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Month: July 2021

I’m Warning You: The Plumbing Around Here Is Pure Evil

25 July 2021 / / 0 Comments
6 Min Read

I never thought I would be compelled to publicly complain about plumbing.

Yet, here we are…

“D*ck Guillotine.”

No, I’m not talking about the lead singer of the fantastic dumb-rock band, Electric Six. That would be D*ck1LOL, I can’t actually type out d-i-c-k because of my stupid self-censoring WordPress plugin. Hilarious, I say. Valentine. Though I can see how you could easily mix those two up. Instead I’m talking about the Word Of The Day, brought to you by the fine ----- at Better Beach Rentals.

“Better Beach Rentals?!?” you say. “I totally forget that you were still hung up on that bizarro beach house experience you had…way back in March.”

Okay, so I know that my ongoing review of the shit-tastic fiasco that was our 5-week stay at Eden Cove 9 (aka EC9)–which you can read up, albeit in reverse chronological order, here–has been dragging on for a while now. But I plead with you to give me a break–there were more layers to this stinky-ass onion than I had anticipated.

Plus, you know…I’m kinda long-winded about the smallest of frickin’ details, so there’s that working against me too.

All that being said, we really should just dive right into today’s theme without further context…

Level Four: Plumbing The Depths Of Hell

Shower [Severe-Lack-Of] Power!

So keep in mind that EC9 is very loudly touted as a “luxury experience,” and if you look at pictures of the bathrooms, you would be inclined to agree. Even in person, they look pretty fancy for the most part.

But be not deceived. The all suck butt in their own special ways.

For starters, EC9 boasts 3 and 1/2 bathrooms, including 3 very nice tiled showers. Good luck getting a luxury experience in any of them, though.

Two of them suffer from the same problem, and that is the shower has 3 options: the big shower head, the handheld shower head, and the body jets that shoot out right at ya. The issue is that you really only get to choose which one not to use at any given time, so the water pressure is always split between two of them, therefore you never get any decent pressure from any source.

It may sound like folly to complain about this, but I guarantee you, when you (or your insurance company) is paying for “luxury” and you can’t get a shower with decent pressure–it will piss you off to no end.

Eventually I discovered that the Elder’s shower–the least fancy of the 3–only had one option, the big shower head, and thus could actually provide a decent and comfortable experience.

The catch, though? The handle that allowed you to adjust the temperature was…simply missing. Just not there at all. In time I found that I could move it ever so slightly if I really dug my nails into the exposed hardware and twisted, but nevertheless is sure made for several nearly-scalded-scrotal experiences.

Though the most tolerable, Shower #3 still fell waaaaaay short of “luxury.” I mean, how hard can it be for maintenance to replace the ----- heat-adjusting handle? That can’t cost more than $10!

The Impossible Toilet.

Speaking of easily fixed issues that remain unaddressed, the Impossible Toilet is the one thing that made me say, “Really?!? The management and/or owner couldn’t be bothered to do this one thing right? Me-thinks I might be in the midst of a shit-show…”

What is this Impossible Toilet of which I speak, you wonder? Well let me show you:

Gif-ure 1: The dumbest way to get carpal tunnel syndrome.

Do not adjust your television sets. You are seeing a toilet handle that got installed upside down. And remained upside down. Again, I know how stupid it sounds. But this was the moment that the thought “Oh my god, I rented a ----- fun house” first went through my mind.

As you can see from the video, with the handle pointing in instead of out, it actually becomes really hard to get your hand back there to flush it. And once you do…well, nevermind not trying to rub the back of your hand all over the toilet lid–the human arm was never designed to pull up while in that position. I think I pulled a tendon in my arm every time I tried to use that toilet.

And surprisingly, even if when I was motivated enough to put the lid down just to flush, I found that it still hurt my arm like heck to pull up with my arm twisted around in that position.

Yet another reason to leave you wondering “what is up with this place? It’s just so…weird.”

The Back Breakers.

Of all the 4 toilets in EC9, I don’t recall a single one having a stable seat. That’s right: they were all Back Breakers.

A slightly wobbly toilet seat seems silly, but when you have pre-existing back issues? It’s no laughing matter when you’re sitting there doing your biz, when you go to slightly readjust your position and–WHEEEVP!2Because that is totally the sound something makes when it goes sideways. Your torso remains in place while the seat and your hip region slide violently to the side.

