As many of you know, Ol’ Dutch loves to peruse the internet for local garage sales, farm stuff and other items that can be found on such places as Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. Being near a bigger city during the winter, there are a lot of people who either need extra money, are liquidating estates or selling stolen merchandise, all of which can mean good deals.
The internet is a real boon to those wanting to sell items as in the former situations and the latter have also found it an easy way to get rid of hot stuff. Now this isn’t the “hot stuff” that we all talked about in the 70s when mentioning the new girl at school but it’s things that people have used the five discount to obtain. Yes, stolen.
So, yesterday I was perusing the local ads and saw a nice dresser for sale. Now I am not in the market for one necessarily but I did notice this ad for its use of a peculiar vernacular. Now I don’t know where these people are from but it seems that wherever that is, they use a strange and unique form of measuring things.
The picture of said dresser was with a cat stretched out beside it and they simply stated, “We don’t know how tall the dresser is but it’s about one cat tall.”
It reminds me of when I took #1 child, Cricket, to college and got her all set up in her dorm room with a loft bed. As soon as I get home, she calls saying she needs a board for an additional piece to the bed. I told her to go to the lumber yard and get one and that they would cut it for her.
Not having a tape measure close at hand, she showed up at the lumber yard with a piece of string cut, yes you guessed it, the exact length she needed. She said the men there got a good laugh and I don’t think she even had to pay for the lumber in the end. I guess whatever works?
I got to thinking (a dangerous thing according to Miss Trixie) and realized that we have used all kinds of things to measure with down through history. Things like bushels, feet -- yes, it was literally a person’s foot -- steps, cubits and hands.
Most of these are not too accurate as they depend on the size of the member being used. A cubit as you recall from your Bible School days is the length of an arm from elbow to fingertips and  I guess that was good enough for Noah to build a heck of a boat so how can you argue with success. But if you get some long armed Saipem running around the jobsite you may end up with real problems during construction. And they say size doesn’t matter?
And speaking of hands as a measurement, you don’t have to be from Texas to recognize that is how they size up a horse. Typically, it’s the width of a closed hand including the thumb and about 4 inches on average.  Obviously if you are selling big horses it’s best to find a tiny handed person to do your measuring so that you appear to have horses of immense stature as some big ole ham-hock-handed country boy measurer would reduce your sales price immensely.
Since Miss Trixie does not appear to be running away very soon, I am starting to build a pad for a house for the winter month, which has required some new tape measures among other tools all necessary to get a tad more accurate than maybe Noah had.
But I guess if he was able to house them “two by two” and since there is just Miss Trixie and me, with a small yorkie that may just work.

Kevin Kirkpatrick and his yorkie, Cooper, fish, hunt, ATV of hike daily. His email is [email protected]. Additional news can be found at www.troutrepublic.com or on Twitter at TroutRepublic