Thursday, June 30, 2011

Damn, I'm Good...

I was going to make a different post today, but the ol' compy's been acting up so I can't upload the photos to show you all what I was talking about last time. Gadfry... has it already been a month? You all really should update more... especially Tiff. I blame her for my sloth.

Anyway... a friend asked if I could bale and haul some hay for him so we did. It was while I was hauling that I got to thinking about things. As most of you know... that's not always a good thing, but in this case...

The bales were good alfalfa bales, and that means they were like bricks, and those stack incredibly well, so I got to looking at my stack, and it was a pretty nice stack. But pride goeth before the fall, and in stacking terms, that's literal, so I didn't get too haughty.

So... just to tell the tale, there are people who've stacked more hay than I have, but I can stack up there with the best of them, and that's what got me to thinking...

I can't remember when exactly my dad put me on the stacker, he never could stack worth a darn, and it bugged him, so as soon as he could, he put me in that thing. I was probably around 16, and I can remember it like it was yesterday. There's a lot of levers in that thing that run all the hydraulics and you have to fumble around like a schoolboy on prom night trying to find the right one for what you want to do. I was going at a snail's pace too... it was a steep learning curve. Now I can clip along at 10 mph and do everything through muscle memory. Funny thing what better than 20 years of doing something can do for your skills.

It's actually kind of funny... when you're good at something, you make it look easy and everyone thinks they can do it too. They think they can just borrow my machine and the perfect stacks will magically appear. It's not that easy, and I find it hilarious when I go look at their job and it's horrendous.

I take it as a lesson, when you watch somebody and they make what they're doing look real easy, it's probably skill at work, not necessarily that the job is easy in and of itself.

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Today's mystery lyric: (Remember the rules folks, no online searching of the lyrics, if you don't know it, you don't have the answer!)

Out in the street,
dogs are all around you,
cats are all in heat

Answer to last lyric: Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffet. Way to go Tiffy!