Rich: Hello, everyone, from beautiful, sunny California! Did I say sunny? Yes, it is still sunny and 75 degrees! And I am soon to complete the project I have been working on this summer in Palmdale, California. This brings changes ... not only scenery changes, but often climate changes.

My next project is in northern California, in the city of Redding. This town sits at the very north end of the central valley of California, or, one might say (if you are from here), the city of Redding sits in the foothills of Lake Shasta! Within 15-20 minutes of the lake, itself. This location would be HOT in the summer, and COLD in the winter. We have heard from the locals about summer here, that "Redding is 114 during the day and at night it is dark." (I took that to mean that it is also 114 degrees at night!)

This change brings other changes ... let me explain. A year ago, I started with this company as an assistant framing supervisor. Then, within the last year, I was promoted to a full time framing supervisor. This week, I was given a promotion to the job I wanted a year ago when I started with this company: a supervisory position that would look after multiple sites.

Many people would say that this would be a DE-motion, but I enjoy the planning and project management that goes into a building project of this magnitude more than the day to day nuts and bolts implementation.

Marlene: We're all getting excited about leaving for "home" on Thursday. The kids are really excited. I'm feeling quite content here, but I am anxious to see everybody. It's amazing that we've made such good friends in the short five months we've been here. Our little Martha (90 years old and still driving) took my hand and said, "We'll miss you so much." Such a sweet little lady. We got a picture of all of us together and we'll treasure that, for sure.

We're stopping in Montana for Landon Nye's wedding and then staying for meeting in the morning with all the people we met when we lived there and then we'll make the loooonnnnnggg, boring journey the rest of the way to Kim's. That is the longest, straightest stretch of road, but maybe that's a good thing.

Mark goes in for another look at his arms before we leave. He's hoping to have his casts off for good but I'm not too sure. The last time (two weeks ago) he had the doctor here check them. He said the arms should have been pinned and that we'll have to watch them for two to three years because they're both broken on the growth plate. He said that the breaks were very bad. Oh, well. I told the doctor it's a good thing he's wanting to be a rancher and not a pianist.

Mark has already had three sets of casts on these breaks. At least, if he has to have them on again, they'll be new and clean for our northern visit.

We're enjoying our last few days of sun and warmth here. Went to the pool just because we could yesterday. Hope to see you soon!

Brad was from town. He dropped out of high school to come to work in the lambing shed. It was his first real job.

More used to hanging out with his buddies -- heads huddled under hoods of cars -- he was quite unprepared for the long hours of work. Hired to clean pens, he had to learn how to push a loaded wheelbarrow; the ground was uneven and muddy and he wasn't a big kid. But he had heart; he was trying to do the right thing.

He'd married his pregnant girl friend and now they had a newborn baby. She was still living with her parents but they "needed" to get a place of their own. He had to prove himself capable as a breadwinner.

Most days his tail was dragging by early afternoon. Just the thought of going back to work after supper seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. He was homesick from the get-go. No cruising up and down main street with his teenage wife. No drag racing! No fun!

Lambing was in full swing. The days were growing warmer. The resulting mud made it hard to reach the manure pile without a wheelbarrow upset. We laid a wooden plank for him to wheel on, but that was a balancing act that rarely ended well. The pile began to take on a sprawling, ill-formed shape.

Jack complained that it looked bad and was taking up too much space in front of the shed. "Brad needs to dump the load up onto the side of the pile," he said. I tried to help by dumping occasional wheelbarrow loads between Brad's wheelbarrow spills. But the pile continued to sprawl.

On his next visit, Jack decided to use the tractor and loader to neaten the mess up. He wanted a proper pile!

The shed was built on the level creek bottom. The saturated soil was unstable enough to rut after a few passes with the tractor. Each time Jack would back away from the pile, the front wheels would leave ridges of mud pushed up. As he pushed in again, trying to scrape up the individual wheelbarrow loads, he would also scrape up the ridges of mud. With him intent on getting all the straw and manure off the ground and into the pile, the unintended addition of the ridges of mud made the pile grow exponentially. Meanwhile, a muddy depression was forming all around the circumference. The front wheels sank deeper and deeper with each pass. The pile tripled in size.

Working just inside the open shed door, Brad and I were watching this developing situation with increasing interest; it was getting funnier by the minute. Eventually the front wheels sank so deep that the back wheels spun out. Jack rocked the tractor back and forth until it was stuck.

