Ok, there I was, waist deep in grenade pins . . .
Seriously though, what now seems like 100 years ago, my father was studying to be a drilling mud engineer. He worked in a small lab that was from the outside considered to be either an over sized camper, or a small box truck. He did not make very much money, and with four of us kids at home, my mother had her hands full. I was the oldest son of three, so while dad chased the drilling rigs, he told me to look out for the others. Dad was about as mechanically inclined as a wad of chewing gum and fixed things with bailing wire and duct tape, but brilliant with a slew of other things. We couldn’t afford to fix things when they broke, or buy new ones. I had no choice but to learn how to fix different things. I would ride my bicycle down to an appliance store that had a guy in the back that would teach me little things, and sometimes gave me used parts. I worked on everybody’s bicycles, lawnmowers, and learned to do some home repairs. When I got to high school, I took shop class. One summer during my senior year, I spent a few days with my dad on a rig. He had told me about a nice creek nearby and suggested I run some trot lines on it to see if I could catch some catfish out of it. While there with him, a guy offered me a job on one of the crews, and I accepted it. I did everything, and lived there at the rig site. I sent my paychecks to my mother. When the rig moved, I moved with it, and years later in 1983 a guy showed up and shut it all down. He said the oilfield had died, and I was out of a job. So after a few weeks finding out nobody was hiring, I joined the Army. With no actual formal training, my skills didn’t mean much, so they assigned my 23 year old butt to the infantry. I earned honor graduate, soldier of the cycle, my own “Iron Mike” trophy, and a slot to jump school. Before too long, almost all my skills became necessary at one point or another and earned me promotions and other schools. I became to go to guy in almost every unit I was in. 10 years later an RPG slammed into a building I was running towards, and I saw my right boot sole directly over my left shoulder. A year after that I came home. A year after that a neighbor offered me a maintenance position at his steel processing plant. 24 years later, after being the plant manager for 14 years I came home again, and once again my skills don’t mean much. I’ve had quite a few vehicles in that time span, and worked on countless others for various reasons. Everything from a Corvette to dirt bikes and four wheelers to boats. I like to make stuff out of nothing.
Now, I have a fourteen year old King Ranch F150 I bought brand new, and a TJ I bought last summer. Neither are race cars, and neither get abused. Instead, they get polished and treated as if they were on a showroom somewhere. My truck just went over 118k, and the Jeep has 180k on it, so I figure I’ll have plenty to wrench on for a while yet.
Today I started to replace a leaking valve cover gasket. I say started because I haven’t taken all the bolts out yet. A nap became a priority, as well as walking the dogs, fixing my neighbors garage door, listening to my youngest daughter tell me about her job, and fixing the drywall in the laundry room where my wife punched a doorknob through the wall by accident, so I’ll get back to it tomorrow, maybe, it’s raining again.