It’s not a joke man. That will jack your back up lickity-split.

A quick errata though: now that I think about it, there was one toilet that was nice and stable. But of course, it had two fatal character flaws: 1) it was the only toilet that couldn’t be accessed from a common space (like a hallway), as it was attached to the room where the in-laws would be sleeping, and so I only got to use it on occasion, and then only in the middle of the day; and 2) it had a vent constantly blowing freezing cold air directly at the king (or queen) upon their throne, so long-term shat-sessions were, shall we say, highly discouraged.

The D*ck Guillotine.

Yes, it is the moment you’ve all been waiting for, in which you finally get to find out what, pray-tell, exactly a D*ck Guillotine is.

Let’s start with yet another visual demonstration:

Gif-ure 2: Chop-chop, boys!

Growing up, one of my aunts had a D*ck Guillotine in her main bathroom, and it literally GAVE ME NIGHTMARES. And if you’re of the ilk who like stand when they pee, than you should be gravely terrified of these C*ck-Choppers as well.

As you can see from my demonstration, a DG is a toilet seat that cannot physically stay in the upright position. So if a gent goes to take a whiz at a DG, one of three things happens:

  1. He has to awkwardly hold the seat in the locked and upright position with his non-aiming hand. Not only is the human back meant to never be in this position, it’s just plain nasty to be touching the underside of a toilet seat. Gross.
  2. He tries to out-piss the toilet seat. But c’mon, we all know that you can’t fully empty your bladder in the time it takes for the seat to get to stream-level. This always ends in one way: a violent and ungodly attempt to cut off one’s flow before straight-up pissing all over the toilet seat during its descent. Even if stopped in time, there is the real medical threat of straining one’s urethral sphincter muscle in the process. And nobody wants that.
  3. If one is overly-endowed, the D*ck Guillotine lives up to its name..and pinches your peter in a particularly peculiar position. Ouch. So…three cheers for being an “average man”?

In other words, such a toilet is completely ----- useless to any man who doesn’t have the time and/or functioning knee joints to sit down to pee. COMPLETELY USELESS, I SAY!

The Steaming Pile Of Sh*t.

Instead of ending on the high note of penile decapitation, I’ll leave you with how we left the lone toilet we had on the top floor with our and the Younger’s bedrooms: fortunately, not completely full of shit.

With about 5 days left to go of our 5 weeks stay, that toilet decided to stop refilling itself with water after flushing. Often times this can easily be rectified with just a little bit of fiddling, but not this time, no siree, Bob! The fricking handle to the water valve was frozen in place on top of that, and the last thing I wanted was to break the ----- thing off trying to get it to turn!

So we just learned to co-exist with a toilet that we couldn’t take a dump in for those final days. We limited it to liquid waste only, and then after a handful of uses, would use the Younger’s whale bath toy to haul enough water over to manually induce a “flush.”

Now, you may be wondering: why we didn’t do what any renter should have done and called the Better Beach Rental’s maintenance team to come out and fix it?

I’ve already touched on some of the interactions we had with these guys (the elevator, the smoke detectors, etc), while I’ve yet to share other run-ins and fiascos. Let’s just suffice it to say we were rather frustrated with their seeming inability to get anything fixed in a timely manner.

Anne Frankly, we were simply tired of their sh*t.

The End.

…of the plumbing stories anyway.

Why, but of course there is more. With these asshats, there’s always more…

Content created on: 24/25 July 2021 (Sat/Sun)

Footnotes & References:[+]

How To Be Infinitely Popular In A Completely Asinine Way

18 July 2021 / / 0 Comments
7 Min Read

Don’t work hard, work smart!

Though I admit I’m working on something pretty ----- dumb…

“The Prissy Pet Project”–does that ring a bell? Yeah, I know it’s been a while since I rapped at ya about it, so I forgive you if you have no clue what I’m jabbering on about. But fear not! I’ll bring mostly up to speed.

In long, you can read all about it here.

In short–which is the version you were really hoping for–it’s my long-lived and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at becoming an online kimchi broker, but has so far only really ended with me having a fierce hatred for Amazon and capitalism, along with a totally useless Tumblr blog with about 4k followers.

Originally, that “totally useless” blog with a paltry 4,000 followers was supposed to act as the advertising arm of my Amazon store front, kimchiandketo.com, and all the profits were going to be made by getting a small cut of any Amazon sale made by clicking on any of my advertised products.

