A touch of Farmers' Day

I'd really like to thank you kind readers for the well wishes and support as I navigate (with no little whining) the road to recovery. Very thoughtful and touching and appreciated. I am blessed.

Saturday was the 90th iteration of Farmers' Day in Kimball. It started as a day to honor county farmers and ranchers who the locals understood were the producers which allowed the community to survive economically. Things haven't changed economically, and I'll just leave it at that.

Here are a few images from the parade.

The kids always put a smile on my face.

As does the Color Guard from Frankie Warren AFB. You can either have marching, or nukular weapons deliverin', but not both. Hmm. Maybe a sixth week of boot camp? Just teasing. When I was that age and not deployed I usually had a massive hangover on Saturday morning too.

KVFD finally took delivery of their new fire engine.

KHS Band! They're really good this year. I had a video but my phone decided to reformat its card...

Choo-choo!

A '61-ish Nash/Hudson Metropolitan from Wyoming.

Cub Scouts have returned to town after a 20 year absence.

 The next five images should be enjoyed in sequence.

PERSONAL FOUL, CHOP BLOCK, KID WITH TWO HATS. FIFTEEN MINUTES IN TIME OUT, REPEAT CANDY TOSS!

VERY autumnal light.

Those are BIG oxen!

And a couple of videos. 







And best for last, the Junior High Band! These kids are my favorites for some reason.



Mom was telling me last evening how cool Farmers' Day used to be. She tells great stories about the husband calling contests which were (and remain, IMO) legendary.

Huskers managed to defeat both Northwestern and themselves last evening. Nice to see them returning to their Cornhusker Traditions and away from whatever that maniac bo pelini was trying to accomplish.

And now I'm off to soak the foot. 

Red sky

Red sky in morning, sailor take warning,
Red sky at night, sailor's delight.

If the weather guessers are to be believed we shouldn't get much weather from the front that's passing on this, the first full day of Autumn, 2016. Some cloudiness, a little breeze, a little rain. That'll be okay, and if it's not okay, it'll still be okay, if you take my meaning.

I'm from a small farming community. There are pluses and minuses to living in a small town. Quiet, little traffic, little crime. It's hard to get scented tofu, though, and the only rabid progressives are in local government and populate the school system. And everybody knows you and knows your business. Which is a plus as well as a minus. On the plus side, no one honked or yelled at me for standing in the middle of Highway 30 at dawn and snapping a few pics. "That's just Shaun, he does that shit all the time."

The last three weeks have been anything but enjoyable. The infection near my left Achilles tendon has been tough to treat, and the healing process is taking longer than, well, longer than I'd like. The endotoxins released from the cellular battlefield make me ill and cause a lot of inflammation and irritation, thus a lot of pain. Unlike the prospective worst U.S. President in history, I'm not good at powering through the sick and hurt the way all XX'ers have done for all of time. I lack a platoon of secret squirrels to carry me around, and I lack minions, and I also lack the dozens of gubmint pseudo-physicians putting their lives and careers on hold to minister to my every sniffle and cerebral-vascular accident. Butt I digress.

Healing the infection has meant forced inactivity. The foot needs to be elevated a lot, and physical activity generally involves the foot not being elevated. So, sitting around and reading, which would be heaven, if I could forget the chores that are piling up. The mind, of course, could and should be active regardless of what the body is doing, so I really should have been writing these last 21 days and change. And my computers are all laptops, perfectly operable from the foot-up and reclined position. But the spark has been lacking. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

I haven't been completely inactive. Cattle need checking and tending to on a daily basis pretty much regardless of other considerations. It's a responsibility one cannot duck. This time of year, fortunately, the checking and tending can be done almost exclusively from the pickup.

Yesterday we moved cows from summer to fall pasture, and that was done mostly from the pickup. The journey was about five miles, the cows knew where they were going, and the dogs got to chase cows!, which they live for. It was a pretty morning, coolish and misty at the beginning but warming up and breaking into clear September skies when we finished.





The fact that celestial/calendar autumn arrived while we were moving the cattle had nothing to do with going from summer to fall pasture. The calendar only rarely lines up exactly with range conditions. We went into summer pasture on July 1, for instance, eleven days after calendar summer had arrived.

