cc: file, Andrea, Tony Hafen, Sara and Des Penny, & Maxine Shirts
"After writing about something as foreign as compassion last week (0426.html), it makes sense to me to write about repetitive, monotonous, mechanical tasks. After all, these tasks are a common theme of my life. When I sit back and think about it for just a minute, it is quite startling how different my youth was to any of yours.
Since we all tend to be somewhat LIFO (Last In, First Out), it is easy to write about Matt, since he is who I see regularly these days. He lives for the repetitive, monotonous (to me), mechanical task of playing computer games. He loves it when I bring home my laptop computer from work, and when I am not using the computer to look for the fingerprint of God in word usage in the Book of Mormon, so he can play his computer games.
Matt, as you know, I have been limiting the amount of time you can play computer games on my laptop, and have been very pleased with your acceptance of my somewhat arbitrary rules. One thing your acceptance shows me is that you are not actually addicted to your computer games. I do worry, because I am convinced it is possible to become addicted to anything which stimulates our senses.
I worry about the instantaneous mental feedback and artificial highs that seems to accompany computer game addiction. This feedback seems to have a parallel with the mental feedback loop (the short circuit, if you will) that can be correlated with too much music (how many CD's do each of you have), with coffee, with tea, with tobacco, with alcoholic beverages (including wine), with drugs like sleeping pills and anti-depression drugs and pain drugs and ,of course, with illegal drugs, or with pornography (including many of today's television sitcoms and soap operas and movies), or with sexual perversions, including masturbation, and the many other repetitive, monotonous, mechanical tasks which give us an adrenaline or testosterone or estrogen or brain chemical feedback high. And I think we are all susceptible. Andrea points out my `interest' in Jay Leno's monologue, in James Bond movies, and in working on repetitive, monotonous, mechanical tasks on the computer, like editing 5 columns of words, with up to 65,000 lines per column, just because I see a possible interesting end result.
My youth was spent doing repetitive, monotonous, mechanical tasks. Farm work is like that. And there is little of the instantaneous mental feedback and artificial highs described above. In the fall and spring we hooked up the tractor, and drove around and around the fields with a plow or a harrow or a planter or a cultivator, working a 10 foot wide swath until the entire field was covered. It typically took a couple of 10 to 12 hour days to plow a 5 acre field, the size of the field just north of Mom & Dad's (now Darrell & Nancy Krueger's house). Every morning and every evening the cattle had to be fed. This involved loading up half a dozen sacks of rolled wheat (about 80 pounds each), in the front of the pickup, then filling the rest of the bed with corn silage from the silage pit, and then spreading it out in the manger, pouring the rolled wheat on the corn silage, then pouring some ground up meat byproducts on the corn. Then after they finished the meal, someone would go back and break bales of hay and place the hay in the manger. I tried to get out of that repetitive, monotonous, mechanical job because of my allergies.
We had to roll the wheat. There were two big metal rollers in the grainery, and steam from the byproducts plant was run into the wheat and it was fed through the rollers to roll the wheat. There was a grain elevator that carried the rolled wheat up and dropped it in a large bin that the gunny sacks could easily be filled from. We ground up all of the meat byproducts which were cooked and pressed into 3 foot diameter by 4-6 inch thick cakes. We would load these cakes up on the back of the pickup and then run them through a tractor driven grinder to create this black greasy meal with little pieces of bone in it. Most of this was sold to Barlocker's over in Enterprise as feed to the big turkey farms they had. I remember that one time Randy Shirts came out to the farm and helped me with the repetitive, monotonous, mechanical task of grinding meat packing byproduct cakes.
Of course, one of the very most repetitive, monotonous, mechanical tasks on a farm in Southern Utah is irrigation. We had a water turn 3 to 5 days per week. Hooked on the back end of a shovel we would dig head ditches, connect furrows, clean out material that clogged up the furrows, kill the prairie dogs that were always diverting the water away from some parts of the field, and walking to another field. It was much more fun to be at home and watch Leave it to Beaver, The Rifleman, I Love Lucy, or Gilligan's Island. So the goal was to get this stuff done as fast as possible.
And the most repetitive, monotonous, mechanical task was making hamburger patties with the hamburger patty machine (../9729.html and ../0047.html). I think I still keep count of things like 4x4 music by how long it took the hamburger patty machine to go back, push hamburger into the circle cut out of a metal sheet, push the metal sheet out, placing a piece of wax paper under the hamburger patty, and then push the hamburger patty out of the metal plate with an appropriately sized circular cookie cutter.
No one wanted to do this work, and since it was one of my first jobs at Nelson Packing Plant, back when I was about 12, I always thought it was my job and just did it. By the time I was 18, I could grind hamburger in the big grinder, keep feeding hamburger into the hamburger machine, catch the piles of hamburger patties, put the boxes together, pile the hamburger patties into the boxes, close the boxes, tie a string around the boxes with the size hamburger patties, label the boxes, and keep the hamburger pattie machine going.
The worst year was one 4th of July where I ended up making, as I recall, 65 boxes of hamburger patties. At 10 patties per pound and an average of 20 pounds per box, this works out to 15,000 hamburger patties from Nelson Meat Packing Plant for Cedar City, Kanaraville, Hurricane, Washington, St. George, and Santa Clara. Today it would be child abuse to have a kid stand at a machine in a cold damp room long enough to make this many patties. At 6 seconds per pattie, this works out to 25 hours, if the machine were run continuously. However, 1/3 of the hambergers were 5 patties per pound, and, since it has been 35 years since I made my last hamburger patty, I probably do not have the timing of how long it took to make a hamburger patty, the size of patties, etc. accurate. Oh well!
