This week (first week of May) has not been overly exciting, it seems as if summer is sitting in early and we may be in for a long hot summer.
Earlier this week my sidekick and I decided to cut some more tree limbs. I have noticed that my sidekick (Tejas) doesn’t do much work. As I was getting the ladder, ax, hand saw, pole chain saw, regular chain saw out of the shed Tejas was either laying in the shade or playing with one of his stuffed toys. He likes the stuffed toy that makes a noise. I find it interesting that he doesn’t chew the stuffed toys into small pieces, instead they last for months.
His all-time favorite is a plastic bottle that water or soda comes in. He seems to like the popping and crunching sound they make as he chews on them. He does destroy the plastic bottles; somehow he chews them until they are flat, then I pick them up.
Tejas and I had started about 9:00am which is early for me. Lately, the pollen had been so high early in the morning that I have to stay inside or I will be sneezing and have itchy eyes (notice how I have stayed politically correct here and did not mention snot). I moved the trailer close to the area where the limbs would be cut so I would not need to carry a long distance. Retired people need to save their energy for other things. You want to know what other things. I don’t know I just made that up. To be honest it trips my trigger when I see people doing double work, so I try to not do things twice. As an example, there was a fellow grinding a stump at the house across the street. As I watched he was pulling up parts if roots and tossing then a few feet into a pile. His trailer was parked on the street and he later picked up the roots and carried them to the trailer. He could have backed the trailer into the drive way and tossed the roots onto the trailer reducing the bending, picking up and carrying to the trailer. Or he could have tossed the roots into a wheelbarrow and took them all to the trailer at one time.
If Necessity is the mother of invention, then Laziness is the father. For a couple of you who have just thought, “yes men are lazy”, I want to define Lazy as it is used in that statement. Lazy defined is, “wise enough to find a more efficient method to do a particular task”.
I was sawing limbs that were several feet above my head. I was wearing a pair of goggles over my glassed to keep the saw dust out of my eyes. Those goggles worked well as the small breeze directed the saw dust directly at my face. I would like to say I was smart in positioning my ladder but I think that it was more the luck of the Irish that kept the limbs from hitting me as they fell. I was cutting a particularly large limb when I thought about my side kick. I was sitting on top of the shed so the limb would not hit me but Tejas was on the ground and if he was to walk under the limb as it fell that could be disastrous. I climbed down and put him in the house.
All the limbs fell without injury to me or my sidekick. There is a magical method of loading the trailer and I used it. Basically the magic is from the first two limbs that are loaded. These two limbs should have several smaller limbs in them and be long enough to touch the front of the trailer and hangover the back about 8 inches. All other limbs are loaded on top of these two. When it is time to unload one or two people can pull those two limbs and everything on the trailer will unload. What took an hour to load can be unloaded in 5 seconds (that technique was invented by a man “a Father of Invention”).
My neighbor and I rode out to the Bunk House for lunch today and the only interesting thing that occurred was the fact that I washed my bike before we left. I am not real big on washing vehicles even though I do like them to be clean. The food was good but as I stated earlier it seems as if summer is sitting in early and it was hot riding today. When I took the helmet off it was sweated wet. The helmet dried while we were inside eating but it was again wet when I took it off back at the house.
From the always overheated mind of Don Ford
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