TheBanyanTree: Some days, it just ain't your day...

[Dale M. Parish]

It is aggrivating to have a whole Saturday in which you want to accomplish a very reasonable task list, and have each item on the list turn into a multi-major list of problems.  Sometimes, I wonder if maybe I'm being attacked by undercover senior moments, and may be my own worst enemy.  Ever have one of those days?

I did manage to get the haircut first thing, but even that got complicated.  I'd intended to get up early and be at the barber shop at 0700, but when I got up to let Buck out about 0630, I found as I dressed that I'd left my truck keys in the downstairs bedroom in which my visiting stepdauthter was sleeping.  I've always given her privacy, so decided that I'd eat breakfast and read the paper and let her wake up, since she'd said she needed to be on the road to Huntsville by 0800 to shoot a wedding.  I shouldn't be too late, and I could wait with all the mommies and school kids that crowded the barbershop after eightish.  

There were eight pickups and two carryalls parked in front of the barbershop when I got there nearing 0830.  I noticed that the handicapped parking sign hadn't been put out, but someone in a jacked-up Jeep was backing out as I turned in, and I took his space besides the otherwise unmarked handicapped spot right in front of the door.  As I traversed that door, I saw why it was crowded.  In Mark's chair- nearest the door-- was the child's booster seat turned sideways with a hand-lettered sign that said, "Mark's sick today," and Mike, my preferred barber, was hard at work.  There was only one empty seat-- one of the school auditorium seats in the back, and I was glad I'd brought my iPad so I caould read the Kindle book I'd started last night.  

An hour and a half later, it was my turn.  One good thing-- I finished the book only a few minutes into the haircut of the last guy before me.  There had been a string of kids-- most old enough to behave.  The little ones are usually Mark's fare-- Mike is my age.  He and I usually talk about things no body else remembers, but Mark's a young barber with elementary school kids of his own, and he's better with the small children and Mike's only glad to let him, but today, Mike had to cut everybody who waited.  And a lot of them didn't.  Once they stuck their head in the door, they'd look up and down the seats against the wall opposite the three barber chairs and announce they'd come back next Saturday, or if they were retirees, next week.

After finishing my haircut, I went back home to hook up the loboy and tried to get Buck to get into the truck.  It should have been a sign to me to just unhook the trailer and stay home when he refused to get into the truck.  We've been giving him one of the child's cones at Dairy Queen whenever we take him to town, and he usually is eater to go, but he must have seen how the day was going to turn out, and elected to go into the kennel instead.  

I normally stop at Crawdad's and get a cup of coffee to drink on the way into town-- it only adds a minute.  Most days.  When I got out of the truck, a friendly sort of fella moseys over to ask if I don't have a piece of wire in my truck that he can borrow.  I glance at his truck, and he sheepishly admits that their dog had stood on the electric door lock and locked his keys in his truck.  They were going to go pick up a car, and had stopped for a snack, and now they were stranded without an extra key.  He had a Louisiana tag, and I figured there was no use telling him that Texas state law forbade leaving keys in an unattended vehicle.  He had enough troubles.  There was a time when I kept a slim-jim in my truck for such occurrances, but in the last 20 years, the locking mechanisms have made it extra-difficult to pop a lock on the newer vehicles, and I didn't put it into this truck when I transferred all the truck junk from the old truck.  I looked, but couldn't find a coat hanger or anything that I could give him except the name and number of Gilbeaux's Wrecker, whom I knew would come out and open the truck.  For a price.  He thanked me, but didn't seem to want to make the call, and I left him, his girl friend and the dog to their fate.

When I got to the shop, I found that both rear tires of the loader were low.  It took the little air copmressor nearly 20 minutes to get them pumped up.  Then, I saw that the old dead pine tree had fallen onto the pile of limestone that I was intending to borrow from, on the side of the bee hives.  I've learned that when I need to work the tractor around the bee hives, I need to wait until just before dark, when they're all settling in the hive, but I didn't have the luxury of waiting for dark, so I had to work the pile from the other side, and back the loboy in between the hives and the pile.  Wasn't too bad-- the bees didn't bother me, and the trailer was loaded with three loader buckets.  As I roaded the loader back to the shop, I noticed the pile of oak tree limbs that had been piled up on the middle of the sideroad since Hurricane Ike, and decided to pick them up and carry them on to the burn pile.  

I'd burned the pile a few months ago when the Burn Ban had been lifted.  Now, we've had unseasonable rains the last two weeks, and the ground's saturated.  I dumped the limbs, and was going to circle around the burn-hill and scatter the remenants from the last fire when the outside front wheel of the loader broke through.  Damn!!  Before I lost the backend, I stopped, turned around and tried to use the backhoe to pull the rig back, but soon had lost the backend, too.  The dozer was parked in the shop, but I only had my two quarter-inch chains I use to pull my Kubota with-- the good log chain was on the big trailer up at my brothers.  I couldn't get anyone on the phone there, so went into town to Tractor Supply the get a pair of new high-test chains, which I located, but when I went to pull them out of the shipping bucket, they were coated in oil, and they had one grab hook and one slip hook on each.  I found a single loose grab hook of the right size, but that was the last one in the bin.  They were short-handed and I had a 20 minute wait before I could get someone with gloves to move the hooks and verify that they were out of grab hooks.  While I was waiting in line to check out, Cindy called. She was out of school and I asked her if she could come over and run the dozer for me.  She wanted to stop and get out of her school clothes and into her rubber boots first.  I told her I'd see her at the shop. 

When I got back to the shop, I was going to crank the dozer and let it warm up while I changed one of the slip hooks out for the grab hook.  But the damned dozer wouldn't start.  Its been sitting there for two or three months and I remembered having to jump it once last summer, but the inactivity had let the batteries loose enough charge that it wouldn't crank.

So I called Cindy back and told her that she didn't have to come-- the dozer wouldn't start, and that I'd just have to get the loader out the hard way.  She wasnted to know if I had supper plans-- her shorthand that she's hungry.  I told her I was going to eat a lot of mud until I got could teach the 580K to swim.  She asked me how I wasn going to do it, and I told her, with "sticks and stones."  Which I did, but didn't finish until nearly dark, just before JB's Barbecue, down at the highway, closed.  So I managed to bring home supper and the limestone that needs to go on the driveway, but it didn't get done today.  

Dang it.

Hugs,
Dale
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Dale M. Parish
628 Parish RD
Orange TX 77632