fire it up

at leahs' request ,insistance i am firing up this blog to record some stories of grampa orrs' life. i am not a techie, and even to get this far i have gone through a near meltdown! mullertown was the name of the farm grampa grew up on in county down n. ireland; i think naming farms is common all over the uk. here, i'm going to call dad, jack just grampa. if anyone can correct, edit or add thier own memories or thoughts to what i write, that would be great; i would like this to be a family/friend kind of place. i am a one finger wonder on the keyboard, and spend most of my time in the bush working, so i may not be prolific. one good thing, amoung many, about growing up on a farm is that you get to work with your dad. grampa wasn't a big talker or a verbal teacher, but, when guys work together they tend to talk....so i heard many stories about ireland, his family, the great war, mining, logging, the depression, courting grama and his war. i will be bouncing around as far as order of events goes but, i'm getting to be an old guy, so i can do what i want! grampa and i had to dig a drainage ditch once; where our artisian well overfowed was getting boggy; hiring a backhoe was never consitered. we had to dig south about 50 feet then west to the ditch about 100 feet. grampa worked up top cutting the sod and i was in the hole digging the dirt. it was 2 feet wide 4 ft deep. after a couple of hours digging grampa leaned on his shovel and said " gime a tailer made"; thankfully time for a rest and a smoke break. he said "ya know this is just like a slit trench........ya always had to have a good hole to get into!......i always made mine a little bigger because when gerry started to shell us sure as hell there'd be two or three of them young fellas that would wanna be in the hole with me....they called me pops ya know". then he looked at me like i was maybe a clueless new soldier and said " you know, gerry could drop a morter in your hip pocket!" what could i say... i just listened and dug the slit trench!