Requiem for the Peacemaker

 Requiem for the Peacemaker

They dress the wound of my people

    as though it were not serious.

‘Peace, peace,’ they say,   

 when there is no peace.

--Jeremiah 6:14

My tendency is to be a peacemaker.  I think this is because my father and my big brother were both hard of hearing when I was a boy. We would be working in the garden or in the yard, and one would say something, and the other would misunderstand it, and there would be an argument.

As I was the only one present with two good ears, I saw it as my responsibility to try to make peace between them.

Somewhere along the way, it became part of my self-image.

More than ten years ago when I was president of the union on campus, there was a disagreement between a member of the union and one of the administrators.  I thought I could mediate a peace between the two.  It was then that the late Dr. Robert Ratzlaff, who was the academic vice president at the time, passed on a very simple, very useful bit of wisdom, “Sometimes people just aren’t going to get along.”

I took it to heart then, and the wisdom of it has become more and more apparent as my experience of the world has increased.  As for the two people I was trying to mediate, they never got along.  I think one of them is dead now. The chance for rapprochement is over.

So what do you do when you have two individuals that don’t get along with each other and you can’t fire or kill either of them? (Killing: It’s not only wrong, it is against the law. This is my mantra.) I go to the Bible for guidance.  There I find a pair of my favorite characters: Jacob and Laban.  After a while, they didn’t even want to try to get along.  They were tied together by Leah and Rachel.  Laban loved them as his daughters and Jacob loved them as his wives.

They piled up a big pile of rocks and used it to divide up the world: You stay on that side; I will stay on this; Leah and Rachel can pass back and forth between.

And since there was no Facebook, Twitter, or anything else like that for them to snipe at each other, that settled it.

This brings us to an important distinction: Solving a problem versus managing a problem.

We like to solve problems because then they...solved.  We don’t have to think about it anymore.  It is all over.

Right now, by all indications, smallpox is solved. We vaccinated everybody and the smallpox virus has gone extinct. (Except for the labs where they keep it around for some reason.) We need not deal with smallpox.

COVID is not solved. It is being managed.  How successfully? Listen to the debate around you and make up your own mind.  Nothing illustrates the wisdom of Dr. Ratzlaff’s words like the hatred filled debate that is swirling around us now.

If we could make a pile of rocks and keep one group on one side and one on the other, that would be quite helpful, but because of social media we can’t.  And in any case, there isn’t just one side. Oh, and it’s been politicized, so we have two political parties which have no incentive to turn down the heat on it.

It can’t be solved; it can’t be managed.  What is a peacemaker to do?

Move out from the position in the middle, take the rocks you were going to use to separate the combatants, and hide under one of them. Or I guess you could get some popcorn and watch the donnybrook. 

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. )

Dread, T-wrenches, and Courage

 Dread, T-wrenches, and Courage

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was lecturing to my class the other day, and I made the statement, “Everything is easier the second time you do it.”  Almost by the time it was out of my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true.  But it still carries a useful truth. Let me explain this contradiction.

We’ve all faced things we dreaded.  I hate the word dread, but there it is.  Dread is an unprofitable emotion.  It takes something that is unpleasant and spreads that unpleasantness over time without lessening its intensity.  There are, nevertheless, things we dread, but so often once we do them they are not quite so back.  We can become more skilled at them and make them less onerous. We discover they were entirely different than what we expected.

So in that sense many, many things can be easier the second time you do them.

But in class I had flash through my mind something that had happened many years ago.  It had come a winter storm. There was four inch of snow on the ground, and it was 20 degrees outside.  The plumbing for our kitchen sink comes up parallel to an outside wall.  You guessed it: It froze and burst.  

At that time I had no inside cut off, so I ran out to cut it off at the meter. I had to get a shovel to pry off the lid to the meter well and I had with me a crescent wrench to turn off the valve.  When the lid came off, I discovered why they call it a meter well: It was filled with water well above the valve.

I plunged my arm into the water up to the elbow to turn it off.  I was having trouble getting it done the first time, so I removed my wrench from the water, readjusted it, and went in again.  

It was more difficult to do the second time.

Knowledge is one piece of understanding this.  On one hand, learning how to do something makes the mechanics of doing it easier. On the other hand, knowing how painful something is makes it more difficult to repeat.

What came out of that experience was I spent $7 to buy a T-Wrench that you can use so you don’t have to plunge your arm into the water.  They cost $21 now, so you can see this was all some time ago.  I wrote about this experience at the time, so the more dedicated among you might remember it.  

Recently, I wonder that in addition to knowledge, there might be something else involved: Courage.  In my case, the baby-courage of sticking my arm into the freezing water to get that valve turned off.  The grownup courage it takes for a woman to have a child, and even a second one.

I talked about dread earlier.  I do consider it unprofitable at best and destructive at worst, but dread is often overcome by courage. Courage overcoming dread can lead us to go through unpleasant things and master them.  At the very least, we may be able to find ways to cope--our own personal T-wrenches.

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. )

Drama and Ice Cream

 Drama and Ice Cream

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last night we went to Braums to pick up supper and bring it home.  We’d turned in our order and were waiting when an Indian couple came with their ice cream cones and sat down at one of the booths by us.

For the sake of my readers in Oklahoma, let me say, yes, Indian.  These were not descendants of the pre-Columbian inhabitants of our continent.  They were from India or from some region in ethnic continuity with it.  And they were speaking a language that was not English.  It had the tonal quality of Hindi, but the specifics don’t matter.

I said they were speaking, but it would be more precise to say she was speaking.  A lot.  She was speaking in a tone that the males of the species had better learn to listen to should they wish to lead simple, happy lives.  

They were each dressed like they were out on a date, and she was dressed in a very classy manner.

As I said, she was talking to him as they both sat on the same bench of the booth.

Were I to guess--and please allow me that liberty--I would say she was giving him an unsolicited assessment of his character.  It sounded thorough. I don’t think she missed too many spots.

Then, at one point, he gently plopped his ice cream cone down on its side in front of her, and walked quietly out the door of Braums.  I think that my wife and I may have been the only ones to notice. 

For her part, she sat there in the booth for a small space as if nothing had happened.  Then she carefully gathered her accoutrements, both ice creams included, as if nothing happened, and left quietly out the door of Braums as well.

I couldn’t see if she departed in the car with him or she went home by Shank’s Mare. It will remain a mystery.

Again, I think that my wife and I were the only ones who noticed this as it was done in such a quiet, classy fashion.

I was going to say I hope they work it all out, but I think it’s better to say, I hope they both find their way.

