Lockhart: My wife calls me “Lucky the safety man”

My wife has called me “Lucky the safety man” for years. She has become an expert at giving me the look of doubt anytime I attempt to do anything around the house that might cause injury. That just makes me want to try to do it that much harder.

A while back I had her lift me up to weld a brace in on a new barn I was building. I put a pallet on the hay forks and stood on the pallet to weld. I also had a feed bucket with my welding rods, tape measure, soap stone and what not in there. She said it looked like something to trip me and make me fall. She had that, “another trip to the ER look on her face.” Hmmf, just put the tractor in granny gear and be easy with the joystick on the front end loader. I’ll be extra careful honey.

I sat the pipe on the front of the pallet and had some baling wire attached to each end of the pipe to sort of hold the brace in place while I welded each end. The real trick was not to burn the baling wire into before I got it tacked, otherwise the brace would come crashing down and most likely knock me off the pallet and my wife would stand over my broken body and say I told you so.

Now pallets are ok so long as you don’t get all your weight on one side, then they kind of slip and tend to cause me to fall or at least do the wobbly dance while I’m fifteen feet up in the air. I’ve used them enough over the years to know that much for sure, this ain’t my first rodeo.

When she raises the front end loader up really high wifey has to lean way up in the tractor seat to see me. She has short legs too, so she has a tendency to take her foot off the brake whenever she leans up. I’ve learned over the years to sort of hold on for dear life when she is working the front end loader. She’s a kind of sketchy tractor operator.

So anyways I get this durned brace baling wired into place and start welding it in. The wind is blowing the slag right back on me. I’ve got my seventy dollar fire resistant welding shirt on, old blue jeans and my work cowboy boots. Im about fire safe as I can make myself on the farm.

That danged slag gets inside my shirt and rolls downhill. I’ve got twenty feet of welding lead sort of wrapped around my shoulder, my feet can’t really move and I can see through the darkened lense of the welding helmet I’m within a quarter of an inch of the baling wire holding it all in. So, basically I just have to ignore that the slag is rolling down the front of my body burning the dickens out of me. I can’t move and I can’t quit, and my wife can’t see what’s happening. This ain’t what I had in mind.

I finally get one side of that big brace welded in and I immediately throw the welding shirt to the ground. Wifey looks confused. I motion to back up and do the other side of the brace.

She pulls up to the same side of the brace and I wave her off. I want to be on the other side of it, so the wind don’t cause me to be burned alive like some sort of sacrifice to the Lincoln welder welding god. She doesn’t understand, and she shoots green daggers of aggravation at me from inside the cab of the tractor. We communicate solely by reading lips, hand gestures and telepathic words of war. Needless to say, I hold on for dear life, she has a tendency to try to accidentally knock me off when she’s mad.

So she gets the tractor positioned around so I’m not gonna be cooked alive. I weld up the other side pretty good, but then I figure out this old piece of oil field pipe is magnetized. So instead of it welding easily, I have to wrap the welding lead around the pipe about a dozen times. For what ever reason this kind of counter acts the magnetism of the pipe. I weld and weld on it because I’m about half way afraid a magnetized brace weld might break when my 250 pound butt is on the roof. It might break under a big snow, but I don’t care about that. I just don’t want the barn to fall with me on top of it. Wifey would probably post pictures of me hurt before she called the ambulance.

I get done and she lowers the front end loader, kills the tractor and steps down. She picked up the shirt and asked why I took it off. I raised my shirt and I had three lines of burnt spots from my neck to my belt. I was especially cooked on the fatter part of my belly. I guess the fat burnt easier than the rest of me.

Wifey grins and say another day with Lucky the safety inspector. Then she headed to the house. I kind of sat down and took a break for a bit. I thought maybe she’d bring back some ointment or something, but nope.

She was on the phone with her friend when I came in the back door. I heard her laughing and saying something about smelling something burning inside the tractor when I was working.