But thanks to the greedy forces of capitalism, Amazon decided to make that “small cut” even smaller, rendering my business model completely unprofitable. Hence, rendering my (by far) more successful blog as useless as a bull’s teat.

I have to admit, though…it was kinda nice being sorta popular in at least one part of the interwebs. And part of what made kimchi-and-keto so popular was the use of an automated re-blogging widget called Queue+. Basically it would let me reblog other blogs’ posts en masse, randomly, and on a regular schedule.

Of course, the more you post, the more exposure you get, the more followers you gain, and the bigger you ego-concerning-completely-asinine-and-inutile-things gets. Now back in August 2020, I had just about ran plumb out of what was once a rather generous supply of queued posts. Instead of finding new content to refill my queue, I instead found it much easier to reblog all the posts of the one blog I knew would be full of suitable content: mine.1My Tumblr blog, not this blog you’re reading right now. Recycling all my posts was mildly tedious process, but at the end of the day I had quite a few posts ready to be fired off one at a time, at the frequency of my choosing:

Figure 1: Yes, Jefe, I would say I have plethora of posts in my queue…

At the time, I made a handy little calculation of when my now-overflowing well of posts would run dry, based on various posting frequencies:

Frequency: Posts per Day:# of Days:Burndown Date:
30 min48233.5March 24, 2021
15 min96 117November 28, 2020
10 min14478October 20, 2020
6 min240 47September 19, 2020
Table 1: How long will my popularity last?


Wanting to make this as passive as possible for as long as possible, I opted to stretch things out and set the interval at every 30 minutes. At the time, March 24, 2021, seemed like forever and a day away. But as you know, that date has come and went, and sure enough, the number of posts in my queue drained to zero.

Given that, really, all this is pretty pointless, I never found the time to try to load my queue back up, because, you know, priorities and all. Yet, it still bothered me that I was the owner of a fruitless blog, just gathering dust and Tumblr-weeds.2In all transparency, this was originally an unintended pun.

This simmering & unjustifiable anxiety finally got the best of me yesterday, when I got so sick and tired of my empty queue constantly reminding me of what a failure that the whole Prissy Pet Project has been that I finally decided to do something about it.

And this time, I was dead set on being popular forever. Or at least as long as Tumblr is around. Though that probably won’t be too much longer now.

Are you ready for some asinine details? Okay, here you go…

“Bottleneck.” That is the word of the day. What process really takes up most of the time for a given task? What is disproportionately slowing things down?

You remember how I described the process of adding posts to a Queue+ queue as “mildly tedious”? Well, in theory it should be instantaneous compared to hand-picking and adding posts one at a time. And by that standard it really is. But let me walk you through the process, and I’ll point out where, in practice, bottlenecks happen–and what to do about them.

The process itself is fairly simple. Just add ‘/archive’ to the URL of any Tumblr blog and you’ll get something that looks like this, which is what happens when you type ‘https://kimchi-and-keto.tumblr.com/archive’ into your browser:

Figure 2: What a Tumblr archive looks like.

So this is just a thumbnail gallery of all the posts on a particular Tumblr blog, sorted by Month/Year. Now in the pic above, what you don’t see is the additional options a Queue+ Chrome plugin will give you at the top. In fact, I learned that this particular plugin got banned from the Chrome App store (LOL?), and the only reason I can use it is because I still had it on my 10 year old PC, and it still functioned–much to my delight.

Well, if you have that plugin, you can essentially “Select All” posts with one click, and then add them to your Queue+ queue with another two quick clicks. But…

But the problem is that only add the ones that have had their thumbnails loaded, so the bottleneck then becomes “How fast can your old computer load as many thumbnails as possible?”

I know, I know, it sounds so ----- stupid. And it is. But that’s the burden I gotta bear if I want to stay popular on Tumblr for no good reason.

As it turns out, since you have to either scroll down or use the Page Down key to get new thumbnails to load, this takes forever, at least when you’re hoping to re-add all 11k+ of your posts.

Now, as with most things with me, I 1) don’t accept the status quo, and 2) usually let things get out of hand. Let’s see if I managed to stay true to form?

The first thing I realized was that I could speed things up by making those thumbnails as small as reasonably possible. How did I do this, you ask? By just zooming my browser out to ~10%! And I can’t believe it, but this actually worked:

Figure 3: Zooming out let’s you load a lot more thumbnails at once!

