OkieInExile

Attacking the Soldering Demon

2012-02-12T17:39:00.000-06:00

Attacking the Soldering Demon

By Bobby Neal Winters

I may have mentioned in an earlier post that I have demons which have kept me from pursuing the world of electronics: the Demon of Lack-of-Self-Confidence; the Demon of Fear-of-Loss-Money.

Chief among my demons up until now has been the Soldering Demon. I ran into this demon while trying to put together a kit for an RF-modulator for an ELF computer. I had never soldered before, but I figured I would try. The directions which came with the kit were as encouraging as they were racist and sexist: “These parts are usually assembled by teenage Mexican girls.”

I kid you not.

It turns out that the teenage Mexican girls out did me. Instead of an RF-modulator I created a one-and-a-half by two-inch rectangle of lead or tin or what-the-hell-ever. Money was tight in those days growing up, so this failure carried a huge load of guilt.

Time rolled forward and a tried to fight the demon by getting electronic kits for my older daughters. The oldest one was game. She could handle hot glue like a pro, and I figured it was just a small step from there to soldering.

Wrong.

We tried a telephone kit. I figured that since she wanted a phone in her room that this would be an incentive. We got started, but we couldn’t follow through.

The problem is that there is actually something to be learned. There is a certain amount of patience, a certain amount of hand-eye coordination, and a certain amount of skill that only practice can bring.

Roll time forward again.

As a part of my continuing Zombie Apocalypse Crystal Radio quest, I came upon directions for a Three-Penny Radio. This takes the crystal radio one or two steps further by introducing amplification. The problem is that it required a bit of soldering, but this was turned into a virtue by making the soldering simple.

We did this late yesterday afternoon. We’d put together a solar cell kit earlier and this had gone well. I thought we could start on the Three-Penny Radio by just doing part of it, but Lydia wanted to push on. This was a mistake because I hadn’t had a chance to look over the directions. [The directions on the site are complete, but they’ve not been idiot-proofed as we shall see.]

We soldered it all together, stuck the earpiece in our ears, and nada. Nothing. Simon and Garfunkle’s Sound of Silence done for real. It was then that Lydia exercised an amount of discretion that I didn’t have until just a few years ago.

“Let’s fix this later, Dad.”

So we put it away.

Went to bed last night, church this morning, ate lunch, and took a nap.

When I woke up, Lydia was gone.

I went to the table and compared what we’d done to the picture in the instructions. The two were different.

I then did what you do when you solder something incorrectly. I un-soldered it and re-soldered it. I put the battery in it, put the earpiece in my ear, and heard the beautiful sound of static. With a little tuning, this was replaced by music.

I rock.

I am now waiting for Lydia to get back to receive her assessment.

The Invisible World

2012-02-05T14:34:00.000-06:00

The Invisible World

By Bobby Winters

While ignorance is not something we should be thankful for as a good in itself, I am glad there are so many things that have been saved for me to learn in adulthood so that I may better appreciate them. Crystal radio now comes into that list.

I am even more fortunate in that I have a child learning with me so that I may have my pleasure amplified by feeling along with her.

I found plans for a crystal radio at this site. You may look up the details there. My understanding of the construction of the device itself was increased when I realize it could be visualized in the following way. The main part is a circle. (I suppose this could be what they refer to as a circuit, but I don’t want to use that technical term in a way that is nonstandard.) The circle consists of the coil, the diode, and the earpiece.

I chose to use a crystal radio earpiece instead of modifying an old telephone hand set. I might come to regret this in the case of a zombie apocalypse, but it’s a risk I am willing to take for the sake of simplicity. Messing with the tiny wires in the phone cord was too much for my old eyes and my aging hands. I might work it in at the next step.

I made my coil out of wire I had left-over from the radio fence I’d installed to keep Charlie in. I had been uncertain about it. So uncertain was I, that I made a second one out of magnet wire. When I tried it out this afternoon, it wouldn’t work, so I had Lydia bring out the first one, and it worked!

The diode is the the final part of the circle. It cost about a dollar to buy and about $5 to have shipped. Oi!

But you put these three pieces in a circle for the main part of the radio.

The you hook the coil to an antenna and another part of the circle to the ground wire.

Then you listen.

The sound was almost ghostly. You might wonder whether it was there or not, but it is.

Then you realize you’ve made something that captures that invisible world around us, and your heart soars with joy. You don’t have to be an engineer; you don’t have to be a scientist. It’s just a little wire, an earpiece, and your diode...a rock on a wire.

I would like to remove the “store-bought” elements from this, in particular the diode and the earpiece. I suppose thinking in terms of the zombie apocalypse is my standard. Things that are re-purposed are okay. Things that you could get by tearing up something else are okay.

Crystal Radios and the Zombie Apocalypse

2012-01-30T15:06:00.001-06:00

Crystal Radios and the Zombie Apocalypse

By Bobby Winters

For those who’ve been following this space for a while, this is another adventure in the tradition of the Potato Cannon and the One-Piece-at-a-Time Computer. A notion came into my mind that I wanted to make a crystal radio. Their is one important difference. I remember the moment I decided to make the potato cannon: I saw rednecks on TV creating explosions and generally having fun, and I wanted to reclaim my heritage. I remember the moment I decided to build a computer: I had extrapolated from how to make a potato cannon to how to make an IED and decided I didn’t want to wind up on some FBI watch list.

But I have no memory of the moment I decided to make a crystal radio.

I suppose, like all things, pieces of the desire to do this have been floating around in me waiting for a key ingredient, but that key ingredient came in so slowly that I didn’t recognize it as happening. One day I simply knew I wanted to do it.

Why make a radio?

Radios are cool. They are Einstein’s spooky action at a distance embodied. Some guy--maybe far around the world--talks into a microphone it goes out into the air and you can hear it thousands of miles away.

You say, yes, that is cool. Why do you want to build one? You can buy them cheaply. Heck, you own several already.

Okay, there is something about being able to do it yourself. It’s the difference between winning the affections of a real, live woman in all her complexity and buying them. One requires some virtue on your part, and the other only requires that you have cash.

Then there is the Zombie Apocalypse thing.

There are certain skills we should cultivate in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse.

Please be aware that I am only speaking of the Zombie Apocalypse metaphorically. In less colorful terms, we creatures of modernity are so far removed from nature and are so reliant on the tools of high civilization for our very survival that we begin to feel rather exposed.

If there were a Zombie Apocalypse how would we be informed of the coming Zombie Hoards. There would be no news from cable-tv; those folks are almost zombies already. There would be no power from the electric grid. There would only be lone, isolated Ham radio operators transmitting reports using batteries charged by wind power. Those who know how to make crystal radios will be able to hear their transmissions and be ready when the zombies arrive, waiting for them with their potato cannons. (After the potatoes run out, zombie body parts will be used.)

I’ve been doing research on the Internet and have found a wealth of information. At this point I am one 1N34A diode away from having the parts I need to make the radio set. I went to Radio Shack and all I could find was a 1N40A diode. Although, I have to say that on YouTube I found the plans for a so-called Foxhole radio that uses a razor blade and the stub of a number two pencil in place of the diode. I’ve got to think that if you can get a razor blade and a number two pencil to work then going from 1N34A to 1N40A isn’t going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference.

In the mean time, I have enlisted the help of Lydia.

Back when daughters one and two were younger, I’d bought an AM radio kit, but couldn’t get them interested. The kit had lain untouched for years. Saturday afternoon, Lydia and I put it together. We can get exactly one station: KKOW. We listened to a little of a basketball game. She was hooked.

As she took her long, thin fingers and maneuvered the resistors, capacitors, and transistors into place, I saw something else begin to happen, something exciting.

Next Saturday the crystal radio. Then I replace the diode with a razor blade and a number two pencil. Then we figure out something about tuners and amplification.

We will be ready for the zombies when they come.

The Tin Can Telephone Part II

2012-01-22T14:15:00.001-06:00

The Tin Can Telephone Part II

By Bobby Neal Winters
This is a continuation from The Tin Can Telephone on my other blog.

It is tempting to say that teaching is all about communication. There might be some validity to that, but the plain statement itself would be easy to misinterpret. Teaching is not about getting information from the head of the teacher to the head of the student. Something like that will no doubt happen along the way, but it is a part of a much more subtle process. It is a process whose subtlety I appreciate more with each passing year.

One can model the teacher in front of the classroom with the tin can telephone as I did earlier. The teacher speaks, puts slides up, hands out activities, i.e. is a transmitter. The students listen (or not!); they take notes (or not!). That is, they are receivers.

I wrote earlier of the transmitter and the receiver each having code books. This is true in the classroom as well. The thing is this: everyone has a different code book. As students, part of the education process is learning the teacher’s code book. As a teacher, part of the education process is to facilitate this happening.

The difference in code books has been recognized more widely than just me. Each year a particular liberal arts university sends out a list of catch phrases and historical events that have over the life time of typical professor. Many of these are drawn from popular culture and would be used by academics who are trying to bridge the gap with their students. Along with the phrases and events is the assurance that the students were not yet alive when these phrases and events were current.

While others no doubt interpret this differently than I do, this list serves as a reminder to me of the futility of trying to be the “cool teacher.”

When I was a first year graduate student, teaching for the first time, I, along with the rest of the teaching assistants, met in a group for an hour each week with one of the math professors to talk about teaching. As part of this, the professor said something I will never forget: “If you are a great teacher, your students might learn 90 percent of what you know. When they teach, they will teacher their students 90 percent of what they know, and so forth. We know the direction this sequence goes. Before long, the student isn’t learning anything.”

I don’t recall the point he was making with it. I remember much less than 90 percent of what he said. But I have mediated on it over the years and have had some thoughts.

The first is that my students have to be learning from people besides me. And they do. I only get them for a very short time. They learn from people before me; they learn from people after me; and they are learning from other people at the same time.

The second is that students can draw inferences from partial information. Knowledge does not consist of isolated data items; it has structure. A contemplative mind grows knowledge.

The third is that we pass more than information. If we do our job we pass a spirit that I would call a love of learning. We can also sharpen a general love of learning into a love of our subject.

This third part is--to me--most important. It is also the most difficult thing to do. I am not sure that I’ve ever passed the love of learning to anyone, but I may have nurtured it in some or helped to focus a student’s love of learning on a particular topic.

It is in this part where the mysterious way that humans deal with other humans come into play. The Duke of Wellington supposedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was one on the playing fields of Eton. Our early lives do shape us far out of measure to the amount of time we spent living them. For most of us, it wasn’t Eton which shaped us but our families. We deal with other people in the modes we learned in dealing with our families.

