I Stumped Ol' Stumpy!

Mrs. HM is a freakin' genius! Or at least a semi-proficient researcher.

Tuesday, I was walking back to T-Hoe with the lone piece of mail in my hand, when I saw something in the middle of the road. Pretty much the exact middle, where the stripes would be painted if our county blacktop road had a center line. I bent over to pick it up.

Huh. It was heavy! What in the Not-Heaven? Was it a magnet? Stuff was stuck on the back of it. Maybe it was part of the latch on EmBee. It's been broken for a while. But it's a round magnet, and a rectangular piece of metal to stick to. That piece of metal, last I saw, was in the butt-end of EmBee.

I picked up that intriguing piece of roadsam, to bring back to the Mansion and ask Farmer H. After soaking in water and Dawn dish detergent for a few hours, I scrubbed it as clean as I could. I took it to Farmer H.

"Look what I found in the road down by the mailboxes. Is it part of our magnet?"

"No. That's no magnet."

"It's really heavy. Do you think it's lead?"

"Yeah. That's lead."

"I got it as clean as I could. Is there anything else you can think of that will clean it up? Make it shiny? Does vinegar interact with lead?"

"I don't think it would hurt it, but it might turn it black."

"Yeah. It's clean enough. I'm not really going to do anything with it. It says 1/2 OZ FE. I think it's heavier than a half-ounce. Maybe it means it's one 2-ounce piece. And FE means iron. Do you think it's iron?"

"It's lead. It feels like 1/2 ounce to me."

"I wonder what it's for? A little scale, maybe? Do you think a drug dealer was using it to measure out his dealings?"

"It's possible. Like a little postage scale, maybe. They use those."

"Huh. Well. I'm taking it downstairs to my office."

Here's the object, all prettied up and posed on top of a Pepcid lid:

The back has no writing. It was kind of gunky with black stuff and road dust, so I had to scrub it with my fingernail, even after soaking. There's no writing on the back. It's 1 inch long, and 1/2 inch wide, and 1/4 inch thick. The base is a little wider than the top, though you can't tell it by this picture.

There it is, on end. I did a little research on the innernets. Looks like Farmer H doesn't know what he's talking about. He can go around, stumping on his footless ankles (from the sound of him walking above my head while I'm in my dark basement lair), all puffed-up in the knowledge that his knowledge is the most knowledgeable knowledge ever acknowledged... but I know he's WRONG! On this one, anyway.

My little metal lozenge is neither lead nor part of a scale.

It's a wheel weight used to balance tires. It's iron. Some of them have a little flap that gets hooked on a tire rim, and others come with adhesive backs. I guess this had the adhesive, and fell off a tire. That would be the gummy part I scrubbed off.

You'd think Farmer H, the gearhead, would know about a weight used for balancing tires!

Now I wonder what else he's told me over the years that isn't accurate.