Culture--which includes art, literature, religion, and so many other things--is a collection of ways we develop for living in a fallen world.  Things don’t always work out the way we would like or the way we would expect.  As human beings, we learn ways of dealing.

Their cultural way of dealing with a disagreement in a public place was quiet and classy.  That makes them different from many of us.  However, they are united with the rest of us in the challenges that come with being men and women.  Our feelings are deep and strong. They are often difficult to contain.

But I have now seen this can be done with dignity and class.

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. )

Mowing and Yellowjackets

 Mowing and Yellowjackets

By Bobby Neal Winters

As those of you who labor behind the mechanical beasts known as lawn mowers are fully aware, this season has been more strenuous than average.  For those who don’t, let me explain.  All God-fearing mowers--and I am more afraid with each passing day--begin the season on a weekly rotation. (I say weekly rotation, and most of us mean seven days, but there are those who mow every eighth day and eliminate a whole mowing after seven repetitions by this numerical sleight of hand, but let’s not go too far out into the weeds.)

After a while, as the spring rains subside, we can make the shift to mowing every other week. (I tried to write bi-weekly, but does that mean every two weeks or twice a week. God forbid!) That took longer than normal this year.  Typically the last time we have to mow every two weeks is around the first of July, when rain becomes a fable.  This year, by way of contrast, I remained in my two-week cycle until August.  

Quite frankly, I was only able to go from early August until early September without mowing because I simply didn’t have time to. In any case, it has been an unusual mowing year.

And then came the Yellowjackets.

No, I haven’t been stung, and I shall endeavor not to be, but my sweet wife has.  She has been painting some trim on the exterior of the house.  At one moment, she noted some Yellowjackets keeping her company; in the next moment she’d been stung five times.

She is the sturdy one from our family.  Five stings would’ve put any of the rest of us in the hospital.

The Yellowjackets are a particularly nasty member of the order hymenoptera.  I’ve seen them referred to as [redacted] with wings, where the redacted word is the plural of a rude term for the anal sphincter. They are very territorial. Bees will only bother you if you bother them; I’ve actually seen my wife pet a bumblebee.  Yellowjackets are proactive.  If they think that you might eventually think about bothering them, they are on you.  Bees make honey; Yellowjackets make misery.

You may have noticed I am capitalizing Yellowjacket.  I am afraid not to.  I am afraid of not showing them sufficient respect.

My wife went into defense mode because she wanted to finish her painting.  She put together a Yellowjacket trap that she found online.  It consisted of a milk jug, soapy water, and a strip of salami on a string.  Yellowjackets perished in it by the thousands...and still they came.  It was like watching one of the more over-the-top zombie movies.

This is my wife, the butterfly lady.  She has a butterfly larva she is fostering right now. She loves living creatures, and they love her.

But the Yellowjackets.

She escalated her effort through several levels of chemical warfare, until she thought the numbers were sufficiently diminished for her to continue painting in peace.

No.

They got her again.

This time on her arm.  From one side, she looks like Popeye. 

The territory was yielded to the Yellowjackets.  

What does this have to do with mowing?  If you walk by my house, and look into the back yard, you will be able to see approximately where the Yellowjackets are.  Their territory is unmown. We’ve yielded them 100 square feet of the state of Kansas as theirs until the winter freeze takes them. 

We are told they will not use the same nests next year.

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. )

From Time to Time

 From Time to Time

By Bobby Neal Winters

From time to time, it is good to think of some of the good things that were done for us by those who came before us.  Some of them saw problems and came up with simple, long-term solutions to those problems.  Consider the calendar.

The year--and by year I mean Solar year--is 365.24217 days long.  The Solar year is the length of time it takes to pass from the first day of spring in one year to the next. (It is to be compared to the Sidereal year, but just let it go.)  We lay out our calendar to try to fit the calendar year, but we’ve got a problem, that fraction.  

We have to divide the calendar into an integral number of years and that fraction gets in the way.  We like to have the first day of spring to hit around March 20, but if we set the calendar year as having 365 days, the first day of spring starts moving away from that.  In about four years, it’ll be March 21.  In forty years it will be March 30.  In 80 years, it will be April 10.  

Do you begin to see the problem?  You’d have to start tracking spring in a way separate from the calendar, and it’s quite reasonable to think that knowing when the first day of spring is was the original purpose of the calendar.

This problem was fiddled with for a while, but someone, and I will say Julius Caesar--and I know people who will correct me--decided to add a “leap day” to the calendar every four years and call those years leap years.  If you do the math--or even if you don’t--that works out to having a calendar year that is 365.25 days long.  This is closer to 365.24217, but it’s not dead on.  You are off by 0.00783 of a day in the other direction.

That difference is a lot smaller.  That should solve the problem, but--as the Steve Miller Band said, “Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future....” After 15 hundred years, you are off by 11 days. Spring is starting much earlier in the year.

This time the powers that be fiddled with more sophistication.  They noticed that if you skipped adding a leap year every 100 year you would get a calendar year that was 365.24 years long on the average.  This is a little better but not all that much.  After 1500 years, you will still be 3 days off. This particular reform was being promoted by Pope Gregory of the Roman Catholic Church, and they believe in eternity.  Someone figured out that if you skipped adding a leap year in years divisible by 100 unless that year was divisible by 400 then you got a year that was 365.2425 days long.  This differs from the true value by 0.00033.

In 1500 years, you will be off by less than 12 hours. In 10,000 years you will be off by 3 days.  This is what we like to call someone else’s problem.

And all we have to do is follow a rule that says add a year to the calendar in years divisible by 4. However, when the century turns, you can skip adding the day. Unless the year is divisible by 400 hundred, then add it anyway. Most of us remember the “divisible by 4” part.  The fact that we have a presidential election that year helps.

We only have to remember not to add the day every 100 years.  Although I’ve never had to deal with that because, the only turn of the century I’ve experienced was the year 2000 which was divisible by 400, so it was a leap year as usual. 

One of the beautiful things about this solution is that it requires only a tiny amount of effort and even that small amount of effort is spread across years, centuries, or nearly a half a millennium. Very few of you reading this will have to remember that we get to skip a leap year in 2100, and we’re clear on remembering not to skip it until 2400.

Actually, “we” don’t have to remember.  The people who make the calendars do.  If we had to do anything, there would be people against it just as there are people against the time change. 

Maybe I shouldn’t’ve said anything. 

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. )

No Good Deed

 No Good Deed

By Bobby Neal Winters

Oscar Wilde said, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

This is an axiom of administrative work.  

I would like to explore it a little, but I will need to go back more than forty years to do it.

