Wood glue and Metaphors

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am a teacher at base.  I’ve woven some interesting activities around this: woodworking, for example.

Before I started woodworking late last year, I never dreamed what a big part glue would play.

Sure, I knew the wood had to be held together somehow, but I thought nails or screws.  I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

For one thing, I’ve used precious few nails. In fact, if your definition of nail is too narrow, I haven’t used any.  I’ve used “pins.”  These pins aren’t exactly like the one’s used to hold pieces of cloth together.  

I bought myself a Ryobi pin nailer which shoots slender pieces of metal into wood (or you hand if you aren’t careful).  The metal of the pin (or brad) is about as thick as a thick staple.  

It turns out that for what I am doing, glue is foundational.

Now, as I said above, I have used pins.  I have also used more screws in the last six months than I had in the previous almost six decades of life.  However, the pins and the screws are pretty much there to keep the wood in place until the glue dries.

Here I would like to observe that I hadn’t worked much with glue since kindergarten or maybe first grade in art projects.  Now I find myself learning something that some use to earn a living.  Let us not poo-poo the commercial value of the arts, eh?

Another thing I have learned--first by hearing it in YouTube videos and then by seeing it with my own eyes--glue is stronger than wood. 

As I am a math teacher at base, and, as such, have the psychological need to make things overly precise, let me amplify that last point.  Wood consists of cellulose fibers that are held together by a natural substance called lignin.  Modern wood glue is stronger than lignin.  To see this, you can glue a couple of boards together properly and then break them apart.  When you do this, the wood will break before the glue does.

I’ve made myself a work table.  I made each leg by putting a pair of two-by-fours into an ell-shape; that is to say, the cross-section is an ell. I put my glue on the “two-inch” lateral side of one piece and laid it against the “four-inch” lateral side of the other.  Then I nailed them together with pins.  If it had been the pins alone, I would’ve been able to pull the pieces apart with my hands, but I clamped them and let them dry.  Now they are holding up a work table.

Wood-glue: It is great stuff.

I see my woodworking as being another creative outlet that runs parallel to my writing.  I have observed in this space before that I find them similar.  Each requires putting pieces together.  You work with each piece and you then put the pieces together.

My wife actually taught me that I needed to put pieces together.  She accomplished this in her own gentle way by saying, “I think you have a rough transition here.”  

So I needed something to hold it together.

There are lots of ways of doing this.  My favorite way is metaphor.  To my way of looking at things, metaphors are to writing as glue is to woodworking: they are stronger than the wood itself.

Often when we write, we do so to present what we perceive as a truth.  One way to do it is to use an extended metaphor which seems to be parallel to the truth we are trying to convey. Those who disagree with us can criticize our writing and tear it apart.

In cases such as this, often the metaphor will stand, but the rest of our writing will break.

For example, there might be some who would argue that writing is not like woodworking at all and give good, convincing reasons for it, thereby breaking this essay.  However, woodworking/wood glue are still good metaphors.

As with woodworking, there are some who are better at writing than others.  Some writers are better at using metaphors; some woodworkers are better at applying glue.

There is something to know.

When writers use metaphors, we are reaching out into the real world, the world of common shared experience.  We want something concrete that the reader can understand, so that they can use it as a guide to understanding what we are trying to actually tell them.

In a case like today, I thought I needed to do a little exposition on wood glue.  As I didn’t know anything about it before late last year, I thought many of my readers might not either.

This has the value that even if something breaks the essay, at least you’ve learned something.  And that’s what it’s all about for me in the end.

I am a teacher at base, after all.

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

Long, Hot, Dry Summer and the Great Brown Spot

 Long, Hot, Dry Summer and the Great Brown Spot

By Bobby Neal Winters

Yesterday I mowed for the first time since mid-June. 

If you follow this space, you know I’ve had kind of an interesting summer. I had surgery to repair a hernia just after the 4th of July.  A little over two weeks later, I came down with COVID.

While either of those events could’ve affected my mowing schedule, neither of them actually did.  As those of you who work under the auspices of NALM (the National Association of Lawn Mowers) and seek to improve themselves and improve the world one lawn at a time, the weather this summer has been the overriding concern.

It simply stopped raining at some point.

Those of you who are absolute sticklers for the literal truth will note that there has been some scattered rain.

Well, yeah, there has.  Scattered be the key modifier there.  I remember one morning I got up to walk and experienced an 8-inch rain.  Eight-inch in the sense that the drops were falling 8 inches apart. 

The lack of rain affects mowing in two ways.  The first of these is that the grass simply doesn’t grow.  It gets to a certain point and says, “No, I am done.”

