Farm News 12-24-06
Sunday morning, after chores, 29°
Bah! Humbug!
If Christians were truly kind and considerate people they wouldn't assault our ears with such annoyances as Little Drummer Boy, rum-ti-tum-tum. I don't care how much rum I put in my tum, Little Drummer Boy remains annoying. And how are we supposed to fill our hearts with joy and love when Alvin and the Chipmunks are squeaking about love and joy? Someone should feed those damned chipmunks to the cat, kick the drummer boy down the stairs, and fill the drum with rum.
Reaching the Summit: Texaco Hill
At 1,647 feet high, the summit of Texaco Hill rolls up and above the surrounding valleys, draws, and gullies in the Flint Hills of Kansas. Fortunately, the climbing routes are not difficult to find, and there have not been any climbers lost on the hill in recent memory. The link to Texaco Hill, by the way, leads to a photograph by John Charlton, a reader. John did the photography for Roadside Kansas, a book I usually carry with me when traveling Kansas highways.
Jeannette and I eschewed climbing gear and used nothing more than a Honda Accord to reach the summit. When we finally reached the top we stood there, breathing hard in the thin air, while the Honda's radiator started boiling. I roundly cursed it, but it still boiled, and I could hear it saying, “If Janet Jackson could survive a wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl, you can survive a radiator malfunction on top of Texaco Hill.”
Texaco Hill is home to one of the many small oil fields dotting the Flint Hills. There are maybe 10 oil wells in sight, a pair of storage tanks, and 10 or more old building foundations. My guess is that there used to be an oil town up there, much like the mining camps found in south-east Kansas. The foundations are all that is left, but several of those foundations will probably last for centuries, especially the two we found that included tornado shelters.
The wells, topped with 'nodding donkeys', walking beam pump heads, were all powered by newer versions of the old hit-or-miss pump engines. The engines are dominated by a pair of flywheels, one on each side. First made in the early 1900s, they would run on kerosene, diesel fuel, or just about anything else that is liquid and will burn. Many of the ones in use in oil fields ran on what is called 'casing head gas', an oil well by-product that somewhat resembles gasoline. When I was 15 years old my 1929 Model 'A' Ford ran most of the time on casing head gas because it was free. All I had to do was drive to the nearest crude oil storage tank and drain off some, I carried a small bucket for the purpose, and then pour it into the Ford's tank. A Honda would probably curl up and die if you tried to feed it casing head gas.
There were no cattle in sight. A great deal of the Flint Hills is used only for summer pasture. In the Spring cattle trucks haul in skinny calves from Texas and in the fall the cattle trucks haul out grass-fat steers. Most of the migrating birds had already passed through, so there were no animals in the view, only plants, mostly grasses.
They're called the Flint Hills, but these aren't mounds that were pushed up, they are the remains of a flat sea bottom etched and eroded by waterways. The horizon isn't a series of bumps, it is a series of horizontal lines. Rachel Sudlow, an artist in Lawrence, has done a series of photographs of the Flint hills taken looking over the backs of cows. The variations in the two horizons, the back of the cow and the edge of the hills, help make some interesting pictures.
After the radiator had cooled a bit we restarted the not-trusty Honda and went on our way, finally coming out of the hills and rolling into Olpe (pronounced Ol-pee). After putting a little more than a gallon of water into the Honda's radiator, the cooling system functioned properly for the rest of the trip.
Theme for the Year
When I reached the age of 69 I decided to call it my 'queer year' and to spend the year ranting about discrimination based on sexual preferences. Now that I'm 70 I need to decide on a new theme. It isn't that any great progress has been made on discrimination against homosexuals, people who like to loudly proclaim themselves to be Christians, Muslims, or Jews are still trying to tell us that if two women marry each other then traditional man-woman (or is it woman-man?) marriages will be destroyed. Those self-anointed ones aren't just wrong-headed, they are liars, and preaching at them won't make them any more honest, nor does their preaching make same-sex marriages a threat to society.
Why am I concerned with gay rights? I am a 70 year old heterosexual male with iatrogenic Bob Dole Disease, happily married to a woman, so how do gay rights issues affect me? Well, many Americans don't think so, but the fact is that we are each individually morally responsible for the acts of our government. That's the nature of a democracy. We either agree to go along with the government or we enter into rebellion. Although I am not quite ready to enter into open rebellion, I am outraged that the people of Kansas followed such trash as Fred Phelps and Terry Fox and passed a constitutional amendment that is both ugly and discriminatory.
However, it is time to put my outrage aside and follow a new theme. At the birthday open house on Sunday, my 93 year old aunt, the oldest person bearing the same surname as I, gave me a night sky calendar. I took it as an imperative from the occult to choose the stars as the next theme. Should I devote a year to learning the names of constellations and the stars forming them? I hope, of course, that I will continue to explore Kansas for many more years.