From the open door of the cab, he sent me up the hill to get the bulldozer and chain. When I clattered back down, he instructed Brad, out the open back window, how to hook us up. I pulled the tractor onto solid ground. With his shiny boots on terra-firma, Jack must have realized the full extent of how bad his pile looked; he decided he'd fix it up with the bulldozer. Bad decision!

It only got bigger and messier. Finally, in apparent exasperation, he climbed out of the bulldozer and, without a word, got into his pickup and drove away. It's not nice -- but we were overcome with laughter. Water was filling in the depression and the huge pile was looking like a rugged, mountain island in the middle of a big lake.

A Vivid Memory of September 24, 1942
by Jess Cloyd
Hot Springs, SD

Don's OBSERVATIONS regarding the September 25, 1942, snowstorm in last week's Bulletin brought back a vivid memory of the day before in Iowa.

As I was an 18 year old, waiting to be drafted, employers were not anxious to put me on their payroll. So the logical consideration was working for Uncle Sam. Camp Dodge, 10 miles north of Des Moines, had been a National Guard Headquarters, turned into an induction center for the World War II draftees. (Lucky us!)

Being the proud owner of a 1936, four door V8 Ford (with built-on trunk -- that was an "extra" in 1936), I commuted to the camp daily with five Italian Catholic city boys in tow. For a naive Welsh/ Irish/ Dutch Protestant Iowa farm boy, that was a rare combination and some interesting discussions accompanied every trip. There was no cafeteria, so we had our school-boy lunch buckets and lunch time could turn into a rousing debate on the war, sports, religion or philosophy.

On September 24, 1942 -- I remember it as my grandmother's birthday -- we went to work in balmy Iowa autumn sunshine, in thin, open-necked, short-sleeved shirts. Our workplace was a huge armory type edifice, divided into a thousand (or so) cubicles serving as doctors' "examining rooms." There, hundreds of inductees a day stood au naturel, waiting for the next exam -- and finally were interviewed by one of us clerk-typists, who filled out their official forms of induction into the U.S. Army.

Since the building was essentially windowless, none of us saw the incoming dark clouds of a vicious snowstorm pouncing down on us. By 5 o'clock, the roads were heavily snow-covered and the temperature dropped rapidly. A somber six of us piled into that miserably cold Ford and the driver (me) had 10 miles of taunting. Not only was icy wind coming through the cracks of the doors, but the timid little gasoline heater (only old timers remember enjoying those pretensions) emitted a tiny, squeaky sound resembling rusty fan blades turning but gave out no heat.

Rest assured, Don, that by the time that snowstorm reached you on the 25th, some drastic measures had been taken in Iowa to keep the "boys" happy! And a few months later, I, too, went through those lines to become a Private for Uncle Sam.

This Week's Special Days
October 8---Columbus Day (observed)
October 12---Columbus Day (traditional)

This Week's Birthdays
October 7---Steven Anderson
October 10---Hannah Aydelotte (6 years)
October 10---Cody Printz
October 11---Jay Smith
October 12---Muriel Wold Rodriguez
October 12---Tami Anderson Hunt
Happy Birthday!

More October Birthdays
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October 1---Brooklynn Ann Johnson (3 years)
October 1---Carolyn Amy Horne (3 years)
October 4---Wesley Sigman
October 5---Leona Anderson
October 5---Steven Miller

October 14---Douglas Anderson
October 18---Lori Anderson
October 18---Adriana Stahlecker Brown
October 18---Dan Mellon
October 20---Wade Morgan Printz (8 years)
October 22---Rich Johnson (from CA)
October 24---Eric Shockey
October 24---Ken Kitto
October 26---Ardis Sigman Quick
October 27---Marlene Anderson Johnson
October 28---Derrick McNeill
October 29---Sami Larson
October 29---Tom Miller
October 30---Anne Mellon Montford

October Anniversaries
Z
October 1---Keith Mason and Lori Anderson (2 years)
October 4---Don and Patty Bratten Anderson (10 years)
October 5---Tom and Lou Miller (34 years)

October 17---Troy and Marlee Morgan Freesemann (13 years)
October 27---Don and Gert Dake Pettit (17 years)

October Special Days
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October 8---Columbus Day (observed)
October 31---Hallowe'en

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