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Happy birthday, Paul. The double nickel. I don't remember any advantages to being 55 other than still being around. I guess I just don't do anything that qualifies me for any senior discounts. I will say that those milestones (50, 55, 60) weren't as bad as I had expected.

Octa, it is nice when some one guesses your age as younger than you are isn't it. I think I had just turned 61 and said something about working on my birthday. The secretary at the dock tried to guess what birthday it was, and was guessing forties. I told her THANK YOU!! but I never did tell her how old I really was.

Stan, we got the rain today that you got yesterday, but not as much as you. It was cloudy most of the day. We had a couple of showers about midday, and about four this afternoon the sky turned blue. It is a little cooler this evening than it has been.

Yesterday was a dysfunctional day. I guess I was being punished for skipping church. Nothing really bad happened, but nothing worked out quite right. Between rust and being overloaded, the springs on my boat trailer have lost their strength. The trailer frame is sitting on the center of the axle, and the axle has started to bend from the weight of the boat and the added 2000lbs of oysters. I had a spare spring, so I tried to replace one of the ones on the trailer. It turned out to be just a little shorter than the other one, so the axle wouldn't line up straight. I ended up cutting some wood blocks and put them between the axle and frame over the springs. The motor was giving me a fit the last day I worked. It kept losing the fire on one cylinder, and at one point it wouldn't pick it back up so that I thought I was going to have to run back in on one cylinder. I checked it over yesterday morning, but couldn't find anything wrong. I checked the gap on the plugs, and checked all the wires. I changed the lube in the lower unit since I was working on it. While I was working, I let the dogs loose to run for a while. They stayed around until five minutes before I was ready to leave, and then disappeared. I wasted an hour looking for them when I should have been gone. I finally got them back and got the boat over. A few days of walking on the oysters will cut through the bottom of my hip boots, and they start to leak. To keep my feet dry, I wear a plastic trash bag over my feet when they start leaking. The first thing I did was push my toe through one of the bags when I put my boots on. No spare bags in the truck, and it was too far and too late to get another one. The boots are so cut up, that the water level in the boots is the same as the level outside of them. I was late getting out, so I couldn't get to the good oysters because the tide was so low. The engine ran fine on the way out, but when I started back in, it started losing a cylinder again. I would have to slow the throttle down and take it out of gear so I could rev it up until it picked up the cylinder again. Some times it would run fine for a hundred yards, and sometimes a couple hundred, and then lose it again. It was getting dark by the time I got back to the landing, and then as soon as I started pulling the boat on the trailer, the strap I winch the boat up with popped. Once I got the boat on and up the ramp, a game warden pulled up and had to check out my licenses, life jackets, and tags. Everything was alright, but it was getting darker all the time, and I wanted to get on the road. It was a frustrating day from start to finish. Ah well, only one more day left to work on this hot market, and then things will slow down again. At least today went smoothly.

The power company replaced the underground cables here last fall, and used the same rig that Tom was describing. It was pretty neat to watch. The machine cost about $600,000. It actually pushes the rods through the ground. They are solid steel rods, about 2in diameter, and are threaded on the ends to connect together. I think it was a tapered thread and a tapered shoulder and socket. There is a rack on top with spare sections of rods and a cylinder underneath with slots for the rods to drop in to. It rotates, picks up a rod from the rack, then rotates and drops it onto the bed. A hydraulic ram comes forward and threads into that rod, then pushes it up to the rod in the ground, and spins them together. Then the ram pushes it into the ground. There is an eccentric bit on the end of the first section with a sending unit that sends a signal to a man with a sensing unit. He follows the bit, and tells the operator where it is, or needs to go. There is an indicator on the operator's control panel that keeps track of the direction the bit is turned. By turning the rod as he is pushing, the operator can adjust up or down, or right or left. Once they get to where they are going, they attach a section of power cable on a big reel, to the end and start reversing the process to pull it back through. When they finish, they pump a slurry of clay and water through the hole that hardens and forms a case around the cable to help protect it. They were going a couple hundred feet at a time, going from transformer to transformer. Y'all take care.