Here’s a time-lapsed gif of loading one month’s worth of my posts (48 x ~30 = 1440), which represents about a minute or 2 in real time:

Figure 4: Loading 1440 posts in under 90 seconds.

Ok, but what about the tedious task of sitting there and Page-Downing endlessly? Well I got you covered there too! I just used a little trick I learned by watching MacGyver growing up.

You see that candle in one of the pictures above? Well here’s what is really going on with it:

Figure 5: A handy hack I learned from MacGyver.

This is what I call the ol’ “Brick on the gas pedal” trick. That’s right: I took a little wood block I had lying around, put it on my Page Down key, then balanced a candle on it, and voila! I could Page Down without lifting (or, technically, “lowering”) a finger!

Given that I my poor computer could only load a limited number of thumbnails before choking, I had to break my task down by month. I had 14 of these, since the blog had been active from January 2020 up until it ran out of gas at the end of March 2021. This still would take 5-10 minutes per month, but towards the end I just said “Screw it!” and loaded all of February and January 2020 and did that in once shot (I was working backwards in time, if you were wondering).

This put me up to ~24k posts:

Figure 6: 24 thousand posts ~= 500 days of free popularity!

At 24k sweet, sweet posts, that should last me upwards of 500 days, or about a year and a half. Nice, but…could I do better?

It was at this point in time that I got another idea…Once I had a batch of post thumbnails loaded–the bottleneck, remember?–why couldn’t I just Select All and Add To Queue+ multiple times while I was already there?

The last batch I had loaded up consisted of about 3900 posts, so I invested another half hour and repeated this process ~10x (remember, my computer is slow–it probably would have gone faster on a more fancy computer).

So by the end of the day yesterday, what did I have to show for my hard work?

Figure 7: 57k sweet, sweet posts.

That’s right, 57,167 posts, ready to be fired off, 48 per day. If you do the math, that means I shouldn’t have to touch things for about 3 years and 3 months!

I should be happy, right? I should just leave it there, right?

Well, I actually did…but just for the evening though!

If we’re going to automate things, then let’s do it right and make the dang thing run until my 3-year-old graduates from high school at least!

So guess what I did with my spare time today? Yup, in between tasks, I loaded up my posts 2 months at a time, and then reposted them 10 times per batch!

“What do you have to show for it?”, you are most definitely wondering. Well here’s your answer:

Figure 8. Trust me. That’s a lot of f**king posts.

269,920 Posts.

5623.3333333 Days

15.40639269406392 Years

It’s not quite forever forever–but it’s close!

The point of the story is: 1) why half-ass things when you can full-ass things? And 2) here’s to all those haters that said that my hours upon hours of watching MacGyver would never pay off. Well, guess which one of us is the most popular girl on Tumblr now, huh?

HUH?!?

Content created on: 16 July 2021 (Friday)

Footnotes & References:[+]

An Unsurpassed Tractor Tale That Will Never Get Tired

11 July 2021 / / 0 Comments
6 Min Read

Attention, all you agriculturally ignorant city-slickers out there!

This one’s for you…

“Oh sh*t. Dad’s not going to be too happy about this…”

I sat there on the side of a dirt road, trying to take a nap in the cab of our neighbor’s tractor, waiting for my dad to show up. In addition to the mid-morning July sun, my ability to snooze was severely handicapped by the persistent thought that, indeed, the patriarchal figure in my life would indubitably be disappointed in the predicament in which I had found myself.

Now, pissing Dad off to no end with my agriculture-related shenanigans and general farming ----- -ups was nothing new. However, I had just taken it to a whole ‘nother level with this here Pirate-Tractor. And I can’t say I was very hopeful that he would give me points for creativity.

Hmmm…I suppose I should back this tractor tale on up and tell you how I got here in the first place, though…

‘Twas back in the middle of the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99, and I was working full-time on our family farm with my dad before heading off to start college in the fall. We had been having problems with the two tractors we owned breaking down on us, so we had to resort to borrowing a spare one from a fellow farmer for a few weeks.

We’re not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, so when the left rear tire–one of the big ones, mind you–began gradually working its way off the rear axle, did we complain and ask for a refund? No! Why? Because we had no choice!

