roll our memories up like a string of Christmas lights.  They are far apart in the calendar, but near to hand in the roll. And often tangled.

But the merry go round keeps on turning.  Soon the flowers will bloom and the summer will come. And we will have to mow. 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. )

Thus to sing and thus to love, Alleluia!

 Thus to sing, and thus to love, Alleluia!

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been attending a Bible study up at Our Lady of Lourdes that is being led by some friends I’ve had for more than three decades.  On the second Sunday of the study, a member of the class, at their request, led the group in the song “Holy, Holy, Holy.”  This was chosen because the lyrics are lifted directly from the Book of Revelation, which is what the group is studying.

I was surprised for two reasons. Number one, Catholics are much better singers than I’ve been led to believe.  Number two, the song is a protestant song; it was written by an Anglican clergyman in the early nineteenth century.

But this got me to thinking: Even though the Church, the Body of Christ, is terribly divided, we do have a certain unity when it comes to hymns.

We were never meant to have so many churches.  You don’t have to believe me; read Paul’s epistles. Jesus gave us one church, and the rest was done by man.

But we can get together around hymns.

Twenty or so years ago when I first became active in church, I became familiar with the hymn, “Here I am, Lord.”  It can really get your blood pumping.  It was written by a Jesuit, i.e. a Roman Catholic.  Again, so much for Catholics not being able to sing.

I’ve attended Easter Vigil with my Catholic friends.  They ended the service with “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” which was written by John and Charles Wesley.  If that is not a Methodist hymn, then there are none.  And quite frankly, even if all of our churches crumble into pebbles, our hymns will be sung. (At Opolis UMC they sometimes sing six hymns during a service.)

I’ve been to church with my Lutherin grandsons.  They sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”  Charles Wesley at his best.

I’ve sung “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” at the Methodist Church.  It was written by Martin Luther. Again, if that is not a Lutherin hymn, then there is no such thing.

I am sure that there is an interesting study to be made with regard to how much cross-pollination there is among the hymn books of the various churches.

Why is this?

Hymns are close to our hearts.  

There is a saying, “Those who sing, pray twice!”

It is true.

And we remember when we sing.  Some of the clearest memories I have of my mother are standing by her side singing in church.

My family and I have discovered the TV series Ghost.  We first found the series on CBS, and then we found the British show it was copied from.

The premise is there is a couple living in a haunted house, and because of a brush with death, the wife attains the ability to see and hear ghosts.  One Christmas, the husband’s family comes to visit. The one thing the wife wants to do is to get around the piano and sing Christmas carols, but the husband’s family isn’t interested.  Because of this, the wife goes to the piano and sings them alone.

But she isn’t alone.  Behind her, and invisible to everyone else, are the ghosts, who are more than happy to sing with her.  (I tear up just writing about it.)

My point: Like her, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. If we are divided on this manner of worship, or that matter of doctrine, at least we can sing together.

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. )

Hard Times

 Hard Times

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve had a couple of weeks where I’ve been whipsaw between the two imposters triumph and disaster. It’s not just me either.  COVID, though it seems it might be winding down, has left destruction in its wake.  It’s left us in a precarious age.  

But it is a rare event that does nothing good. If nothing else, these times have made me think back on the life my father led.

My father lived in a house with a dirt floor when he was a boy. He remembered at least one occasion when there was sleet falling and he was playing outside without any shoes because he had none. His family sharecropped, but then they left that life to follow the oil boom as it spread over Oklahoma.

He was out and out of school for a while so he could work in the oil field too.  Then he just dropped out so he could work as a day laborer in the oil field full time.  This continued until  World War II broke out.  He was then drafted and half a world away from home for a few years doing his bit in the war.

He knew hard times.

He did his best to protect his children, my brother and me, from hard times all his life.  He followed us around lest we dash our foot against a stone. He would say, “Watch me. Learn what I am doing.  I won’t always be here.”

He was trying to prepare us for hard times.

And he did, but not in the way he thought he was.  He was trying--with very little success--to teach specific skills.  What he truly taught was much more important.

He told stories about himself, about things that happened while hunting, about things that happened in the days of the old boom, and very rarely about things that happened in the war.

My brother and I loved the war stories.  

One theme that I remember being repeated: “Don’t just lay [sic] there and die.”