But there is also the dust.  The lack of rain causes dust;  Mowing stirs up the dust; and if you mow, you are walking around in a cloud of dust like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown. I once caught pneumonia from doing that when I was a teenager.

Yesterday, I caught things just right.  We had received just enough rain to settle the dust.  The backyard had begun to look a little scraggly. 

For those of you who are not familiar with the word “scraggly,” it is used by my people in the following way.  There comes a time in a young man’s life when he begins to shave.  At a certain point, he says to himself that he will try to grow a beard so he stops shaving.  The result of this is a beard described by the adjective “scraggly.” 

Just as the cure for a scraggly beard is to shave it, the cure to a scraggly lawn is to mow it.  The light, dust-settling rain we received gave me the window I needed.

Having been almost two months since I’d mowed, I was tuned into the whole experience.  I was attentive to even the most minute detail.  I gained some insights.

During normal times, my lawn suffers from--among other things--being shaded by a lot of trees.  The shade keeps the grass from getting all of the sunlight the rest of the grass gets. During times when we are actually getting rain, this is a bad thing, but when we have had weeks upon weeks of hot, dry, sunny weather, something else happens.

The shade has protected the grass beneath it.  It reduced the evaporation of what little moisture there was in the soil.

This was made clear to me when it came time to mow around the “Great Brown Spot.”

You have probably heard of the “Great Red Spot” on Jupiter.  It is a storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere that has been going on for hundreds of years.  Our astronomers have been observing it since almost the time of Galileo and wondered what it was for a long, long time. 

If there are astronomers on Jupiter who are looking our way, they have no doubt seen the “Great Brown Spot” in my backyard and are wondering what causes it.

The “Great Brown Spot” is the part of my lawn that gets the most direct sunlight.  In the spring, it is very healthy because of this.  It is not so much of an advantage in the midst of a hot, dry summer.

(As a side note, I got to thinking about what the astronomers on Jupiter would be like.  In science fiction, it has been speculated that the inhabitants of gas giants like Jupiter would have to be like dirigibles or blimps.  That is to say, they would be giant bags of gas.  This would make them ideal candidates for a life of politics or maybe even positions at the university, but I digress.)

In contrast to this, there are parts of the backyard that are positively verdant. I noticed that this required a combination of factors: 1) As noted earlier, shade; 2) being near the water spouts of the gutters from the house; 3) being near one of the flower beds that my wife waters.

Indeed, there is one spot that almost caused my mower to drown out.  We have a little inflatable pool for our grandsons to use.  It is filled with a garden hose which leaks.  The place where the hose leaks may be the nicest square-foot of lawn in town.

If it doesn’t rain, I won’t have to mow again this year, but quite frankly, I felt like a better human being once the job was done.  Maybe we should work in prayers for rain whenever we have the Lord’s attention.

Just sayin’.

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. )

 On taking a more active part in the Pandemic

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last Saturday morning at 5AM, I awoke to the sounds of my better half throwing up.  Only someone who had been married to this particular woman would’ve recognized it for what it was.  It sounded like tablespoons of gravel being thrown into the toilet.  When I throw up, it sounds like a tyrannosaurus rex is trying to mate with an electrical transformer.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine. Nothing wrong with me,” came the reply.

By 9AM our daughters had convinced her to take the COVID test.

POSITIVE.

She moved into a spare bedroom to try to save me, but it was to no avail.

I was okay on Sunday.  I woke up fine on Monday.  I took my walk before it got hot. I stopped and talked to people while maintaining social distance. But before I had finished my two-mile round, I noticed a tickling in my bronchial tubes.

I returned home.  Ate my breakfast.  Took a COVID test.

POSITIVE.

Well, I am healthy, I say to myself.  I’ve been inoculated and I was boosted only seven months ago.  I will be fine.

No.

I have a superpower when it comes to detecting whether I have a virus.  It is my spine.  Whenever I have a virus or am vaccinated against one, I have aches between every single vertebrae in my spine.

That started coming on in the afternoon.  It was unmistakable from the very beginning and it increased throughout the day.

Monday night was bad.

Not only every vertebrae of my spine, but every joint in my body, every part of my body that had ever encountered anything harder than a blade of grass, ached.

I was wracked with chills even though we were in the middle of a heat-wave.

Then, in the dead of the night, our cat Mischief came and put her nose against mine.

She was checking whether or not I was still breathing.  She wanted to know if I was dead or not.  I very consciously, with whatever life was still in me, exhaled into her nostrils.  I wanted her to know that I was alive so that she wouldn’t begin to feed on the soft parts of my body.