Instead, we learned to co-exist with this modest inconvenience by regularly jacking up that side of the tractor off the ground, laboriously moving the tire back in towards the cab, and then tightening all the bolts down with the heaviest-duty ratchet you’ve ever seen.

Well I had finally had enough of that horse baloney after having to do it 4-5 times, so I decided to that I was going to tighten them bolts down so friggin’ tight that they would never come loose again. Fortunately, we had brought the tractor home for the holidays1Before we took a day and half “vacation” for the 4th of July. so I was able to scrounge up an array of steel pipes and bars from around ye olde homestead, and MacGuyvered myself a cheater bar2A cheater bar is any bar or pipe that is used to effectively lengthen a ratchet handle, enabling one to apply extra torque when tightening/loosening a particularly stubborn bolt or nut. See Figure 1. about 6 feet long.

Figure 1: An arbitrary example of a so-called “cheater bar”. Because I knew you were too proud to ask what one was…

Yes, you read that right: 6 feet. Picture a ratchet. Just a regular ratchet, not the one in the figure above–I need to make this as dramatic as possible. Now picture that ratchet, but ~10x bigger. On the wheel of a tractor. With my lightweight ass hanging off the end of it like a hyperactive sloth, with both my feet and hands wrapped around it, bouncing up and down like a regularly-active monkey.

I rinsed and repeated this thorough procedure for all 8 or so of the lugnuts, and upon completion, proudly proclaimed to Dad, “This ----- ain’t going nowhere!”

A few days later, it was time to get the tractor back into action, so early that morning Dad told me to “road”3I.e. Drive the tractor down the highway. it to one of our fields about 20 miles away while he ran errands in town, and then wait there until he got back.

Relatively speaking, it seemed that I had a relaxing morning ahead of me, so you didn’t have to ask me twice to hop up in that thing and haul tail down KS Highway 51. Granted, “haul tail” in a tractor means maxing out around 22 mph, so all in all, I had almost an hour commute ahead of me.

Fast-forward to about an hour later, with a little under a mile to my final destination, I started to feel a slight shaking. I thought it was a bit odd, so I started looking around to see what might be causing the ruckus. Just as I turned to my left, I saw the strangest ----- thing my life: a giant tire speed past me.

What. The. ----- .

You know how in old Wile E. Coyote cartoons where he runs off the cliff, but there’s a split second when he’s suspended in mid-air before he realizes he’s about to fall, and somehow gravity doesn’t kick in until he acknowledges it?

It was exactly like that.

It’s hard to describe the cognitive dissonance I experienced in that moment–how the hell could anything be passing me?!? This stretch of highway was closed for repaving, so I was literally the only traffic for a good 5-10 miles in each direction.

“So where the heck did that tire come fro–“

Oh.

Sh*t.

That’s…that’s my tire.

“But, wait! How, then, am I still rolling down the road uprigh–“

*creaaaaaaak*

“Oh, hello, Gravity,” I thought aloud as the laws of physics reasserted themselves and the entire tire-less quadrant of the tractor plummeted 4 feet straight down.

*THUNK!* went the left side of the axle as it landed hard in the freshly-paved road, making a rather noticeable divot.

I sat there tilted sharply to my left at a 45-degree angle, stunned and desperately trying to comprehend that that just happened, watching my tire roll on down the road without me.

After about a quarter of a mile, it veered to the left off the highway, down the ditch…and out into the smack-dab middle of the field where I was supposed to ultimately end up at. Oh, the irony.

On the bright side, thanks to the highway being closed, there was no oncoming traffic, because if there had been any, I’m pretty certain a rather gruesome and fatal car accident would have ensued. I mean, that’s some Final Destination-level sh*t right there.

On the other hand, the road closure meant the only thing I could do was just sit there and hope the KDOT4Kansas Department of Transportation crew would show up and decide against strangling me for completely undoing all there hard work with the nasty divot I had made.

And eventually they did–and no doubt that was a WTF moment for them when the rolled up to the scene with me just sitting there in the tractor sideways. Lucky for me, they found it more humorous than anything else, and graciously took pity on me. They ended up wrapping a chain around the now-naked axle and then around the teeth of one of their front-loaders and helped my peg-legged little Pirate-Tractor hobble off onto the dirt road right there off the highway. They propped me up by putting a couple blocks underneath the axle, then were like “OK, see you!” They were happy to get me out of their way, but weren’t going to help me out beyond that…so, thanks?