My first car was a 1965 Chevy II Nova.  I’ve mentioned it before.  In Spanish its name was more honest: No va.  It translates as “it doesn’t go.”  And mine didn’t go.  It had a maximum speed of about 60.  My dad had bought it for me for $75 and had his friend get it running for $300 more.  It had four doors and it’s windows rolled up and down. 

I drove it to school. 

My school was two miles from my house.  Between my school and my house was the town of Harden City.  Let me describe Harden City to you.  A gravel road crossed a blacktop road and there were a handful of buildings there.

In one of those buildings, there lived a poor family.  I am going to call them the Cunninghams because it suits me.  There are levels of poor and ways of being poor.  The Cunninghams were poor in money, but not poor in spirit. 

I say they weren’t poor in spirit because they asked me for rides to and from school.  They were in grade school and I was in high school. I could’ve said no and made it stick, but I didn’t.  It was nothing to me.  They were on the way. I pulled about 100 feet off the main road, dropped them off, and then headed back on my way.

I forget how many Cunninghams there were.  Like I say, it was at least 4 decades ago.  There were at least two.  The younger one--who was 7 or 8 at the time--had the foulest mouth I have ever heard on a boy of his age, but he had his big brother, who I will call Walter Jr because it pleases me,  to take care of him.  It became a routine.  I did it for a year or two and haven’t thought much about it since.  

Then in the course of talking to my brother, he mentioned that Walter Jr. had caught COVID and was in the hospital.

Then, stretched out over time, came news of his gradual decline and death.

His demise has affected me disproportionally to our relationship.  Our entire interaction with each other had been in five minute intervals on a daily basis over maybe a year or two; but I find myself with tears in my eyes.

All I know of him is this: He’d been a good brother who got rides for him and his little brother. I saw his obituary picture on Facebook, and I wouldn’t’ve recognized him if I’d passed him on the street.

We are connected by a tiny, tiny act of kindness on my part that came at no cost to me.

Until now.

Every interaction we have with a fellow human being binds them to us by a tiny thread. As we grow older and busier these threads are spread out.  Those threads we form when we are younger are bunched closer together.  They become intertwined with other threads, other memories.  This is tied up with memories of my car and therefore memories of my father, my mother, some of my school teachers who are many years gone.  

The well of tears is deep.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Do them anyway.

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. )

Bubba and the COVID controversy

 Bubba and the COVID controversy

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last week I got a call from my old friend Bubba back home.  It had been a while since he’d called me.  So long, in fact, that some of you had been asking about him.  I’d been worried myself, but I put off calling him. Bubba is a complicated soul.  While he often comes off as an unsophisticated country bumpkin, under that rough facade resides the soul of an artist.  It’s best when I let him call me.

I smiled when I saw his name on the caller ID.

“Hello, Bubba,” I began. “It’s so good to...,” but I didn’t get a chance to finish.

“Hey there!” He talked over me. “Can you believe how stupid people are?”

There was an easy question, I thought.  Yes, yes I can believe how stupid people are.  I work with people.  While there are some who are brilliant beyond compare, others are plumbing the depths and looking for a longer rope. I was about to answer in the affirmative when he continued.

“Can you believe all of these arguments about masks and vaccinations?”

Here he paused to breathe for some reason.  Maybe a junebug had flown into his mouth.

“Yes, it is something, isn’t it.”

“People are fighting about it day and night,” he said. “You can’t scroll for an inch on Facebook without reading posts on it.  And nobody is being nice.”

I was about to agree, but I wasn’t quick enough.

“If you haven’t got the shots, someone will call you an ignorant baboon.  If you have got the shot, someone will call you sheeple. Whatever happened to kindness, whatever happened to patience?”

Here I decided to be more forceful and broke in.

“What do you think about the whole thing?” I asked.

“Well, you know,” he said. “COVID has turned up the heat on everything.  I personally have lost two friends to COVID that I know of.  One of them was a close friend. Both of them would’ve been vaccinated if they could’ve, but they died before the vaccine.  On top of that, COVID has put such a strain on the hospitals, that there are people who have died of other things who would’ve otherwise lived. So, even if you aren’t in a high risk group, getting vaccinated can turn down the strain on the hospitals.

“But it is a free country. While there are limits to freedom, this is one thing that people can choose not to do.”

This confused me because it seemed reasonable.  It was like I didn’t know Bubba any more.

“So you got the shots?” I asked.

“Well I wasn’t going to,” he said. “But I saw some people in line to get something that was free, so I lined up too and I got a shot.  Four weeks later, the same thing happened.”

“Goodbye, Bubba,” I said.

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. )

  

Time for Silence

Time for Silence

By Bobby Neal Winters

Sometimes I put on YouTube while I am going through my email early in the morning just so there will be a sound.  I got into this habit in June of 2017 while I was teaching Elementary Statistics down in Paraguay.  Jean had been going to go with me, but my second grandson had just been born so there went that.  I went down by myself and I got lonesome. The TV was mostly in Spanish so YouTube became my companion. 

There were times I became so hungry to hear English I began talking to myself while walking down the street.  You kind of have to choose your moments or they might take you away.

All of this having been said, there is a lot of value in silence.

I’ve noticed that while there are times that I need to have input from music, from audiobooks, from conversation for my writing process, there are times when all those things do is drive thought from my mind.  The noise of audio input drowns out my internal dialog and my thoughts become sterile.

I must make time for silence.

Silence is useful.  Silence is a thing.  I am not a musician at all, and while we usually think of music as being sound, silence is a part of it.  In music, not only are there symbols for every note, they have symbols for measured silences between notes.  They call them “rests.” 

Often rests denote periods where one musician stops playing for a while to allow others to do their bit.  We need to have something like this for meetings; that’s all I am going to say about that.

Not only do we need silence ourselves, there are times when we need to be silent.  As someone who has made his living in higher education, let me say that I do know something about this.  I was once in a meeting where someone spoke for ten minutes just to say that he didn’t have anything to say about the topic.

And that is a clue: If you don’t have anything to say, then don’t say anything.  You’d think that would come easy, but as illustrated in the anecdote above, it does not, at least not always.

If you’ve ever read James’ epistle--and if you haven’t I encourage you to--you may remember the passage in Chapter 3 about the tongue.  We all understand--or should--the problem of gossip.  But there is another aspect worthy of consideration.  This is the effect that the things we say have on us.  A lot of people are afraid that hearing the wrong things might corrupt us. I won’t say that’s not a problem, but we do have the power to think about what we’ve heard and make up our own minds.

But when we say something, our ego gets attached to it.  Even when we’ve been proven wrong, it is easy to just double-down and stick with our mistake.  As James says, “When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts.”

