Head, Heart, Hands, Health. 4-H Stories, Part One: No Mony Mony, Ever.

Standard language warning, it is me, after all.

Do I need to explain 4-H to people?  I have no idea if this is a commonly understood thing anymore, or if it was and is the near-sole province of farm communities.

"TURN IT OFF!!! RIGHT NOW!!!"
The words boomed shrilly across the exhibitor's hall on that late June night as the County Extension Agent, Ann, stomped toward the PA system, looking for all the world like she was preparing to commit murders.  Ann was normally smiling and working to get various kids' attention and participation in activities and conversations, her enthusiasm for these things seeming to me to be a little over the top, but wow, was she mad right then.  The cause of her sudden rage?  The first 4 seconds of this:

Life With Crazy Larry (Don't ever call him that to his face)

Buckle up, friends, this is a long one.

Good walls make good neighbors, and good fences take a chainsaw and a solid morning's work

I was, maybe, 21, having a couple beers on a Saturday night, when I ran into my friend Bloach and he poleaxed me by telling me, in not so many words, that my Dad was proud of me for building him a fence.  The wording of the compliment my father paid me, told to his friends and relayed to me secondhand, was so utterly Dad that I'll remember it until I die.  "I guess they do grow up sometime."  I laughed at those words that night, but remembering it now brings tears to my eyes.  Knowing Dad, knowing the man he was and is, and knowing what I’d both put him through and been through with him, that was about right.

On timing, chains, timing chains, and me slacking

To my tens of loyal readers:

Apologies on the lack of anything substantive this week.  The timing chain on my car's engine broke late Sunday/early Monday morning.  If you're unfamiliar with the mysteries of modern internal combustion engines, this means that the engine suffered catastrophic damage, leaving me without a way to get around on my own.  My time this week has been swallowed by alternately crapping my pants, breaking out in cold sweats, and finding a new vehicle.

As of yesterday afternoon, I am back on the road, thanks in large part to an unexpectedly strong support network who got me in touch with the people I needed to 1) find a car, 2) get an excellent rate on a car loan, and 3) haul my ass around until I got things squared.  You people know who you are, and you have my thanks.

I should be able to get something new slapped together over the weekend.  To the 13 people who checked my blog this week hoping for something new and interesting, I apologize.

I'll be back soon, so bear with me,

Doug

It's Not Fake, It's Pre-determined

 

Ah, Bobo, you were one of Gramp's favorites

 

I'm twelve years old, sitting in the high school gym on a Thursday night, and a large, sour-smelling man in a red, white, and blue singlet is threatening to kill me.  

You Never Even Called Me by my Name (Wherein I start out wistful and then go all the way off the rails)

Most good stories involve alcohol at some point, whether in the story itself or in the telling

Many years ago, a young man named Adolph (he was given the name before that other jackass ruined it for everyone) attended a wedding.  In his small, almost entirely German Catholic farm community, a wedding was less an intimate family affair and more an excuse to round up everyone who lived within 5 miles of the bride and groom for a party.  Young Adolph had a bit too much fun at that wedding, and drank quite a bit more dandelion wine than he should have.  He found himself in such a state that getting home was looking like a sketchy proposition, but luckily there was a solution at hand.

You know what goes into sausage, don't you? Why I'm a heartless bastard when it comes to pet pictures.

If you think trigger warnings should be a thing, I'm going to discuss, in part, how we get meat.  You have been advised.

Seriously, if you don't want to hear details about cutting along the dotted lines, you should leave now.

I didn't really get attached to pets when I was younger, and even now I'd much rather watch videos of dogs falling off things than of dogs being sooo cute (#12 totally restored my faith in humanity, though).  Mind you, I like dogs, cats, etc., and they tend to like me, but butchering day forces a pragmatism that precludes much emotional investment in animals.  No, I never butchered a house pet (wow, that got dark real quick, you sicko), but taking livestock from living thing to packaged cuts of meat colored the way I've looked at all animals for quite a while.

Growing up rural, Overture: Stay in the lines

Not actually from back home, but fairly representative of most county roads

Rural Ohio in the early 90's was a pretty orderly backdrop for a teen's life. Roads that connected the places you started from with the places you were going to all ran in straight lines, north-south or east-west, letters one way and numbers the other starting from the northeast corner of the county.  This orderly grid system made navigating very simple for 16 year old me, as I only had to know that there was a party on, say, Road 5 between G and H, in order to find my way there with about 8 friends in tow.

The occasional diagonal road was given a bottom-of-the-alphabet letter, and short spur roads (sometimes paved, but often only gravel) got an alphanumeric designation (F-6, I-9, you sunk my Battleship) depending on where they fell on the county grid. Those spurs were where we ended up many nights; thirty-odd cars on the roadside with knots of kids standing, talking, drinking, smoking, dancing, kissing, and occasionally fighting under dark skies to the tune of car stereos blasting from open trunks. We lived our nights on the straight lines between other straight lines.