When I as a teacher stand in front of my students, only in very rare cases do they know me as a person. They will not know how to deal with me as me. They will deal with me as they would someone they already know that I remind them of.

When I was a graduate student, they dealt with me as a peer. As I aged, they related to me like a cousin or a young uncle. These days as I approach 50, having children in college myself, they relate to me like a father or--because of the gray in my hair--a grandfather. I am not expected to be cool. Indeed, it’s creepy when I try; not that I try.

This is the image, the persona I come to them with. I don’t fight it. Instead, I build on it. They will take my being just a tiny bit grumpy in their stride. Indeed, they expect it. As I am aware of how they perceive me, I can use it to shape our interactions and to make aspects of myself--such as my love for the subject--be attractive enough for them to want to take it up themselves. You can learn a lot from a teacher you hate, but a love of learning is not part of that.

To conclude, I will return to the tin can telephone model for one more round. The last stage of the learning process is the student teaching himself, i.e. studying. We who teach at the university often have the expectation that the student will already have this mastered by the time we see him. I use “expectation” in that sentence not in the sense we really expect it, but in the sense we believe it is a standard the student should meet.

The reality is that many of them frequently don’t meet that standard. They haven’t mastered the art of studying. Many professors would deny its their job to teach them. I would say that it is often part of the job, and whether and how to do it is part of the art of teaching.

What You Are Prepared to See

2012-01-16T10:19:00.000-06:00

What You Are Prepared to See

By Bobby Neal Winters

When I first started writing about ten years back, I had a exercise I did. I found stories in the Bible and wrote them up in modern style. The one rule I had was that I would be absolutely faithful to what was written in that I would not subtract anything. I kept the plot-line; I kept the dialog; I would add flesh to the bone that was there, but I wouldn’t change the bones.

It was a remarkable educational experience.

The first thing I learned was that there is a lot that is open to interpretation. An example of this would be in the story of Deborah and Barack. We know simply that Deborah was married, she was a prophetess, and she was a judge of Israel. She lived under a tree known as the Palm of Deborah.

That’s it.

I chose to make her an old woman. This, I thought, who work better with her character. As she was living in a male dominated environment, I thought that making her a wise elder would work better. As this was an age without modern dentistry, I chose to make her toothless. As a part of this, I gave her the habit of sucking the pulp from pomegranate pieces and spitting out the seeds in a rather disgusting manner.

Because of this, I learned something else: when you mess with other people’s mental images, you get push-back. I showed this to some of my friends who’d imagined Deborah as a princess between the ages of 30 and 40, with a mouth full of teach and a diadem on her head. Apparently there is an old painting that depicts Deborah as such.

The artist had been doing his own interpretation. There is nothing wrong with that. He had his own reasons just like I had mine. My point is that my reader had seen that interpretation first and had taken it up as her own and had imposed it over the story.

I eventually carried this exercise out with several Bible stories. At the end, I decided I would try to put them together as a collection, but they were just shy of what I considered to be book-length, so I decided to fatten them up a little bit. What I did was to write a short story about a preacher who had been transferred to a church that had once had beautiful stain glass windows. The windows had been painted over by individuals--members of the church, pastors, etc--who found particular stories to be objectionable for one reason or the other.

In the story, the preacher cleaned the paint from the various windows, revealing the story beneath. Each one of these cleanings served as an occasion to insert a story. ( I admit the conceit of thinking of myself as someone who was similarly revealing a previously concealed story to the reader.)

This not only served as a framework for placing these stories together and working in a bit of didactic explanation as well, but it serves as a metaphor for how controlling information controls understanding.

There is the old story about the three blind men who feel different parts of an elephant and come to different conclusions as to what sort of an animal it is according to whether they feel its leg, ear, or trunk.

One might assume for the sake of the story that these men had been blind from birth and had never seen and elephant and that they had never fully experienced an elephant before even in a tactile way. If they had, then they might have been able to have an insight from even a partial input.

I gained a greater insight into this during my trip to South America. Those of you who grew up during the same era as I will, perhaps, remember Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Wild Kingdom was hosted by a fellow named Marlin Perkins. It featured trips to the African Savanna and the jungles of South America. I also received a steady diet of other nature programs featuring floats down the Amazon. Then, of course, there is the by now classic movie Romancing the Stone with the drug dealers and treasure hunters.

Given this sort of input, it’s a wonder I had the courage to go. My courage was bolstered by those who had been there before me and told me that I could do it. Indeed, I not only did it, but I took my family with me, and we wouldn’t trade for it.

The thing is that South America is not a fishing village on the Amazon or an alligator farm owned by a crazy drug-lord. We are prepared to see it that way by what gets through on our TV and movies. The truth is rather more complex. In Asuncion, Paraguay you can stand in a neighborhood and see a horse-drawn cart collecting trash and a pickup truck with boys in the back texting on cell phones. There are three centuries going on at once.

Quite frankly, there were times when I thought that, if I knew more Spanish, I could easily go native because I had more in common with the folks there than I did with the folks either in the Northeastern US or on the West Coast.

When only minor excursions out, I’ve lived my life in Kansas and Oklahoma. This is still the frontier. We have a strong, agrarian strain. On one strip out of Asuncion while I was there, I saw a huge billboard with a couple of cattle on it. It read “Mas Pasto, Mas Carne.” This translates as “More Grass, More Meat.” Having grown up on the farm report, I knew I was among my own kind.

It would be easy for me to go all paranoid here and say there is a conspiracy to make us think of South America and the rest of the world as being backward. This conclusion awaits a more careful argument. It is much easier to believe that most Americans live in cities and have a certain filter they put on the rest of the world. They view South America as backward and so concentrate on what fits that image, filtering out evidence to the contrary.

The hard truth is that these same people view most of the United States outside of the city limits of certain selected cities as being backward too.

When we go to the movies and watch television, we know that we are viewing fiction, but even fiction is set within a certain realistic context, so it is easy to be led astray. I have two examples where my personal experience has been illuminating.

In the movie Fletch, starring Chevy Chase, the main character takes a trip to Provo, Utah. Provo, in that movie, is portrayed as a very small town. Indeed, it is purported little more than a pig farm. I took sabbatical there in the academic year 1995-96 and one of the reasons I chose it was my impression that it was a small town. While I knew it was more than a pig farm, the expectation I had for it was quasi-rural. Imagine my surprise when I arrived and discovered that Provo, a town of 90 thousand, is located in the Utah County metro area with a population of a quarter million people. In fact, as most of the population in Utah is concentrated in a corridor around Interstate 15 that is about ten miles wide and a hundred miles long, you could say that it is part of a city of a million.

An error in the other direction comes from one of my favorite episodes of the X-Files. It was set in Connerville, Oklahoma and featured Lightening Boy. This was very interesting to me because I grew up twelve miles north of Connerville. I’ve friends buried in Connerville. Connerville consists of a couple of churches, a few houses, a cemetery, and the Blue River Bar. That’s it.

In the X-Files, it had a hospital with rather impressive scientific resources. There were things pictured as being in Connerville that are not available for a hundred miles in any direction.

And, of course, in each case the picture painted was done that way because of the needs of the story. There is no harm intended.

But unless you’ve been to Provo or unless you’ve been to Connerville, you don’t know.

The House You Live in

2012-01-15T17:55:00.000-06:00

The House You Live in

By Bobby Neal Winters

I like watching other people work with concrete. This may be because my father was a truck driver who hauled bulk cement to road jobs and ready-mix concrete outfits. In the summer, of 2007, we did an addition to our house and I enjoyed watching the masonry crew pour the footings and then lay the cinder block foundation.

Once you have the foundation, you attach a floor to it and then you put up the two-by-fours that frame the walls. Then you put the roof on. Once the roof is on, you can hang the drywall. That’s how we do it here. My house is an old house, so there are parts of it that have lathe and plaster walls instead of the gypsum drywall.

I imagine one can follow a line of historical continuity all the way back to the way things were done in England.

My family and I spent July of 2009 in Asuncion, Paraguay where I was teaching Introduction to Analytic Processes at Universidad Catolica. We stayed at a bed and breakfast called El Rinconcito while we were there. During that time, another house was being constructed across the street. This house was made from brick, and it was interesting for me to see how they did it.

Instead of just pouring a foundation, they had poured a frame. They must have had forms in place to hold the concrete in place while it was being poured, but they were gone by they time we arrived. Within the concrete, they had put four-inch PVC pipe as conduit for plumbing and electrical connections.

The roof was framed by four-by-sixes and constructed out of ceramic tile.

When we first arrived, they were in the process of laying the brick. Each of the bricks was six inches by six inches square and two inches thick. They would’ve stopped about any bullet you could’ve shot at them. Before we left, they had the exterior walls up and were putting stucco over the brick.

I feel safe in guessing that the PVC pipes within the concrete framing is a fairly recent innovation.

One weekend while we were in Paraguay, we took at tour of eastern Paraguay where the old towns have such names as Jesus, Trinidad, and Encarnacion. There are old missions in this area which were abandoned in the 1700s. In looking at them, I saw a continuity in the architecture with the house across from El Rinconcito. I imagine there is a continuity in construction techniques as well.

These old missions, with the churches, the monk’s quarters, and the walls surround them, were built by people who’d come over from Spain and brought their techniques with them. Those had come from the old Roman/Mediterranean tradition.

It sort of reminded me of a book entitled The Shape of the Liturgy by Gregory Dix who follows the shape of churches as they evolved from the Mediterranean-style homes used as church-houses in the early Christian era to the sorts of churches I saw in Paraguay in the old missions.

Every generation learns by watching the generation before it. We hope to keep the good stuff and to add to it what is needed for the present age. The PVC pipe as conduit in the concrete framing struck me as a clever solution to marrying the solid construction of the ancient era to the modern amenities of indoor plumbing, electricity, and even computer network cables.

When I visited Siberia, during June of the year 2000, the group I was with was taken on an excursion to to the village of Balshoye Galoustnoye. While there, we visited an American ex-patriot who was building his own traditional Siberian home. It was made of huge logs from the larch tree.

There was no foundation as we understand it and the larch logs sat on the ground to allow for the expansion and contraction due to the extreme winters. The logs in the wall were made to fit together tightly and the cracks were sealed with mortar to keep the Siberian wind from whistling through.

In the middle of the house was a huge oven. It was designed so that the grandmother and the baby could sleep on top of it.