There is much to be said for keeping your mouth shut when you don’t know what you are talking about.  There is also much to be said for changing your mind when you discover that you are wrong, but that is very, very hard.  It is much easier to be silent.

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. )

 Nature and Nature

By Bobby Neal Winters

Have you ever considered how odd it is that we have zoos?  Cattle ranches, I can understand; hunting ranches somewhat; but zoos?  

We rip wild animals out of their natural environments, and put them into enclosures so that we may see them safely. The more “realistic” it is, the better we feel about it.  We pay money for the privilege in most cases, and we believe it is important for our children to see them.  We believe it’s very important.

We do this because we enjoy seeing the animals and our children enjoy seeing the animals.  We like the feeling we get ourselves and we like the vicarious feeling we get from our children.  I enjoy zoos too.  Given a choice between going to a zoo for a few hours and sitting through a sporting event for an equal amount of time, I would choose the zoo every time.

I enjoy it; we enjoy it.  The question is why.

My answer is that it is natural for us to like animals, to like to see animals, to like to be around animals.

This raises (not begs!) another question: Why?  Why is it natural for us to like to be around animals?

One answer would be that we evolved as animals.  If there are other animals around, that means there is water somewhere around.  There are sources of food for the other animals, so there must be a source of food for us, and, of course, the other animals are a source of food for us.  If the other animals are predators, then seeing those predators trapped within a zoo’s enclosure gives us a safe adrenaline rush.

That all sounds quite reasonable, but let's try another.

We were created after all the other animals and given dominion over them.  This dominion is not to be the dominion of a despot over slaves, but it is to be a dominion modeled after the Loving God who created us.  We are to be caretakers rather than despots.  This is built into us.  This is why we have zoos; this is why we have pets.  We have a built-in need to nurture not only our own children, but the animals of the world as well.

First appearances aside, these two characterizations are not really at odds with each other.  They are just written in different languages, in different alphabets, by different typewriters.  Both explain, one gives meaning.

We’ve got raccoons in the neighborhood.  Jean and I walked past the old Methodist parsonage one day and saw a pair of yearlings in the garbage which had been dutifully set out on the curb.  We saw one the size of a full kitchen garbage bag stealing food from our cats as the cats looked on in terror and disgust.  While we were on vacation, a raccoon broke out of the vent on our roof like the Kool-Aid Man. 

Foxes roam around town in the twilight. There are squirrels in every tree.

All of this wildlife around us, but we don’t kill it. (Though that one raccoon is skating on thin ice!) Indeed, it is a subject for conversation and often delight.  We love the animals as long as they don’t encroach too far upon us.  We love seeing them; be love being around them.

It is the way we were made.

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 boring details about an exciting age

 Some boring details about an exciting age

By Bobby Neal Winters

One of the hats that I wear at the university is that I am the Director of the Polymer Chemistry Initiative.  I’m not a chemist, but don’t let that confuse you, because I am an administrator.  We specialize in directing things about which we know zip.  Sometimes it's easier to do if you don’t know anything about it. One of the issues we have is that not many of the general population know much about polymers.  What are they good for?

I recently purchased a 3-D printer.  I say recently, but I’ve had it since mid-June.  It came with some assembly required, and I was able to do that over the course of a Sunday with time enough for Bible Study in between.

The big issue with these devices is getting the bed correctly calibrated.  That took me the better part of a week.  The nozzle kept knocking whatever I was printing off the bed.  I was ever so patient in going through the procedures to calibrate.  Then I noticed a wire that was unplugged from a connector. (For those of you who are familiar with such things, it was the connector to my z-axis stepper.) I astutely plugged the wire back in, and, voila, it works.

I’ve been learning how to use the printer now and a whole new world has opened.

I am using it on my current project.  I want to make a weather station in my backyard.  As I am reaching a certain age, one of my duties will soon include talking about the weather in a level of detail that younger minds are not able to comprehend.  They don’t get how it was possible for us to walk to school twelve miles in the snow, uphill both ways. They will soon enough, but in the meantime, I will be up to me and others like me to fill them in.

I want to be able to tell them about the wind, the humidity, the dew point, how much rain we got last night and when it started.

For this, I need a weather station.  True, our local treasures Doug Heady and Mike Hayslip do give us great information, but they have to cover from Chanute to Bela Vista.  I want the lowdown on the southwest quadrant of Pittsburg.

Yes, you can buy weather stations, and ones that are probably better than what I am going to make.  Yes, they would probably cost less than what I am going to spend on building one.

But what is the fun in that?

For my project, I need a computer controller.  This will either be a Raspberry Pi computer or an Arduino controller.  I am sort of leaning toward the latter right now.  They will need a source of power.  I will be using a 12-volt marine battery.  I need a box to house it all in.  

As I don’t want to be having to interrupt my data to change or charge the battery, I want to have a solar panel to keep the battery charged.

My first priority is to get the power situation in order.  I bought a plastic storage box from Home Despot [sic] to mount everything to and in.  I want the battery and the controller (eventually) to be in the box, but the solar panel will have to be on the outside.  

In order to get the most out of the sunshine, I need to keep the solar panel angled to the south.  To do this, I 3-D printed some brackets to hold it at that angle.  Of course the first solar panel I got didn’t work (I don’t buy  the most expensive kind) and I had made my brackets specifically for that type, so when I bought my second solar panel it, quite naturally, didn’t fit.  As I type this, I am printing out an addition to my original brackets to make them work.

When I am done, I am going to mount my system on the top of a landscaping timber that is planted vertically like a fencepost in my backyard.  I printed a bracket that will hold it to the top of that poll.  I’ve also printed a variety of brackets to hold the battery and wires in place.  Believe me, there are a lot of wires.

If you’ve made it this far, you are probably thinking to yourself, he doesn’t have to have a weather station to become a bore, he’s there on several other fronts already.

I know it and I am okay with that.

But the point of this is the plastic filament that I am printing all this stuff with is a polymer.  These polymers can be created with different properties for different applications.  There is a lot of stuff that is coming together.  It is an exciting age.

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. )

Back from Virginia

 Back from Virginia

By Bobby Neal Winters

I recently got back from a trip to Virginia.  We visited Jamestown, Yorktown, and Monticello. (And they pronounce it Mont-i-CHEL-lo.)  We just soaked in history for three days.  The details presented clarified some perspectives which I think we need to think about as a nation.

Jamestown provides a nice place to look because in those early years we have three big influences on what it means to be an American already present: The English Settlers, the Indigenous Peoples, and the Enslaved Africans.  Yes, while the original colonists Jamestown didn’t have slaves, they did enter into the picture very shortly after the colony was established. 

