wed aug 3
A month ago, Mary showed me a piece of pipe sticking up in the lawn, and said the lawn mower is hitting it. It’s not a big deal, she said, but … Maybe I could fix it? I gotta hand it to her: she asked nicely.
So this morning, I put the backhoe on the back of the tractor, backed up the backhoe to the broken pipe, hooked a tooth under it, and pulled it straight up. It was like riding a bucking bronco in a cowboy bar. Half the tractor left the ground, and the ground itself heaved up for 5 feet in either direction as the pipe pulled toward the surface. It stretched, but it didn’t come out, and it didn’t break, and now, instead of being 4″ proud of the lawn, it was 8″ proud of the lawn. Nice job! So I opened up a slit in the lawn with the bucket, thinking I could push the pipe back down and bury it. That didn’t work either, because – I’m telling you – they don’t make pipes like they used to. So now I’ve got a big pipe in a big brown gash in the lawn where it used to be flat and smooth and green. So I went to the store and bought metal cutting blades for my tiger saw, ran an extension cord, cut the pipe in 2 places, brought the backhoe back out, buried the severed ends, smoothed over the hole in the lawn, and put everything away. That was easy.
I’ve got a feeling someone tried pulling this pipe out of the ground just like I did, failed just like I did, and left this section sticking up thru the lawn, NOT like I did.
Mary’s car has been in hospice for several months. The fender’s busted, the gas tank leaks, the check-engine light is on, the oil pressure dips, it idles bad, and you have to leave the key on for 10 seconds before you start it in the morning if you want the engine to have gas. Oh, and the front left light is out. And the air conditioning.
It’s time.
It’s about time.
It’s past time.
It’s a good time to get a new car.
Mary loved that car, but today she bought a Santa Fe. I hope she loves it as much as she loved her Tahoe.
The glue gave out on one of my strands of butternut beads, and there were beads all over the bathroom floor!
This is the cardboard full-sized mock-up for the kitchen fan hood.
Mary signed off on it.
sun aug 7
Charon wanted a couple of grab bars in their bathrooms, and Mary had my truck for the day, so I loaded tools and grab bars into my milk crate and rode my motorcycle to E. Fairfield for the install. It was a beautiful day and it all went well.
But I’ve noticed that the bike’s idle speed has been drifting, and it’s died a couple times when I’ve come to a stop, which is embarrassing. That worm gear idle adjustment thingy I made last year sort of saved the day, but the fact is that I shouldn’t have to be using it in the first place, so something is definitely wrong.
I took out the spark plugs and peered into the holes, and cylinder 1 has some buildup on the plug. I cleaned them off, put them back in, and backed off the air pilot screw half a turn. I’ll try it out tomorrow.
There’s something wrong with 2 of them., and I know, once I figure out what it is, it’s going to be obvious in hindsight. .
We harvested the garlic and laid it out on the floor in the basement to dry. It smells fabulous down there.
The garlic we planted the Fall before last ‘took a year off’ and sprouted this spring, along with last Fall’s planting. Between the garlic and silver bullet I had left over, Dracula hasn’t got a chance.
mon aug 8
I went to burlington to get steel, and all I wanted to do was get my steel and go home, because there’s not a lot about the city that attracts me.
We’re picking a lot of raspberries, in spite of an infestation of Japanese beetles. Little fuckers showed up in June and ate holes in all the leaves while mating in little threesomes. Mary set out some traps, which collected dead beetle bodies by the bag-full until the raccoons heard about it and ate the bags of bugs. Mary googled it and decided the best solution was to pick them off the bushes by hand and drown them, one by one, in soapy water. She spent several days doing so and left a 5 gallon bucket full of soapy corpses next to the garage. The weather turned hot and the bucket of bugs rotted, and the stench of death filled the building. I emptied the bucket in the woods.
wed aug 10
I marked and drilled 36 holes in the steel, each of which took 3-6 passes because they’re big holes, for a total of 124 separate clamp+align+drill sequences. Everything looked good until I noticed that 1 hole was a little bit wrong. How wrong? Just wrong enough so I can’t hide it, and I gotta do 1 piece over again. Damn.