Each of the houses I’ve described has a particular appearance on the outside. They represent particular styles that are recognizable to folks who’ve been around the block a time or two. What you see on the outside builds particular expectations for structure on the inside. You see the stucco and the tile roof, and you expect the connections going back to the Caesars.

This sort of architecture manifests a depth of knowledge that has been tested by time.

The Siberian home embodies wisdom as well. It doesn’t have the grandeur the brick house picked up through the various empires on the northern rim of the Mediterranean, but it embodies the simple wisdom of survival.

In my mind, these the houses in Asuncion and in Balshoye Galoustnoye are represent a deep, durable sort of reality that I hold dear. When we juxtapose the typical American house against these two we see that it is something different. There is more emphasis on the surface in the American house than in the depth. This is not necessarily meant as a criticism; it is simply an observation that might be a window to another aspect of the real world.

The sheet rock and two-by-fours that form my walls are descendants of the lathe and plaster. The lathe and plaster hearken back to the chinking between the logs in an house not too different from the larch house in Siberia. When sheet rock is hung, there are gaps between the pieces. These gaps are first taped and then mudded over in the same spirit that stucco is put over the bricks in the brick house in Paraguay. Pipes and electrical wire and run within the walls between the sheets of drywall, and you can put insulation in between as well.

But what is on the outside doesn’t necessarily tell you much about what’s on the inside. There are thousands of different types of siding each designed to give a different impression.

Vinyl Siding

2012-01-14T15:53:00.001-06:00

Vinyl Siding

By Bobby Neal Winters

Back in the summer of 2004, my house needed painting. I’d done this a couple of times before and thought that I’d gained as much from the experience as I could. I didn’t want to spend the money to hire it done, so I reached out for another idea and found one: vinyl siding.

My idea was this: The amount of work required to do this would be about the same as required for painting if you took all the preparation into account. It would cost a little more, but once I was done it would be done forever. As I said, this was my thinking.

I planned this as a project that would be spread over three years or so. The first year, I would do the north side of the house, which faces the street, and the west side of the house which, for various reasons, was easy to do. The second year I would do the side toward the driveway. The third year I would do the south side of the house which had various problems associated with it and I wanted to be more of an expert when I got there.

I did learn a lot during those first two years and part of that was that I didn’t want to personally hang vinyl siding on the back side of my house.

There were other great truths that I learned, however.

Vinyl Siding is a system.

That’s right. It is an intricately developed system. It has been designed with the idea that a weekend handyman such as me can buy certain parts, follow certain directions, and get decent results. Let me explain.

The idea is to put vinyl siding over your old wooden siding. The old wooden siding is somewhat rough and uneven. This makes it difficult to cover. This problem has been dealt with long before you, Mr. Weekend Handyman, have come on the scene by the invention of something called fan-fold.

You may have seen fan-fold and not known what it’s for. For all the world, it looks like some sort of insulation. It is a quarter-inch thick piece of Styrofoam-like material that folds much like an old-fashion paper fan. You unfold it, press it flat against the wooden siding on your house, and nail it to your house with a special sort of nail.

When you start nailing fan-fold to your siding, you read the directions looking for something specific on how you are suppose to do it. How are you supposed to line up your nails? Exactly how far apart should they be? You look, but--in stark contrast to later parts of the project--you get no tight specs. You are just supposed to do it.

When you do get it up, you notice that the rough, uneven surface of the siding has disappeared and has been replaced by a flat surface. Indeed, it is a flat surface that will let you start a nail quicker than anything else you’ve sunk a nail into.

After you get the fan-fold up, you have to frame it all in. This is where it gets kind of persnickety. You have to have your horizontal strip that frames the bottom level; you have to have your vertical strips that frame the side plumb; you have to nail your nails in just tight enough, but not too tight.

But if you take care with the level and the plumb-line, then the rest follows along pretty easy.

And when you get a few strips of your vinyl siding up, it becomes clear why you don’t have to be so careful with where you put your nails on the fan-fold: It’s all going to get covered up.

This was my great gestalt about vinyl siding. It is all about appearances. Let’s say it again. From the beginning to the end, it is about appearances.

You put paint on your house to make it look better. Yes, it makes the wood last longer, but it’s really about looks. You don’t want to live in a house that looks like its on poles down in the Mississippi Delta. Vinyl siding is just a means to achieve the same goal.

My real epiphany came when I got to the soffit. This is the underside of the part of the overhang of your roof. My soffit was ugly, nay even scary-looking. The vinyl covered all of the ugliness, all of the terror. It was beautiful.

Now, I do understand, that vinyl siding doesn’t get a lot of respect out in the world. It’s not exactly the way the Rockefeller's would do it. Yes, a house of stone would be better. Or a house of wood that was carefully scraped with the aid of a blowtorch and then painstakingly repainted on a regular schedule.

Here’s the deal. You can’t tell the difference between such a nicely scraped and maintained house and vinyl siding from the street.

What’s more, during my second year of hanging vinyl siding, I began to take pride and care with my work. I would look up at places that weren’t perfect and they would jump right out at me. But then, after I waited a few weeks and forgot about my boo-boos, I couldn’t tell. They disappeared because I didn’t remember where they were.

I figured out that no one else could tell either.

This is a theme that permeates much modern construction: It is all about appearances. Many solid-looking “concrete” buildings are a frame with a wire-mesh attached and concrete sprayed on the mesh.

If you’ve seen The Matrix there is a scene in a lobby where the walls appear to be solid marble. When the machine guns get going, we see that it’s just marble veneer.

My final epiphany was that this doesn’t stop with siding or construction: It’s true about people; it’s true about businesses; it’s true about institutions.

Now, there are some solid buildings out there that are rock from foundation to roof, but there are so many that just look that way, it’s hard to tell. Knowing that you have to look, might put you a little ahead.

The Differences between Men and Women Part n

2011-11-24T13:01:00.001-06:00

The Differences between Men and Women Part n

By Bobby Neal Winters

Men and Women have different approaches to things. It’s not that one is better than the other, no sir, just different.

When Jean and I moved to Pittsburg in late May of 1989, one of the first purchases we made was that of a dryer. Our daughter was seventeen months old at the time and still in diapers. In those days, disposable diapers had been available for quite some time, and we kept a few around, but only for long trips.

Jean had been a Botany major as an undergrad and then got her master’s degree is plant physiology. As a major in the life sciences she had been immersed in a culture that was very environmentally conscious. When we had Lora, this manifested itself in the practice of using cloth diapers. Disposable diapers contain feces and feces in landfills contaminates ground water. As Lora’s diapers were particularly nasty, it made sense that wringing them out in the toilet and then washing them in the washing machine was the only responsible thing to do.

We probably saved countless lives.

The drier we bought was so that we could dry them in the winter. In the summer, it was felt that hanging them in the sunshine on a clothesline did a much better job than the drier. It’s also cheaper, doesn’t use fossil fuel, it makes clothing smell better, and Jean just liked (and still likes) to go into the out of doors.

We did need a dryer for cold or rainy weather, though, so we bought one on credit and paid it out over six months so we could establish a credit rating. As an aside, my credit rating is now better than the US government’s; I am buried every week under mail from people who want me to get credit cards from them. This is all because of having bought a dryer that my wife doesn’t like to use.

Move the clock ahead 22 years. We’ve had two more daughters with the last coming seven years after the second. Jean was 40 by that time and the third daughter was in disposable diapers from day one. I guess her poop isn’t as dangerous as the first one’s.

But even after all these years, Jean still likes to hang out laundry for all of the reasons given above. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s one of the things I love most about her. I don’t understand it, but I love it.

I can’t say for sure, but I think that one of the reasons she picked our house was the nice clothesline in the back yard. Its poles were made out of 4-inch iron pipe, the cross pieces welded into place by manly men who’d learned to weld in the mines. The poles were set 30 feet apart and set into the ground with concrete. They had been in place for at least 30 years before we bought the house.

One day in the summer of 2010, there came a great wind which blew limbs from the great walnut tree which dominates the back half of the back yard. A great limb did break off from the great tree and went down on the clothesline wires. It was at this point that the leverage--and note this term because it will come up again--of one of the poles did cause it to bend at an angle with the ground. The pole bent because 50 years worth of rain had rusted it.

I manage to put off fixing this by various stop-gap measures worthy of my forebears in the Southern, Scots-Irish influenced, honor-culture. (It sounds so much more noble than redneck, eh?) However, during the summer of 2011, it became clear that this was no longer satisfactory, so I removed the old pole, got a new pole, and concreted the new pole into the ground.

It is at this point I need to inform the reader than I didn’t use pipe. I used a long metal tube such as is use for posts in chain-link fences. Hit a minor chord on the organ.

One sunny day there were a lot of blue jeans that needed washing. They were washed and hung out on the line. Water, as those who think about such things know, is deceptively heavy. This heaviness combined with the leverage--I told you it would come up again--caused the new pole to bend.

Because the new pole was of such a flimsy metal, there was no making-do. It needed to be replaced. Before I could do that, the old one had to be removed from the ground. The previous post--the one made out of pipe--had come out of the ground with a little “wallering.” I started “wallering” the current post. Without budging, it snapped off flush with the concrete in the ground.

I uttered an Anglo-Saxon word that rhymes with a the name of a particular water fowl species. While you are figuring out why I said, “Noose,” let me continue.

This was a puzzle. I had concreted the post in with 60 pounds of quick-crete. That isn’t all that heavy but it was under ground. There was no way to get a hold of it, and the ground itself was as hard as concrete as we had not yet begun to have our fall rains.

We did another stop-gap solution that was worthy of my Scots-Irish cultural forbears. We replaced the pole with a swing set, and waited for it to rain.

When the rains finally came and I could theoretically get a shovel into the ground, it became a question of finding the time. All of the stars aligned on Thanksgiving Day.

I went into the backyard with shovel, sledge hammer, adze, work gloves, and rope. It was a bit coolish when I began so I put on a sweat shirt.

Then I began.

I dug a conical hole around the cylindrical piece of concrete. I then took the rope and rapped it many times around the concrete. I then put the old clothesline pole through a loop in the rope and began to use--you guessed it--leverage to get the concrete out.

Except it didn’t work. The blasted thing wouldn’t budge.

I took the sledge hammer and swung at it a few times. I fancied that I saw it move. I tried the lever thing again. Nothing.

I swung the sledge some more.

It is at this point that I will make myself vulnerable and share. When I swing a sledge hammer, I change. Lose control of the tone of my voice. I don’t think as clearly. I think this is because the use of the sledge hammer stimulates the male hormone man-o-dren and causes blood to flow away from the brain.