This has all been swimming through my head for days now.  I’ve been waiting for it to jell so that I could write about it.  Here goes.

There’s been some nasty complicated stuff that those of us who are of English heritage really need to ruminate on.  I would have to include myself in that because as far as I’ve been able to discern, I don’t have a single ancestor who came from anywhere but England.  At various times, I thought there was some Cherokee ancestry; at others, I thought there was some Irish.  But with every DNA test, with every internet ancestry search, it’s just English, English, English.

That is so boring.

The previous sentence would so confuse my colonist ancestors because it was very important to them that they were English.  This seems to have been one of the bones of contention leading up to the American Revolution.  They didn’t feel like they were being treated as Englishmen. Then the Revolution was like a bad divorce. They didn’t want anything to do with England anymore.  

If you look at surveys of ethnicity, you will see a big stripe of “American” there.  Likely as not, the bulk of those are of English ancestry.  They say “American” instead of “English” because it had been so important for their ancestors to be English, but then they felt betrayed.

We need to pay close attention to that because this could happen again.

Here I am getting into dangerous ground and some of you might be mad at me.  The English, the Indigenous people, and the Enslaved Africans all had descendents who are now American.  (Yes, there are others and we love you too.) It is very important to all of these people that they be American.

But there are problems.  The descendents of the Enslaved Africans have problems.  It came to be currently encoded in the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”  There are those who say “All lives matter” or “Blue lives matter,” and these are all true too.  (I am not responsible for this nomenclature, but there it is.)

I would like to characterize the situation a little differently.

Think of the descendents in America of the English, the Indigenous, the African, the Irish, the Italian, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, etc as all being organs in the body.  They are all part of one thing: America. (The Apostle Paul does a nice riff on something similar in one of his epistles.) 

So think of your body.  Suppose you get an x-ray and there is a spot on your liver.  Would you react by saying, “All organs matter” and ignore the spot on your liver?  I don’t think so.  I think that you’d see about getting your liver fixed.

Not only is it a vital part of your body, but the spot might very well spread.

This is an analogy and arguing by analogy is always dangerous. It depends upon everyone realizing that we are all part of the same body.  But I believe it is good because it catches the fact that I am actually helping myself when I help someone else because we are all Americans and America is healthy to the extent its “members” 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. )

 Jamestown, Pocahontas, and Disney

By Bobby Neal Winters

In sixteen hundred seven
We sail the open sea
For glory, God, and gold
And The Virginia Company
--Alan Menken

I am in an AirBnB in Virginia as I write this.  It is located on the peninsula between the James and York rivers.  It is the location of the first successful English settlement in the New World.  If the family tree app that I have is right, some of my mother’s people lived here nigh on to 400 years ago.

Nobody’s told me that I look familiar.

We’ve literally spent days in museums.  We’ve talked to the docents who are knowledgeable, patient people.  We’ve seen the movies.  We looked at the exhibits.  We’ve tread the ancient ground.  We’ve learned a few things.

They’ve done a good bit of work to flesh out the roles of the indigenous peoples and Africans at various points.  I am not saying it is perfect, but they’ve moved it beyond Disney.  They’ve put enough details in to give me a feeling that there were real people involved. It seems to me to be closer to the truth.

There, I’ve said it.  I would like to know the truth about things.  The truth is often buried beneath a ton of sugar. The story of Pocahontas is a nice example here. 

The Disney movie Pocahontas came out when my girls were little, and we did watch it and enjoy it. We still have it on VHS somewhere.  Quite frankly, I have to admit that throughout the day we spent at Jamestown I had the tune “The Virginia Company” from that movie running through my head.  The only thing true about it is there is a place called Virginia.

 First of all, Pocahontas wasn’t her real name.  It was her nickname.  I don’t remember her real name, and in fact she had a couple of those: the one they called her and her secret name.  On top of those names she had her Christian name Rebecca Rolfe because she was a baptised Christian.

Even that isn’t the whole story.  The English had kidnapped her and were trying to use her to make her father, the leader of her tribe, see things their way.  This was actually a thing that the indigenous peoples were familiar with because they did it to each other.  There was a way you were supposed to act as a prisoner of another tribe: you changed your name and you worshipped the way they did.

Pocahontas/Rebecca bore a son to John Rolfe and died in England after having been there a year.  She was 20 years old.  Everything we know of her makes me think that she was a remarkable individual.  She’s buried at Saint George’s Church in Gravesend, Kent, United Kingdom.  Her grave is not far from the Thames.

It is a tragic story.  It is a human story.  It is the human story.

I mean to say the human story is a tragedy with elements of romance, farce, and true crime.  If it were a movie, they wouldn’t know how to market it, but they don’t have to because you are in the theater already with the doors locked behind you and there is only one exit.  

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. )

Building Bridges

 Building Bridges

By Bobby Neal Winters

Social media has supercharged our discourse.  I don’t use the word “supercharged” lightly because there are sparks flying off everything.  Recently this phenomenon has manifested itself in yours truly being tagged in a post of an article that conveyed a charge: Mathematics is racist.

So this was on Facebook. The article was written by a journalist who was writing about something a scholar had said.  I don’t even know if the journalist was writing for a right-wing rag or a left-wing rag.  There are plenty of both, each specializes in making things the other side says sound stupid and the stupid things they say sound even stupider.  They are people who are trying to build walls rather than bridges.

I’ve not read the words of the scholar.  I’ve not followed up on their research.  I’ve done no due diligence in this.

I will, regardless, use this as an opportunity to defend mathematics. I do this because mathematics has provided a bridge for me to a different sort of world than I grew up in.

As much as I was able to discern, there are those who claim that mathematics is racist because it says there is only one right answer.  Here I need to make a correction of fact; mathematics does not claim there is only one right answer. This might shock some of the right wingers who are waving this as a bloody shirt. 

In mathematics there are times when we can show--with a level of certainty that is not approached in any other area of human endeavor--there are infinitely many solutions to a given problem and we can describe exactly what they are.

This being said, mathematics specializes in being careful.  We teach processes.  The processes have multiple steps.  In each of these steps there is a possibility of going wrong, but typically we set the processes up so that at the end there is one correct answer that everyone should get to.  This makes homework easier to check.  In that way, mathematics is rigid.  

We get into trouble with this.  I wish I had a nickel for everytime I heard: “I got the right answer, but I didn’t do it the way the teacher said, so they counted it wrong.  I think the teacher is a jerk.  I hate math.”

