I was 16 when I put brand new brakes on my car. It took most of an afternoon, and it was a task that finally completed gave me a real sense of accomplishment. True, I had a couple of small parts left over. But I was young and I operated under the assumption that the auto parts store had given me either spares or parts that didn’t go with my model.
Once finished, I climbed in the driver’s seat, turned the ignition, and took off down the road. Wow! It was a smooth ride and I felt great. That is, until I came up fast to my first stop sign and applied the brakes. Odd feeling, pushing down on the brake pedal at 50 miles an hour and encountering no resistance. It’s a memory I can still summon readily to this day. Fortunate for me, the auto engineers had built in a backup breaking mechanism called the emergency brake, a handy invention that I deduced might be best to deploy … quickly.
I give you this preamble as evidence that even though a person comes from solid civil engineering stock, basic mechanical skill is not an inherited gene. We all have the friend, often on speed dial, who is great at teasing out the workings of ‘most any thingamajig. But my solutions to mechanical failures are victories hard won. The puzzles that five-year-olds routinely solve on Facebook in a cute two minutes elude me — sometimes for hours, and sometimes for many years.
The Neanderthals who lurk in my ancestry were a smartish but conservative group of bipeds. They developed a reliable tool kit over the millennia to make their lives run smoother. But then they apparently had a community meeting and said, Enough is enough, and they settled in for the next 100,000 years and made no new improvements. I kind of admire that about them; perhaps we could learn a thing or two from that approach to technology.
But then there is my H. sapiens DNA. It allows me, eventually, to not only see a solution but also want to implement it. Yesterday, for instance, we were unloading feed barrels. Cindy backed up the tractor and boom pole to the bed of the truck. Dangling from the boom pole was a nifty contraption called a barrel lifter. This simple invention is the best $40 we ever spent. It has two metal “hands” at the end of a chain that grab the edge of the barrel. Once the boom pole is raised, the barrel lifter and barrel in tow swing up and out of the truck bed. No muscling required.
The first barrel was a breeze. The second barrel presented a slight problem. It didn’t completely clear the bed of the truck. Taking on my finest Thinker pose, I struggled for a solution. After some minutes, the little gray cells began to sing: It’s the weight, I deduced triumphantly! Each 300-pound feed barrel removed took more weight off the truck suspension, thereby raising the bed of the truck a couple of inches and causing each subsequent barrel to drag along the tailgate when hoisted. But voilà! A few adjustments to the tractor’s three-point hitch, which in turn shortened the top link’s angle after each barrel, gave the boom pole a higher lift. Problem solved.
This Eureka moment may not mean much to you engineering types. But small successes like this one are huge to my sapiens self. Victories for H. sapiens, yet disappointments to my inner Neanderthal, who, wrinkling his jutting brow, mutters, What’s next? Will he be wanting to invent block and tackle?
Perhaps. But I must leave that astonishing accomplishment for later. I’ve just had a brain flash that there just might be a better way to knap flint! Stay tuned.
Congrats on solving the puzzle. Loading and unloading a pickup with a new type of load… towing the odd device with a pickup… all sorts of ‘one off’ jobs usually lead to some sort of head scratching.
Among some of the H. sapiens I work with there is also the immediate euphoria attached to solving the first end of a puzzle. Like – there you go; what else could possibly go wrong? So now you have the truck loaded… when we get where we’re going and don’t have these tools to hand, how do you suppose we’ll get it unloaded? And no, backing up quickly with the tail gate down and then hitting the brakes is not a solution.
Your new tool sounds pretty cool.
We have two neat dents in our livestock trailer, one one each side of the front. The seem to correspond with where the tail gate of the truck makes contact when left down and backing at an angle. Go figure.
Yes, it is the simple tools that thrill me the most.
Have you consulted Phil Harding to see whether he’s already got a copyright on your flint-working style?
The Neanderthals had way too many barristers to accomplish anything.
Once again, Google comes to the rescue on obscure British phrases and personalities.
Your strange ways confuse me. I am just a simple caveman.
I thought you knew Time Team. Who knew.
I’ll probably be watching another episode today, because it’s my day off. Last day off was in late March, according to my calendar.
Tomorrow I’ll be pampering the squashes and melons with some fertilizer after today’s bible-sized downpour.
Is there a method to get the squash vines to root quickly? Are the tendrils able to turn into roots, or do the nodes have to be buried?
