Author: Stanley Turner

2010-05-19 22:50:16′, ‘2010-05-20 02:50:16’, ‘

Laura figured out that she could reach the really long Ice sickles from an upstairs window.  So Eddie and I decided to duke it out.

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2009-12-09 21:09:01′, ‘2009-12-10 01:09:01’, ‘

I left my tent up after OctoberFest.  It turns out to have been a bad decision.  We got a lot of snow in December, about a foot an an half.  Since I had left my tent up, it failed to support that much snow.  It snapped a number of my tentpoles and got a little flat.

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2009-12-30 02:24:19

On Memorial Day Weekend, A Motorcyclist was riding down the trail at the Farm House when he was attacked and thrown from his motorcycle by an element of Nature.  It slashed his face as it lifted him from his bike, viciously pulled him into the air and smashed him into the ground.   His collarbone was shattered and required surgery and he also sustained a broken ankle.   Doug W. helped drag his damaged body out of the woods to the road where Fire and Rescue personnel took him to the hospital.   There they surgically removed his very expensive motocross body armor.   His boots were saved tho, because they removed them before Doug arrived.   Due to the nature of his wounds it was necessary to evacuate him to a Fairfax Hospital where his collarbone was reconstructed and somewhere along the way his face was stitched up.   The ankle only got a soft cast.

In other words a,Vicious vegetative verdant Vino Vine violently vaulted a valiant vanguard who Vacated and vamoosed from his Vehicle with vehemence and velocity leaving the victim a vestige of his vivaciousness.

2009-12-30 02:23:10′, ‘

Eddie and I joined Anna’s Scouts at the cabin Saturday nite. Eddie had a lot of fun and stayed up late playing Capture the Flag with the scouts.    Then we went to bed in our tent.   About 3 O’clock in the morning I heard an animal moving around the tent and since it was outside, I just listened to it a little bit and went back to sleep.   A little later, I heard another noise.   I opened my eyes and it’s pitch black, can’t see a thing. I am still a bit sleepy and it seems that the animal is inside the tent.   I am trying to figure out how it got inside the tent when I realize that the animal is moving towards me in the dark. I feel it start to climb on my air mattress,   I give a crazy yell to scare it and shove at it so that it flies across the tent. Then it makes a noise that sounds like “Daddy, why did you push me off the bed?” It seems that Eddie decided to move from his air mattress to mine.   Oh well, no blood no foul.

2009-12-30 01:37:18′, ‘

Mom has a new kitten which jumped onto my lap and fell asleep.   I had to go look at something, so I picked it up and placed its limp sleeping body in the chair.   When I was done I came back and sat down.  After about 10 seconds I felt something move under me.   I looked down and saw  a little black paw sticking out from between my legs.   It wasn’t making any noise or struggling in any way.  I got up and the cat was just laying there on its back with its legs all kinda splayed out.   When I picked up the kitten, it was all limp in my hands.   I couldn’t tell if the cat was just still asleep or that I had killed it.  I shook it some to see if I could just wake it up, but I was worried that if something in the cat was broke, that I would make the cat’s problem worse if I shook it too hard.   So after some gentle wiggling of the cat, it seemed to move its legs a little.   Eventually after much poking, I woke the cat up and it walked slowly away from me.  Now I don’t know if I knocked the cat out or just had a hard time waking it up, or both.   But the good thing is that I didn’t kill mom’s cat.’, ‘

‘2009-12-29 21:34:27’, ‘2009-12-30 01:34:27’, ‘

Since my lawn maintenance worker decided to stop mowing my lawn, I had to get Nick to fix the walk behind mower that I bought from him about 10 years ago.  After Nick played with the carburetor, it started on the second pull.  I decided to mow my lawn today.   So I chased the mower around the yard and when I got about 3/4 thru, the mower started surging and then died.  I called Nick, who remotely diagnosed that  I had water in my tank.  I drained some gas into a bottle and could not tell if there was any water in there.  I had to syphon the gas out of  the tank and I now remember vividly what gas tastes like.  I then practiced spitting a lot.  I tore things apart and figured that there was a bunch of dirt at the bottom of the new tank that Nick had put on the mower.   The new gas filter he had put on, was full of junk.  I was jamming Q-Tips into the drain thing to try to clear out the clog but nothing worked.   I eventually put a hose on the drain thing and blew air back into the tank.  At first it was hard to blow and then it blew clear.  I once again remembered what gas tasted like.  When I hooked things back up, the gas was flowing freely.  I finished mowing the lawn. 

