No excitement here

I guess I'll start with a blond joke. For some reason, Mary doesn't like blond jokes. I don't get it, seein's I'm the one who's blond. She has beautiful dark brown (almost black) hair with a hint of auburn.

My guess is that she considers blond jokes to be thinly disguised slams on women. Since such a thing would likely give her a head ache (probably just before bed time), I'll be very sure to state explicitly that the blond person in this story is male.

Anyhow, this blond man went to the local farm & fleet store to buy a chain saw. The salesman sold him one that he claimed would cut a cord of wood a day.

Well, the guy came back the next day just hopping mad. Try as he might, he just couldn't get more than a tenth of a cord or so.

The salesman, slick as he is, told this blond guy that he needs to practice. He gave the guy some pointers and sent him back out.

About a week later, he came back. He told a long sad story about how he got up before dawn every day and worked hard until the sun set. He refined his technique. He called his buddies and asked for advice. Still, the best he could do was a quarter of a cord in a very long day.

This puzzled the salesman. He picked up the saw and looked it over carefully. He pulled the starter cord and it fired up with a loud roar.

The blond guy jumped about three feed in the air and asked "What the heck is that?"

See, that wasn't that bad.

Actually, my sister claims that it's the bleach blonds that give us a bad reputation. It sounds like a good theory to me.

I have a programmer friend who dyes her blond hair brown. I guess that's called artificial intelligence The next time she has a problem with her programs, I'm going to suggest to her that her blond roots may be getting a bit too long.

Oh yah... what was I talking about?

Not much happening today. Just some routine farm building.

Actually, I was quite scattered today. Maybe that's because I didn't get much sleep last night. Of course, there are other days where I don't have such a handy excuse.

Still, I managed to start building the fence around the redneck strawberry pyramid and the redneck raised beds for the herb garden.

OK, so I managed to pound one pole in the ground before becoming distracted.

I took the egg collection doors off of the top nest box and replaced them with some old aluminum skirting that Mary picked up from someone who was moving their double wide. A scrounger after my own heart! I'm so proud of her. I suspect that my Uncle Dan is, too.

I changed the design of the doors so that I can put them up so that they will stay up. That makes it easier to clean the nest boxes. Also, I need to scam the hinges for some other modifications that I'm making to the barn.

With so little real content, I guess I ought to tell you some old stories.

Back when I was stationed in Germany, I worked in the crypto vault repairing the machines. I could tell you more than that, but I would have to.... never mind. I'm not going to repeat that old saw.

Anyhow, I used to repair those machines that let you talk on the radio without being overheard by the enemy. Remember the scramblers from the James Bond movies?

One day, we were waiting by the entrance of the vault. We had repaired everything that needs to be repaired, inventoried all the classified equipment, and cleaned the shop. Heaven forbid that we get out a few minutes early. It is much better that we wait there by the big 28 volt power supply and leave at the proper time.

The power supply is a big monster that weighs over 100 pounds. Since it was an old piece of equipment even then, it used a selenium rectifier. Aside from efficiency issues, they have the interesting characteristic of venting poisonous gas when overloaded. They actually smell like a toxic fart. One blew when I was in training at Fort Gordon, and we had to evacuate the area.

So there I was, bored professional soldier that I was, goofing with a little capsule that I bought off of the German economy. It's a little glass ampule filled with some kind of a hydrogen sulfide solution, and is sold as a stink bomb.

Well, I just happened to drop it at the time. That got us out of there really quickly because the sergeant thought that the selenium stack had blown in the power supply. I really hadn't planned it that way. In fact, I don't even recall if I had dropped the stink bomb on purpose.

Doing it on purpose wouldn't have been a good idea, anyhow. The next day, we had to haul that monster up the stairs, on to a Jeep, and over to the electronics maintenance facility. They tested it and found nothing wrong with it, of course.

I didn't dare tell anyone about it back then. The people who hauled that big machine up the stairs might not have been amused. I might even have gotten into some kind of legal trouble. I trust it's well past the statute of limitations by now, though.

So fast forward for about twenty years to the early 21st century. I was mowing the lawn at my parents' cottage. I couldn't get the lawn tractor going, so I used the push mower. That thing was heavy! It was OK going down hill, but it was a real pain to push up the hill.

I was thinking "You know, this thing ought to have some kind of a power assist!"

Then, I took a better look at the mower and noticed a lever by the hand grip. I pulled the lever, and the power assist nearly took the thing out of my hands.

And I have an engineering degree.



The gratuitous photo of the day is Mary's Redneck Laser Sight.



That flashlight actually does a pretty good job of lighting up the sight picture. Her Ruger 10-22 now sports a genuine 4X scope and a real laser sight. The varmints that want to eat our chickens tend to come out after dark and skulk under low objects. The laser sight can be a real big help in those situations.