by Kathy Brasby | Jun 10, 2019 | Country life, Humor
When things go wonky in our lives, we like to blame our shortcomings on our parents. My parents were pretty normal, but I’ve realized that I can blame my explosions on my dad. It’s a generation thing.
Being the daughter of a farmer means that I have a plethora of different skills from chick dipping to hay bucking.
When I was a child, we lived several miles from the nearest town. There was no trash pickup so we had a 55-gallon barrel where we burnt trash. When I was 10, Dad showed me how to dump trash in the barrel and start the fire.
He struck a match and held it over some old newspaper. The flame grabbed the paper and began to spread to the rest of the rubbish.
“If you have a lot of trouble getting the match to catch,” he said, “you can sprinkle a little gas on the trash, and it’ll get things going.”
Oddly enough, the match always has trouble catching. At first, I sprinkled a little gas just like he showed me. But sometimes your wrist slips and a little more gets sprinkled. That worked better with a satisfying whoosh.
My brother was in on this too, and soon we were diligent in soaking the trash before tossing in the match. We never had a failure. The time that the boom was so big it blew out the flames scared us a little.
Not enough, apparently.
Shortly after college, I moved into a house that has a natural gas grill in the back yard. I was a total rookie with such a convenience item.
I had heard from someone that there was a hole in the back of the pipe supporting the grill. You stuck a lit match in the hole to start the grill.
I made sure the lid to the grill was closed so the flame wouldn’t go out once I got it going. Then I turned the gas knob on, crawled around to the back of the pipe and stuck the lit match into the tube.
A massive fireball shot out in all directions over my head. The lid swung up and crashed down. Yep, the flame went out.
I kept that story to myself for a long time.
Several years later, the kids and I were working on a house rehabilitation. The day was cold, and the furnace was off. So I trekked down to the basement and pulled the cover off the furnace. I searched the innards of the furnace because I wasn’t sure where to light it.
No problem. Inventive was my middle name. I turned on the gas, stood beside the furnace (not in front. I’m not a fool.) and tossed in a match. Whoosh. Flames leaped out and then settled into a nice little fire in the furnace. Just like I expected.
The bang brought the kids racing down the stairs.
They thought I might be dead. No worries. Just a few singed eyebrows and some frizzy hair. And the furnace was roaring. We had heat.
Alas, they took away my lighting privileges that day.
I hadn’t lit a grill in years, but recently we were having guests for dinner, and nobody was around. I needed the grill hot for steaks. And I knew how to do this.
I turned on the propane tank under our grill and twisted the knobs to start. This grill has an ignite button so I should be good. It clicked, but no flame blossomed.
Obviously, it was time to go looking for a match. But where on earth did I manually light this thing? Farm kids have a good eye, and I figured out how to remove a plate under the grill. I tossed in the match. Boom!
Just for the record, the steaks were delicious. But my daughter eyed me that evening. “What happened to your hair?” It did grow out quickly, so no real harm there.
But I was banished again.
I recently ran across an idea for a burner that obliterates weeds. All you have to do is point at the weed and press a button. Poof. A little flame shot out to burn the weed.
I thought that was kinda slow. One weed at a time?
However, the dial went to 11, which theoretically could leave a 10-foot crater in the back yard. That ought to take care of all the weeds. I was ready to order one.
My kids have ordered a straitjacket instead.
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Kathy Brasby | Jun 3, 2019 | Country life, Humor, Stories
A few weeks ago, I was teaching chicks how to drink. That probably makes no sense to you but baby chickens pop out of their eggs with no clue how to drink. When the hen is not in the picture, their human owner gets to fill in.
Chicks are amazingly cute little beings. There’s no room for brains in their head, but they make up for it with cuteness.
Photo by Kathy Brasby
If you’ve ever gone to the feed store with your six-year-old, you know how amazingly cute the chicks are. Six-year-olds never miss the chick cages. Once there, they unfurl all the tricks a child knows. Anything is fair here. They might scream or plead or remind you that you hadn’t bought them anything in decades, maybe centuries.
Parents: don’t trust traditional responses. Don’t tell your child, “You’re not old enough to care for this chick,” because the child will assure you that this is their chance to reveal the profound changes in their heart, character, and behavior that have emerged since breakfast when they left their cereal bowl on the table and spoon on the floor. They are changed creatures, just like that chick that just transformed from an egg to a fuzz ball.
