Farm News 04-20-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 52°

Weight: 205

Grandson

Jake Dashiell Lubin was born Thursday morning, my fourth grandson. He is, of course, good-looking and very smart.

Barn News

Shotgun has kitties! Four of them in a hay feeder in an empty stall. She looked like she would have fourteen instead of four, but her four are all big, strong, and healthy. One is red, another is pink. One is a calico and the fourth is gray.

The goose egg in the incubator is due to hatch today. Incubation is not exact, so it might not hatch for several days, and it might not hatch at all.

There are six-packs of Hyacinth Bean and tomato seeds sitting on top of the incubator where they will germinate more quickly with the bottom heat. Hyacinth Beans are a very fast growing vine with pretty purple flowers. The beans are a flattened sphere, black with a white strip on part of the edge. The vines need sun, moisture, and rich soil to do well.

Central Pump & Plumbing

Wednesday I went to Central Pump & Plumbing for an annual pump check. Normally, I wouldn't think of going into that place without a bunny to provide protection, but Suzette's most recent litter is too old and Sally's aren't born, yet. The CP&P know, though, that I was a man with trained attack bunnies and they didn't give me too much trouble.

The pump mechanic, a weird old geezer, had the audacity to suggest that my plan of putting my weight at the top of the page each week wouldn't work. I think it's working fine: millions (well, ten or eleven, maybe) readers now know they are doing better at controlling their weight than is the famous barnyard writer. He has promised to email to me his guaranteed method for losing weight. I can't weight to review it.

There was one improvement, the pump mechanic couldn't access my records on his laptop last year, and this year he did fine, remembering to have his nurse bring up the records before he walked into the examination room. It made him look real professional and I was proud of him.

Leaving France

Fifty years ago I was desperately trying to leave France. I had been growing crazier steadily over the previous few months, and it was becoming a serious problem. At that time, in the Army, going crazy was an offense that could lead to stockade time. Time spent in the stockade did not count against your enlistment time, so if you spent four months in the stockade you had to add four months to the date when you could get out.

I was due to get out in August and was trying to get an early release in order to start college for the summer session. Obtaining an early release involved filling out lots of forms. Fortunately, I had been a clerk/typist for the preceding two years and was proficient at filling out military forms. Once the first batch of forms were filled out they had to be approved, which they never were, so you then started on the forms for the appeal. By April I was on my second appeal. If that wasn't approved, I wouldn't be able to get out until after summer school had already started.

Ten thousand kinds of bullshit were blanketing France at that time. Sputnik, the first ever satellite, had fallen to the earth in January, setting the tone for the year. Sputnik, by the way, was a Soviet satellite, the US first managed that trick at the end of January. Egypt and Syria had united to form the United Arab Republic, which scared the hell out of France and the UK, because they were afraid that the Suez Canal might be closed again. The situation in Algeria was going straight to hell, with the Algerian rebels about to win independence from France, and the French Fourth Republic was collapsing. Some people were seriously wanting Charles De Gaulle to become the King of France and others were wanting a Marxist revolution.

I read On the Road by Kerouac and decided I had better things to do than rot in France. The first American soldiers had died in Viet Nam and I was afraid that war might heat up and cause the Army to extend our enlistments. Finally, I knew I was going crazy and I didn't want to be in the Army if it worsened. Three good reasons to submit a request for an early release.

One week before the deadline the early release request was approved. Whew. Next, I had to get out of there. I wanted to ship my car back to the US, but that would leave me without transportation. Finally, after many bi-lingual telephone conversations, I arranged to deliver my car to a shipping firm in Paris who would haul it to a port and put it on a ship bound for New York. The Army was going to fly me from Paris to New Jersey.

About five kilometers from the main gate of the post I came to the first road block, this one manned by local Gendarmes. After some shouting and hand-waving they passed me through, and that was the way it was all the way to Paris. There were French Army road blocks, police road blocks, and rioter road blocks. That was the first time I saw burning barricades in the streets. It was all exciting, but, dammit, I wanted to get to Paris and then out of France.

It was a very long drive that day, but finally, late in the evening, I reached Paris. There were sandbag machine gun emplacements on the street corners, and the Metropolitan Guard troopers were driving their blue vans on the sidewalks at high speeds. I holed up in a bar for the night.

The next morning I was able to deliver my car to the shipper and then deliver myself to Orly, the airport, after going through many, many roadblocks. That evening at Orly I got the final good news: all US flights were canceled. Shit. I tossed my duffel bag on the floor, tossed myself down beside it, and, like a good soldier, went to sleep. At about 3:00 am somebody shook me and said, “There is a flight to the US here, and there are a couple of empty seats.”

It was a nice, reliable old turboprop Air Force plane, and it was going to the Canary Islands before it went to New Jersey, but I was on it, and I was thinking that I might be able to retain some sanity, after all.

Books

I'm surprised. I didn't finish a book this week. The May issue of Scientific American arrived and I read that, but the two books I'm reading, one fiction and one non-fiction, are both somewhat slow going.