I knew I couldn’t fight her off.

That same night, she had performed the same proof-of-life test with my wife.

Mischief must’ve been hungry.

Monday night was the worst night.  

Things got rapidly better after that.  

We had been given the advice from a family friend to get paxlovid, which is an antiviral.  I’d tried to do this on Saturday, but you need a prescription.  Well, we got prescriptions on Monday.  After the night of hell, we turned the corner.  It’s been a week and we don’t feel any worse than is consistent with six decades of life.

I would like to give the credit to paxlovid, but scientifically I can’t.  I am pretty sure it was part of it, but we are both quite healthy to begin with; we’ve both been inoculated and boosted (probably should’ve gotten that second booster).

So our quick bounce back was probably from a combination of things.  

But I am going to give at least some credit to paxlovid.

That having been said, let it be known that paxlovid imparts a characteristic taste to your mouth.  I cannot describe it accurately using vocabulary consistent with the standards of a family newspaper, but you get the idea.

Nothing is free in this world but the grace of God.

So for us COVID was like a bad case of the flu.  We will still be getting vaccinated as recommended.  We will still wear the masks when needed.

Getting out of bed is a privilege; health is a privilege; life is a privilege.

AMEN.

And, Mischief, I’ve got an eye on you.

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. )

Journey to the Seventh Planet

By Bobby Neal Winters

Interstate 44 claws its way through the state of Missouri. You really have to experience it to understand.  It’s not that it's not pretty.  The scenery is quite pretty.  One would have to have a heart made of stone to not be affected by the scenic beauty...at first.

As you drive along after first entering Missouri, you say, “What a pretty little hollow nestled among the scenic hills.”

But something happens to you after you do that twenty times over the course of an hour.  Hearts made of flesh do turn to stone; hearts already of stone turn to diamond.

And depending upon how far you go and how fast you drive, you might be doing that for six hours.

The way they put it in Latin is: “Iter facimus.” The word “iter” means journey and “facimus” means we make. So a journey is like breakfast or a house.  It is something that you put together.

Driving across Missouri, there is the piece from Joplin to Springfield; then Springfield to Rolla; then Rolla to Saint Louis.

The Romans were onto something.  Chopping a trip into pieces gives you hope. Hope will keep you alive.  The folks in Missouri have caught onto that.  The way they have done it, makes me proud to be an American.

As you penetrate more deeply into Missouri and the density of the pretty hills that separate the gorgeous hollows numbs the beauty-perceiving portions of your brain, your eyes begin to wander to the billboards.  The billboards highlight roadside attractions: There are scenic wonders and shopping opportunities ahead.  These billboards are more densely packed than even the hills and hollows.

The scenic wonders are understandable. Given the beauty of the hills and hollows that you can see for free from the interstate itself, you might wonder about the beauty of whatever they are trying to lure you off the beaten path to pay money to see.

However, there is something beyond that.  It is something that highlights the economic genius of the people of Missouri: The Uranus Fudge Factory.

If you’ve not gotten the joke, maybe it’s because it’s been a long time since you were 12. Maybe you’ve always been emotionally mature. Maybe you don’t pronounce “Uranus” with the stress on the second syllable. You really need that long “a” sound there.

The first time you see a billboard for the Uranus Fudge Factory, you think: Seriously, that’s pretty tacky.  You think: I would never stop there. What’s wrong with people who stop at a place like that?  

Then you think, people who are traveling with children who are old enough to read but still immature enough to think this is funny probably do.

Then the miles pass.  The hills and hollows add up.  They blunt your aesthetic senses. Your mind becomes as numb as your back, as backside, as...Uranus. 

You become curious.

I do want credit for waiting until our return journey before yielding to my curiosity and taking the exit to Uranus, Missouri in order to visit “The Uranus Fudge Factory.”

I will admit one thing.  I only thought that what I read on the billboards was tacky.  For true tackiness, one must enter the Fudge Factory.  The tackiness is palpable.  The tackiness has been monetized.

It’s for this last bit that I am going to tip my hat to those entrepreneurs in Uranus, Missouri.  Nature didn’t give them anything much to distinguish them from any other exit on Interstate 44. (Though I would say they probably go back to the heyday of Route 66.) 

The only distinguishing asset they had was someone naming their community with a moniker that can be pronounced in such a way as to make a middle-schooler snicker.  If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. If it gives you a goofy-sounding name, you go around the corner to where fudge is made.

We stopped.  We bought fudge.  It’s a done thing that we now won’t have to do again.  But that’s what we’d said before.