That is basically the advice they give you in active shooter drills. Humans have what is called the fight or flight response. That really isn’t the best name, because it leaves out one alternative: freeze.  Our instincts have been set with three ways to deal with fear:  

We can run.  Running is good when you can outrun the danger. (Though I am very fond of the joke, “I can’t outrun the bear, but I can outrun you.”)

We can choose to fight it out.  Even if we lose, we can make them pay for their meal.  We can slow them down while our offspring get away.

But we can also simply freeze.  This works if you are a tiny creature that has brush to hide in, but if you are big and out in the open, it turns into what dad said, you just lie there and die.

Times have changed since Daddy’s day.  Hard times look different now.  I really don’t know what he would’ve made of COVID or the changes associated with it.  But I think the attitude that we don’t just “lay there and die” is a good one.  Running is not always cowardly; fighting is not always brutal.  They are not mutually exclusive: You can run while you are fighting and fight while you are running.  

Don’t just lay there and die.

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. )

Lost

 Lost

By Bobby Neal Winters

How can a man be born when he is old?

It is a question that comes echoing down to us from history.  Nicodemus asked Jesus, and Jesus gave him a good answer.  I suspect Nicodemus had some idea of the answer, and if so Jesus would know that.  Sometimes smart people ask the questions they know the answer to already as a test.

This is a piece of scripture I am very familiar with.  Since I grew up as a Baptist, I am doubly familiar with it.  It has taken me until now, after years of contemplation and years of study, to understand it.  Maybe.  Maybe I understand it.

There is a word, an adjective, that is applied to a lot of things: Lost.  It can be applied to objects. I lost my wedding ring a year ago, and I’ve not found it yet.  It still exists.  It’s still out there.  But my direct connection with it has been severed. I don’t know where it is.

“Lost” can also be applied to people.  It takes on different nuances when applied to human beings. Sometimes it means the lost person does not know where he is.  Or maybe that should be put, he knows he is “here,” but he doesn’t know where “here” is.  And the “here” where he is at is not the place where he wants to be.

There was once a young man who left his family with some of his daddy’s money.  He spent it all and wound up wallowing with the hogs, eating their food.  He was in a place where he didn’t want to be.  He knew where he wanted to be, but only had hope that he could get back there.  He had to move himself to the place where he might be found.

That is the difficult thing.  Swallowing the pride.  Admitting not only that you are not perfect; admitting that you are wrong.

This is especially true when you are old, and when you’ve been wrong in the same way all of your life.  In my perennial favorite Christmas story, Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol,” Marley’s ghost has a long line of bank boxes chained to him.  Marley was lost and died that way.  He had his old way of doing things chained to him.  Had he changed his ways while he was alive, the bank boxes would’ve been removed from him.  But--listen to this bit--he loved the bank boxes and didn’t want to let them go.

So he didn’t.  He kept them. Now he has them. Forever.

Change can be gradual.  I love the change and small dedicated effort can make. The mighty oak tree I see out my window has grown from a tiny acorn over the years with only air, water, and sunshine.

But we had to plant it in a new place for that to happen.  A squirrel had planted it up against the house.  The only thing for it there was eventual death. We dug it from the ground; it died to its old place; we planted it in a good place; it was born again.

It is straight, tall, and a blessing to all.

To become what it could be required a drastic change.

It was easier for the tree than it is for a human being.  My wife and I did all the deciding.

People are harder. When they are lost, they often won’t admit it.  It’s the world that is wrong.  Everyone is wrong but them.  They create a tiny hell for themselves, but they believe it is the whole world.  And they will work to drag everyone else into it with them.

Jewell asked, “Who will save your soul, if you won’t save your own?” 

How can a man be born when he is old?

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 Carpenter's Hands

 The Carpenter’s Hands

By Bobby Neal Winters

In taking up woodworking, I’ve stepped into a new world.  No, new is not right, the world is not new, it is old, but it is different.  There’s a different language, different customs, different things to learn, but they are old things for the most part.

Man is a tool using animal. We use tools to do things, but we use tools to make other tools.  We’ve used this ability to leverage ourselves out of the mud. And to talk about our tools, to teach others how to use them, we’ve created words. Words have been some of our most important tools.

As I sit here, there is a tool called a “wheel marking gauge” that is just to my left hand.  It is a device to which I was happily ignorant as little as a week ago, but having learned of its existence I had to have one.

As you might’ve guessed, it’s a measuring device.  It can be used for a variety of applications, but when I first saw it on YouTube it was being used to make a mortise and tenon joint.