This usually comes from the brighter students who are mistaken in what they think their teacher is teaching.  In the basic mathematics courses--and I am talking up to calculus and even beyond--we are not teaching problem solving, at least not in its full glory. We are teaching methods of problem solving.  

The methods we teach are tools, so when you get the right answer by using a method other than what the teacher was using, that’s like when you use a pair of pliers to tighten a nut when the shop teacher was trying to teach you how to use a socket wrench. Yes, I have no doubt that’s the way you will do it in real life, but you have just cheated yourself out of learning how to use a socket wrench.  Don’t expect to get credit for it.

The set of methods learned in math class form a toolbox.  I personally love to see students come up with ways I’ve not seen provided they are true methods and not just accidents.  

There is such a thing as mathematical truth. Here I will sound more like a theologian than a mathematician.  Mathematical truth is eternal: It is true yesterday, today, and forever.

Let me illustrate this with one of my favorite stories about spherical trigonometry.  Trigonometry is about triangles; spherical trigonometry is about triangles on the surfaces of spheres.  If a triangle on the surface of a sphere is bothersome to you, suck it up and push past it.  

Anyway, there was some wonderful work done on spherical trigonometry by the muslims in Persia.  They did the math so they would know the right direction to Mecca as an aid to them in prayer. It was brilliant work, then hundreds of years later, spherical trigonometry was used in navigation to aid in the exploration of the world.  

This spherical trigonometry--in tandem with mathematical development in astronomy and improved time-keeping devices--allowed sailors who were thousands of miles away from home to know where they were with incredible precision.  This kept them from getting lost and running up on shoals or getting lost and dying of scurvy or getting lost and having any number of other untoward things happen to them.

We need mathematics--and its incredible unforgiving precision--because sometimes it is the difference between life and death.

We can also do a better job of teaching it.  This goes for most subjects.  There are young people who don’t have the advantages of middle-class, suburban youths.  As teachers we will have to build our metaphorical bridges to the students.  At the end, those students are going to be building real bridges that we hope won’t give way.  In the end, the student will have a mathematical bridge that will take them to a new world.

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 Flight of the Phoenix

By Bobby Neal Winters

Going back to revisit the movies of your youth is a dangerous pastime. Sometimes you discover that a movie that you loved wasn’t actually very good.  But there are other times too.

I’d remembered The Flight of the Phoenix with James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Christian Marquand, Ernest Borgnine, and Hardy Kruger as just another desert survival movie.  It is a desert survival movie, but there is something else there that I see now but had missed as a youth. It is not just a man versus nature story, but a man versus man story in a more subtle way.

As the movie is from 1965, I will not worry about spoilers.  A plane crashes in the desert; the survivors build a new plane from the wreckage of the old (hence the name Phoenix); they fly it to safety.

That paragraph describes the movie exactly as I remembered it.  The fact that it was a story inhabited by well-drawn characters eluded me.

The thread that unites them is they are all flawed, broken men.  Richard Attenborough plays the alcoholic navigator of the doomed plan.  Ernest Borgnine is suffering from what we would now call PTSD.  Jimmy Stewart is a burned out pilot whose best days are behind him.  Hardy Kruger is an arrogant engineer.

The movie begins on the ill-fated plane.  The pilot (played by Stewart) has not done due diligence in the aircraft’s upkeep and neither has the alcohol navigator.  They are taken off course by a dust storm, but as the radio is broken--and had been broken at the time of take-off--and are forced down hundreds of miles from even the tiniest outpost of civilization. 

They wait for rescue but that is for nought as they are too far off course.

Then the engineer announces they can build a plane from the parts of their craft that are still salvageable. 

This is not met by as much enthusiasm as one might expect.  It may be because the engineer is German; the rest of the survivors are American, British, and French; and the second world war is less than two decades in the past.

Or it may be because it wasn’t the pilot’s idea.

This was a surprise to me.  I’d remembered Stewart as someone who played the same sort of affable character over and over.  As the pilot of the downed plane, he’s not particularly affable; he’s not positive; he’s not nurturing; he’s not supportive.  He’s not even a good man, much less a hero.

And the engineer doesn’t make it easy either.  He’s arrogant, impatient, and hard-driving.  He and the pilot don’t like each other at all.

The only thing that keeps the tenuous project alive is the desire to survive and the efforts of the alcoholic navigator as a diplomat.

In the end, they survive, but only after the blood sacrifice of two of the more virtuous characters.

It’s been two weeks since I rewatched it, but it has been on my mind often during those two weeks.  The image it presents of broken people who don’t like each other being forced to work together to survive strikes me as a model we should examine.  

Maybe we should make them watch it in Washington.

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 God of tiny little things

The God of tiny little things

By Bobby Neal Winters

When my kids were young and my wife was teaching Sunday School, they taught the kids a new song.  It was supposed to go, “My God is a great big God / Big enough to save me / Big enough to keep me.”  I had some reservations because the last line seemed to deny free will.  I needn’t have worried.  The children learned the final couplet as “Big enough to save me / Big enough to eat me.”

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, they say.

Perhaps the quasi-Calvanistic turn of the last line shouldn’t’ve bothered me as much on the emphasis on “Bigness.”  God is big in whatever sense that is meaningful for God, but God is also small.  While a God that is big enough to save us is comforting to a small child who feels so vulnerable in the world, the world is saved by small things.

This morning I am sitting on my new patio.  My wife and I build it one paver at a time.  It is sitting on a bed of sand.  I am sitting under an oak tree that my middle daughter brought home in a plastic cup from the second or third grade.  It is shading me with its leaves, each of which only measures a few square inches.  The tree itself grew to its current height bit by bit over the course of two decades.  Each of its cells is a tiny universe unto itself that we are only beginning to understand.

Without the tiny cells, the tree is nothing and I am being burned to a crisp in the mid-morning sun.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about my landscaping.  My latest efforts have been built over the moldering remains of what I attempted 20 or more years ago.  The results are much better this time.  What has happened?

Well, I’ve gotten better at landscaping.

This is not because I’ve laid a lot of pavers over the decades.  I have not.  My early efforts at shaping the earth into a place more agreeable to me were not so successful as to encourage practice.  Instead, years of frustration combined with prayer (and I consider writing to be a form of prayer) have created a certain reserve of patience within me.  

Patience is the reins upon our spirit that keeps us from rushing ahead too fast.  Patience allows us to map out paths within our world.

And patience, as is fitting, is not built overnight.  Patience is built tiny bit by tiny bit as we receive God’s grace through the things we do.  God exists within the tiny things.