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. )

July and the Memory of Kamikaze June Bugs

 July and the Memory of Kamikaze June Bugs

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are embedded in nature. It surrounds us; it flows within us; it is our friend; it is our enemy; we are subject to it.

I’ve bounced back from my hernia surgery.  Yesterday, which was the one week anniversary of “the repair,” I walked my full walk. I’d been sneaking up on it for a few days and I am gradually healed.

Those of you who work downtown and sometimes watch me as I walk by will not have seen me because I was walking before 6 in the morning.

Some may ask why one would do that?  These would be people who are not living in Kansas right now.  

It got up to 99 degrees yesterday.  Worse is forecast for next week.  It is July; it is Kansas; suck it up, Buttercup.

When I was walking, the temperature was still only in the low 70s. It was lovely.

There are a few others out at the same time.  Not many, but a few.  The occasional runner; the dog walkers of the world dutifully scooping poop; and the gardeners, watering their gardens.

It’s hot; it’s been dry too.  A few mornings ago I got up to walk and it was darker than usual.  No stars.  Mysterious flashes of light to the north. It took a while for my brain to process the clues: Lightening.  Was it going to rain?

The answer was yes, but not in a meaningful way.  It did make the day cooler though. Grace but not as much as we would like.

I’ve not mowed since the middle of June.  If I tried to mow my front yard, I'd have to use GPS to keep from getting lost in it.  

We did have a mast year in oak last year, so we’ve got a lot of little oak trees coming up that could stand a good trimming, but they are not uniform over the lawn. The rest of the lawn consists of short, dry brownish leaves that don’t reach up to the lawnmower blade.

The backyard, which has a different microclimate from the front yard, could be mowed. It would be possible to do it without losing your track, but you might get lost in the dust.

Someone out there has read this and said, “Well, what he needs to do is put in a sprinkler system. That would take care of his problems. The grass would grow and it would keep the dust down.” I can hear his voice in my head.  He sounds grumpy.

My reply to this would be, “You really don’t know me do you?  Haven’t you been paying attention? I said I’d not had to mow for a month.  That is what we call success!”

There is something to be said for living in harmony with nature.  Don’t get me wrong, I love air-conditioning.  I grew up without it, so I might even love it more than all of the rest of you together.  But we did live without it.  

We had swamp-coolers and electric fans.  We lived slower lives.  To say we surrendered to nature might be too much, but we gave nature its props. We spent our evenings sitting in puddles of our own sweat, trying to come into symbiosis with the June Bugs as they went kamikaze on the light fixtures.

When you live in this sort of harmony with nature, you learn to appreciate the small things: a cloud going over the sun; the shade of a tree; a breeze moving past you after you’ve worked up a sweat.

One day it will rain again.  The days will grow noticeably shorter and the night longer.  The winds will switch around to the north.  We will have wind, thunder, and lightning. And it will rain.

We will bless that day.

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. )

 

Self-Discovery and the Art of Installing Insulation

 Self-Discovering and the Art of Installing Insulation

By Bobby Neal Winters

I will turn 60 in October and I am still finding out who I am. I reread that sentence.  Maybe it should read, I am still becoming who I am.  Then I wonder if the second alternative has any content at all; aren’t we always becoming who we are?  But the first takes the stance that there is someone who I am and that life is the process of discovering it...

I need more tea.

I had surgery last Thursday as I write this, and I am writing on Monday instead of Saturday as is my usual habit.  My surgery wasn’t bad--I’ve had airplane flights that were worse--but I kind of lowered my energy level.

I’ve been told by my surgeon that I can do anything I want to do as long as it doesn’t require lifting more than 15 pounds for the next six weeks.  Writing? Of course! Walking? Certainly. Mowing the lawn? Yes, but not on hills.

Woodworking?

Okay, what part?  Cutting a single two-by-four with a miter saw is allowed.  Carrying around a four foot by eight foot piece of plywood is not.

Both of these activities are important to my woodworking now:  I’ve decided to turn my garage into a workshop. 

I’ve been using the empty house next door, but for various reasons it is not optimal.  It will cost less money and effort to make our garage into an acceptable shop than it would to do so to the house next door. 

It’s like “If you give a mouse a cookie” and turns into quite an exercise in planning.

<ITALICS>If you want to be warm while you do woodworking in winter, you need to install a heater in your shop.  If you install a heater, you’d better insulate so you aren’t just wasting money.  If you insulate, you’d better put up some interior panels to keep the insulation in.