I had heard of a mortise and tenon joint in the past, but until recently that phrase was just a collection of syllables. These are words that come into the English language through Old French. A mortise is a hole and a tenon is a projection you put into a hole. What were two separate things, are now one.  Something new has come into the world.  

The mortise and tenon joint is a way that you join two boards together without nails or screws and maybe not even glue. The tenon must fit very tightly within the mortise, and, as a consequence, measurements must be precise.

As I typed the word measurement, the image of a tape measure popped into my head, so I figured it might have yours too.  I need to knock that thought out of both of our heads.  The type of measurement needed for this is much more exact than can be accomplished with just a tape measure.  

In transferring the measure of the mortise to the board out of which you are going to cut your tenon, you can’t use just a tape measure or ruler or anything that would cause you to write down a number.  There would always be rounding off, and you would always be wrong.

Because of this, they need a wheel marking gauge. You can set the device to the exact size needed on the mortise board and transfer it directly to the tenon board without changing it to a number in between.  The wheel gauge I have does have measurements calibrated on its axis, but you would never need to look at them when you are transferring the measurements.  They are there for other needs.

Having praised the wheel marking gauge, let me say that not everyone uses them.  There are those who’ve made their own measuring device that works in a similar way. It's made mainly of wood, but with a single nail through it to do the marking.

There are two breeds of woodworkers on the internet: The Power Tool folks and the Hand Tool folks. The hand tool people use very sharp chisels to cut their mortises and sharp Japanese saws to cut their tenons.  The hands of those who do this are rough, but amazingly skilled. There is something there to be admired.  

It makes me want to do my woodworking better. It makes me want to be a better writer.  Heck, it just makes me want to be 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. )

What We Are, We Are

 What We Are, We Are

By Bobby Neal Winters

When I was in high school, the father of a friend of mine had heart disease.  He was a good man, as is his son, and the community circled round them in love.  There was an event to help defray expenses, and a part of that was an auction and a cake walk.

One of the prizes was a poster of a setting sun with a cutting from Tennyson’s poem Ulysses in the background.

I am not a poet, nor do I read much poetry; I get my fix on poetry through song lyrics; but Ulysses captured me. I either bid on the poster and bought it or I won it at the cakewalk, and the poem has been my boon companion since that night. 

For those of you who may have grown up as an ignorant Okie like me, Ulysses was a hero of the Trojan War.  There is an ancient poem called the Odyssey which recounts his adventures/misadventures on his voyage home.  I don’t know any more about this than the Classic Comics that Mr. Gantt kept in his English Classroom, but that stuck with me. I often recite the portions I’ve memorized in my head, and I revisit the poem itself from time to time.

It has been a companion on my journey. There are days when I alternate between it and Reba McIntire singing Bobbie Gentry’s “Fancy.”

I’ve not been as bold a soul as Ulysses. My adventures have been of a different sort.  I have gone many more places than that Okie boy at the cakewalk would’ve believed, but most of my adventures have been of a different sort.

I like to learn things. I’ve learned how to calculate the positions of planets in the sky. In doing that, I got started on learning the Python computing language.   In learning the Python computing language, I discovered that when computer programs get big, they become hard to keep up with so I began learning how to organize them better.

At some point, I wanted to learn about robots and electronics. In doing the deepdive on that, I learned about the Maker Movement and all of the associated free resources on the internet to learn how to do things. 

Connected with that, I learned how to set up a simple home solar charging system.  Connected with that I began a project to set up a homemade, backyard weather station which is now on hold because of...weather.

Now I am learning woodworking.

None of this is like spending time with the Lotus Eaters or being captured by Cyclops, but, as Bobbie Gentry would say, “I ain’t done bad.”

Looking back on it, it seems kind of random because, well, it is.  But this is a connection. That connection is me.  I’ve learned things; I know the things; I think about the things; I share them with you.

The poet Dante I am told put Ulysses in hell, and I am sure he had his reasons. But this one fragment of a poem by an English aristocrat inspired by an ancient poem about a character from the Trojan war--which may never have happened--has had an effect.  It has been a chord in a string of random colored stones that has brought them together in a necklace.

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. )

If I Had a Hammer

 If I Had a Hammer

By Bobby Neal Winters

I received an email this week from a friend and former coworker who, among other kind things, told me my writing just “keeps getting better.”  It kind of made my day.  She knew me well enough to know this was the best thing to say. Let me explain.

I’ve taken up wood work.  When I first typed that sentence, “wood work” came out as “word work.”  Word work would be writing, wouldn’t it?

