May the Fourth

Happy Unofficial Star Wars Day.

When our oldest son was born in Germany in the late 80's, we had no way of knowing that he would have a fan-generated holiday associated with his birthday. If he had his choice, I believe he would much rather had been born on November 5th (a red letter date in history, according to Doc Brown).

Today was the official start of Spring at our house. Much like the existence of an astronomical 1st day of a season and a meteorological 1st day of Spring, we mark the start of a new season at our house by a different sort of accounting. Our mark of the beginning of Spring is the first grass cutting.

Saturday (yesterday), Jennifer and I had gotten out of the car and one of us had remarked, "I can hear the grass growing." This, of course, was a reference to my Air Force days in Germany. I worked in the Pavements and Grounds section of a Civil Engineering Squadron. During the cooler months we all functioned as one shop, but during the growing season part of the year our shop was split into  pavements, and Grounds... essentially, some of us became uniformed groundskeepers. When the French built this airbase in the 50's, there were flocks of sheep that performed this function. When the U.S. Air Force assumed control of the airbase, at some point the sheep departed and the lawnmowers took over (as late as 1968 sheep still patrolled the flightline). Grounds was generally not considered a primo assignment, and the troops in grounds were generally razzed on a daily basis about their duties, and part of the razzing was the expression, "I can hear the grass growing". In other words, get out of the truck bay. And grab a weedeater! The real, unspoken truth about Grounds was this: we liked it. Our mission was clear: cut grass wherever we found it. We were the Masters of our own Destiny. There was but One Rule: never let your tractor run out of fuel. Let me explain.

If I recall correctly, it took two tractors two days to cut the flightline. Our flightline was not short- we could land a C-5 Galaxy in an emergency. I say "in an emergency" because our flightline had this dip, and although a C-5 could land there, it could never take off because of the dip. The tractors we had were Ford New Holland diesels that pulled 15' (~5M) mowers powered by the PTO (power-take off). We fueled up in the morning, and cut grass until 1700 rolled around or we ran low on fuel. The shop superintendent always warned us about running out of fuel- these were fuel-injected industrial tractors, and apparently it was quite the chore to get them going again once air got into the fuel supply. Needless to say, I don't think anyone ever ran out of fuel.

That was then, and this is now. It takes me roughly 30-45 minutes to do our lawn. It's a nice workout, too- I even have an entry in urbandictionary.com for "yardio"- stop by when you have a minute and give my definition a "thumbs up"!

Data- haven't had much of this lately. I need to rebuild the relationships, as well as a few tables.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.