Junk Competition, Trojan Labradors and Black Cows with Orange Spots

The stories in this column are true. Averett lives a dull life in rural Southside Virginia with his wife Management, two children and a rotating assortment of goats, dogs, cats, snakes and other local fauna.

I am working on a way to clean up some of my collection of old trucks.  I just discovered it is possible to surrender the title of a truck to DMV and legally the truck ceases to exist.  By my calculations, a truck that doesn’t legally exist can’t count against my quota.

Since the last one I brought home raises the count to over a dozen, which happens to be my limit (not of total stuff, just Dodge trucks), I have to do something.  As I was trying to decide which ones to make nonexistent, I realized an untitled truck isn’t really a truck.  It is a collection of parts, although assembled into a single unit.

This means I currently have six trucks, which happens to be well under my quota.  Anybody out there have a 1939 to 1946 Plymouth or Dodge truck for sale cheap?  I have just the place for it.

I just discovered the most disturbing thing.  It seems my son and his lady friend have been having a discussion about whose father has the most junk scattered about the landscape.  First of all I have no junk. The son should certainly know that.  I have attractive, useable, valuable and collectable stuff attractively decorating the premises.

What is really disturbing is that the other father was declared the winner of the competition.  Had I known a competition was in progress I would have waited before sending those last few loads of stuff away.

As it turns out, I have to admit this guy is better than I am in bringing stuff home and getting approval from his version of Management.  Several weeks ago he brought home a Trojan Labrador Retriever.  Remember the story of the Trojan Horse?  The Trojans hid inside a large wooden horse and the Greeks brought the horse inside the city.

This guy brought home five puppies cleverly hidden inside the mother. A week later she gave birth.  The important thing here is not only did all of the puppies survive, so did he.  I must admit, at least temporarily, he did better than I could have.  However, there is still plenty of time for me to catch up and pass him.  I’ll just have to try harder and spend more time working on it.

Several weeks ago I noticed my cows were breaking out in orange spots.  Although this is a nice change from them breaking out of the pasture and attempting to relocate to other spots, it just doesn’t seem typical.  Although I’ve never seen black and orange cows before I wasn’t concerned.  Stranger things have happened around here.

I was somewhat curious though.  Would I end up with a herd of orange cows? Would the black dog end up orange?  How about the cat?

Oddly enough, all of this turned out to be caused by my most recent auction purchase.  Packed in a pallet of other neat and valuable stuff were about a dozen gallons of ink.  I thought I had hit another jackpot.  Computer printer ink is about ten dollars an ounce.  As it turned out, this ink was only useable in a very old and obsolete printing machine.

Absolutely no one still uses printers like those.  You would have to be crazy to try.  Unfortunately, I could not find one of these machines so I could use the ink.  So the ink sat in my barn until the son used it for a physics experiment.

The son has always been interested in physics.  Since he was a small child he has studied the effect of explosives on various items.  There appears to be some evidence this is a genetic situation. There is a family story that his grandfather once put dynamite with various length fuses in all of the cannons on Missionary Ridge in Tennessee.  According to an eye, make that an ear witness, the results were spectacular.  How he happened on an un-needed case of dynamite was unfortunately never shared.  Knowledge like that could come in handy sometimes.

In any case, the son exploded several gallons of orange ink in the back field, attractively painting trees, shrubs, bushes and grass orange. This particular ink requires the addition of another chemical to make it dry, so without the chemical the wet ink has been waiting to paint my cows as they walk past.

I should have known there was a simple explanation for orange cows.