On this occasion, I began having visions of my deceased father-in-law, Jim. Jim and I had one taken out an old porch together with the use of a farm jack. The farm jack is a marvelous device that is uniquely capable of removing concrete posts from the ground.

I stood up off the ground, walked to the back door, and called to Jean.

The door opened.

“Jean,” I said, “I need someone with a brain.”

“Yes.”

“Where is the farm jack?”

She told me and agreed to come out and help.

Lest you believe that the farm jack is a panacea, I will tell you this is not the case. It was part of the solution, but not all. Suffice it to say that after a bit of jacking around, a good bit of “wallering,” and propicious--but appropriate--use of Anglo-Saxon epithets, we were able to make use of leverage to extract the concrete from the ground.

In much less time than it took to extract the old post, I concreted a new one in.

I will now eat lunch and then go to seek symbiosis with the recliner...in a manly way.

Hiking the Appalachian Trail

2011-11-06T12:08:00.003-06:00

Hiking the Appalachian Trail

By Bobby Neal Winters

I came home from work last Monday evening, changed clothes, started up the mower, and mowed the front yard. I got hot and stopped until I cooled off, which happened this Saturday morning. I try to take care of my lawn and not just when I get those letters the city send out when the neighbors complain. (I know who you are and I know what you did.) Mowing, as you may recall, is my last chance to get into heaven. I’ve given up on faith and I’ve given up on works, so a good lawn is the only path left.

This time of year, though, keeping your lawn up can be dangerous. When you mow out in the heat, you can get overheated before you know it. This can have dire consequences. If the city can get on your case for having a pile of brush, what are they going to do for having an unburied body on the front lawn? And it’s not like your kids are going to take care of it either. Your wife would be stuck with the job. That is if you are not like Mark Sanford, Governor of the great state of South Carolina.

It is my opinion that every man should live his life in such a way so that his wife would give CPR to him if he fell of heat prostration while mowing. I am thinking that breathing life into her husband’s hot, sweaty body might not be a high priority with her right now. But then perhaps if the dear governor had been spending more time on his own lawn (wink-wink, nod-nod) he wouldn’t have strayed off on the Appalachian Trail, as it were.

Having mentioned that, I’ve got to wonder how his Argentine girlfriend liked being referred to as the Appalachian Trail. It’s curvy and beautiful from a distance, but up close it’s full of bugs and a lot of guys have hiked it before you. (Wink-wink, nod-nod.)

It brings me to mind of the wealthy and powerful Eliot Spitzer, who paid over four-thousand dollars for what our boys in khaki could get for a pair of nylons and a couple of Hershey bars back during WWII. I’ve shared with you before the remarks from the table at Rotary when that story was broken, but they are too precious not to share again.

“Four-thousand dollars an hour? What do you do for four-thousand dollars?”

“An hour? What do you do for a whole hour?”

But I digress.

My point is that one of the ways that lawn care gets us into heaven is by keeping us out of such mischief. If you are pushing a mower, trying to avoid stepping in any of the “presents” left by the family dog, then you are not thinking about “hiking the Appalachian Trail” as it were. And what is more, if, when you are done with your chore your wife should bring you a tall glass of iced Fresca—on her own without you asking—you couldn’t possibly image straying from the straight-and-narrow road.

But, like I said earlier, you’ve got to be careful when you’re mowing in this hot weather. Avoid getting over-heated, but when you do stop and take a break. If you have a large task, break it up into smaller tasks and take a break to cool off between them. And most importantly, don’t do anything to annoy the person whom might have to give you CPR.

(Bobby Winters is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Mathematics, and Interim Chair of the Department of Chemistry. It’s a long story. )

Male enhanced mowing

2011-11-06T12:08:00.000-06:00

Male enhanced mowing

By Bobby Neal Winters

Because I have an extensive network of infiltrators, I am aware my readers in Oklahoma have been mowing for a couple of weeks now, but here in our little corner of Kansas because of our more northerly location, the start of the season comes a little later. After a winter like the one we had, we need to know there’s something good about living up north.

As I write this, it is the Thursday of spring break. It has been a long tradition that spring break is either the last bitterly cold week of the year or the first rainy week of the year. This year we followed the second pattern and have received abundant warm rain. The effect of this has been to bring out the leaves on some of the less conservative trees and to bring up the grass. As a consequence, the mowing season will soon be upon us, and it is time for those of us who’ve learned the value of preparation to ready ourselves for that eventuality.

At the beginning of last year, I was of the opinion that I was at a turning point in my mowing life. For many years, I had contented myself with a 3.5 horsepower mower, but after much consideration as to whether such a loathsome sinner as me was worthy, I made the move of going to a 4.5 horsepower machine. It was a honey, let me tell you, and I came to call it Little Darlin’.

Little Darlin’ cut my mowing time by one-third and used less gas in the bargain. This was because I didn’t have to pickup the youngest child’s toys anymore. I could just mow over them, and no sign of them would ever be found.

“You’re looking for your soccer ball? No, I haven’t seen it.”

But I let it go to my head. I got cocky and forgot the cardinal rule of mowing: Stumps aren’t toys. On the very last mowing of the year, I found the stump of a cedar tree I’d cut down several years ago. They say trees aren’t intelligent, and naturally you’d think that stumps were even less so, yet I believe this stump was seeking revenge. It has done this to me before, so the argument can be made it’s smarter than I am. Maybe it’s not smart, but something else is true.

I try to live a good life, the way folks on TV tell me, but I keep getting mixed messages. We are taught we should recycle and repair, and I believe that, yet when I went to my Names and Numbers yellow pages I could only find one lawnmower repair man, Bob by name. I gave Bob a call and all I got was a recording. Bob, it seems, is no longer in business. In a world market where the folks in China can make it cheaper than folks in Kansas can fix it, I suppose this is a natural thing, but there just some sort of wrongness about it.

In any case, in spite of all my good intentions, I was forced to buy a new mower for the second straight year. This was a good time for it because it seems the lawnmower business is undergoing a paradigm shift. What I mean to say is that last year, everything I looked at was listed by horsepower, but this year there are many models that are only listed by CC. There were 148CC engines, 160CC engines, and so forth.

You must understand that this puts me in a quandary because I don’t really know what any of this technical jargon means. Even the horsepower thing I only use with the idea that bigger is better with the vague idea that is has something to do with the amount of work a horse could do. It’s sort of like Smilin’ Bob in all of those male enhancement commercials. (Maybe male enhancement just means he can burp louder than he did before.) Ego wouldn’t let me take the chance that I might be slipping back a notch on my mower, so I got a machine that was listed with both horsepower and CCs. It is 6.5 horsepower and 190 CCs.

I am taking a real chance by going up by 2 horses in one year, but my ego needs it having lost my Little Darlin’ so soon. I think that subconsciously I’m hoping to get a machine powerful enough to do to stumps what Little Darlin’ could do to toys.

But I get the feeling if I try to find out I will be writing this article again next year.

(Bobby Winters is a Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State University, writer, and speaker. You may contact him at bwinters1@cox.net. )

The mowing life

2011-11-06T12:07:00.002-06:00

The mowing life

By Bobby Neal Winters

My in-laws just got back from the north land where they had been refugees from the Kansas heat during the months of July, August, and part of September. Upon returning, my mother-in-law inquired as to the health of our mutual friends Bill and Beth. It seems Bill and Beth’s lawn had not been mown recently, and, upon seeing this, my mother-in-law immediately feared for their well-being.

This is was no idle worry. I have noticed myself that the one of the first things people do when they die is to give up mowing. This first occurred to me on a road trip to Oklahoma with the family. My youngest was pointing out “haunkted” [haunted] houses. Sure enough each of the houses she pointed out to us had an un-mown lawn, a sign of the unnatural if there ever was one.

My mother-in-law need not have feared as our friends are in good health. I can’t say it for a fact, but I rather suspect they, like me, are thinking about their mowing end-game for the year.

How and when to finish is an aspect of the sport all but the most serious participants in the sport of mowing completely ignore even though it is the most important part of the mental aspect of the game. You heard me right. There is a mental part of mowing that is too often neglected.

It begins at the first of the season with the question of when to begin. On one hand, there is the natural temptation to put off the first mowing as long as possible. However, this has a downside in that if you wait too long, it becomes quite a difficult operation. What is the point in mowing once instead of twice when it takes more than twice the effort to do it? What all we mowers must keep in mind is that the point is to expend the least amount of effort that is humanly possible within certain constraints as to your lawn’s appearance. We need to husband our strength for more important matters, but we don’t want our neighbors to think we’ve died. (I have to wonder what it would mean “to wife” our strength. Maybe my wife will tell me if she ever sits down to take a break.)

After that first mowing, the weather here in Kansas guarantees we are pretty much locked into a weekly schedule for a while, or so I thought. A few years ago my friend Paul—who is an engineer with a practical turn of mind—told me about the 8-day method. If you mow every 8 days instead of every 7, after 7 weeks you’re one mowing ahead. The practical mathematics of this appealed to me immediately. If you start mowing before the first of May, then you can get ahead by the 4^th of July.

The 4^th of July is an important date in the mowing game just as it is in other sports. In this part of the country, there are some years in which you can switch from a weekly schedule to a biweekly schedule at that time.

Let me tell you what, if you can switch into that biweekly schedule, you are in the clover, as it were.

That did not happen this year, and I personally blame it on the shifting in weather patterns that is due to global warming. (It is my belief that our president didn’t sign the Kyoto Treaty because he is in the back pocket of Briggs and Stratton.)

When you get into the month of September, you really have to start watching your game. Regardless of the year, you can pretty well count on the fact that you are going to have to mow twice in September, but the strategy is to place your mowings so that (a) you only have to mow once in October and (b) that one mowing is at the optimal time.

If it’s too early, then that makes the first mowing in the spring more difficult. If it’s too late, you might get caught by rains and have to postpone your last mowing until November, which is a time when the pros have gone on to other things like Autumn-League Leaf Raking.

Bill, the mutual friend of me and my in-laws, is a real pro. Those of us who take our mowing seriously watch him closely for hints. If his lawn looks a little scraggledy now, you can be dang sure there is a good reason for it. He has some strategy that will rock the mowing world.

You can count on it.

(Bobby Winters is a professor of mathematics, writer, and speaker. You may contact him at bobby@okieinexile.com or visit his website at www.okieinexile.com.)