Later I decided to chop down a maple tree that was putting too much shade in my back yard with my Axe. It was only about 6 inches in diameter, so I figured I did not need to get out the Chainsaw.   After about 3 minutes of chopping the tree went Thump, Thump and was leaning against another tree with a very long 3 inch diameter branch sticking out over the back yard.  It was about a foot  over my head and I tried to swing at it to start cutting it off.  I missed.  It was a very hard swing.  I had not expected to miss it.  My arms continued to move in an arc past the branch and then down straight in front of me.  Next thing I knew, it had stopped by hitting my left ankle.   I had sharpened my Axe very well.  I looked down at my foot, expecting the worst, but found that I had put my hiking boots on in order to mow the lawn.   There was no blood.  I went inside and took the boot off.  I had a 3 inch line of scraped skin starting at my ankle that was beginning to swell.  Like Ouchie.  I had thought about wearing my Teva sandals to mow the lawn,  but in retrospect, I made the right decision.

“Eddie with Pack Leader, Car and Trophy”

Eddie designed a new Pinewood Derby car for his Webelo’s II competition. It used 3 different colors and a  Lego driver with an X-wing canopy.  Eddie and I cut it to his chosen shape and we sanded it down to 600 Grit.  Laura and Eddie Laid down 3 layers of a base coat using Lawn Care Green.   Sanded the green to 600 grit.  Laura taped the parts of the car that were supposed to stay green, got the can of Red Gloss paint and shot it at the car.  The first squirts out of the can must have included a lot of solvent because there was a bunch of big bubbly red streaks on the car that would not dry properly.  Laura was sad.   I had to scrape and sand the gooey red stuff down to the wood since it had dissolved some of our pretty green paint.  I shook up the paint can real good and went at the car again.  It did a little better.  We bought a new can of red paint.   When we had sanded the red paint to 600 grit, Laura taped off the car sections that were to remain Red when the next color was added.   The Blue paint went on much better.    When Laura pulled off all the tape, we had a Red, Green and Blue car.  Then a layer of Clear Gloss.  Then all the decals.  Then More Gloss. Meanwhile, Laura had also polished the axles and the wheel hubs.    It was then my turn.  I had to install the wheels and the weights to bring the car up to 5 oz.    This time I decided to use my drill press to pre-drill the axle holes, therefore guaranteeing that the tire axles will go in straight.  Wrong.  Two of them still went in cockeyed and I had to whap on the axle nails with a screwdriver so that all 4 wheels touched when it was rolled. I weighed all the parts together before I assembled it and trimmed off the Lead until all the separate parts were exactly 5 oz.  I then put all the parts on the car and then weighed it.  The car somehow was up to 5.2 oz. thus proving that things weigh more than the sum of their parts once assembled.  So I started trimming the lead again to get it back down to 5 oz.

I had volunteered to run the Pinewood derby software for the Pack using my Laptop which was connected to the electronic speed equipment on the  Pinewood derby racing track.   From my previous years experience, I had learned all the tricks to make everything work together because it would mess up after about 15 races.  I would reset power to the timer, unplug and re-plug cables and restart the software.  Last year, it always worked.  Not this year.  This year the special software updated itself over the internet.  After the update, it still seemed to work fine.  But, after about 40 races, nothing would work and the software would not get the race times from the timing equipment.  This would also really really mess up my computer.  On a reboot, it once gave me the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH (BSOD).  I would have to shutdown and reboot 2 or 3 times before it came up cleanly enough to run the Racing Software again.   All this would be occurring while a room full of about 60 parents and kids are ALL looking at me attempting to get everything in sync and they were not smiling at me.    For the little stuff, I would stop the race and signal to the helpers to push things while I did stuff to the computer to verify everything was working again before starting the next race.   Luckily the big crashes would wait until the end of the races which would end the competitions.  Then I would reboot and give the results to the leaders.  BUT, for the last set of races for the Bears, a hard crash happened after the 4th heat with 2 more to go.  I stopped the race, fidgeted with things.  Nothing worked.  Everybody is watching me.  I go to the Pack leader and tell him that I need to reboot the computer and it will probably take about 15 minutes before we can restart the races.    He makes the announcement and takes the Bears out to play outside.  Meanwhile, I am waiting for my Laptop to reboot.  Various techies stop by to offer me unhelpful advice on what I should be doing.   Eventually, I get rebooted and verify that the hardware seems to be working.  I give the signal and all the Bears trudge back in.  We finish the last 2 heats with no problems.  Afterwards, a couple of parents stop by and tell me that I had the worst job and they felt sorry for me.  I thanked them. Meanwhile for the Webelo’s II races.  Eddie won 1st place for show and came in 4th place for speed.  Yay!  We go to the District finals on Feb 20.’, ‘