Hmm, the melon tendrils do develop rootlets where they touch the ground, much like tomato plants. I’m assuming you are planting winter squash at this time of the year? I typically put my melons on a trellis, as I do my lighter winter squash. but I let some of the vines trail on the ground. I assume they need the extra nutrition through those rootlets. The Charentais are almost ripe, the turkey melons need another couple of weeks. But, August is shaping up nicely as breakfast melon season.
My summer squash is typically a bushing variety and doesn’t vine. But, our yellow- crook-necks are coming in fast and furious. So, I’m going to share a secret with you, Michael.
Find a copy of “Butter Beans to Blackberries: recipes from the Southern Garden” by Ronni Lundy. This is the rare cookbook that, not only ultimately propels you into the kitchen, first sends you out to work in the garden.
In fact, my butter beans are ready. So, I need to get a mess and shell them to go with our pork
chops tonight.
Cheers
My soil may be too loose on the surface for the tendrils to recognize it as a rooting medium. Some extra roots are developing next to the tendrils on some nodes, which guards against the EvilMouseMonster biting through the main root and wrecking the plant (two plants are in recovery mode right now).
I have direct seeded squash (three species) and melons (two) on May 9, and I’m proud to say that the first kuri is almost ripe – not bad for our latitude and 240 metres above sea level, I think!
Even the Russian Charentais relatives are now getting going (I seeded way too few); of the three squash species, C. moschata isn’t far behind maxima, with pepo having barely set fruit.
I’ll find that book. It’s the recipes that are important to import – people in this country are content with a kuri that’s spent two weeks drying in the field, a week in storage, then another week until it is sold to them and then a few days at home until it’s being turned into soup with so many ingredients noone recognizes that by that time it tastes like a turnip.
I have to learn a whole lot more about which cultivars get better with age. Do your maxima store well?
Butter beans…maybe my tropical microclimate is able to provide enough heat even for them.
Right now I’m having to face the prospect of a solid 50 metres of beans to shell – thinking about buying thimbles…
Delicious pork chops I do not have, but wonderful green beans will be melted in butter and the mashed potatoes drowned in it, too. Right now, I think.
For a birthday present, some years back, Cindy bought me a table sheller for beans. Very expensive. And, it was next to useless. Only good for a commercial strain of green beans (consistent size). It couldn’t shell lima, butter beans, or crowders. And, worst of all, it couldn’t shell them green and it couldn’t shell them dry. They had to be at the perfect in between stage. I’m sure there had to be a small-farm-sheller, other than these two-hands, once manufactured. I live in hope.
Home made bean sheller: one burlap sack, one baseball bat (cricket bat will substitute for Michael). In a pinch, a meter long limb from fallen oak will also serve. One piece of twine, baling wire, or other fastening gadget to close the sack and hang it from a tree, clothes line, what have you.
Put dry peas, or beans, in the sack (I’ve not done this with Lima beans and suspect they may require modifications). Practice your best piñata stroke.
Practice will likely convince you that laying the filled sack on the ground and gingerly walking on it will yield the same effect – but do have a good swing of a bat at it first – particularly if you’ve recently encountered someone who got on your nerves. Very therapeutic.
After a good roughing up you are left to separate the crumbled hulls from the seed – and those recalcitrants who simply refuse to be shelled by this treatment. Fanning. If you need assistance on the fanning side of it, call back. 🙂
p.s. – a decent burlap sack should be good for three or four rounds… they are not immortal.
I have learned a secret method to do the shelling dance from a lady not far from you and promise to get back to you once I have had a proper go at it.
The cricket bat does sound tempting, though. Comfy white attire and stiff drinks for everyone.
Seeded a few hundred seedling pots today and killed a zucchini to make way for yet more Sucrine du Berry.
“…killed a zucchini…” How vicious. Are we certain it is really dead? Not wanting any Zombie Zucchinis (or perhaps we are – the recent run of Zombie films could use a reboot).
Looking forward to the shelling dance intel.
A nightmare. Finding myself strapped to a bowling alley, zucchini hurling themselves at me.
Everything could use a reboot right now. The people I see, I thought to myself the other day, have never been this boring and faceless in all my life. They’ve always had something about them that would still make them interesting to look at…zombies would be an improvement right now.
For Michael and Clem,
The cruelest gift,
Found upon the porch,
Left by some do-gooding neighbor,
A bag of zucchini.
little zucchini
at first
died and left
me nine more of her
children to take care
off
🙂