Mowing your way to heaven

2011-11-06T12:03:00.002-06:00

Mowing your way to heaven

By Bobby Neal Winters

As some of you may recall, I started off my mowing season this year with great hope. I’d replaced my 3.5 horse power mower with a 4.5 horse power model. If I’d known the difference it would make I’d’ve done it sooner because it took 50 percent off my mowing time. It used to take over an hour and a half to mow my lawn, and this summer it has averaged one hour.

Now I could be persuaded that some of the increased efficiency is because I’ve gotten better at nudging toys out of the way with my foot, but most of it is because of the higher horsepower in that I can more readily mow over the toys instead. If you have a mulching mower, the kids will never even miss them.

The upshot is I’ve spent a good deal less time mowing this summer on account of that.

Now you have to understand that this is not an undiluted blessing because I have given up on getting to heaven by good works and instead I am making my case by the amount of time I spend working on my lawn. I am trying to mow my way to heaven.

This sounds strange, but there are a lot of men just like me who’ve given up on all of the usual theologies and are trying to avoid the eternal flames by virtue of their lawn. Like any religion, there are various sub-theologies within it.

There are some who think that you have to have a perfect lawn with all of the grass of the same species and at exactly the same height. Within that group, there are the ones who favor a particular kind of grass. These are the ones who’d be sitting on a mountain top living on cold water and parched corn if they were affiliated with a traditional religion.

Others believe that you aren’t required to have a perfect lawn, but you really need to be trying for a perfect lawn. The creed is that a perfect lawn is not to be obtained in this life, but that during a period of time after death, the imperfections of one’s lawn will be taken away.

I’ve belonged to each of these sects in my time, but I now follow another way. I believe our lawns make us righteous through suffering.

Initially I believed in the manner of the first group, but I discovered I’d have to kill all of my old lawn and sod it in completely new, and that was simply beyond my ability. Then I moved to the second sect, and, after a while, I discovered difficult that was. Even though you know you can’t have a perfect lawn, you still have to try, and trying is the hard part.

So I decided to quit trying and now go directly to suffering without the intervening effort.

The new 4.5 horse power machine is not the only thing that’s cut into my mowing time this summer. That hot, dry spell we had did its part too. Usually I start the year with a one-week rotation and switch off to a two-week rotation around the Fourth of July. This year I did that, and mowed at the beginning of July and again at the middle, but then the grass stayed basically the same height until the end of August, turning ultimately into a toasty brown.

From a theological point of view, this worries me. Is God working against me? And at the same time is he telling me what I’m in for?

Now I could have watered, but then you come up against the sprinkling versus total immersion schools of thought, and, besides, that puts us back into the position of trying to have a perfect lawn. If I water, I might as well go back to my old religion.

If this wasn’t already hard enough, you’ve got folks like the Organist. She lives a block or two away from me, depending on how you count block, and I caught her out edging her walk the other day. Edging, mind you. This is totally unacceptable. She’s gumming up the works whatever way you look at it. On one hand, she’s opened herself to charges of perfectionism, and on the other, she’s upped the bar on suffering.

And she’s a woman. Women don’t get into heaven through yard work but through housekeeping.

As if things weren’t hard enough, this kind of piety has been known to start revivals. You’ve got to keep a lid on it and never give an inch.

Anyway, she’s lives a couple of blocks away. I’m hoping it’ll dampen out before it gets here.

(Bobby Winters is a Professor of Mathematics, writer, and speaker. You may contact him at bwinters1@cox.net or visit his website at www.okieinexile.com. )

Lawn Bailout

2011-11-06T12:02:00.002-06:00

Lawn Bailout

By Bobby Neal Winters

After all of the anticipation and preparation, after all of the worry and anxiety, after all of the dreams and hopes and fears, it has begun. I’ve mown for the first time this season.

It was rougher than I thought it would be. The layer of detritus accreted by my lawn was thicker than usual. The contribution of balls from my gum tree was particularly thick. I was told by my neighbor Bob Laushman, who had been in turn told by his arboreal consultant, a.k.a. tree guy, that there is a two-day window in which a freeze will kill your gumballs for a year. Someone in that conversation made a remark concerning this which is not suitable for a family publication.

When we got our Easter freeze two years back, it hit that two-day window just perfect and we had a ball-less year. That was the year the frost bit back the oaks and even the walnuts. Walnuts are hard to bite-back because they are conservative and not so easily fooled. In any case, we didn’t have a big crop of gumballs that year.

Having said all that, it was not the regular layer of natural debris that slowed the process. It was the dog we called Charlie. (I only call him that when I am in a particularly good mood.)

Our travails with Charlie began right away with his escaping. Particularly loyal readers may recall my having put out pleas for advice on how to keep him in the yard. We settled finally on a radio fence/shock-collar combos. There was a short period of time when he outsmarted it, but that has now been fixed. In the meantime, however, he has taken to digging.

It wasn’t such a problem when he was just digging up Jean’s strawberries and her butterfly garden, but those have not proven to be sufficient challenges for him. He has proceeded to the rest of the yard.

Some of you might be aware that I wasn’t always such a genteel character as I am now. I didn’t always seek to better myself and make myself righteous through the manly art of mowing. While growing up, I knew some folks whose only grass was that which grew up through the frames of abandon farm equipment, the rest having been killed by the traffic of kids and dogs and billy goats.

As I was mowing my back yard, having to winch my mower occasionally from one of the pits Charlie has dug, I had flashbacks to those days. I looked into the animal’s perpetually smiling face and imagined myself doing violence to him. I remembered my trip to Siberia when an American ex-patriot there had told me of his suspicions that his Buryat neighbors had eaten his dog. I momentarily envied him.

The question, the persistent question, I am asked and ask myself is why not just get rid of the dog. The answer is that my daughter loves him. Looking at that sentence I wonder how many sons-in-law owe their continued survival to that very thing. It’s something to think about, especially by potential sons-in-law. (Not you, Andrew.)

I’ve approached the folks at NALM, the National Association of Lawn Mowers, about advice. This is a dangerous thing to do because it means they might want to examine my lawn which could result in my being suspended from competition for the year or, given the state of my lawn, indefinitely.

They were surprisingly understanding. They made a number of suggestions for reclamation including hauling in a few truck loads of dirt. (Do any of you know there the dirt goes when a dog digs a hole by the way?) When I asked them where would I get the money for this, they suggested I apply for a bailout from Washington just like everyone else.

It’s something to think about.

(Bobby Winters is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State University.)

Mowing a higher way

2011-11-06T12:01:00.000-06:00

Mowing a higher way

By Bobby Neal Winters

Charlie, our smiling, digging dog, has discovered a 30-foot gopher run in our backyard, and, thereby, combined his love of digging with his love of killing small animals. I found this out while mowing yesterday, and it comes at an awkward time, just before my last one or two mowings of the year.

This is serious business too, as I’ve given up hope of getting into heaven through either faith or works and have pinned my fate on my lawn. It is a hard path which, ironically, requires both faith and work, but as all other roads are closed for me, it’s the only one I have left.

It is all the harder because I’ve undergone a paradigm-shift in the way I view my lawn. I’ve been mowing it by myself for years, and, for years, it has remained relatively stable. There was the back and forth in front of my house allowing for a few trees to mow around. It was simple.

The back yard was less simple, but, over the course of twenty years, I’d optimized my approach to it. I’d divided it into four zones. There is the peony-grapevine zone, wherein I painstakingly mow around peonies and grapevines. There is “the narrows” on the west side. There is the clothesline/swing-set region (CLSWR) in which the clothesline and the swing-set are the defining obstacles, and there is the end-zone that encircles the brush pile. In the beginning, “the narrows” and the CLSWR were the regions most amenable to the standard back-and-forth (or up-and-down) mowing technique favored by the experts from NALM, the National Association of Lawn Mowers, but over the years with the addition of trees and dogs and dog-associated equipment, even those two areas must be approach by rather ad hoc methods.

But like a frog in a cook pot, I only perceive the small differences over time, not their accumulation. While I’ve not been boiled alive, I have reached a level of complexity that I did not appreciate until I’d been gone and turned it over to my EDF, i.e. eldest daughter’s fiancé.

While I was gone to Paraguay in July, I let my EDF do the mowing. As I did have some idea that my lawn had become idiosyncratic, I gave the lad a tour before I left, showing him various features of the yard, and giving him sage advice.

“If it looks like it hasn’t been mown before, don’t decide you’re Christopher Columbus.”

I paid high-dollar for that wisdom in terms of new lawn mowers, but I gave it to him for free.

When we arrived back from Paraguay, we were greeted not only with a freshly mown lawn, but with his learned assessment that we had “the worse lawn ever” in terms of mowability.

The front lawn, which had been easy to mow in the past, was made complicated by our acquisition of the property on our west and the planting of six fruit trees in that small space.

EDF also found the backyard to be rather more challenging than expected, as I’d neglected to tell him of my patented four-zone approach.

His reaction was an eye-opener to me. I’d been mowing along the same way for years thinking that I was lacking in some way. The truth of the matter is that I’d been engaged in “extreme” mowing without ever realizing it.

It is my plan to make a petition to the HMC, the Higher Mowing Commission, to move my lawn to a higher classification. The HMC works hand in glove with NALM to improve lawns and lawn-mowing in this country. If my petition is granted, my lawn will move from the “regular” category to a category that recognizes a higher level of difficulty induced by both flora and fauna.

The addition of the gopher-run canyons Charlie has dug for me would’ve boosted me up to an even higher level of difficulty, had they been included in my petition, but changing it now would only look like whining. HMC hates whiners.

That is about par for the mowing course, however.

(Bobby Winters is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Science, Professor of Mathematics, and Acting Chair of the Department of Chemistry.)

Th e Mowing Guru

2011-11-06T12:00:00.000-06:00

The Mowing Guru

By Bobby Neal Winters

I got a call the other day from my old friend Bubba back home. Mowing was on his mind.

With the latest rain having brought up the green grass, I’ve been thinking about the mowing season myself. It is always one of the most active times of the year as I am trying to mow my way into heaven. Bubba’s call helped spur my thinking. He lives about a five-hour drive south of me, and, over the years, I’ve discovered that they are about three weeks ahead of us as far as the mowing season goes.

“I mowed the yard for the first time today,” he said. “And I witnessed a miracle.”

“A miracle?” I echoed back as a question. Bubba is given to flights of fancy and indulges in a bit of hyperbole beyond that, so I’ve learned to be wary.

“Yes,” he said. “I got my riding mower started without a trip to the repair shop.”

