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lord_steak
05-11-2003, 05:49 AM
Parents can be the most closed-eared people I know. My dad wanted to surprise my step-mom by getting the drainage ditch in the yard (the one that I had to single-handedly dig in a 6-hour period) lined and filled with chunks of flint. We got a load from a number of piles out in the woods, brought it back, and with how much rain we've taken lately, the yard is soupy in most places. I said we should take it down by wheelbarrow. My dad decided that the 3/4 ton 4-wheel drive truck should be backed right down to the ditch. So that's what he did.

Took the load out, put it in the ditch, obvious we'd need two more loads. My dad gets in, starts her up, tries to get out, spins the tires. Irritating. So, we go get the 40ft. chain and the winch, setup the winch at one of the trees, and get started. After we get the thing to move about 2 ft, dad said he wanted to drive her out. I said it was just as soupy, and the tires were all coated badly enough his traction was approaching zero. He detatched the chain, and tries.

Well, with the yard as soupy as it was, he didn't go forward much. Instead, the truck slid down the slanted yard towards the horse fence, and he would not take his foot off the gas. He nearly put the side up in into a huge black oak tree. He got out, and started swearing up a storm. I went to move whatever could get whatever was lying around that part of the yard out, and prepare to go winching again.

That's got to be a big up about having large trees spread about the yard; whatever gets stuck can get pulled out. Eventually. I looked around and began plotting how to go about this. To me, it felt like a real-life application of the skills I gained in some of the games -- you know, the parts in some games that you've got to figure out some ridiculous pathway by going in straight lines between scattered points across the screen? Well, with all the trees around the yards, that's what I had in front of me. I plotted a route that'd work, and got started. After awhile, dad said he wants to line up the truck so he can drive her straight out....

Winching is hard work, but I can't seem to get it through my dad's head: the yard's soupy; you can't drive in it. I'll see if I can get pictures of the torn-up yard once we get the truck out. Tomorrow morning's gonna be fun....

What bothers me the most is that he and my step-mom never listen to me about ANYTHING. The 4runner I wrecked a few months ago; I had said things since late last spring about the tires and brakes being bad -- she doesn't fix it and gets two yearlings instead; I'm the one behind the wheel when the problems of no traction comes up in a big way. And then I had been saying for a year and a half now that her computer's been giving problems it shouldn't, increasingly more so as time went by -- the hard drive has failed on it now (I harvested the video card and the monitor from that machine; it's nice to have 16-bit colour with 800 x 640 again, rather than be stuck with 16 colours on 640 x 480). There's many other examples over the 3 years I've known my step-mom; those are the most-prevelent.

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http://www.unf.edu/~pynm0001/music/1.mp3Brave Sir Robin</a>
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Cornellius
05-12-2003, 02:32 AM
Well, some people don't like to take advices from younger people.

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lord_steak
05-12-2003, 12:28 PM
> Here's what you do. Accept the fact he is going to do this
> no matter what, let him "dig himself deeper into a hole"
> until he realizes that it won't work, then work with him to
> get out of the mess he created.
>

That's eventually what happened. We decided that getting a pull from another truck might just do the trick, so, we got another 60ft of chain, and winched the truck about 20 more ft uphill, then she managed to get out with the help of another truck.

Palmerfest Weekend (you'd have to be from OU or the nearby area to know what Palmerfest is), and instead of attending, I had the joys of dealing with stuck truck, dodging fallen trees, and laying almost 2 ton of rock in that drainage ditch I dug. It looks good; if I ever get a camera, I'll take a picture.

<P ID="signature">--
http://www.unf.edu/~pynm0001/music/1.mp3Brave Sir Robin</a>
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