New Year’s Resolutions

Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going to bore you or make you feel guilty with a whole list of how I am going to attempt to change my life this year. At my age, I guess I am pretty much stuck in what I have made of myself. So instead of a total reforming of my life, this year I am going to attempt a lighter approach: to laugh more, to tell more funny stories about myself and my family, and laugh at myself more often. To share more memories and take more opportunities to be kind. I want to listen more and talk less, to laugh more and whine less.
So first, some memories.
Another Tale of the Tow’er.
To help people understand what I mean by tow’er, let me explain. Whenever something has to be towed on the farm — starting a recalcitrant tractor, getting a dead vehicle back to the shop, moving a truck that is being used as a feed rack, relocating a non-running tractor — it always involves two people: the “tow’er” and the tow’ee.
The tow’er is the one on the tractor/vehicle that is pulling, the tow’ee is the one on the non-running vehicle. In our family, I am ALWAYS the tow’er. And I like it that way.
This story happened many years ago and in this instance I am once again the tow’er, but from behind instead of in front.
We delivered a pump to a ranch west of Thermopolis. To get to this ranch, the road is not just bad, it’s horrible, a dugway up the side of a bentonite-type clay hill. We took two pickups and a trailer to gather some vintage equipment to relocate from his pile to our pile. By the time we got everything loaded, it had clouded up and sprinkled a little bit. We started to pull out and I mentioned to Rick that we might want to chain the trailer, which didn’t have brakes to my pickup to help keep it from slipping. At first, he didn’t think we would need to, both pickups were 4x4’s and loaded to the hilt. But just before he dropped over the hill, he felt the trailer slip and his pickup felt a little slippery, too, so we stopped and hooked a chain from the back of the trailer to the tow hooks on the front of my pickup.
I put my truck in 4-low and we started off of that hill. I basically set the pace because the GMC I was driving had a very low, low gear. When we got to the bottom, we unhooked and sighed with relief. It was getting dark then and, as we headed down the highway, me still following Rick, I could see flashes of light flying off to the side of the road. When I pulled up close enough to see what was happening, I could tell that a cutter bar on a piece of equipment we tied up had come loose and was hanging out on the right-hand side of the load. As Rick drove, that cutter bar was taking the reflectors off of every post and launching them into the unknown. I got him shut down pretty quick, so he only de-reflectored about a half-mile of posts in the end.
I am sure WDOT wondered what farmer did all of that damage, but we still laugh whenever we have occasion to tell the story.
So laugh at our stories, because we are laughing at them, too.
Cooling Salad
1 small box orange gelatin mix
1 can mandarin oranges
1 banana
1 cup orange sherbet
Drain juice from oranges, add water to make one cup. Heat and pour over gelatin, stir until dissolved. Add sherbet and continue stirring until sherbet is melted, then add orange sections and sliced banana. Chill until firm.