Bah! Humbug!
If Christians were truly kind and considerate people they wouldn't assault our ears with such annoyances as Little Drummer Boy, rum-ti-tum-tum. I don't care how much rum I put in my tum, Little Drummer Boy remains annoying. And how are we supposed to fill our hearts with joy and love when Alvin and the Chipmunks are squeaking about love and joy? Someone should feed those damned chipmunks to the cat, kick the drummer boy down the stairs, and fill the drum with rum.
Reaching the Summit: Texaco Hill
At 1,647 feet high, the summit of Texaco Hill rolls up and above the surrounding valleys, draws, and gullies in the Flint Hills of Kansas. Fortunately, the climbing routes are not difficult to find, and there have not been any climbers lost on the hill in recent memory. The link to Texaco Hill, by the way, leads to a photograph by John Charlton, a reader. John did the photography for Roadside Kansas, a book I usually carry with me when traveling Kansas highways.
Jeannette and I eschewed climbing gear and used nothing more than a Honda Accord to reach the summit. When we finally reached the top we stood there, breathing hard in the thin air, while the Honda's radiator started boiling. I roundly cursed it, but it still boiled, and I could hear it saying, “If Janet Jackson could survive a wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl, you can survive a radiator malfunction on top of Texaco Hill.”
Texaco Hill is home to one of the many small oil fields dotting the Flint Hills. There are maybe 10 oil wells in sight, a pair of storage tanks, and 10 or more old building foundations. My guess is that there used to be an oil town up there, much like the mining camps found in south-east Kansas. The foundations are all that is left, but several of those foundations will probably last for centuries, especially the two we found that included tornado shelters.
The wells, topped with 'nodding donkeys', walking beam pump heads, were all powered by newer versions of the old hit-or-miss pump engines. The engines are dominated by a pair of flywheels, one on each side. First made in the early 1900s, they would run on kerosene, diesel fuel, or just about anything else that is liquid and will burn. Many of the ones in use in oil fields ran on what is called 'casing head gas', an oil well by-product that somewhat resembles gasoline. When I was 15 years old my 1929 Model 'A' Ford ran most of the time on casing head gas because it was free. All I had to do was drive to the nearest crude oil storage tank and drain off some, I carried a small bucket for the purpose, and then pour it into the Ford's tank. A Honda would probably curl up and die if you tried to feed it casing head gas.
There were no cattle in sight. A great deal of the Flint Hills is used only for summer pasture. In the Spring cattle trucks haul in skinny calves from Texas and in the fall the cattle trucks haul out grass-fat steers. Most of the migrating birds had already passed through, so there were no animals in the view, only plants, mostly grasses.
They're called the Flint Hills, but these aren't mounds that were pushed up, they are the remains of a flat sea bottom etched and eroded by waterways. The horizon isn't a series of bumps, it is a series of horizontal lines. Rachel Sudlow, an artist in Lawrence, has done a series of photographs of the Flint hills taken looking over the backs of cows. The variations in the two horizons, the back of the cow and the edge of the hills, help make some interesting pictures.
After the radiator had cooled a bit we restarted the not-trusty Honda and went on our way, finally coming out of the hills and rolling into Olpe (pronounced Ol-pee). After putting a little more than a gallon of water into the Honda's radiator, the cooling system functioned properly for the rest of the trip.
Theme for the Year
When I reached the age of 69 I decided to call it my 'queer year' and to spend the year ranting about discrimination based on sexual preferences. Now that I'm 70 I need to decide on a new theme. It isn't that any great progress has been made on discrimination against homosexuals, people who like to loudly proclaim themselves to be Christians, Muslims, or Jews are still trying to tell us that if two women marry each other then traditional man-woman (or is it woman-man?) marriages will be destroyed. Those self-anointed ones aren't just wrong-headed, they are liars, and preaching at them won't make them any more honest, nor does their preaching make same-sex marriages a threat to society.
Why am I concerned with gay rights? I am a 70 year old heterosexual male with iatrogenic Bob Dole Disease, happily married to a woman, so how do gay rights issues affect me? Well, many Americans don't think so, but the fact is that we are each individually morally responsible for the acts of our government. That's the nature of a democracy. We either agree to go along with the government or we enter into rebellion. Although I am not quite ready to enter into open rebellion, I am outraged that the people of Kansas followed such trash as Fred Phelps and Terry Fox and passed a constitutional amendment that is both ugly and discriminatory.
However, it is time to put my outrage aside and follow a new theme. At the birthday open house on Sunday, my 93 year old aunt, the oldest person bearing the same surname as I, gave me a night sky calendar. I took it as an imperative from the occult to choose the stars as the next theme. Should I devote a year to learning the names of constellations and the stars forming them? I hope, of course, that I will continue to explore Kansas for many more years.
posted by The Geezer at 8:29 AM
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