We have the means of grace that the church has mapped out, and I am not for a moment saying anyone should abandon those. But through prayer and the tiny things you do during the day every day, God’s grace can change you.

Neither am I saying that God isn’t as big as the largest supercluster of galaxies.  He is big enough to save you; He’s even big enough to eat you.  But He’s also small enough to do what needs to be done.

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 Last Trip

 The Last Trip

By Bobby Neal Winters

In 2019, August of that year, the month in this town that if you haven’t taken a vacation yet, then it’s not going to happen, my family took a trip to Colorado, and we took my wife’s mother along.  Of all the trips I’ve ever taken, all over the world, four continents, eight countries, etc, that is the one I am most happy of.  I’m not happy because it was so much fun--and it was--or because I saw some cousins I hadn’t seen in a while--Hello Jan, Ed, and Judy--but because my mother-in-law Janet was on it.

Having a mother-in-law was not what TV had led me to believe.  Bewitched, which was my main source, misled us with Endora. (Although looking back as an adult, I find I have more sympathy with Endora and Maurice than I would’ve thought.) Janet, my mother-in-law, was a warm, wonderful person.  She never turned me into anything.

We invited her to go with us any time it was remotely likely--to the movies, to dinner, on vacations--and sometimes she went with us, and she was never any trouble.

So I am happy she decided to go on that vacation to Colorado with us, but that’s not the last trip I am talking about.

The last trip was at about 11 o’clock at night on the last Sunday of April 2021.  She’d been in good, solid health through Christmas Day and we’d celebrated together as much as the CDC would allow.  We got a call the next day that she was having trouble breathing.  She didn’t want us to come over because she was afraid she had COVID and didn’t want to expose us any more than she already might’ve.  She just wanted us to call the ambulance because she didn’t want to be any trouble.

We called the ambulance and then went over to guide them in.  What follows is a blur.  She was in the hospital for a month; she was released into hospice; Jean took care of her with the help of family; she began to get better and was released from hospice.

Things were definitely looking better, but then came the last weekend.  Friday things were kind of iffy.  Saturday things weren’t good.  Sunday things were definitely taking a turn for the worse.  

She was in tremendous pain.  Jean was dosing her with morphine, but she held out against any thought of going to the hospital.  

She didn’t want to be any trouble.

I’d gone to bed early as is my habit.  About 11pm I got a text from Jean: “...I think it’s time to go to the emergency room.”

I texted her back and went to her mother’s house.  I don’t remember putting my clothes on, but I suppose I did. We got her in the car and headed out.  

The most direct route from her house to the hospital is not the smoothes.  It goes over those brick streets the local residents are so fond of.  I went up to 4th Street and then over to Rouse, but I had forgotten about all of the construction.  It was dark; we hit every bump; and she gasped every time we did.

At some point, and I don’t remember exactly where, she said, “Thank you for being so good during all this.”

I knew at that point she thought it was her last trip with me.  

And it was.

Since that night, I’ve avoided that route as much as I could.  I’ve found other routes from here to the hospital with smoother roads, less construction, routes that wouldn’t’ve taken much longer but where she wouldn’t’ve experienced as much pain.

I’ve seen images in the distance that lit up recognition for her in my head, but of course when they resolved into detail they were not her.

Last Thursday, I drove Jean to the mortuary, she paid the bill, and we picked up Janet’s cremains.  I put her in the back of my car this time and we retraced some of the same path.  This time in the opposite direction with much less hurry.

We brought her home.  It wasn’t any bother.

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. )

 

Things I’ve Learned

 Things I’ve Learned

By Bobby Neal Winters

Before I start on the things I’ve learned over the years, let me say that the chief of these is that I am not as smart as I think I am.  So, if you want to tell me that after you’ve finished reading the list, you can keep it to yourself; I already know.

Problems are best dealt with at the lowest level possible. That is where the relationships are the strongest. That is where most of the work has to be done.

If the lowest levels are left on their own, that brings corruption.  The lower-level units need to be connected with each other and have good communication.  They need to be accountable, and there should be a mechanism wherein they can share solutions with each other.

There will be plenty of problems anyway.

Jealousy is a massive waste of time, energy, and emotion. Other people’s achievements are there to be admired.  We should use them to inspire us.  We should praise them highly instead of trying to minimize what they’ve done.

The biggest barriers you face fit nicely between your own two ears.  “I can’t” just can’t do it.

Everything comes at a cost. It might be planning; it might be hard work; it might be time; it is likely a combination of all three.  It might also be your soul. Some things just aren’t worth the price.

Nobody got to where they are alone.  Everybody is born into a family, and some of those families have money. Some men are great because they’ve got a wife that takes care of all their basic needs for them, and this allows them to go out and be the “Great Man.” 

If you know someone who never seems to be able to keep a good job, but always has a nice vehicle, then it is either credit or an inheritance.  

There are some people in positions of power who are like a tortoise on top of a fencepost: They have no business being there; they don’t really want to be there; they can’t do anything; and they sure as hell didn’t get there on their own.

You should floss.

Yes, everyday.

If you are in a country where you don’t have a good grasp of the language, you can get what you need if you don’t mind being embarrassed and can mime.  You might not want to do this for toilet paper.

If you are in a country where you don’t know the language, speaking English slowly and loudly and waiving $20-bills works.

You shouldn’t worry too much about petty embarrassments.  People are so self-involved that, while they might laugh, they are soon so absorbed in their own problems they forget whatever you may have done.

Even in the light of that, try not to do anything spectacularly stupid on a slow news day.

Tip.

I hope you are all off to a fantastic summer.

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. )

Building Wall

 Building Wall

By Bobby Neal Winters

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’

--Robert Frost

My driveway is parallel to my neighbor’s property.  There is a strip of land a few feet wide between the drive and where his lot begins.  His lot is a few feet higher than mine, and in the past there was a tendency for soil to wash from the higher ground onto my driveway.  This was just nature: gravity and water.

I forget when it was, so I am going to say it was twenty years ago, I built a retaining wall out of landscaping timbers. I did this without a plan, without advice.  Then I filled the area between the drive and the wall with brick, flat against the ground to keep grass from growing there.

And it worked...for a while.

Recently, however, it has become a mess.  Weeds have grown up through it and it is difficult to mow around.

I decided that something needed to be done.

The first step was to take out the old wall.  This was kind of an education. My mantra has been that it is easier to tear down than it is to build up, but I need to remember that is a relative statement. Tearing down was a sweaty job, and I never actually tore down the wall I’d made with landscaping timbers. Those timbers are there even yet. 