When Jean and I first got to town almost 33 years ago, we had very little, but we did have a VCR, and we kept getting tapes for it.  These things begin to pile up, so I decided to make a cabinet to hold VHS tape.  I did it using only wood, glue, and dowel pegs.  I may have used a couple of metal hinges and the associated screws; I forget.

It was horrible.  And we used it for many years.

By horrible I mean, I used cheap wood; I didn’t sand it; the glue was e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.  The hinges were crooked.  

But it did function. And only recently did it go in the dumpster.

A lot of writing is the same way. It can be ugly, but still function. Yet when you get to a certain point in your craft as a writer you might wish to put it in the dumpster.

As I watch videos about woodworking, I have noticed there is a collection of techniques and tools they run to again and again.  They build a lot of boxes.  Almost everything is a box.

You want to make a chest of drawers?  Well, a drawer is a box without a top. The chest is just a box with strategically placed holes in the front.

It is more than that, of course, but that will serve for broad strokes.  Even the boxes have pieces, and there are techniques in putting the pieces together.

I’ve been watching a lot of Steve Ramsey who has the WoodWorking For Mere Mortals channel. In one of his earlier videos, he made a chessboard, which is something I now want to do.  When he put the finish on, he put something like six layers of varnish on, letting it dry in between each layer. He then began the process of sanding. He sanded it down through finer and finer grits, using more and more sophisticated techniques.  It looked like jewelry when he was done.

These days, he recommends spray-on varnish. And sometimes he says you needn’t do any finish-work at all.

It’s about the purpose.  You see, you can take his techniques for finishing the chessboard, and use it to make a table top, desktop, etc, and make that surface very, very nice.  But that sort of attention is not needed for everything.

Likewise, in writing, we have our tools.  We break things into pieces.  Writers don’t build boxes; writers build paragraphs. Instead of using glue, screws, and mortise-and-tenon, we use transitions, themes, and metaphors.

Writers and woodworkers both have to practice.  If I say, “Practice makes perfect,” someone will say, “Perfect practice makes perfect,” so instead I will say, “Practice gives us opportunities to get better.”

In the end, in whatever you do, you aren’t going to be perfect.  At least I’m not. I do hope in writing and woodworking to get 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 Cold and a Broken Hallelujah

A Cold and a Broken Hallelujah

By Bobby Neal Winters

Leonard Cohen passed away in 2016 at the age of 82.  He was a tremendous song writer who wrote a couple of my favorite songs, but I’d never heard of him until years later.  It’s not that he didn’t record songs himself, but other people recorded his songs too and struck gold with them.

Other people were more successful in interpreting his songs than he was.  Don Henley and Sigrid somehow rendered more popular interpretations of “Everybody Knows” than he did.  Rufus Wright and Jeff Buckley had better interpretations of “Hallelujah” than he did.

Interpretation is an underrated gift.  I mean interpretation in art here not interpretation in language as you might think about it, but that is a good analogy.

The model of communication is simple.  The artist has a box of symbols; the interpreter has a box of symbols, not necessarily the same ones; and the artist sends his symbols to the interpreter over a channel that might have some noise in it.  Let’s ignore the noise because it will distract us from the point; it would be noise, as it were.

Think of it as the artist is trying to transmit a picture of something he sees to the interpreter.  He puts together a picture with some puzzle pieces that he has.  He sends the names of the puzzle pieces to the interpreter.  The interpreter picks out the puzzle pieces from his collection that he believes corresponds to the ones the artist sent.  

There is a subtle point here, so I am going to try to be careful.  The picture that the interpreter puts together may never look exactly like the one that the artist sent.  The interpreter’s puzzle pieces are either going to be bigger, smaller, or shaped differently.  But...

But the picture the interpreter puts may in fact look more like what the artist saw than the picture the artist put together.

This can happen in a number of ways.  The interpreter and the artist live in the same reality.  They craft their symbols, their puzzle pieces from that same reality.  The interpreter may have a more refined set of symbols than the artist has.  

This happens when the artist looks in a particular direction and sees something that no one has seen.  His message causes the interpreter to look in that same direction.  The interpreter then resends the message with his own set of symbols.

Johnny Cash was very good at this.  It is well known that he interpreted the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt” and owned it thereafter.  Cash had an amazing set of tools for this, especially when he recorded it. His voice was aged to perfection.  But this was magnified through the lens of Cash’s gigantic personna. We knew Johnny; we heard Johnny’ we believed Johnny.