Fact: You cannot move a hole.
Next door, the bathtubs are keeping me busy. I put in all the valves and all the copper stubs for shower heads and hooked them up to the supplies.
It’s obvious in hindsight, but I should have installed the tub drain before I installed the tub, so suddenly it’s a 2-man job. The other tub has a drain hole that doesn’t fit any of the kits in the stores, so “I’m going to think about it for awhile.”
Fact: You cannot make a hole smaller.
Even with a custom washer.
I thought long and hard about how to route the heating system next door. I decided that, since I’m always making everything so complicated all the time, then – just this once – I’m going to keep it simple and put in 1 zone upstairs and one zone downstairs and be done with it. Today, I marked and drilled almost all the holes.
c3pr has been hard. I keep fixing everything that doesn’t work and – over and over, it’s been something to do with the system upgrade – which is the hardest kind of problem to solve. Last night, I was working on yet another segmentation fault (at video EOF, this time) and it turned out to be a logic bug in my code, and it made me happy, because that’s the easiest kind of bug to fix.
fri aug 12
Today, we’re supposed to pick up Mary’s new car, and she gave me a list of things to do to her old one before she trades it in. The list looked easy, so I got to work.
Put back spare seats. Check.
Take out brake controller. Check.
Take off trailer hitch. Fuck!
I started with the cotter pin, which was rusted in place and I bent it when I beat on it. Hmmmph! How about the retaining pin? It didn’t move when I beat on it, and it didn’t turn when I twisted it. It was firmly rusted in place.
Heat. Let’s try heat. I had – just yesterday – moved my torch tanks downstairs, and I lugged them around the back and up the lawn to the garage. Whew! My igniter was at the other house, and I made a special trip to go get it. I heated the whole trailer hitch as hot as I could get it, beating on it with a big hammer the whole time, and finally the retaining pin started to move, and I got it turned around to expose the other end of the cotter pin, and managed to beat, twist, and pry it out. Hoorah! (but, to put it in perspective, the cotter pin is about the size of a big paper clip.) The retaining pin was loose now, and it popped right out. That left the hitch itself: a square plug in a square hole, rusted firmly in place. So I heated it up again, beat on it some more, and hooked it to a chain. I backed up the tractor, hooked it to the other end of the chain, put it in gear, and popped the clutch. The tractor lurched forward and the Tahoe lurched backward. And the trailer hitch just smiled, like: “that all you got?” I did it again. And again, until the the Tahoe was dragged, 6″ at a time, half-way out of the garage.
I put the retainer and the cotter back in and gave up.
It didn’t work.
We drove it to Burlington and left it there. We spent 3 hours at Hyundai signing paperwork, traded in the Tahoe for $1000, and drove off in a shiny new Santa Fe.
Say goodbye to the Tahoe.
sun aug 14
The new kitchen fan enclosure is starting to take shape, and I spent all morning machining short pieces of Re-bar. The ends are sharpened to match the railings, and the fasteners match the ones holding the gutters up. In the right hands, a little re-bar can be a beautiful thing.
For accurate work, a sturdy setup is key.
Last night, I had my first fist-pump moment in a long time working on c3pr. I’ve got what I call the charlesJr code, which I worked on last year, and I’ve got the camera code I wrote this winter, and they’re supposed to run at the same time on the same computer and they’re supposed to talk to one another thru HAL. And last night, for the first time, they did. You’ve come a long way, baby.
Today we took Mary’s new car to Abbi’s Creemee Stand in Danville. This is a new record in the Farthest-Away-Creemee-Stand category, but we wanted to take it for a substantial drive to see if it would fall apart. It was all pavement and highways on the way out, and the car drove great. My creemee’s maple flavor was the best I’ve ever had, but I thought the cream base was not as creamy as a creemee ought to be.