The hard part was the bricks. I’d used about 100 bricks to fill the area between the landscaping timbers and my drive.  They are sitting stacked neatly on my driveway even as I write this. Digging them out with a shovel, bending over my belly to pick them up, and then stacking them neatly in a pile required considerable effort. Thankfully Jean was there to help.

In the two decades since I built my old retaining wall, I’ve learned a lot of things. One of those things is that I am stupid; I can’t just make stuff up as I go along and expect it to go well.  Because of this, I got on YouTube and found a video--several actually--on building a retaining wall.

You should have a base of gravel of a certain depth, so I dug a ditch as long as my wall and filled it with gravel.  The gravel needs to be tamped down, so I bought a tamper and tamped it. As you lay your blocks, you need to tamp them down with a rubber mallet.

My neighbor came over about this stage of the process to see what I was doing.  He was curious because seeing me do anything physical is something of a novelty.  I brought him up to speed on it and we talked about our luck, or lack thereof, on such projects.

Once you get your first course of blocks laid on the gravel base, it is like putting together Legos, forty-pound Legos, but Legos but Legos nevertheless. 

When the wall is up, you need to fill in between the dirt and the wall with gravel so as to allow the water from the higher level to flow down.

I still need to do that part, so I will be making trips to Home Despot for gravel today.

Is the wall perfect? No, but it doesn’t look bad and it suits the person who paid for it: Me.  It will be easier to mow around and easier to keep presentable.

At least that’s the plan.

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. )

Battery-powered mowing: One year after starting

Battery-powered mowing: One year after starting

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last year, as the attentive reader may recall, I made the switch from ICE (internal combustion engine) mowing to battery-powered mowing.  I gave periodic reports on that last year and it all went great, as experiments like that always do.

When you make a switch to something it is because you want it to work.  You think that it is cool and everything you do is colored by the glow of your desires.  This is why the scientific method was developed: We know that we lie to ourselves, so we set up a structure to try to keep us honest.

I didn’t do any of that when I got my new battery-powered Ryobi mower. It was 2020 and I had absolutely no desire to take the glow off of anything. I needed all the glow I had, as I am sure you did too.

Now we’ve had winter; I’ve been fully vaccinated; the mask mandate has been lifted. There ain’t nothin’ but blue skies ahead now, Bro.

How is the battery-powered mower holding up now?

I believe I can be objective now because the shine has literally been worn-off of it. It is plastic so that means instead of scratching the paint you scratch the plastic.  And it has scratches.

But nothing has broken so far.

It is lighter than a metal mower and I do believe that has reduced the fatigue factor involved in mowing.

I absolutely do not miss the gasoline aspect.  It was awkward to go get gas for my gas mower.  In my dad’s day, that was easy. You filled up your car tank and then filled your mower using a siphoning hose.  Get ready to mow and gargle with gas at the same time; the chick’s really dug it.

But I found having to put a gas can in your car, schlepping it to Casey’s, filling it up, and then schlepping it back to be inconvenient.  

Now I have two batteries and I keep one of them charging all the time.

I have been asked whether I have to have the two batteries.  This is to say, can I finish daily mowing without changing the battery?

Let’s put this in context.  Back in the day when I was young, and my heart was an open book, I used to mow my whole lawn, front and back, in one go.  In those days, I would stop after the front was mowed and refill the mower with gas; this is the moral equivalent of a battery change.  But this ever-changing world in which we’re living made me older, so I now mow the front yard one day and the backyard the next.

When I did that, I didn’t have to stop to refill anymore.  Now I can mow the front yard with one battery and it is not even close.  The backyard is a closer thing.  When I do the first mowing of the year, the grass is very thick, so in the two season inaugural mows, I’ve had to change the battery both times.  

Last year, the first mowing was the only mowing I had to use two batteries.  This year the rain has mixed things up.  The first mowing, as I said, required both of my batteries, but then I went a few mowings with just one battery. Yesterday, the rain had forced me to go nine days instead of seven or eight.  And the grass was wet.  I had to use the second battery for just a few minutes.

Are battery-powered mowers a panacea?  No, no they aren’t.  You do have to modify the way you do things.  But they are quiet; they are convenient; there is less upkeep.

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. )

Landscaping as a Means of Grace

 Landscaping as a Means of Grace

By Bobby Neal Winters

John Wesley would say that God is continually improving us through his grace if we do what He says. James the brother of Jesus said, “Faith without works is dead.” Home Depot says we have that on sale.

Last summer during the lockdown, I became reacquainted with my shovel. The first thing that happened was that our dog Charlie died and I had to dig him a grave.  He was a biggish dog so I had to dig him a biggish/deepish grave, and in doing that I discovered that the shovel was comfortable in my hand.

I topped the grave off with a couple of pavers so that we wouldn’t lose Charlie.  His buddy Obidiah is barking at thin air, so his days are numbered on this earth.  It would be disturbing to find Charlie while burying Obie; therefore we mark his grave.

Pavers, as it turns out, are not all that expensive.  We had a path we continually used across the back yard that was a muddy mess whenever it rained. As a solution to this, I made a nice walkway with weed cloth, sand, pavers, and river pebbles.  (How do I know they were river pebbles? It said it right there on the bag in both English and Spanish.)

It is a thing of beauty, let me tell you.  After having finished that, I decided I wanted a fire pit.  There was a place in my backyard that had been a continual source of problems. These were mainly problems caused by us: We stack rocks there; we stacked brush there; the good folks at the City would occasionally write us nice letters about it.  

We decided to cure that problem by building our firepit there.

Now, I’ve called it a fire pit.  It is actually a tiny patio where I can put a metal contraption that Home Despot calls a fire pit.  Pits are on the ground; barbeque grills are in the air; this is between.

This allowed me to reorder a lot of other landscaping elements to this tiny patio.

And I looked at what I had done and saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were November, so I stopped for the year.  My family complained it was too cold to use the fire pit. How can it be too cold to use a fire pit?  You got fire right there in it.

But now spring has sprung.  There had been an old picnic table in the back yard that Charlie had used like Snoopy’s dog house, but as I mentioned earlier, Charlie is no longer with us.  Obie is too blind and senile to even find a table.  The table itself was broken.  The metal had rusted so as to render it only safe enough to be a dog’s fantasy airplane.

Because of this, I borrowed my youngest daughter’s boyfriend’s angle-grinder, and took it apart, leaving the wood in nice shape.  I didn’t even know how expensive wood was at the time.

I then, using the skills I’d honed to perfection earlier, made a little patio where the table had been.  I am looking for a second hand garden table to put on it.  The folks at Home Despot are mighty proud of theirs.

The yard looks a lot better, and I feel like a better person.

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. )