The summer pasture was holding well and would have provided good grazing until hard freeze. The fall pasture we elected to go to has been ungrazed for two years, however, and is lush with a season's full growth as well as abundant regrowth of the cool season grasses. The idea is to take advantage of that regrowth while we have the opportunity and before a hard frost arrives. Depending on what mother nature does, we could be reaping the benefit of springlike browse for some weeks to come. And the summer pasture will enjoy a few weeks, perhaps, of regeneration sans grazing pressure. Hey, presto! Rangeland management!

They really like cool season regrowth...

Under a wide and cloudy sky...

I began writing this on Friday morning (Sept. 23), but somewhere along in here I had enough pain going on that I wasn't writing very well, so most of the following was written on Saturday afternoon.

I've kept up with other bits and bobs of chores; those that don't require a lot of walking or a lot of time. One such chore is draining, cleaning and refilling stock tanks. Not much of a chore, really, and one that can be done in small bites.

Our stock tanks are  generally used heavily enough that the aquatic environment is more like a slow moving stream rather than a still pond or lake. They teem with life, including algae, microscopic single- and multi-cellular organisms, and water bugs. Cows drink about 15 gallons each day, and calves about 5-6 gallons, so there's a constant influx of fresh water to replace what the cows (and evaporation) take. Therefore, when in use for watering, the tanks never see heavy growth or blooming of algae or water plants.

That being the case, they don't really need cleaning each year. They are completely open to the environment though, and accumulate dust and tumbleweeds and other atmospheric detritus, so they do begin to silt up over time, and it's generally easier in the long run to clean them out every year.

Draining.

The green stuff is a combination of silt and algae and assorted bits of "gunk"

Most of that stuff is dried algae. This one hadn't been cleaned for two years.

The drain hole from the inside. This is a bottomed or portable tank.

Drain plug and gasket. The gasket has seen better days.

Old and busted, new hotness.

It fits! And it's an o ring rather than a flat gasket. But it works.

The other (out) side of the plug.

Where the plug goes.

The plug fitting is sized for a slip-joint pliers handle. Pliers are the universal tool of  ranching.

Ta-dah! O ring seals perfectly.

Clean, shiny and ready for dihydrogen monooxide.

This is a bottomless or permanent tank. It's made of galvanized sections bolted together in a ring, laid into a base of concrete which is plumbed for drainage as well as supply.

Water is mostly drained here, but I let the gunk dry a bit more before scooping it out.

Another bottomless tank. The open pipe is the standpipe which is fitted into the drain. The standpipe opening sets the water level as overfill flows down the standpipe and into the drain. This tank had also been uncleaned for two years and has a nice growth of aquatic weeds.

This end of the standpipe screws into the drain in the concrete base of the bottomless tank.

Standpipe

I've just removed the standpipe and water is flowing through the drain.

Drain discharge, cleverly placed on the downhill side of the tank.

These calves have five other tanks to choose from, but they want to drink from the empty one...

And it's their lucky day, because...

...here comes the water!

I've just replaced the standpipe, using the other universal ranching tool, the pipe wrench.

And that's another annual chore complete.

Earlier today (Saturday) I attended the 90th Annual Farmers' Day parade. Hope to throw up some pics and vids and a complete recap tomorrow. Or so. Depends on a couple of things. Whether I'm pain-free-ish enough for one. And whether I'm in the proper mood, or can force myself into the proper mood. Part of that last may depend on how well the Huskers play tonight.

Hope this finds you all well and enjoying early autumn.

Life's like that

Each mortal life is an enterprise which ends, as they say, gravely.

Many years ago a pair of strapping young lads -- brothers aged 18 and 16 -- went out on a bright summer morning to play tennis. The date was July 1. That simple bit of exercise changed their lives forever.

John, the elder, lived to be 93 years old, and his long, full life included marriage, two daughters, and great success as an executive, businessman, and entrepreneur.

Junior, the younger, died on July 7. That was it for Junior, finis, the end, period, dot. He left behind no children to listen to the Galaxy Song and marvel at the amazing unlikeliness of their birth.

Life's like that.



The year was 1924, the lawn where the brothers played tennis was at the White House in Washington, D.C., and their parents were, of course, President Calvin and First Lady Grace Coolidge.

The culprit in young Calvin's death was bacterial septicemia which developed from an infected blister on the top of the third toe of the lad's right foot -- a blister he got from the tennis match.

