On Saturday, the family had to go visit some of the 'kin folk' in Virginia for a baby shower, which meant that I was left to my own devices for the better part of the day. As a side note here, there are just a few things that men should try hard to avoid. One of those things is any event that includes the word "shower." The only kind of showers I want to be involved in either fall from the sky or involve one person and a bar of soap.

As many of you already know, some of the other things I try to avoid are casseroles, biting dogs and angry women. Anyway, these 'showers' are really just excuses for women to get together and do women things. Even if the baby is yours, do you want to go where they try to get their friends to drink from a baby bottle or carry a balloon between their legs? No man would ever put those kinds of things on the agenda, to be sure. Such an event planned by a man would involve chicken wings and some kind of a sporting event or at least a televised account of such an event.

The other social functions that my family regularly attends are kids' birthday parties. I do attend those when I can, especially the ones for my own children. But the bulk of them are definitely attended by wives. There is a circuit of those things that kids have to go to, apparently. We must have been out of the loop when I was a kid, because I didn't go to 20 parties a year the way my children do. Anyway, I stayed busy during my uninterrupted 'me' time Saturday. Other than a break to eat supper and visit with some friends for a few minutes, I spent the entire day working right up until bedtime. Even sans interruptions, I didn't do the things I intended to do.

That morning was spent putting a few trees in the ground that we picked up from the Alleghany Soil and Water District office in Sparta. Since free trees were being given out, I decided to take the opportunity to get involved in some planting. I picked out a few ash, oaks, plums and other trees and then planted them around the property. I also got a few elderberry bushes and some button bushes to place around the yard.

Planting trees and bushes in fairly labor intensive work, but I really enjoy it. There's just something about putting something in the soil and watching it grow that brings pleasure and even a kind of peace. It's like the thought that something I do today might benefit people 100 years from now. Tree planting also teaches lessons on faith and patience, since the trees start off looking like little more than sticks with a few roots on the bottom. It takes faith to expend the work to dig a hole and plant something that looks dead and believe it will turn into something alive. I'll try not to wax religious here, but there are certain parallels with many of the things we face in life.

Trees are magnificent things, in my way of looking at it. They provide shade in the summer, they block the wind in the winter, they provide privacy from passers-by and they make the grass grow more slowly. What more could a man want in a plant? How about a place for kids to play, firewood and building materials?

After getting my trees planted, I went back out to the building to get a few stakes cut to mark the tree locations. I had intended to go plant the garden after that, but it just never quite happened. Since my battery-powered saw works well at cutting up scrap lumber, I soon had a nice stack of treated one-inch stakes ready to mark the trees.

However, when I went in to fetch the white paint to spray my stakes, it wouldn't spray. I tried to see if there was something in the valve and ended up spraying a geyser of paint into the air that left little white spots on nearly everything in a 10-foot radius. After that episode, the paint can still wouldn't work. Thinking I had another can of paint somewhere, I started moving things off the work table and that's when I realized that I had a mess to deal with. Since I had already started clearing off the work bench, which is about eight feet on one side and three on the other and shaped like an 'L', I somehow ended up putting up pegboard. It was one of those jobs that I hadn't really meant to do, but it just happened. After a few hours of hanging pegboard, I found myself in the midst of placing nearly everything on the walls-from tools to tape, rope and extension cords-lost in my own thoughts.

Once all of that was placed in a manner that seemed logical to me, I looked up and realized that better than half of the day had passed me by without my even realizing it. It was about a quarter past three before I even noticed that I hadn't eaten lunch.

That's when I realized that without any interference or a very specific agenda, I sometimes find myself bouncing from one thing to the next like a pinball. All of the things I did were productive, just not necessarily the ones that needed to be done. One of the side trails I took that day happened when I was trying to put a little oil on my vise after noticing that it was making a squeaking noise when I closed it. That's when I found out that one of my oil cans was empty and the other wasn't working. When I filled the one that was working, I immediately noticed the can had a leak on the side and another on the bottom. Maybe that's why it was empty. These weren't the kind of leaks that would have emptied the can in a five-minute period, but given ample time, a drip could empty an ocean.

Since there were several leaks and it had already been soldered, I decided not to try it again.

So I found myself taking the other oil can apart to try and find out why it was stopped up.

After taking it all apart and cleaning it, I realized that it was completely plugged with something that looked like dirt or sawdust and the mechanism was damaged beyond repair. The two cans had a different kind of threads on the top, so I couldn't just switch the tops. That meant I had to move parts from one mechanism to the other and make a sort of hybrid. About this time, I started realizing that I might should have just poured some oil in my hand and rubbed it on the thing. By the time it was all said and done, I had spent some 45 minutes fixing an oil can that I only use about once a year instead of planting the garden.

Soon some friends came by and I went with them to get some food, afterwards returning to move a few things around in the building with the extra help. One of the things was a serging machine from the old Modern Globe sewing factory that I ended up with as a work table when we couldn't figure it out.

By this time, it was too late to get anything done in the garden and the rain started on Sunday. According to the forecast, it will likely rain all week. At least my oil can is working.
 

Get the whole story - read this week's edition of The Alleghany News!