…and that is where you found me at the beginning of the story, anxiously awaiting the wrath of Bob J. upon his return.

Of course, “running errands in town” took him 4x longer than promised, so I had to sit there in that stupid ----- Pirate-Tractor from 10 am until around 2 or 3 pm–almost 5 hours–before he finally showed up.

In the meantime I thought I might have been able to prop up the Prodigal Tire and roll it back to the tractor, and maybe even put it back on before he returned. But one very important life lesson I learned out in the middle of that dusty-ass field was holy crap, tractor tires are heavy! Yeah, I couldn’t lift that a centimeter off the ground, though it’s probably for the better, as I indubitably would have run the risk of getting crushed by the 500-800 lb thing at some point during the hypothetical wheel-wrangling.

No, if you came here for an actual near-death event in this story–my death anways–then that would have been when Dad and I nearly got into a fist-fight over which one of was responsible for it coming off.

You may be surprised to hear that I actually had a pretty strong case against him. As it turned out, back when I was tightening all the lugnuts–remember that?–there was the usual 8 in a circular pattern, and then one oddly off to the side. I had asked him whether or not I should tighten that one, and he told me no, so I didn’t touch it.

Well, as it turns out, that was the one that actually kept the tire on the axle. Go figure.

But honestly, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago–about 20 years after the fact, and long after Dad had passed away–that I finally admitted that, yeah, he was right: I should have been paying attention to that rascally tire. You know, instead of be-bopping down the road like a cool cat without a care and all that.

Anyways, that is the point of the story: pay attention, Dumbass.

Otherwise you might end up being the guy or gal who finally does it–who finally manages, as they say, to put the “laughter” in “vehicular manslaughter”.

Editor’s note: This was one component of the Near-Tragedy Trifecta of the Summer of ’99. You can read about the other two [less exciting] close encounters with grave bodily harm here.

Content created on: 8/9 July 2021 (Thurs/Fri)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Unborn On The 4th Of July

4 July 2021 / / 0 Comments
5 Min Read

What could possibly be more interesting than life on the farm?

Death on the farm. Definitely “death on the farm”…

“He gave his life in service of his country.”

Usually when you hear that phrase you’re bound to assume that a “fallen soldier” is the topic of the solemn and hushed conversation you’ve just awkwardly intruded upon. But what if I told you that’s not always the case? Truly, there are other unsung heroes across the Fruited Plain of this great nation that have laid down their life–or at least came darn tootin’ close–for the betterment of their fellow citizens. Case in point: the Semi-Involuntary Farm Boy.

And I’m here to tell you first hand: the danger is very real and very present…

Let me be real with you: I hated growing up on the farm. Me and agriculture? We simply didn’t get along. But on the bright side, it sure is nice having a tidy collection of Crazy Farming Stories in my back pocket, ever-ready for whenever I need to impress my city-slicker friends.

Amongst my favorite of these are what I call the Near-Tragedy Trifecta: the 3 consecutive1Okay, so technically I think these unfolded over the span of about a week. days in July 1999 where my life played out eerily similar to what I imagine a farm-themed installment of the infamous Final Destination movie franchise would indubitably have looked like–with the exception that I managed to walk away relatively unscathed.

For context, the Summer of ’99 was the summer between high school and college for me, and I spent it toiling away with my dad on our family farm so I could buy a car of my own. Surprisingly, this is the first time I’ve talked about that summer in these parts, because, whew-wee, boy! That was one crazy-ass summer!

In Exhibit A, I present to you here, in non-chronological order, 3 of the several times I probably should have died over the course of those 3 months…

Sunday, July 4, 1999: Around the Fourth of July that year, my dad and stepmom decided to celebrate the birth of this fine nation…at the Prairie Band of Potawatomi Nation, in the finest casino their reservation had to offer, that is! Since said nation/reservation/casino was on the other side of the state, they kindly left me in charge of the basic day-to-day operations of our farm in their absence.

Now, when the farm is in “just keep shit running before you run off to hang out with you honey” mode, one of the primary tasks is to make sure that the crops are being watered, and this usually means making the rounds to check whether all the farm’s irrigation motors and sprinklers are running. On the morning of the Fourth, my grandma and I were hauling tail around Morton County doing just that, me with high hopes of knocking my duties out early and being able to take off to Beaver (Oklahoma) to celebrate the day away with my Amazonian girlfriend, Teri.

