I first went to work for Rex shortly after I pulled his shed off the neighbor’s roof. Rex lived down the road a bit from where I was living at the time and a straight wind or something like it picked up his shed and placed it on the roof of the neighbor’s carport.

I had a heavy-duty truck with a place to attach the cable to the roof on it so I went down and we attached the cable to my truck and what was left of the shed on top the neighbor’s carport. It would have been nice if Rex had checked out the stability of the neighbor’s carport before we pulled his shed off it. But, Rex being Rex that was not happening.

So when I was instructed to put the truck in reverse and go backwards I did. It had been funny to see the shed be picked up and placed on the carport but it was not funny to see that shed come off the carport and bring a good section of the carport with it.

Rex looked at me and said, “I guess we should fix it.” I looked at him and said,. “we?” It was the first time I worked for Rex. I handed him the pieces of roof to put back on and he put them on.

I don’t know where Rex got the idea but the about a week later he dropped by the house at 7 in the morning and ask me why I was not ready to go to work. Now I can take a joke as well as the next person but going to work at 7 in the morning when one is not ready to gets a little old about 5 min into it. 

I will not go into all the projects I worked or baby-sat Rex on, just those that seem to be a bit unusual. We went out into a campground to make a shed for the people to sit under when it rained or just to have a place with a cement bottom that was dry and clear.

We had just about gotten all of the spars up when a wind came along. I will never forget the look on Rex’s face as the whole thing collapsed like a deck of cards and he rode the last spar down to the ground. I was sure I was going to find Rex hurt and bleeding under the pile of lumber but there he was laughing and saying, “One hell of a ride!”

It took us another three weeks to repair the damage and put the roof on. I was busy handing Rex nails and 4X8 sheets of plywood. I did later manage to get the forklift to place the shingles on the roof where Rex could get them and put hem on.

We were putting a foundation down for a church when hunting season started. We were nowhere near the woods but, we were somewhat out in the country, and when I heard shots I ask Rex if we should be worried. he told me no, not really. After all, who would shoot at a church?

I relaxed a bit and reached for another concrete block to hand him and just as I picked it up a bullet bounced off it. Rex looked at me and I looked at him and he said calmly, now is the time to worry. We dumped the mud we had left and cleared out of there until we were sure that we were no longer targets.

I cannot remember a time when I was baby-sitting Rex that I ever had anything hard to do. Well, there was the hot summer day he got the wild idea to put rock salt in with the ice and cokes so they would get colder faster and I was given the job of disarming the box the cokes were in when they decided to explode. Tip here: never put cans of cokes into an ice chest with ice and rock salt.

I told you about the summer with Nobel but I forgot to mention that when he discovered that the PVC Glue had spilled he was under the house singing my darling Clementine at the top of his lungs.

I had a police scanner and Rex had a passion for deer, so when I would hear on the scanner that a deer had been killed by a motorist, we would bypass the rotation that the county sheriff had for deer retrieval and head out there ourselves. The county sheriff would not leave anyone watching the deer, so we would get there first, take it to Rex’s, and he would skin and carve it up.

It did get a bit sticky one night when they called a State Policeman to kill a deer that had been hurt and the trooper went and shot it. I did ask Rex just what would we tell the State Policeman if he discovered the deer in the back of the truck as we went by him.

Rex said we would tell him that the deer jumped in the back of the truck, committed suicide, then threw the gun away. It was after we picked up that deer the County Sheriff decided that if deer with 9mm bullets in their heads could walk away, perhaps they should stand by until the person that is supposed to get them gets them.

I worked for Rex until he decided he wanted to get some more education and started taking courses in A/C and heating at the local Jr. College. Every now and then we would go have a cuppa and talk or he would have something he didn’t want to do by himself and I would baby-sit for him.