To be able to fully appreciate the impact of that statement, one must know Bubba’s history with lawn mowers. Let us begin with the fact that he treats his mowers with a policy of malignant neglect. He never changes his oil, but only replaces it, and, in addition to this, he periodically tries to wean his mowers off it.

Add to this the fact that he mows with lightning speed as if he is in the Indianapolis 500. Now add that he’s a bit on the hefty side. He was once driving around north of the town of Ada, Oklahoma and got lost. He stopped and asked someone who was out in the front yard how he could get to 377 and they said, “Diet and exercise.” All of this to say he runs is mower with heavy loads at high speed and inadequate lubrication.

Most operating manuals don’t advocate this sort of treatment, but, as Bubba is quick to point out, they don’t precisely prohibit it either. Nevertheless, as a result of this sort of treatment, Bubba is required to have his mower repaired every year before the first mowing.

Hence my response:

“Golly, that was a miracle,” I said with a laugh.

“Don’t laugh,” he said. “I’m serious. I think that mowing is my conduit to God.”

He was so serious I was somewhat taken aback.

“Really?” I asked. I do write about mowing my way to heaven, but mine is a theology of works through God’s grace. I got the feeling that this was something different.

“Really!” he said. “When I get out on my riding mower in the sunshine—or should I say Sonshine,” I could see the spelling in the way he said it, “with all of the green grass and warm air and all of the birds and bees and insects of nature around me, I feel directly connected to God.”

“Well, that’s...,” I started a sentence but was interrupted.

“Whatever burden I am carrying, whatever sorrow I may be feeling just disappears when I climb astride that mighty machine,” he continued.

I waited a few beats after he finished this time before replying.

“Well, that’s very interesting,” I said. “I’ve never known anyone before who gets that big of a charge out of mowing.”

“It’s more than a charge,” he said. “It’s like I’m being a conduit for the Holy Spirit itself.”

I thought his was going to say, “Hallelujah,” and I almost said, “Amen!”

“Okay,” I said instead. I felt a feeling that was similar to one I had when I heard a woman say she liked to wash dishes by hand. It was like I wanted to make sure she wasn’t washing any sharp knives.

There was a little more awkward silence before I continued.

“I think it’s great that you enjoy mowing so,” I said. “I just don’t like it that much myself.”

“Well,” he said, sounding more serious than ever, “I will pray for you.”

“Thanks,” I said and we said good-bye.

(Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Mathematics, and Acting Chair of the Department of Chemistry.)

Shaping up for the pre-season

2011-11-06T11:58:00.002-06:00

Shaping up for the pre-season

By Bobby Neal Winters

NALM, the National Association of Lawn Mowers, has been experiencing some turbulent times. As you may have noticed, we are living in an era of change and NALM is consistent with the zeitgeist. For years, NALM was dedicated to the purpose of good lawns and the men who mow them. That word “men” came under scrutiny during the upsurge in women’s rights. Being forward looking and right thinking, the folks at NALM changed that word to “people.”

I don’t think any woman actually asked for the change by the way. I think there were actually motions that it be changed directly to “women,” but people it is and people it will stay until such time aliens land and start demanding the right to mow.

But that was years ago. The trend more recently has been away from “just mowing” to general yard care. This encompasses the creation of flower gardens, lawn gnomes, retaining walls, the planting the treats, and the placement of the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Pink flamingos are in there somewhere.

Last year, I did my bit trying to catch the wave by installing a French drain in my back yard. I did this during the intersession between Spring and Summer semesters last year. There had been a place in my back yard where water had been pooling, and the French drain has worked like a charm. We’ve not received nearly as much rain since.

I followed this by removing some sidewalk that no longer articulated with our front porch after our renovation. In order to do this, I spent some quality time with an 8-pound sledge hammer. Let me share, my friends, my great respect for those who earn their daily bread on the business-end of a sledge hammer. I told my beloved Jean that, should I ever want to end it all in such a way as to allow her to collect my life insurance, the sledge hammer might very well accomplish that feat, but I digress.

This year Jean and I have begun the preseason by moving our hostas. Our hostas have been one of our great, shining successes in the realm of landscaping, so the wise might inquire as to why we are moving them if they are doing well where they are.

We are doing this because of our basement, the west wall of it to be specific. To quote from the Gordon Lightfoot song, “The Captain wired in he had water coming in / And the good ship and crew was in peril...” It was actually a computer science professor cum stonemason, and he didn’t wire it in, but you get the picture.

The water is coming in through the flowerbed which had been the home of our hostas, so we moved the hostas as a prelude to covering the flowerbed with pavers.

This will meet with great approval from the officials at NALM because (1) moving the hostas required creating a new flowerbed which is one of the activities they are encouraging and (2) the covering of the former flowerbed with pavers counts as extending a patio which is also meets with their approval.

This is all good, because we are going to need all the brownie points can get. Our need for a little slack from NALM comes from the state of our back yard. Our old dog Buttercup, may she rest in peace, had an irrational hatred of toads. She listened for them and dug them up from the holes in the ground where they hid. As she grew old and senile, any spot on the ground was suspect. The upside of this was that at least she was growing weaker.

Imagine her being replaced with a dog who doesn’t require a toad as an excuse to dig and is young and healthy to boot. This dog is named Charlie, and our back yard is beginning to look like the surface of the moon.

I wonder if the folks at NALM can be bribed.

(Bobby Winters is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State University.)

The Lawnmower Man

2011-11-06T11:51:00.001-06:00

The Lawnmower Man

By Bobby Neal Winters

(This is an oldie, posted by request)

I ended my mowing season last year on a perfect note. I had resolved to keep mowing as long as possible—like my neighbor Joe—so that when spring came my lawn would turn from brown to green instantaneously just like his. In these parts we judge a man by his lawn, and in these parts, Joe sets the standard. I had finished mowing all of the front yard and about a quarter of the back when I found a cinderblock with my lawnmower.

The cinderblock-seeking feature of this mower had not been one of its selling points, and I would have remembered because it was only a year old. So young, so young.

I come from a part of the world—Southern Oklahoma—where the concept of a lawn is a new one. We mowed the grass to keep the snakes away, or to make them easier to find and kill. But I find that I am taking on the color of my surroundings, and my neighbor has been a good influence. I have finally seen that keeping a good lawn is one of the traits of a righteous man.

So complete is my conversion that I spent part of the autumn doing something that would have made my grandfather turn over in his grave. I actually sowed grass seed and watered it.

Grandpa spent a good part of his life trying to kill grass. My grandmother was a woman who feared the Lord—possibly the Lord feared her as well—and took that part of the Bible that says, “How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband?” quite seriously. She used mowing as a means of grace.

Grandpa’s theology was a bit different. His response was to set the mower as low to the ground as possible and make the dirt fly when he mowed. When this is done to a lawn in mid-July in Southern Oklahoma, that lawn tends to enter into a “dormant” stage, which differs little in appearance from death.

Some men just won’t be saved.

One of the first things that I did when I moved to Pittsburg was buy a lawnmower. I bought the cheapest one that I could find with the idea that I would work my way up. When I got tenure, I would get a better mower. When I got promoted, I would upgrade again, and when I made Full Professor, perhaps—dare I dream—a riding lawnmower.

I deliberately abused the machine. I tried weaning it from oil. Whenever I became frustrated with something, I would startup the mower and walk behind it cursing lest I teach my children foul language. That is what we send them to school for, after all.

It lasted for years. I could never justify buying a new one because it just kept going. I mowed down small trees. It kept going. The frame rusted through on one corner, and one of the wheels came off, but it kept going.

I mowed with it for two years while it was in that condition, and then out of pure depravity, I bought a new one. It was a beauty. Self-propelled. Sweet. I was on my way up the ladder as I had planned. Maybe I was a little behind, but what the heck? It was self-propelled.

The second time that I mowed with it I hit a stump and ruined it. I brought the old, three-wheeled mower out of retirement to finish out the season.

Finally—after ten years of loyal service—I gave it away to a needy couple in the neighborhood who divorced almost immediately. I feel somehow responsible even now.

Then came the mower that I found the cinderblock with. The memory haunts me yet: A grinding sound, a pool of blackness forming beneath it, the sound of my own sobbing. Gone, gone.

Perhaps I am seeking to set myself too far above my station. A man should not think himself better than his grandfather. Grandpa was wise. He knew that while some might attain righteousness by mowing, it is not for such as we. The way of the lawn is not our way.

I went today and bought a new mower. It is exactly like the first one; it was the cheapest that they had. I will try to destroy it.

HV/AC Memo

2011-10-16T20:15:00.000-05:00

HV/AC Memo
By Bobby Neal Winters

We are now in mid-October. Summer has spent itself in an orgy of sunburned earth and seared grass, but winter with its cold rain, darkness, and snow is not yet upon us. We are in a time of year when the weather is rather pleasant...at home.

At the university, by way of contrast, this has traditionally been a time of crisis. Operating the HV/AC systems in large, institutional type buildings is quite a challenge. It is a subject about which there are things to be known: beautiful things, difficult things, things about gages and air flow and all sorts of stuff. It is an area wherein the objective, immutable facts of physics come into contact--nay conflict--the subjective area of human comfort.

Think about it. In any given building, you might have huge lecture halls and tiny offices; you might have young men coming in at six feet eight inches, three hundred pounds and women whose gross weight is no more than 75 pounds and don’t break 60 inches in height.

No matter how you slice it, someone is going to be uncomfortable.

Now consider the situation that a large number of these people have been trained--indeed have doctorates--in being critical.

In this crucible, it is clear that October (and March by way of symmetry) is not going to be a happy month for the folks who run the heating and air-conditioning on campus.

Over the last 22 years that I’ve been on campus, each October there has been a communication sent out to the citizens of campus: administrators, faculty, secretaries, coaches, custodians, and groundskeepers. First it went out by campus mail with blue ink on white paper, rolled out of a ditto machine; then in black and white; then by e-mail. It is a document that carries more meaning than its mere words convey and has survived through several changes of personnel and has accreted nuance as the years passed. One semester they didn’t send it out and the next semester, it was out all the earlier. It’s like the Bible; it is a document unto itself.

While, I will not reproduce it here, its main points are as follows:

We are turning off the air-conditioner;
At some time we will be turning on the heat;
There will be hot days after the air-conditioner is off;
There will be cold days before the heat is on;
At some point you will be miserable.
LIFE IS NOT FAIR!
Does this look easy?
Do YOU want THIS JOB?
Yeah, YOU!
This job would eat you up and spit you out you candy-a**ed bookworm.
If you are cold, you might want to dress decently for a change and not like some over-the-hill hooker.
If you are hot, bring in a stinking electric fan and maybe think about losing some weight.
Did you ever think of anyone besides yourself?
Did you ever think of sending a thank you card for the ten months out of the year you are comfortable?
Do I look like your mother?
I hope you treat her better than you do me.

