The Tractor Story

Friday night I saw several bugs that I hadn’t seen before. The first one I followed around for a while. It was about an inch and a half long, and red and black striped, but it was too fast to focus on very well. When I explained it this is what they told me it was.

Photo from here.

I don’t remember it having that many stripes, but the general shape is about right.

Then PawPaw, one of the roughnecks, brought a beetle into the dog house while I was there. It had huge, serrated pincers. A couple of the guys entertained themselves by trying to get their fingers between the pincers.

Photo from here.

They weren’t successful, but it would have served them right if they were. The beetle was about three inches long, and the pincers another two inches.

Today’s Exploit:

The past few days I have just been waiting for a run to finish so that I can be useful again. After they got stuck they had to do a “wiper run” to clean the hole. They didn’t use my tool for that run, so my life was meaningless for those three days.

During that time I spent a lot of time in the dog house, listening to stories. Mac told many stories about riding various ATVs. The one I remember most was about a trip he took with his girlfriend.

They were out riding in a very remote area and he let her drive. One thing led to another and somehow they wrecked resulting in Mac’s foot being trapped under the vehicle. He was not in a position that he could provide leverage to move it, and his girlfriend was too small to do it.

Mac:  I was stuck there, with my foot trapped for about half an hour before we got help. And then I got run over by a tractor.

Me:  …

That last line left me speechless.

Somehow that was a lead-in for another story, about how the tractor incident came about. But his line reminded me of my sister’s line: and then I found five dollars, which she used to make a boring story more interesting.