sweasel.com

I used to know a guy who looked exactly like that guy on the right… but he was human. I mean, I guess he was human. I never really checked him that closely…

I saw a 3-stripe skink just the other day. It was half-wriggling and half-curling and half-flailing while half-hanging out of my cat’s mouth. I didn’t actually know it was a skink for some time, mind you. The tail (a distinctive very bright blue) was long gone, and, ya know, half of it was in a cat’s mouth.

Oops. I misremembered. It was a juvenile 5-line skink. There’s a good pic (with tail) about 1/3d of the way down the page here: https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/five-lined-skink

I have pics of the actual captured specimen(deceased), but I don’t know how to post local pics online. Also, it’s a bit gory.

In the early 80’s I was stationed at NAS Lemoore, in CA’s Central Valley. First place I ever lived where the TV had tractor commercials.

One summer a new raisin drying tray was introduced. Every evening that week there was a story on the news about how the trays were being received by the farmers. If the President of the US had been assassinated that week we probably wouldn’t have heard about it until the furor over the new raisin drying tray had settled down.

sweasel:

As dog is my witness, I shall take Buff Orpington as a username some day.

I like it! And it is amusingly similar to a nom de clavier I used for a while several years ago…Biff Wellington.

There’s something about a fixation on tractors, trucks, and working vehicles that’s just a little off-kilter. Maybe after having your butt abused for several hours per day over the span of years, you can develop an unnatural affection, akin to Stockholm Syndrome.

It seems a bit late in the season to prune your alpacas, doesn’t it?

RE: Tractorfest fetishists. Being a gear-head since early teens, and now old motorcycles, it’s really amazing what tinkerers and farm boys were doing at the turn of the century. Everything from strapping engines onto bicycles to inventing combine-harvesters. Just ideas, slide rules, calipers and lathes. Much respect for those gents, so it’s a thrill to breathe life back into the machines they cobbled together.

Love your story, Steve. I sort of wish I had one of those new raisin drying trays.

I spent a large portion of my life waking up to or eating my lunch to the Farm and Ranch Report. I miss it. Cattle futures. Pork bellies. The price of wheat or cotton. Beets, sorghum. Our little inherited farm came with a Farmall tractor—a ’30s something—originally red, long since faded to almost pink. Never missed a beat and started every time, if you knew how to start it.

My brother-in-law is a tractor guy. He loves tractor pulls. He carefully and lovingly rebuilds the engines; he spends his evenings and weekends scanning old manufacturer’s parts catalogs so he can build technically legal cheaters. He spends nearly as much time making the outsides of the tractors look old and beat up as he does making the insides look shiny and new.

Buff Orpington
Slab Bulkhead!

I had a Deere from 1995, to 2010. I miss it.

John Deere tractor pulls bring back fond memories of my youth, now that time has worn the rough edges off of that time in my life.

Of course remembering the good times reminds me of the bad.

I have a 1954 Minneapolis Moline 445. Propane powered. Orange with silver wheels. That was their color scheme for some reason. The green and yellow guys don’t approve.

Remember in the original Independence Day movie when Will Smith first launched the small alien spaceship and yelled “I gotta get me one of these!”?

Well this might just do the same for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksNvozC78qA

(I may need to start a GoFundMe for my birthday 🙂 )

Holy shit, those were cool, MikeW. So many, many different ways I could kill myself in the water…

And speaking of country living — they’ve spread pigshit on the fields today. Gurk.

AliceH, I’d really like you guys to have the ability to post pictures, but I can’t find a plugin that will allow it. In theory, if the image is hosted somewhere else (like Imgur), I think you could post an inline graphic. I can’t try it, on account of the blog knows who I am.

Actual book:
Roger L. Welsch, Everything I know about women I learned from my tractor.