Well, the Law of Averages will tell you that if you have 7 irrigation motors, then at least 1 of them is not going to be running when you go to check on it, and sure enough a motor on one of our pumps was in need of being brought back to life.

After some basic maintenance, I went to crank that bad boy back up, and tentatively pressed the ignition button, praying to hear that sweet sweet hum of staying on schedule to see my lady friend.

Engine: “Vroom! Huff-chuff-huff-chuff!”

Me: “Oh, ----- yeah. Ain’t nothing gonna keep me away from Beaver tonight!”

Engine: “VROOOOOOOOOOM!”

Me: “The ----- you say, Mr. Engine?!?”

Driveshaft *Wildly flapping around at a few thousand RPMs*: “Wheeee! Look at me, I’m a helicopter!

Stunned, I sat there staring in awe as it spun out for about 30 more seconds before losing its momentum and coming to a stop…though it took my racing heart another 30 minutes to return to normal afterwards.

After a quick investigation, it was discovered that the bolts fastening the motor to the driveshaft had just straight-up snapped off–ergo the 3000 RPM, 40-pound chopper wannabe that had just been spinning way to close to my cranium.

Fortunately, though, the mechanical failure had been on the motor end of the shaft, otherwise had it came loose from the pump side, the motor would have kept spinning it faster and faster. And, based on where I had been standing, there’s no doubt in my mind that my final, violent moments would have horrifically included getting my skull bashed in and a couple of my precious limbs grotesquely maimed.

The good news is that I ended up making it to my Beaver-based booty call later that day.2PG-rated, that is. Given that I was thiiiiis close to being on the wrong side of a closed-casket funeral, I would definitely call that a win…

Thursday, July 1, 1999 (est.): Irrigation engines must have really had it out for me that week. Mere days previous to the Drive-shaft/Helicopter Brain-Basher incident, Dad had sent me a few miles from we were working to check up on a different pump engine in a nearby field.

Now, on the Farm of Bob J., there were many idiosyncrasies, and this particular engine fell squarely in that category. As I recall, it had a bad battery on it, and so you could only use it to start the engine–but if you left it connected after that it would short-circuit and explode. Fun times, indeed, right?

Also, this engine ran on natural gas, but for some reason we didn’t have a proper valve on the gas line. Now for those not in the know, I guess you have to turn the gas supply down pretty low when you start these types of engines (or something like that). In our case though, we had no flow control and were forced to completely remove the fuel hose and then quickly reattach it once the engine got to spinning.

Anyways, this engine had died, and so again, after some basic maintenance and trouble-shooting, I was ready to see if it would fire back up. But instead of turning a key or pushing an ignition button, I had to bend down to where the battery was inexplicably residing on the ground, and re-connect the battery cable.

This was very confusing to me, though. No, not this oblique and convoluted version of “Gentlemen, start your engines!” It was the fire that was so confusing.

HOLY SH*T, WHY WAS THERE ONLY FLAMES WHERE MY ARM SHOULD BE!?

While my brain was processing the philosophical question of whether or not spontaneous human combustion was for realz, my body was busy getting my perhaps-phantom limb the ----- away from that fire lickity-split! Lucky for my dumb ass, my central nervous system had acted quickly enough in yanking my hand out of el fuego that the only damage done was that all the hairs on my arm had been singed off. Once, I got over the shock, I quickly realized what happened and rushed to shut off the emergency valve to the gas.

You see, when I had disconnected the gas line, I hadn’t realized that it was aiming straight down at the battery. And since it was still blasting that beautiful natural gas, it just needed a single tiny spark courtesy of a freshly hooked-up battery cable to turn that ----- into a full-blown flame-thrower!

I guess it just wouldn’t be the Fourth of July without some fireworks, right? I just wish the Universe would quit taking sh*t so literally though…

Well, Dear Reader, originally I had planned on sharing all 3 stories with you in one sitting, but alas, we are out of time for today. But that’s okay! Near-Tragedy Trifecta Tale #3 truly deserves a post dedicated to it alone.

So I guess the point of the story is you have a full week now to build up yourself some anticipation for…”The Tractor Tire Story”–trump-bump-a-dum!

Oh, and for realz, don’t forget to thank a farmer for sacrificing life and limb to keep your face fed. Perhaps you even know one personally…

Content created on: 2 & 4 July 2021 (Fri/Sun)

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