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Life as we know it is very tenacious. We humans have an amazing immune system, and for as long as men have lived, every single one of them has shrugged off scores of potentially deadly infections. This was true long before the advent of antibiotics.

So long as the immune system is working in an otherwise healthy human, it will almost always triumph over the bacteria. Sometimes it doesn't.

Today we're fortunate to have antibiotics which give the immune system a critical assist in the battle.

Antibiotics don't do the whole job. They kill a lot of bacteria, but they don't kill all of the bacteria. The body itself still has to do the heavy lifting of killing bacteria, cleaning up and excreting the toxins and debris left on the battlefield, and repairing damaged tissues. This is why the very young, the very old, and those whose immune systems are otherwise not up to snuff suffer increased mortality and morbidity from bacterial infection, even with the assist of powerful antibiotics.

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In 1989 a young E-3 Yeoman (YNSN) named James Mayhall joined my squadron in the middle of deployment, meeting the boat during one of our Mediterranean port visits. He had a cold and cough when he arrived and I saw him at sick call. His symptoms were typical of a viral upper respiratory infection (URI), what you would commonly call a bad cold or a touch of the flu. He had a fever of about 101, muscle and joint aches and pains, a headache, and a significant but dry cough. His lungs sounded fine and his heart was ticking along normally. He was a young, healthy sailor who'd managed to catch a dose of the "travel crud."

Travel crud is a pretty common malady. When a sailor meets his ship overseas, the travel part can be pretty exhausting. Long plane rides, bus and taxi rides, overnight stays in transient barracks or foreign hotels, and the stress of joining a new command. Lots of time spent in crowded conditions with dozens or even hundreds of people doing the same thing. Hurry up and wait, long hours of confinement in the closed atmosphere of airplanes and transient quarters. Miserable food, usually some level of dehydration, little if any real rest or sleep, and little if any exercise other than lugging that dammed heavy seabag across half the globe. Your travel companions come from all over the country, and you meet other travelers from all over the planet. Everyone breathes the same air, and everyone shares bugs. Many of those bugs your immune system hasn't seen before, and you return the favor, sharing bugs that are strange to your companions. At the end of the journey you're exhausted, malnourished, dehydrated, dirty, smelly, and in a very different time zone. Each of those stressors chip away a bit at the efficiency and efficacy of your immune system.

If you think about it, it's pretty amazing that we can survive the experience at all. Almost all of us do, though, almost all the time, and usually with nothing worse than a stomach ache or a case of the sniffles.

But sometimes the outcome is much worse.

We'll never know exactly why, but but some combination of travel stressors put Jim Mayhall's immune system enough out of whack that what began as a mild case of travel crud turned into a raging bacterial septicemia. Only a few hours after I'd sent him to his rack with a routine URI he was in the ship's ICU with bilateral fulminant pneumonia, fighting for his life.

Despite our best medical efforts Jim died the next morning, about 22 hours after he came to sick call.

It's always seemed such a sad ending; a young sailor, joining his first operational command and embarking on a real-life true naval adventure, only to be cut down far from home and among strangers.

Life can be like that.

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In my September 7 post I shared the tale of my infected Achilles tendon. Well, a week has gone by, and a miserable week it was. I had a lot of pain and I was pretty sick. I took massive doses of antibiotics, steroids and anti-inflammatories, and even some opiate pain medicine.

In my misery I spent no little time thinking about Calvin Junior, Jim Mayhall, and even Gus McCrae. What would be my fate? I wasn't really worried, but I knew that things could go bad pretty quickly.

On Monday I turned the corner and started to quickly get better. I'm still a bit sore and still healing, but I anticipate a return to full duty in a very short while.

As usual though, the "why" question keeps bouncing around inside my head. Why did I get better instead of the alternative? Why do some people not get better? When you get right down to it, there's just no way to know.

Life's like that

FG

Some days having an airport next door is okay. Well, pretty much every day. But some days are better than others. Goodyear-built FG-1 Corsair.

The stuff that happens

I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I was warned, in my youth, that things would be different when I got older.

When I was a young navy fellow I did a lot of running on the flight and hangar decks of aircraft carriers. Not content to simply embrace that level of silliness, I almost always chose to run in "boots and utes" (combat boots and utilities) because I was deeply in love with the profound coolness of my magnificent self. The running was quite important as I really did need to be fit for my job, but at the end of the day I paid rather a high price for the coolness upgrade.