2008-06-08 16:10:04′, ‘

As part of the dry pond improvement project, Nick handed me a box of Grass Seed that he had swept off of a Home Gardening Floor from bags that had ripped open. So I walked up and down the berm throwing out seed. I was a little startled when I grabbed something soft and Fuzzy in the Seed Box. If you cannot tell, it is a dried mouse. Nick was amused. He claims it was not there on purpose.‘, ‘

2008-07-19 02:09:28′, ‘

Laura and I went to get our 4trax ATVs at our campsite and as I was taking the covers off of them. Laura noticed that there was a Hornet’s nest in the tree next to our bikes. It was about a foot in diameter and 8 feet off the ground. There were a large number of hornets going in and out of it and a bunch that were just sitting out on the surface of the nest. These were the ones that would attack anything that tried to disturb the nest. My problem was that I did not know if starting the 4trak would upset the Bees. Laura decided that I should be the one to test the theory and that she would watch from a safe distance. There were no problems when I started Laura’s bike, but mine was right next to the tree. I put it in neutral and pushed it away from the tree before starting it. No bee issues. I went to a luncheon with my Co-workers and told them my hornet story. This got them started telling me about their city-fied experiences with bees. I heard one story about how a bee got into their house which led to everybody running around screaming until somebody swatted it. Then they carefully picked it up with some toilet paper and flushed the bee down the toilet while every body in the house rejoiced. Another person told us about how he had spotted a 2 inch wasp nest under their deck. So they waited until dark and snuck up on it an sprayed it with some bee spray then ran in the house and waited for the bees to die. I also heard stories about how bees can chase people around in the dark and get you and its very dangerous to mess with them. This inspired me to tell the story about the gigantic 2 foot tall hornet nest that was about 5 feet off the ground at the Farm that Nick and I decided to mess with. We decided that it would be real fun to attach a string of firecrackers to a stick, light them and shove the firecrackers into the center of the nest so that the firecrackers would destroy the nest and release a couple of thousand angry bees into the night. We prepared the stick with a large bunch of Black Cat firecrackers taped to the end of it and my job was to light the firecrackers. We talked some kid into doing the shoving. One thing about Hornets is that they keep a couple of guard bees awake around the entrance of the nest ready to attack any invaders or disturbers. So we got setup with the Kid prepared to shove the stick into the nest with one stroke. I lit my match and was holding it between my thumb and forefinger trying to find the Fireworks fuse. The light from the match attracted the attention of one of the Guard Hornets who flew out to investigate. It flew towards the light and eventually into my cupped hand holding the Match and was going Bap ,Bap, Bap, Bap between my palm and fingers which were holding the match. For some reason, this startled me and I yelled and dropped the match and ran. The kid and everyone else around me also yelled and ran. No one got stung but it took a while to regroup and setup for the next attempt. For the next try, we got setup again. I knew exactly where the Firecracker fuse was in the dark. The Kid was ready, He was pumped. I lit the match, I lit the firecrackers and ran. The kid shoved the firecrackers into the hornets nest with all his strength. The kid ran, Every body ran. As I looked back at the nest while running I saw the firecrackers go off. The only problem was that the Kid had shoved the stick all the way thru the nest and out the other side. All the firecrackers went off outside the nest. Bummer. We figured that the Hornets were probably a little riled up and that we should call it a night. The other people at the table started looking at each other and they started mentioning something about the Darwin awards and they felt that people in my family would not survive long in this world.’, ‘

2008-07-16 02:31:39′,

‘When I got home from work today. There was about 17 messages on my answering machine. 16 of them were just a long series of beeping sounds. I got a call later and when I answered it, I got a loud beeping in my ear. The call was from some orthopedic place. When I called the number, I got fax sounds. Nobody answered. I figured that the Ortho place had tried to send a fax to my home number and since it was unsuccessful, it would keep trying it every 10 minutes. I was bummed. I didn’t want this to go on all nite. I remembered that the printer I just bought had a fax option so I hooked it up to the phone line and waited. When I got the call, I received a fax from the ortho company asking that some lady named Ruth to pay a late bill. It was only $83. There was a contact number which I called and told them to get rid of my phone number from Ruth’s account. We will see if I get any more faxes from them.’, ‘