If it is a workshop, the panels really should be OSB plywood.  And before you put that OSB up, you need to do any electrical wiring that needs to be done.  That means you’ll need to do the wiring for your heater.  Since the wiring for the heater is going to be 220volts, you will need to learn how to deal with your breaker box.</ITALICS>

The thing is, if I screw up while wiring 220 into the breaker box, my wife will have a nice workshop for her next husband.

I am seriously thinking of hiring an electrician to do that part, but quite frankly I  might have to kidnap one to get them out. 

All of that said, I’ve got some time off because of my surgery, but it’s kind of frustrating because I can’t do some of the things I’d really like to do.

I’ve changed quite a bit in the last twenty or thirty years.

There is a moment I remember when I was about thirty--maybe a little more, maybe a little let--and I was walking down First Street about half a block from my house.  This was before I’d started my daily regime of walking.  I was having trouble walking.  My legs were tired and I was winded.  The thought came upon me that if I didn’t do something, I would get to a point where I couldn’t walk.

So I started walking every day.  I started with a short walk and gradually added to it.  Now I do two miles a day and it is a rare day when I don’t.

And I’ve learned to like it.  I look forward to it.

The woodworking has been the same. I found a tablesaw and in learning how to use it, I’ve reorganized large portions of my life.  It is work; it is a lot of work.  It is expensive; at times very expensive. 

But it is good for me. Knowing how to do something makes me better.  Makes me more useful to my family. 

Being useful is important.  That seems to be a part of who I am.  The need to be of use is strong.  It probably explains why I’ve allowed myself to be used at times.  That’s okay; a part of the journey of self-discovery.

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. )

 

 Learning a New Word

By Bobby Neal Winters

Every morning, and I mean every morning, I spend some quality time with Duolingo working on my Spanish.  Lately, I’ve been working on Latin, French, and Italian too, all after my morning Wordle game. It helps me get my brain started since my doctor took me off coffee.

Anyway, I like words and I fancy that I have a good vocabulary, but this week I learned a new word and not from either Wordle or Duolingo.  That word is “inguinal.” 

The doctors and nurses who are reading this already know where this is heading.  That is because ‘inguinal” is an adjective used to identify different kinds of hernias, and it is the kind of hernia that I’ve just discovered that I have.

In my family, the word we used to refer to inguinal hernia was simply “hernia.” My dad had a hernia; my grandfather had a hernia; my great grandfather had had a hernia.  There is probably a string of these that goes back to someone in a tribe exiting sub saharan Africa, tens of thousands of years ago.

For those of you who are luckily innocent of all this, an inguinal hernia is a place where the muscle in the abdominal cavity has given way and allows the large intestines to bulge through.  I saw a bulge; I went to my doctor; he sent me to a surgeon; the surgeon has set up an appointment.

This provides an interesting setting to talk about progress in medical science.  

I mentioned my great grandfather.  He’d had a hernia. In his day, he just let it go.  I suppose he may have dealt with it by laying down and letting his intestines roll back into his body or giving them a little help. He may have had a truss which is a device I will discuss later. But for him surgery was not really an option.

His hernia eventually became strangulated.  That is to say, it got stuck in his abominable wall and the blood supply got cut off.  In his case, the intestine became gangrenous and he died in agony.

Here we come to the device I mentioned earlier: the truss.  The truss is a device designed to push your intestines back into your abdomen where they belong.  Both my grandfather and my father had them.  My brother and I used to find them in grandpa and dad’s respective rooms among their clothing and play with them.  We thought they were just a different kind of clothing that you wore when you grew up.  

We were told, to stop playing with them we would be wearing our own soon enough.

My grandfather was able to use a truss and get by with that and being careful.  He avoided dying in agony of a gangrenous strangulated hernia.  The bar for success was set realistically in my family.

Dad had had surgery twice to repair his hernia.  The first time in 1945 and the second in the late 1970s. 

I can be exact about the first because that was when Dad was drafted into the war.  In a story he told with some frequency, they diagnosed his hernia when he took his physical: the old cliche “turn your head and cough.”

At that time, in his words, “They did not let my feet touch the ground for a month.”  Recovery was brutal.  Because of this, when the hernia recurred, he just got himself a truss, and put off surgery as long as he could: the late 1970s.

When his surgery was done then, he was operated on in the morning and was walking around the hospital halls that afternoon.

Press fast-forward 50 years.  

We now have laparoscopic surgery.  You go in in the morning, make small incisions, and operate through small pieces of pipe while looking at everything through cameras on TV screens like a video game.  Then you go home that very same day.

It’s like medicine has learned something in the last 80 years.

So I am going to have some downtime, but not too far down or for too long.  I will still be able to do Wordle, Duolingo, and to write.  And now I know a new word.

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 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. )

 

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. )