Sometimes the relationship of the interpreter to the artist is like that of the merchant to the explorer.  The explorer goes to the islands on the other side of the world and brings back the exotic spices.  The merchant tastes the spices; feels the heat; and uses his tools to make them into a product.  Elvis was a merchant and Chuck Berry was the explorer for “Johnny B. Goode.”

This is a good place to mention Jimi Hendrix and “All Along the Watchtower.”  

“All Along the Watchtower” was written by Bob Dylan. But after Jimi Hendrix sang it, it became his.  He owned it; Dylan has said this himself. In the manner of Johnny Cash his skills and personna combined to bring it to another level.  But Hendrix also took the song from Dylan’s Folk market to the Rock market.  He was able to reach people Dylan was not.  

Sometimes, and this is much rarer than what I described above, the interpreter takes what the artist did to a completely different place.  He finds something within the message the artist sent a deeper truth than the artist himself knew.  He raises what the original artist did to a higher level of abstraction.  This is something the best preachers do in their sermons.  

They take life illustrations and raise them to a higher level.  As fewer people go to church and even fewer listen to sermons, there will be less and less of this.  I wonder what effect it will have on our culture.

In any case, thank God for the Artist and also for the interpreter.

Amen and amen.

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. )

 

 Some Applied Mathematics

By Bobby Neal Winters

Take control of your space.

That is the advice I gave to my students when I used to teach the introductory level math courses.  You need to find a quiet place.  You need to have your paper, your pencil, your eraser, and your calculator all right there.  If you need a protractor, a ruler, or a compass, have them all at hand.

Have your space organized and free of distractions.  Don’t tolerate invasions of it. It’s okay if someone borrows your protractor, but make them put the son of a gun back.

But control and order are the words of import.

Once you have control, you can proceed.

This is for basic mathematics.  The strength of higher mathematics is the abstraction.  Take a simple, concrete, easy-to-understand notion and raise it to a higher realm of thought.

One of the jobs that I have--either done one way or another--is helping students who are in some sort of academic trouble. A lot of this--and I didn’t keep track of the numbers, but a lot--is caused by not being in a stable situation at home.  They are in a position where they can’t set up the study environment that I described above.  It could be there are financial issues; it could be the parents have problems; it could be drugs and alcohol.

Whatever the reason, there is instability. Until that is fixed, the student is not going to have their best shot at an education.  Indeed, until that is fixed, the student--the human--is not going to have a good shot at life.  If they can get that instability fixed, it will be more important to them in the end than 100 college degrees.

They need to get control of their space.

Sometimes--often--the issue is deeper. The instability lies within themselves. Sometimes the drugs and alcohol are simply self-medication for a deeper illness.  We are getting a better understanding of mental health issues, and I hope we are on our way to being more enlightened. This is a hard step because at the mildest people with mental health issues can be annoying and sometimes they can be scary.

There are things that can be done with self-discipline, daily routines, building good habits, and counselling, but sometimes meds are the only way.  The meds, well..Sometimes they work better than others. They are hard to get calibrated to begin with, and then they can get uncalibrated and everything comes to pieces until the right mix can be found again.  

I’ve seen it over and over and over from multiple angles. 

But many people are striving with it in silence.

In order to proceed they must get control of their space.  It will be of more worth to them than 1000 college degrees if they do.

I am currently putting a workshop together.  That’s what has me thinking about all of this.  There are certain items that you have to have.  You have to know where they are.  That means that you have to have a place to put them; the way that things are stored has to make sense; and you have to put things back once you’ve used them.  You can loan things out, but when they are returned--if they are returned--you need to be sure they are back where they belong.

Because this is your space.

This transfers to the job as well.  You can see how a bookkeeper might do this; you can see how someone in the trades might; but it is also applicable in management.  There are certain things that have to be kept in order; certain things that need to be controlled.

But it is all the same principle.

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 Holy Trinity of the Frontenac-Pittsburg Metroplex

 The Holy Trinity of the Frontenac-Pittsburg Metroplex

By Bobby Neal Winters

The leaders of commerce in this town are creating a paradise for us on the northern end of our lovely metroplex. They have created a Holy Trinity of stores for those of us of a certain turn of mind.

In the beginning were two words and those two words were Home Depot (which I sometimes jokingly turn into Home Despot--such jokes are more effective from more reliable spellers than me). And Home Depot was god and that god sat kitty-corner across from where Wal-Mart used to be.