Running generates a lot of kinetic energy. The feet, legs and the rest of the body are designed to absorb and dissipate the energy, spreading the load so that no single point takes all the impact. While the structural design of our human body is superb, even more amazing is the way it's constantly updating, upgrading and repairing itself. But there are limits to this self-repair, and we were never really designed to run on unyielding steel decks while shod in combat boots. My particular body did the best it could but did not emerge unscathed.

In 2007, as a result of my dedication to self-coolness, most of my left Achilles tendon pulled loose from the heel bone, while on the starboard side a similar thing happened to a lesser extent. On Groundhog Day, 2007, I had the left side surgically repaired and for the most part it's been reasonably trouble free ever since.

Oh, it's always a little bit sore but that's just what happens when you live long enough to regret youthful stupidity. Occasionally it flares up into frank tendinitis, which is usually pretty painful and causes some gimping around.

The tendinitis flared up over the weekend, but this time it came with a twist. I spent a good bit of time working on fence Saturday and Sunday, preparing to turn cattle into an as-yet ungrazed pasture. By the time Monday came my Achilles was rather tender and swollen. Nearly done with my fencing repairs, I forged ahead to finish, and as the day progressed the pain increased.

This time the pain was a bit different. In addition to the ache of tendinitis, there was an underlying burning sensation which I hadn't experienced before.

When I got home and pulled my boots off I noticed the problem right away. The back of my heel was red and inflamed and leaking fluid. It was infected.

I spent a rather miserable night Monday.

On Tuesday I was at the local medical clinic when they opened their doors at 7 a.m. Within an hour I'd had the infected area debrided, drained and dressed and was on my way to the pharmacy to pick up some antibiotics and anti-inflammatories.

Now it’s Wednesday morning and I’m right up against deadline for my weekly Business Farmer submissions. I’m very, very sore. It took well over an hour for me to get up and dressed. I find it quite irritating and exasperating when the simplest things become major challenges, just because of a bit of pain.

Of course I’m exceedingly fortunate to have only a bit of temporary pain to deal with for a few days. My foot will quickly heal itself with the assistance of antibiotics and steroids. Only eighty years ago, before the advent of antibiotics, such an infection might well have been a death sentence.

I suspect that I’ll be gimping and grumbling today and tomorrow but will likely be back to business as usual by the time you read this.

These are days of miracles and wonder, and that’s something I usually take for granted.

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But wait, now it gets really weird!

I always hate it when I come across snakes that have been smashed on the road. Seems like a waste. In reality though, people, cars and roads are as much a part of nature as snakes are. Some cars will squish some snakes. In the fullness of evolutionary time, nature will adjust and fewer snakes will get squished. I understand this, just as I understand that while a squished snake may be cause for regret, it's not a tragedy. It's all part of the grand panoply of life.

Anyway, as I was rolling toward home this morning, hurrying a bit to get to a place I could put my aching foot up and relax, I saw a freshly squished snake. Turned out to be a nice sized and formerly healthy prairie rattlesnake.

On a rather inspirational (if I say so myself) whim I decided to collect and preserve the head and rattles, even though the head was badly smashed. My thought was that I could take some detailed pictures to share with you kind readers -- the kind of pictures that rattlesnakes are seldom willing to pose for.

Let me just say that even though the snake was clearly dead and smashed beyond any possibility of biting me, it was extremely hard to convince myself to pick up that head. But I did it. For you, my readers.

So here are a couple of pictures. The snake head and rattles are now safely tucked away in a plastic bag in my freezer.

That's MISTER Revolutionary to you, cupcake

Immanuel Kant said of immaturity that "...is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another."

Somewhere around the same time a bunch of racist, sexist, homophobic pigs got together and signed a document that said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Less than a century later a tall, scruffy-bearded cat in a stovepipe hat said, "Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation -- or any nation so conceived and so dedicated -- can long endure."

Less than a century later some mackerel snapper from New England said that America was "...unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed...And so," he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

Twenty years later an old, washed up actor said, "From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden."

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In 1949 some English dude published a book wherein he noted that "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

Well, here's the truth, America. You don't have to unfuck the government. You only have to unfuck yourself. Then all the rest of that shit will work.

But you can't just say you've done it. You've actually gotta do it. Opera non verba.