I may be over-reading the subtext here.

In any case, I am getting worried because it hasn’t come out. In recent years, there has been some modernization in our HV/AC systems. We’ve put in some new windows. We’ve generally become more sustainable. It may be the case that they’ve figured out a way to take us through the transition seamlessly. If that is so, I will miss the memo. It meant a lot to me.

The Charcoal Grill/Gas Grill Paradigm Shift

2011-10-08T15:50:00.002-05:00

The Charcoal Grill/Gas Grill Paradigm Shift

By Bobby Neal Winters

I have been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern, middle-class, small-town, quasi-suburban lifestyle. I am hung in the middle between professional university administrator and country boy. This means I still don’t water the lawn, but I don’t hang a snake on the fence to make it rain either. Mainly that’s because I haven’t killed any snakes in the yard lately, but no matter, you get my meaning.

Daddy did not charcoal. The one time Daddy did any cooking outside, he hauled up a bunch of limbs in the yard, made a bonfire, and we had a weenie roast. We didn’t use coat hangers for the hot dogs, instead we sharpened tree limbs. It left a big, black, dead spot in the yard that reminded us of the cook out for years to come.

Daddy didn’t even cook out doors much on camping trips because he didn’t take us camping. He’d grown up in a house with a dirt floor. When the family got a house with a wood floor, it wasn’t big enough for all the kids, so the boys slept in the cellar. This didn’t change until 1942 when Daddy was drafted into the army where he got his fill of camping.

He took us camping exactly once. He made a fire of limbs and boiled coffee in the bottom of a coffee can. Whenever I tell this in front of a group, invariably there is one guy who pops up.

“Oh, yes, I’ve done that. It’s not bad. You put an egg in it to settle the grounds.”

Sorry, fellow, no egg for us. You can pick most of the grounds out with your fingers and the rest will eventually work their way out from between your teeth on there own.

There is a verse in the Bible describing Jacob and Esau: The boys grew up, and Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was content to stay at home among the tents. I figure after his time in the out of doors, Daddy wanted to follow Jacob’s example.

All of this to say, that I had to come up with the cooking out of door stuff from other sources.

Back when Jean and I first married, her folks had got us a Coleman stove for camping. We lived in student housing on the OSU campus, and we used it to make blackened chicken. We couldn’t make it in doors or it would set the smoke alarm off, so I set up the Coleman stove on the gate of my old Ford pickup and cooked it outside.

Eventually, we got a habachi and then gradually worked out way up until I got a grill big enough that I could put a whole sack of charcoal in at one time. My friend Mikey gave me one of those chimneys to start coals in and I thought I was something. It only took about an hour to get my coals going and then about 20 minutes to cook.

Damn! I was there.

Then a month or so back we did a cook out and I discovered my coal pan had rusted through. Well, no problem, I thought. Just go to Home Depot and buy a replacement when I need it.

Jean mentioned this to me last week because Lydia’s birthday is coming up, and she wanted hot dogs for her friends. So I made the Home Depot trip last Saturday.

Those of you who are wise to the ways of the world are a step ahead of me. They don’t sell replacement charcoal pans anymore--if they ever did. I found myself at Home Depot in the barbecue section at the end of the barbecue season. There around me were gas grills marked to sell.

What to do, what to do?

I bought a gas grill and spent some quality time in the out of doors putting it together. On Sunday, I turned on the gas, pressed a button, and had fire. Ten minutes later there were hot dogs.

Daddy would be proud.

A Shift of Metaphysics

2011-08-22T14:14:00.000-05:00

A Shift of Metaphysics

By Bobby Neal Winters

Before I was old enough to go to school, I used to sit on the floor and watch the old TV show Dark Shadows while my mother did housework in the background and we waited for the bus to bring my brother home from school.

Mom always joked that I had to explain it to her. She meant this as a compliment to my intelligence, but I think it’s actually a commentary on the level of writing in that show. It was actually written so that a four-year-old could understand it.

That having been said, Dark Shadows was my introduction to Barnabas Collins and the world of vampires. Let me say at the onset that I am not an expert on vampires. I’ve never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula nor much else beyond Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. Any knowledge I’ve gained I’ve done so through popular sources on TV and at the movies. The things I know are this:

Vampires feed on blood.
Vampires cannot come out in the daylight;
Vampires cannot see their reflection;
Vampires flee from the Cross;
Vampires can only be killed by special means which vary from source to source; a wooden stake through the heart will usually do the trick;
Vampirism is contagious;
There is a connection with bats.

Apparently, the Vampire Myth goes way back in history into the pre-scientific age, but I’ve seen articles in popular science magazines which have attempted to explain the Myth in scientific terms. It may have been no less than Isaac Asimov who attempted to connect the Vampire Myth with rabies. It’s not a bad case either.

This connection by Asimov and others grows out of the modern age. We cannot tolerate mysteries. We must have solid, scientific explanations.

But the purpose of a myth is not to be explained away with science. The purpose of a myth is to teach.

What the Vampire Myth teaches is important because there are vampires.

Okay, you have to take a shift into metaphor to see what I am saying, but bear with me for a moment. Haven’t you ever been around someone who sucks the life out of you? Who when you see them for what they are, their power over you disappears? Who cannot recognize the flaws in themselves? Who have no desire for redemption? Who are terribly hard to deal with?

Often these folks can be charismatic individuals--until you see them for who they are--and they can convert others to their cause while sucking the life out of them at the same time.

I’ve got everything in there but the connection with bats.

My point is that the Vampire Myth is a spiritual thing. It is based in the supernatural, the unnatural.

But in addition to the efforts by Asimov and others on the scientific front, the popular media has shifted as well. Vampirism is viewed in many, if not most, of the popular media on the subject, as a disease. Movies like I am Legend and Daybreakers view vampires as suffering from a disease that one might attempt to sure. It’s caused by a virus just like a cold or the flu.

It’s an extension of the arrogance of modernism into the realm of the undead. If there is a problem we can fix it. If their is a disease we can cure it.

As movies, I am Legend was better than Daybreakers. Though, as I will expand on momentarily, Daybreakers did a good job in capturing many of the spiritual insights the Vampire Myth offers us, it lacked the umami to bring those ingredients together.

Let me now expand. Sunlight kills vampires. It destroys them utterly. They are left as nothing but ashes. In Daybreakers, there was a cure found. The first man cured of vampirism had been caught on fire by the daylight but plunged himself into water to put out the flames. From there he was cured. I am reminded here of the purifying flames of purgatory or the Uncreated Light that was with God at the beginning of the world which burns away all that is impure in us.

There were also those among the vampires who didn’t want to be cured. Because of their fear of death, they were willing to subject themselves--and everyone else--to a life of eternal darkness.

So Daybreakers does capture the spiritual message of the Vampire Myth. What it does is buy into the scientific-materialist notion of mechanism for vampirism.

Bear with me while I tell a story. There is a man of my acquaintance who has some challenges in dealing with reality. One of these is that he could go months without paying his rent even though he had the money.

His landlord was a wealthy man who didn’t become wealthy by letting people go months without paying their rent. Why did he allow this man that option? The landlord’s father knew the renter’s father. The renter’s father had been an abusive man whose abuse had led to the renter’s challenged condition.

The scientific-materialist would say the reason the landlord let him go was because of the chemicals in his brain rewarded him for this act of altruism. The real reason is that his father taught him pity.

Science has some need to try to take over everything. It’s like kudzu. It has its uses, but one must be alert lest it get out of its proper place and succeed in taking over everything.

Three little words

2011-08-13T12:16:00.000-05:00

My Grandpa Byrd, my mother’s father, had been married in Mississippi to a woman who was part Choctaw. She died in the Spanish Influenza leaving him with two boys, Clyde and Joe, both of whom were handsome and charming but each of whom got into trouble in the way it is easy for handsome and charming young men to do.

My Grandma Byrd, mother’s mother, had been married in Alabama to a soldier who, as near as I can recall, had been stationed at Ft. Leavenworth where he died of the Spanish Influenza. They’d had a baby together who’d also died of the flu.

The two of them, Grandma and Grandpa, had married afterward. I know nothing of any love story between them. I do know that she referred to him as “Byrd,” which is not the greatest sign of Romantic love. Together, in addition to Clyde and Joe, they had Jack, Faye, Ona, and Tommy

My Grampa Sam and my Grandma Lora got married when he was 22 and she was 15. She lied about her age on the marriage license; I’ve got a copy of it. If a 22-year-old ran off with a 15-year-old daughter of mine, I’d have him put in prison. Seriously.

But.

But were it not for these circumstances, tragedies included, lining up, I would not exist.

I am the product of lies and tragedy.

I meditate on this in particular because as I grow older I am becoming judgmental and grumpy. I have certain dearly held beliefs. You shouldn’t lie on your marriage license to get married. You should get your inoculations against the flu. Delay gratification. Spend the interest; invest the principal. Buy low; sell high. Keep right except to pass. Always be specific when you lie.

If you’ve got a rule, I am ready to follow it.

But the rules get broken all the time. The people we love die before their time. People let hearts (or other organs) overrule their heads. Tragedy befalls us either randomly, through design, or through our own bad judgment.

Life goes on. Three little words. I prefer “I love you,” but these three will do.

Weed eaters, sex, and batteries

2011-08-01T10:02:00.000-05:00

Weed eaters, sex, and batteries

By Bobby Neal Winters

As some of you may have guessed, some of the little details of life that make the world that much more beautiful aren’t really all that important to me. I have now evolved enough in my development to appreciate this level of detail, to realize that some consider it to be very important, but, as of yet, I’ve not set attaining this level of detail in my own work to be an immediate, high priority.

Take for example lawn care. I mow my lawn on a regular basis. My family, who got into the detail thing even less than I do, gave me a high value on mowing when I was a child. We mowed the lawn for the snakes. This had a double effect, as Aquinas might say. The first of these was to keep the snakes away, as snakes prefer tall grass and will eschew mowed areas in favor of cover. The second is that if a snake were to come into the mowed area he would be rendered easier to find and kill.

It’s a practical thing: life and death.

A detail like weed eating, i.e. trimming and edging does not come into this. Mowing is for safety; trimming and edging is cosmetic.