Then came Tractor Supply.  Tractor Supply isn’t as showy as Home Despot (there I go), but it’s impressive.  The thing is that it has more than just supplies for tractors.  There is stuff in there that you didn’t know you wanted until you saw it.  There is stuff in there that would be better than gold to the sturdy men and women who carved this nation from the wilderness.

Now, at last, we have the completion of the Holy Trinity; the icing on the cake; the bow on the gift: Harbor Freight.

I’d only been to Harbor Freight once or twice in my life, and that was in Joplin.  To tell you the truth, I wasn’t very impressed.  That could be because I just didn’t look it over; or it could be because the one we have in the Frontenac-Pittsburg metroplex is just better.

I made my third trip to our new Harbor Freight yesterday, but this was my most important trip, because it’s the first time I’d been there alone.  My wife had been with me before, and as my fellow husbands can share, having the better half around affects matters.

Harbor Freight is the equivalent of a toy store to a certain turn of mind.  And what I said of Tractor Supply is even more true of Harbor Freight: There is stuff in there that you didn’t know you wanted until you saw it.  Then you might not know what it is, but you still want it.

I went there looking for something.  I didn’t find it, but I found a couple of other things I needed at a price below what I could’ve bought it for online.

I began this piece by praising the leaders of commerce in the area.  It could be that this happened by accident.  One has to be careful praising anyone from City Hall or downtown because sometimes it goes to their heads.  Luckily, we’ve got people who will complain if they buy sand for the roads because it might not snow; then they will complain if it snows, and there’s not enough sand.  There is no winning.

In any case, our current state of affairs is such a nice turn that it looks like design, so I am going to risk praising someone even if it’s not by name and even if they didn’t do it.

So excuse me.  I am now going to finish this up and make a run to the north end of town.

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. )

 Taking a Table Saw to the Tree of Knowledge

By Bobby Neal Winters

In the cult classic, The Gods Must Be Crazy, a tribe of hunter gatherers finds a Coke bottle, and it is such a strange, versatile object, it sows discord among the tribe, and the bulk of the movie consists of our hero on a journey to get rid of it.

The message of the film is that this primitive tribe, by virtue of taking this action, is wiser than the more “developed” peoples who created the bottle.  

If only you could just throw problems over a cliff and they would disappear into the clouds.

In our tradition, that notion was dealt with early.  When we ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we were thrown out of paradise, and an angel with a flaming sword was put at its entrance to keep us from going back.

When you learn something new, there is no unlearning it.  The cat is out of the bag, the genie is out of the bottle.

It is just there.

What the righteous must do is to learn how to deal with it now that you know about it.

We’ve been cleaning out an old house we use for storage. In the course of doing that, we did two things: We found a table saw that belonged to Jean’s father and we cleaned out enough floor space that it could actually be used.

Over the last 32 years I’ve been in town, there have been many occasions when I could have used a table saw.  There have been many occasions when a table saw was exactly what I needed. And on every single one of those occasions I’ve had to figure out some other way to do what needed doing.

I’ve sawed boards in every conceivable awkward position you can imagine.  I could’ve written the kamasutra book of carpentry. Now here within my very grasp is a table saw.

Here’s the thing though:  I don’t know how to use a table saw.

And a table saw is a thing that needs knowing before you use it.

There are two types of people who just read that sentence.  One is confused because a table saw is very simple to use. You plug it in, turn it on, and slide a board across the blade. Very easy.  The second type of person says, yes, and you might very well have a few fingers laying loose when you are done.  (When I looked at the safety videos on this on YouTube, one emergency room physician remarked that reattaching fingers is not quite as easy as you may have been led to believe.)

The table saw is a simple device that you still have to learn to use.

That is true for every single thing that was ever invented.  The invention of the thing is only a small part of the story.  The rest of the story is the world learning the best way to use it.

Consider the knife, or more generally, the cutting edge.  Somebody came upon a sharp piece of flint.  He or she discovered you could cut with it. Somebody else figured out you could kill animals with it. Somebody else discovered you could cut your food into smaller pieces with it. Somebody else discovered you could kill people with it.  Now we’ve got it in operating rooms and wood carving sets.

The thing came into the world; there was no putting it back; then there was learning how to deal with it.

So I am spending some time learning the right way to use a table saw.  I am determined to leave this world with the same number of fingers that I came into it with.  I hope they don’t have to put them in a tupperware dish in the casket 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. )