One other thought along this line is to point out what I did to keep my mind busy when doing all of these repetitive, monotonous, mechanical tasks. I'd plan. I'd make maps in my mind. I'd even design underground cities, like I'd seen in Flash Gordon or Gene Audrey. When plowing, I would start off by writing my initials and the initials of my girlfriend in the field so that people coming in on Hugh's Airwest could see them. No one ever told me they saw them. Oh well! And I'd sing. On the tractor in the middle of a field, where I could barely hear myself, I would sing at the top of my lungs. I enjoyed singing, and I think this is one of the reasons I was first attracted to the Institute Choir at the University of Utah, and why I have always sang in the Ward Choir, where ever we have lived.
So why am I thinking about, or should I say writing about
repetitive, monotonous, mechanical tasks? Because Paul
spent quite a bit of time the end of last week and the
first of this week helping me build 27 dxf files (a
mechanical engineering electronic drafting file format)
for the GDC TilessTM project I have been working on for
the last several months. The image to the right is one of the images
generated using the results of Paul's assistance (click on the image for a larger view). The
map in the background is sand thickness for a constant
depth thickness between 5100 and 5300 feet. The yellows
are the thickest sands, and it is neat how this map shows
up the thick long shore current sands offshore Texas.
These are ancient equivalents to Galveston Island and
South Padre Island. The red box highlights the location
of Tile-02, which is one of the study areas we are doing
at GDC (../0346.html).
It is always amazing to me how hard simple projects become, and how the only way to get them to work is by just keeping after it. The same way I was taught to keep after a field with a plow or a harrow or a cultivator, or to feed the cattle, or to roll the wheat, or to grind the byproducts, or to irrigate, or to make hamburger patties is the way to complete any task.
I have a faded facsimile on the wall of my office that reads:
In many ways I feel I have failed you kids, because for
the most part I do not see the kind of persistence I am
talking about regarding repetitive, monotonous, mechanical
tasks. Oh well! You just lost out, not being raised on
a farm. Keeping in mind you were not raised on a farm:
It seems like my week at GDC was filled with repetitive, monotonous, mechanical tasks. About Wednesday I started trying to find a word that describes this type of work, and I never did find the word that the Thoughtlet title presents. I won't attempt to describe the different maps I generated, databases I organized, overlays I created, or other similar tasks, both because, once again, the thoughtlet is too long, and because none of you have ever expressed much interest in geology and geophysics.
Tuesday morning Andrea and I talked to Sara. She sounds good. She enjoys her work, and is bored to death in the evenings. She doesn't go out in the evenings, and there isn't anyone with a similar background to hang out with. If any of you have ideas of something for her to do besides read, send her a note, or send her a birthday package. Tuesday evening I passed off another 11 year old scout on the Architecture Merit Badge. Cute kids. As with many of the others it was his first merit badge, and they do not understand the program at all.
Wednesday morning I called Jialin in China. He is making slow steady progress for GDC. There were several e-mails back and forth regarding his report.
Thursday John Dinning and Ian Duyer, Vice-President of Business Development for SpotFire, took Mike Dunn and me to lunch. Looks like my work in positioning SpotFire and GDC are coming finally coming together. I stopped and picked up a new copy machine on the way home, forgetting the missionaries were coming to dinner, and was a half-hour late getting home. Oh well! I gave packets to the two missionaries (one from Hanover, Germany and one from South Africa). Elder Slabbert from South Africa gave me a nice note at church about the packet, which I'm going to share:
As the missionaries were leaving, Adam Salt came by. He is
selling Cutco knives. We wanted to buy some when Tyler Camp
came by. However, we couldn't afford it then. So Adam made
a reasonable sale.
Friday I went to lunch with Susan Helgeson. On the way in I was listening to The Book of Mormon on tape, and did not turn the portable cassette player off when I parked the car. I forgot to take the keys out of the car, and Andrea had to bring the extra key down to the office to me. Susan did all of Landmark's marketing years ago. She also helped me with HyperMedia and named the Knowledge BackboneSM, which name I still use. Her husband had a rare disease, and ended up committing suicide to get away from the pain. She is doing well, considering he left her with very large medical bills. Friday night we went to see Spiderman 2. Lots of action. Very good graphics. The story line carries well. I liked it OK, and expect some of you would like it better than others.
Saturday morning Andrea and I went for a walk from by Maudeen Marks' ranch on Barker-Clodine up to the flood control dam, down to Highway-6, then to the headwaters for Buffalo Bayou, and back. I was wearing my hiking shoes for the first time in several years, and got four large blisters. Oh well! Then I went and talked to a member of the church, Kathy, who is just coming back after having left the church when her parents got divorced and she was 9 years old, about employment. Her husband, John McReynolds, is also out of work. It was a good discussion, and hopefully I will be able to figure out a way to help Kathy and John.
After Matt got off of work, Matt, Rachel, Andrea, and I made our first trip to the Houston Aquarium. Partly we were checking it out for Ethan's visit to Houston later in the month. I think it will be a winner for Ethan. Hopefully I will be able to take him, and Grant, and Colby to see the sharks and sawtooth fish and piranhas and even clown fish like Nemo. I think they will like it a lot.
Fast and Testimony meeting was very nice. In the words of John McReyolds, some if it was pretty intense. I wrote:
I went to Gospel Essentials with the McReynolds. In High
Priest Quorum we had a lesson by Floyd Lunt on peer pressure.
Based on a comment by Steve Salt, I wrote:
As I've written the Thoughtlet this afternoon/evening, I've
reflected on this discussion, on things that concern me
and scare me about today's society and the influence it has
and will have on you children, whom I truly do love, and I
wish I would have done a better job at teaching you how to do
repetitive, monotonous, mechanical tasks."