Drought

Mom and I went for a walk last night and found that the stream behind our house is dry for the first time in the 32 years since we have lived in this house. Oh, there are a few puddles but no water is flowing and the rocks in the stream bed are dry. It will take 15 to 18 inches of rain to get us back to a normal situation.

Defensive driving

Mom and I are taking our 3rd defensive driving class this week. If we take the class every 3 years we get a discount on our insurance and since we are not doing a lot of other things it is a good thing to do. And, we do learn or relearn a few things about driving. Like the 3 second rule. What you may ask is the 3 second rule? Vell, I'll tell you. It is how far you should stay behind the vehicle in front of you on the highway. Oh. But how do you know? Well, you pick a marker that the vehicle is passing and see if it takes you 3 seconds to get there.

Also, when you are stopped behind another car in traffic, how far back should you be? You should be far enough back to see its tires on the road. That allows you room to pull around the car if it is stalled and maybe enough room not to get smashed into it if someone hit you from behind.

Learning to Drive

When I was 14 I was working on the farm and drove the tractor all of the time. Sometimes on Sunday afternoon I would take the tractor over to my friends house about a mile and a half away and we would just sit around and shoot the breeze.

But there was another way that I got around. My sister Peggy was living at home and working in the Sylvania plant at Brookville. She bought a 1942 Ford Coupe to use to get to work. It had a high speed differential which meant that it didn't have much power but once you got moving it would run like a sacred rabbit. Since we lived on the back road and I knew every road in the township I would ask her to borrow it when I wanted to go to a 4-H club meeting at Shanondale or to visit another friend somewhere in our part of the world. Several tmes I took the back roads to Summerville on Sunday afternoon, or to Limestone to go swiming.

I took my drivers test the day after I was 16 and the cop said it seemed like I had been driving for a while. I said yes I learned to drive on the farm.

Road work

Until 1952 the road past our house was dirt (mostly clay) and in the winter and spring of the year it got deep ruts whenever it was wet and the ground was not frozen. Sometimes it got so bad that we had to park the car up at the T (about 2/10s of a mile away from the house. For a month or more in the spring the only vehicles that got through were the mailman in his Model A Ford and the Milk truck that picked up the milk. Whenever the road dried enough we would hook the drag to the tractor and fill in the ruts so we could get the car in to the house.

In the wintertime the road often drifted shut with snow and sometimes the Township did not plow us out for a week or more. In 1944 we were snowed in for 5 weeks before they brought in bulldozers to open up the road. Dad had to park the car at the main highway, about a mile away,and walk out to get to work and he had to carry in groceries. My oldest sister had to walk through the snow to get to the bus to go to high school.

Things began to change in the summer of 1952. Dad convinced the Township Supervisors that the road needed to made passable in the winter for the school bus, mail, and milk truck, so they agreed to haul in sandstone to build a base for the road. That summer, in June my friend Roy and I were still 14, but old enough to get work permits, and the Township hired us to work on the road breaking the big rock into little rocks that the roller could crush in to the dirt. We worked about 4 weeks busting rocks on a little over a mile of road from Pumptown to the T. We got $1.00 per hour and worked about 8 hours a day. I was in pretty good shape when we finished. Of course we still had hay making and grain harvesting and chores to do but we were happy to have some money of our own.

With a solid stone base on the road the Township made an effort to keep the road open all winter and that made things a lot better.

Contractors In Iraq

According to an article in Harpers magazine over 1,000 private contractors(mercenaries) have been killed in Iraq and over 13,000 have been wounded. This increases the american deaths by 25% and wounded by about 1/3.

Emerson on Thinking

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-

Quote of the day

"The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory."
Paul Fix

Age 13

When I was 13 years old my dad worked 8 hour shifts on the gas wells: midnight to 8 am, 8 to 4 and 4 to midnight. My brother was away at college so I had a lot of responsibility on the farm. Every Third week I got up at 5:00 am and milked 25 cows, then fed the calves, chickens, and pigs and then washed the milkers. I washed up and ate breakfast at 7:00 and then set the milk cans out for the milk truck and got on the bus at7:20.

The next week when dad had the 8 to 4 shift he did the milking morning and evening and I did the feeding and washed the milkers. When dad worked 4 to midnight, I came home from school at 4:20 and changed clothes and started milking at 5:00 pm. We ate supper at 6:00 pm and I was usually in bed by 8:30.