Don’t tell your child, “We don’t have a place for any chicks,” What your child hears is “yet,” as in “We don’t have any place for any chicks yet.” They have hope! All they now need is a cardboard box, a saucer, and a bag of chicken feed.
Stay away from the chick aisle!
Amongst the research regarding chickens is the discovery that chickens wearing red-tinted contact lenses fight less, eat less, and produce more – the chicken trifecta.
Can you imagine the scientist putting contact lenses on chickens? I wonder if they were soft or hard contacts. What if a chicken lost a lens? Would she attack the hen on her right while giving sweet words to the one on her left?
Would you have to change contacts every day? Maybe mellow chickens would stand in line to get their contacts in for the day. Right after brushing their teeth and combing their hair.
If scientists could put contact lenses on chickens, you’d think researchers could find a way to teach chickens how to drink when they first pop out of the egg. Apparently not.
Chicks remain as ill-prepared for life as ever.
But back to my teaching moment. I had two dozen cute yellow fur balls wandering aimlessly in the desert of their cardboard box, about to start crawling wing over wing in the sand, lips swollen and canteens dusty. The overhead light probably looked like a huge angry sun to them.
They needed a mama to teach them how to drink water.
My son watched. “They don’t know how to drink?” he said.
“They don’t know how to find water,” I said. I dipped each chick’s beak into the water and let each one shake its head in amazement at finding water just before dying of desert exposure.
My son shifted gears. “And why did you put paper down in their pen?”
“So they wouldn’t accidentally eat the wood chips underneath. They don’t know the difference between wood chips and their feed yet.”
He stared down at the yellow wave of chick energy. “So you’re telling me that they don’t know how to eat or drink?”
“Well, I guess…..”
He headed for the door. “I’m amazed they know how to breathe.”
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Kathy Brasby | Sep 16, 2013 | Country life, Humor
I am a careful reader and I did read that poster before I jumped in.
Free cats. On the wild side. The photos on the poster were of three lovely orange and gray cats. My son and I were running errands when I found this treasure.
We needed cats for our barn, which was constantly under attack from a squadron of field mice. I didn’t care that these cats were a little on the wild side. Better to hunt mice.
I found the girl with the cats. “Do you still have them?” I asked.
Her face should have clued me in. Body language says raised eyebrows, wide eyes and an open mouth mean surprise. “Do you want them?”
“Yes.”
“Great! I’ll tell my dad.” She scampered away and I turned to my son.
“I’ll finish up here and you go with them. We can put the cats in the car and go home.”
He followed the girl and I finished my work. When I walked into the parking lot toward our car, I spotted Son at the edge of a small group, a large cardboard box in the center.
The girl’s father snugged the last piece of shipping tape over the flaps on the top of the box as a bystander said, “If they can’t get air in there, they might die.”
The father stepped back from the box, which was tap dancing a bit, and brushed his hands together. “That wouldn’t be the end of the world.”
My son turned to me. “He had welding gloves on when he put the cats in the box.” Welding gloves are long leather armor against welding sparks. And apparently against cat weapons as well.
By now, I was near enough to hear scratching inside the box. A lot of scratching. The sort of demonic scratching that threatens to claw through trees and steel walls.
“A little wild?” I asked him.
Son shrugged. He likes cats and he hoisted the box into the back of the car. “It’ll be OK.” I watched the box shimmering with cat rebellion and muted yowls.
“What if they get through the cardboard?”
“I guess we open the doors and bail out ’til they escape.”
That was comforting.
As I turned back to the family that had advertised the cats, they were nowhere to be seen. What a shock.
And so we drove home. My kids as toddlers usually dozed off as soon as I put the car in drive – and so, apparently, did this cat trio. No sounds until we got to our barn.
We laid the box on its side in the middle of the building so the top faced away from us. We were fools but not that bad.
I peeled off the tape while my son stood guard. I’m not sure what his plan was if the cats did a u-turn. Well, maybe we were that bad of fools…
I had donned my own leather gloves and goggles before I lifted the flap. There was a pause before an explosion of orange and gray fur burst into our barn, across the floor, and out the back door. Followed by heavenly silence.
Son and I looked at each other and I brushed off my hands. “Well, that wasn’t the end of the world.”
But I do read a little more carefully these days.
Like this:
Like Loading...
