West Coast to Midwest



Please pardon the momentary pause in my reports from Pierce County in order to have you journey with me back to Missouri.

We’ve hosted Ann’s family every Easter and Thanksgiving since buying the house in Columbia in 2000, and upon making plans to move to Tacoma this year, we pledged to keep up the tradition for this Thanksgiving. Flying over Thanksgiving isn’t just hectic – it’s expensive. And Ann doesn’t have time off yet. However, since she was working remotely, she was able to complete that work from Missouri for a few days. And I’m also working remotely, but since my employer is based out of Columbia it was double-ok for me to come back. Therefore, rather than flying Wednesday through Sunday, we tagged on a few more days to bring the price of plane tickets down out of the stratosphere.

Flying out of SeaTac was fine. I’ve been in much busier airports, and there seemed to be much more TSA personnel on hand than needed to keep things running smoothly. No problems with the 20-minute layover in Dallas, and we were back in COMO at our scheduled 10:40 p.m.


Sunday morning, Oliver and I went to the farm. The universal yoke on one of the driveshafts had broken, and when he tried to replace it previously, he found he also needed to replace a couple of drawn cup needle roller bearings. He obtained those parts and impressively made the repair within a few minutes of getting to the farm. Although the bearings could have been installed with some kind of small press, or at least a C-clamp, my father would have approved of Oliver’s choice of just pounding them into place with a claw hammer and a pin he found.

While I did a little brush hogging and some other farm stuff, Oliver took to a deer stand. He passed on a couple of deer, then took a young eight-pointer mid-afternoon. We were there in the only vehicle we left behind – our Volkswagen Beetle – which isn’t suitable for large game transport. It did do the job of jumpstarting our UTV, but the UTV wouldn’t get us back to Columbia. We called Ann’s parents, and



they graciously swapped their Ford Ranger for our Beetle, and we brought the deer to Crane’s Meat Processing in Englewood, near the Columbia airport. Our first 24 hours back in Missouri were remarkably productive.

The next day, I was able to take a break from Zoom and phone interviews by getting to do an in-person interview with a couple of sources who happened to be right here in Columbia. I walked downtown and met them at a coffee shop. The story was related to Native American heritage, and Native American Heritage Month was going to be over this weekend, so I did another quick phone interview the next day, finished up the story the following day, posted it to the website and shared it in my employer’s e-newsletter. The quick turnaround reminded me of my daily newspaper days. This was also the first news story I’ve written since publishing the last issue of the magazine I started 12 ½ years ago. To see my last issue, or any of the other 149 issues, go to www.moumethodist.org/magazine.


 

 

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