But, as I am continually reminded, I am no longer a country boy. I live in town. A lot of town folks take what was once just an activity done for personal safety and turn it into a sport. It is a sport in the sense that they practice it themselves and observe--and criticise--the efforts of others.

While I like to think of myself as immune to peer pressure because I never did drugs (didn’t inhale because I’ve never even been in the room with a joint) and never drank a beer until the day after my oldest daughter was born (a St. Pauli Girl: you never forget your first girl), the peer pressure of weed eating has taken root.

I suppose this is because there is a certain amount of cool-looking equipment involved. Weed eaters extend our powers. One could say they are phallic to a certain degree. There are the electric ones, but with them you are tethered to the nearest electrical outlet and require electricity as an outside power source. It totally mutes the feeling of independence.

A gasoline powered machine makes you free. The gas-powered ones also require a special petroleum product to be mixed with the gasoline because of the 2-cycle engines. I find this to be an activity that separates the sexes.

To explain this, I have to be very careful. Women certainly are capable of creating the special mixture of gasoline required for 2-cycle engines. Indeed, as they have some much practice mixing up stuff for cakes and other women-stuff like that, one would suspect they would be far more adept at this than the male of the species. My point is they don’t choose to do it. It could be they leave it to us because “men ought to be good for something.” In any case, it seeming to be a male-only activity makes it more attractive; kind of like writing our names in the snow.

The trouble with gas-powered weed eaters is that they are incredibly tedious. Most only work well the first time they are used. The rest work well for a season. There is a tiny minority that work well for more than a season. These are the few who are lucky enough to be owned by men who know how to take care of things.

My father-in-law was such a man. He preached to me the gospel of draining gasoline from engines over the winter. He was a good man. He left me a well-taken-care-of Homelite weed eater. It always started on the first pull. It always ran as long as you needed it.

He then passed-away and I inherited it. It lasted one season with me. I left the gas in it over the winter, and it wouldn’t start this season. After I’d pulled on it long enough to give a convincing impression of a man having a heart attack, I began to hear his voice. It was gentle, with a touch of humor.

“Didn’t drain the gas over the winter, did you?”

“No,” heave, heave, cough, cough, sweat, sweat, “I didn’t.”

“Having trouble starting it, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” gasp, gasp, drip, drip, “I am.”

“Maybe if you drained the gas now, made up a new batch, and put a new spark plug in it would help.”

I rested for three days and tried this. The weed eater started but couldn’t sustain. I thought about my earlier analogy and all those Cialis commercials that are on, but I decided there was such a thing a pushing a metaphor too far. I also tried fixing my Weedeater brand weed eater, but to no avail.

While I was at Home Depot getting my new spark plug, I noticed something new. It was a battery-powered Ryobi weed eater. It didn’t cost all that much and it combined the freedom of the gasoline version with the ease of use of the electric one.

It’s an eight-teen volt machine. It starts every time.

Having written that just now, it strikes me that maybe, having removed my last excuse for not weed eating that I’ve out-smarted myself.

Such is life.

Listening to the trees

2011-07-17T12:35:00.001-05:00

Listening to the trees

By Bobby Neal Winters

Sometimes at night I will be lying awake in the darkness and the trees will talk to me. The traffic from the bypass will be nil. The sirens will be silent. The trains will be still.

And I can hear the trees. Some folks who are of a different turn might say that the wind is causing vibration in the leaves on the trees, but I know they are speaking to me. They say, “There is a storm coming” or “The storm will skirt off” or “There will be rain but no wind” or “There will only be wind.” Sometimes it’s hard to tell because I don’t speak tree as well as I used to. I grew up speaking tree all the time, but these days I’ve lost my fluency.

But they speak to me anyway, the ones around the house do, because I’ve planted them all. Wait that is inaccurate. My wife and I have planted them, or, in some cases, have suffered to allow them to remain planted. Some of our trees are the result of forgetful squirrels. The squirrels did the planting, but we allowed them first through ignorance and then through laziness and then through sentimentality to remain.

A tree in town is a lot of responsibility because it makes trash. It is a bother. Then in the winter ice can break off limbs and in the spring a storm might come through and push it onto your house or, worse, your neighbor’s.

But through various combinations of arboreal enthusiasm, squirrel dementia, and luck, we’ve got a yard full of trees. They are mature, healthy, and in their prime. I’ve seem some of them grow from things that could be quite happy in a plastic cup, contemplating a choice between bonsai-hood and life out in the yard, to something that could heat a home for a few days.

When I was a boy, I lived among trees. There were trees in the space--the park we called it--between my house and that of my grandparents. There were a group of five or six that I think of in particular. There were others that stood in a line, but these were grouped into what I want to call a copse. I don’t actually know what a copse is. It is a fine word connected with groups of trees, but it seems so fine that perhaps five or six trees is not enough to form one.

Nevertheless, there were these trees which--to me as a boy--seemed to be giant trees. These were what trees were like when they grew up. I thought of them as being eternal, existing forever into the past as had my father, mother, grandfather, and grandmother, who were also giants themselves.

But into my hands comes a strange, old picture: men sitting, standing, squatting beneath this copse of trees. It is clearly the same trees that I had grown up with, but they are different. They are smaller. They are not the trees that were eternal and existed, going forever into the past. These trees who had taught me their language were once young trees. The men beneath them were younger versions of my grandfather, my father, my uncles.

My grandfather, my father, my uncles are all now gone. And the copse of trees was greatly wounded by the storms of this last spring. The winds fell them and my brother had them piled and burned, smoke rising as from the pyre of a fallen Caesar.

Men and trees are both mortal. If the god’s and heroes can pass, then so can I.

My trees are talking to me again, and it is not the wind in the leaves. They are growing taller, looking like trees are supposed to look when they grow up. I’ve pictures of myself standing beside them when they are yet baby trees, child trees, adolescent trees. My hair has grown whiter; my face more etched with laugh-lines; my shape more like that of the adult male gorilla.

Trees have a less predictable life as they live in the out of doors. They may be fell by wind or winter, but I know they may well outlive me. After I am gone, they may still be giving shade to the passerby and food to the squirrel. Given the memory span of the squirrel and the inattention, laziness, and sentimentality of the human animal, they may do that for yet another generation.

At least this is what they tell me. Do you hear it?

Those Ancient Conversations: Archimedes and Cousin Gary

2011-07-10T15:35:00.002-05:00

When I was just a boy, my cousin Gary Burnett lived in Arizona. He told us, my brother and me, stories about it. There were plants there with thorns that, if I remember correctly, could shoot them at you even if you just walked too near. And the desert was deadly. You could get into trouble from the heat and die from it before you knew it.

Then there was a story about a family that had been on a trip and had car trouble. They had abandoned their car and attempted to make it back to civilization for help. They had died along the way. The youngest children had died first, closest to the car; then older children; and last the father, his family scrubbed from existence before his eyes. Death must’ve come as a bitter mercy to him.

As I say, I was a child when I heard this, and, as far as I know, I only heard it once. It made an impression on me. So much was this the case that when I was in Utah in the mid-nineties, at least twenty years later, I never went anywhere out of the Provo city limits without six gallons of water with me. For years, I never heard the words “Arizona” or “desert” without having a flash of skeletonized remains and mummified flesh stretched across bone.

Did I mention that Gary was a really good storyteller?

Now imagine that you are a storyteller and have a good story to tell, but there is no one around to tell your story to, or, I should say, there was no one to tell your story to who was capable of understanding it.

This was the case with Archimedes. I am reading a book now called The Archimedes Codex which is about the rediscovery and recovery of the so-called Archimedes palimpsest. According to this book, Archimedes had outlived the last person he believed capable of understanding him and so began writing letters to individuals at the library at Alexandria in order that they might be preserved for future generations when other worthy minds might come along who could understand what Archimedes was saying.

Those minds did come along from time to time. He was so far advanced from his contemporaries that his writings were almost lost, but they did survive long enough to come into the hands of such a Galileo and Newton to help kindle modern science.

This idea of being ahead of one’s time is important. We are surrounded by the achievements of the past which serve as scaffolding for us. We may climb high without much effort using structure which took hundreds or thousands of years to build. For example, Archimedes didn’t have algebra.

For most algebra is something they are forced to learn that they will never use. For those who use it, it is a language that facilitates the solving of problems. What is now the work of a few minutes and a few lines to an average high school student was once the work of many days of a great mind using many pages of argument. Algebra and other tools of mathematics provide an infrastructure for scientific ideas.

Archimedes worked without that infrastructure. It took almost two-thousand years for the language to catch up to where he was. He had faith to know that it would, so he wrote letters to the future.

I think about this in connection with Bible study. We are eavesdropping on a conversation that is thousands of years old. Parts of the conversation are like things we heard when we were very young. We heard our parents say words and saw them do things that we didn’t understand; sense data without a connecting narrative. As adults we can look back to try to piece it all together.

As with Archimedes, over the millennia, the language in which we can discuss the Bible has been built by the many great minds which have encountered it. Traditions have formed to help us along.

The stories my cousin Gary told us about Arizona scared us, but life has brought me experience to aid in interpreting those stories. The fear is still there, but experience brought knowledge to mature that fear into respect. The danger is just as real as he described: while in Utah, we learned out own desert horror stories.

But we did make desert trips. The knowledge that others gained and shared helped us to make it. The National Park system, cellphones, and highways were a help too.

Multimedia Computer: A Jimmy Swaggart Moment

2011-05-25T19:49:00.000-05:00

Those of us who are of a certain age will remember Jimmy Swaggart weeping pitifully before his congregation saying, "I have SINNED against GAWD."

Well, minus the tears, the taudry stories about hookers and cheap motel rooms, and anything even remotely as interesting as Jimmy's activities, you are about to read a similar confession. I have sinned against Ubuntu.

Yes. having installed Ubuntu on my machine, I began to research the steps required to install MythTV, which seems to be the package of choice for the Ubuntu types, and began to realize this isn't just about software. It is about a lifestyle choice. One has to be intentional about using Ubuntu as a media center. You can't just install it and let it go; a certain amount of persnicketyness is required.

G.K. Chesterton once remarked that it wasn't that Christianity had been tried and found wanting. It had been found difficult and left untried. Thus it is with MythTV.

It is spring; I want to devote myself to yardwork, after which I will watch television I've recorded on my media center.

I bought Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) and installed it on my Multimedia PC. Twenty minutes later I was watching TV. I erased my Ubuntu partitions, formatted the disk, and installed Windows right over it. It didn't even squeak. And I am glad, I say, glad about it.

I still need to install a fan that doesn't drive me nuts, but we are almost there.