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The Horse Whisperer

No, I’m not gonna talk about a Robert Redford movie.

Dad was a horse whisperer. Not in some magical sense, but a guy who was good from horses from birth. It’s a bit of old folklore that a horse whisperer is weaned on the milk of a morgan mare, and dad was.

I know he hated it.I know he was called on to deal with horses with problems- people would call dad before they called a vet- and as often as not he could help them. Sometimes I helped him clean up a bad hoof- he kept a hoof knife in his truck his whole life- and sometimes we’d lance a boil or an infection. Most of the time, he’d get a horse that would shy at the sight of a fence, or something strange like that. Sometimes he’d hook up a horse owner with a goat, or a dog. Some horses wold be calm if there was a goat around, some would chill out around the right kind of a dog.
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Get a grip, willya?

Ktreva is looking for grips for her new toy, and wishes they came in pink.

Now, I don’t want pink grips- but I have always wanted nice wood grips for the Ruger, and today, I got them

Ken Enright at Altamont Company is a busy guy, has a bunch of things on his plate. A busy enough guy that without the pad of paper he invariably carries to write notes on, he’d never be able to keep track of the thousands of irons he has in the fire.

So it was with unadulterated glee that I opened the package from him today, containing my new Ruger grips.
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CRT woes

Steve is trying to get kilt messing with the CRT on his dad’s old depthfinder. Reminds me of a story (almost anything can remind me of a story) about a friend of my dad’s.

Arky was a guy who, though he never exercised, looked like Lil’ Abner. Muscles for days. So strong he sometimes had to move slow lest those muscles cramp up on him. Not a tall man, maybe five eight, but built like a rock.

Arky bought a new Zenith TV from Ed’s TV and Appliance. Now in those days, there were a couple things about tv’s people today forget. I mean, aside from the fact that there were only four channels and some crap on UHF.

No, at that time, a new TV was an event. People welcomed them into their homes like pieces of fine furniture. They were made like furniture. They had wood cabinets. Yes, folks, actual cabinets. Made of actual wood. Some of them looked like pieces of fine furniture. Some didn’t even have remote controls. Or pushbuttons. SOme had big dials to change the channel.

Unquestionably, the most amazing thing about those antiques was the fact that they required installation. Someone would come out, hook up the TV, adjust the antenna if necesary, and tune the set so the color balance was just right. Differences in climate could change the set, so some people had their TV’s reset yeach year, sometimes more often. A tech would come out and fiddle with the set for sometimes an hour.
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