My son has a bunch of Red Cedar trees at his house that for several years had bag worms all over them. They started to look kind of bad so I started spraying them. In fact because Barb has a bunch of fruit trees, I really bought the best sprayer I could get. It will spray the top of a 30 foot tree and has been a pretty darned good sprayer. Yesterday, I went to Dave house and sprayed his trees. I would throw the sprayer hose over my shoulder and in the process of moving the tractor, the hose from the sprayer got under one wheel and I was pulled off the tractor and run over. Thank god it is the small Case tractor and it was only my legs. The bad news is that because I am on blood thinners, I was unsure if there would be any unnecessary bleeding and bruising. There was one ankle that was pretty sprained.
You don't have to tell me to stop doing stupid things. Barbara did a lot of that and all day would look my way and shake her head. She is a lot like that little built in conscience that most people have. I seem to get busy and do things that just aren't as smart as you might do. I spent the rest of the day on the couch and everything seems to be working better today. I don't seem to have any big bruises and the ankle seems to be near normal. Oh well.
We might get by today without more rain. It seems to be a little cloudy but it feels a lot cooler and dryer outside than it has been for a week. There are still places where the mower leaves mud on the top of the grass but mostly it is firm enough to drive on. I won't even consider getting the big tractor out for a couple more days.
One nice thing about sitting on the couch for most of a day, I don't feel guilty about reading a book all day. There are a lot of things I need to do but taking care of a possible injury is one thing I am all in favor of. As a kid, I could fall or get hurt and be back in the game the next day. Now, I need a couple of days to recover when I do something stupid. Kind of like getting sick, it takes me a week to get back up to speed where it only took days before. Did I mention that I hate to be getting old? Yes, I know the alternative and will settle for a few more years.
I am pretty sure that I have mentioned that I am not afraid of death. I don't have a death wish, I just want it to be a simple quick thing that ends my life. I don't want it to be a long protracted period of suffering. How does that old joke go? I want to die like Grandpa did as he drove off the mountain instead like the other passengers in the car that died kicking and screaming. Well, I sure as heck don't want to get in the way of anyone else's desire to live up to their genealogy.
One time a friend of mine was bragging about the fact that most of his family got to be at least 100 or there abouts. He said that the leading cause of death in his family was trucks. I asked him how that was and he said his grandmother was going to cross the street in North Wichita and when she stepped off the curb, a truck took her out. Precisely I think he said a loaded Cement Truck was the bad guy. Grandma had the right of way and she was dead right.
As a kid, I grew up fairly poor in a neighborhood that was called Dog Patch after Al Capp's cartoon strip. The real reason it was so different was a lot of what people describe today's America as. There were the poor and then there was the upper middle class nearby and then there were the children of the really rich just a little further away. It was the difference between the classes that stood out. We all went to the same school. I wanted penny loafers just for the money. The other kids talked about going to summer camps for sailing camps and I was pretty happy just going to Arkansas to Grandma's and swimming in the river. We had one guy that went with his grandparents to Africa and they the had an assembly where he showed us the pictures (Slides) their photographer took.
In my neighborhood, we played a lot of baseball. There were never enough gloves , bats and balls to really get the job done. I can remember that we would play with a ball until it lost it's cover. We would then send the kids out scouting for pop bottles to raise a dollar to buy a new one. One of the neighbor ladies had some son's playing in a League and she kept the new baseballs in her freezer where she could lock them up. She would sell us one for a dollar. Heck, I would have taken one of the used balls they warmed up with but she insisted that we buy a new one.
Just in the last couple of months, I found a site that had posts from the kids I went to elementary school with. One of the newer posters has started putting in pictures of the things that went on in the rich kids neighborhood. I can promise you that ballet and dancing lessons at the Cotillion was not one of our past times. I did not own a pair of tennis shoes, I had just plain old gym shoes and most of the time they were high tops (Keds) My uncle left a tennis racket at our house when he went off to Junior College and by the time I went to High School the strings were so brittle they broke the first time I tried to return a serve in Gym class.
Oh well, better see if I can keep the ball rolling today or if I need to spend more time sitting on the couch
MUD
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