In Cliff's shop

He has two Oliver tractor projects going at once.  

The Oliver overhaul is complete

Cliff's brother, Don, arrived Thursday evening, and they started overhauling the Oliver that very night. It's funny to watch the two brothers work together: Don overhauls things for a living, and he's always been somewhat hyper anyhow... "slam, bam, thank-you-ma'am" is his style. So he likes to move fast and slam things together. Cliff likes to work steadily, but with lots of thought, taking no chances, studying each move to make sure there's no error. Because of the different ways they're wired, they get on one another's nerves at times. My daughter said it's like watching an old married couple, the way they bicker. Here's a slide show I put together that shows how they progressed with the work on the Oliver 1855.

Because our weather for the weekend was warm and sunny, Cliff's sister and her husband decided to ride their Harley from St. Louis and join in the fun.

The overhaul was completed by Saturday night, and the forecast for Sunday continued the spring-like weather pattern we were experiencing.

We decided to ride part of the way home with Charlene and Pat. We ate dinner together in Sedalia, and rode with them as far as California, Missouri, where we waved goodbye to them and turned toward Versailles; we had time to stop by Cliff's favorite aunt's house there and say hello to her. Unfortunately, she wasn't home.

It was a good weekend with lots of family bonding. Great times.

I have a video of the Oliver being started up for the first time after the tuneup. I've shared it on Facebook, but it's so funny... and so typical of Cliff's brother... that I simply must add it here. There's mild profanity at the end, where Donald thought there was a problem (there wasn't).

Notice the big smile on Cliff's face as he listens to his tractor running.

Now Cliff has to break it in somehow. I'm sure he'll think of some way to do that. He has two gigantic plows his brother brought him, but we don't have that much space to plow on our property. He's thinking of asking a local farmer if he'd mind someone plowing on his river-bottom property, now that the crops are put away.

This is why I'm not a photographer

My sister lives probably thirty miles from me, as the crow flies. That is, when she isn't snowbirding in Texas. We do see her perhaps a half dozen times a year. Her son lives in McPherson, Kansas; her grandsons, in Oklahoma City.

So I was thrilled to find out the whole crew was going to be visiting her this weekend.

Knowing how difficult it is to get a group picture, especially when children are involved, I snapped away; I took three shots.

The first one isn't bad, really. OK, Ethan has a forced smile, but that's a four-year-old for you. Trouble is, Grandma Debra was fussing over her granddaughter. No problem, because I took a second picture.

Oops. Debra blinked. Hmmm, and here I thought the children would be the problem.

One more time:

Alrighty then. This one's pretty good, although you can see Ethan is growing weary of posing; he'd rather be playing with the toys Great-Grandma keeps for him. Of course, there's the usual red-eye caused by the flash; I suppose my daughter could fix that for me if I asked her, but I'm satisfied with this.

Cliff and I started out to my sister's on the motorcycle, but ten miles from home we ran into rain. So we returned home and got the car. It rained all day long in Kansas City, North. Steadily. Persistently. Drip drip drip.

Since we were a little north anyhow, Cliff decided to go about sixty miles farther north to get a scrap piece of tin for his Oliver tractor. Don't say Cliff never takes me anywhere.

I've visited some of the finest junk yards in the state, over the years.

Here's the piece he went after. He paid good money for that!

We arrived home to find out it had only sprinkled here; I poured two drops out of the rain gauge.

I had planned to go to the local high school football game, but we got home starving, with only a half-hour to go before kickoff. So we scratched that.

I found out in the process of making this entry that the Chrome browser doesn't work well with Blogger. It won't let me cut and paste the photos to move them, and spell-check doesn't work when I'm making a blog entry.

Sometimes older is best.

Turns out that since there's new growth coming up through the ruined hay, Cliff's old rake does the job better. He doesn't care; it gives him an excuse to use his Oliver 1855.

More on the Marshalltown, Iowa, tractor show

As I've mentioned before, the Marshalltown tractor show was not a big one; all our local shows have a bigger turnout than this one. And yet, it was a productive trip for Cliff, mainly because of one man we met at the show.

This man and his brother had an exquisitely-restored Oliver 1755. He was able to tell Cliff where to get every little part he might ever need. Cliff picked his brain for over an hour.

You'd never know their tractor was this old; it looked as though it just came off the showroom floor.

Such attention to detail!

We were quite impressed, not only with his Oliver tractor, but with his Oliver knowledge.

Plus, he sent us on a little side trip on the way home that was worth the drive to Iowa, all by itself. I'll do a different entry on that.

You city folks, be patient. Eventually I'll have something to blog about besides tractors, gardens, and canning. At least I hope so.