Coming home, Mary said “take a right right here” and suddenly, we were out way past nowhere and trying to make our way west to rte 16. On gps, all roads in the area were drawn the same color (white on light gray!) but the real roads ran the gamut from paved to dirt to class-4/closed-in-winter, and we turned back not once, but twice when the road got too rough. So we got back on the highway and took a left at Joe’s Pond, and then tried to make our way west to rte 12 instead. Captain Kirk didn’t get where he is without Mr Sulu, and it probably helped that I was Navigating this time. We took a Very Exciting side road and got where we wanted to go: Home. The new car handled it all like a champ.
That ought to be enough.
thu aug 18
Up until now, next door, I’ve left the kitchen sink base cabinet in place, and the time finally came when it was In The Way. I moved it, and it was quite the project, with plumbing, electrical, a dishwasher, drawers, and the biggest, puffiest mouse nest you ever saw. Everything must go!
There were mouse turds everywhere: on top of everything, underneath everything, in, on, and stuck to everything. There was water in the trap under the sink, and it spilled and turned into turd soup and I got it all over me. It was disgusting, and I decided it was time to clean the place up.
I admit it: I’m a slob. My workplace is a mess and I never clean up or put things away. But even with me, there comes a point where it’s harder to work among the mess than it is to clean it up, so I cleaned up.
The motorcycle was making funny noises. Really funny noises. So funny that, instead of turning my errand into a joy ride, I panicked and headed straight home.
I was on high alert, since I’d messed with the plugs and the carbs and tightened the chain recently, but I couldn’t find anything particularly wrong, so I set it aside, to think about it. That night, I noticed that my hearing processor was on program #Two instead of my usual program #One, so everything sounds a little bit different and loud sounds sound a Lot different. So the next day, I set my hearing back to Normal and found an errand to run, and the motorcycle sounded fine again. Problem solved!
It was a little like stacking cannon balls.
So far so good.
sun aug 21
Juliet, next door, gave us a home-grown cabbage and Mary sent her home with leeks. We looked at the cabbage. We looked at each other. How do you cook a cabbage? I found something better to do, but Mary got to googling, and … cabbage rolls !!
Next thing I know, we’re having charon and marshall over for dinner, eating cabbage rolls by candle light on the front porch. They were fabulous, but they were a lot of work. (The C-R’s. not C&M)
The reason cabbage rolls never caught on in America is that they’re a LOT of work.
Mary busted her butt today. She cleaned up from last night, did laundry, and then set out on a mission to mow. Mary is a mowing machine. She can tell me, from memory, exactly how many days it’s been since she mowed any given part of the yard. It’s been 8 days since the north lawn was mowed, and 12 days for the lawn next door, and she wasn’t having it. She fired up the tractor, mowed until a rock hobbled the mower. Then she limped it back home, started up the walk-behind and mowed the rest of the yard by hand. She needed air in the tire and, after a little head scratching, figured out for herself that you can’t put air in a grease zerk.
I’m tellin’ ya: the woman is workin’ with a busted nut upstairs.
You know those annoying shopping carts where the wheel rattles back and forth when you push it?
That’s what the mowing deck was like, and this is why.
So it didn’t take much of a hit from a rock (according to Mary) to break it.
I scan through Front Porch Forum every day no matter how boring it is. And yesterday, there was a welder for sale. I’ve been looking for a good welder for a long time, and last night in bed, I dreamed I called the guy and and it was sold. Then I dreamed I called the guy and he had one of those voices I just can’t understand, no matter how many times he repeats himself. I woke up cold and sweating and had to pee. This morning, I called him up, grabbed my coffee, and went and bought a welder! A 185A 220V Hobart with a tank and regulator, helmet, gloves, and an extension cord. AND an adjustable height welding table with a 1/2″ steel top and locking casters. 56″ of solid steel was just too heavy to get into the truck, so I went home and rode the tractor into town, put it in the loader, and drove it back. Man oh man, if I wasn’t in over my head already, welding-wise, I sure am now.
Lightly used by an retired fabricator who never wants to weld again.
tue aug 23
Mary says that Laura says that the rusty motorcycle in front of the abandoned trailer is gone. I’d messaged his facebook last week and, like my first 2 tries, I got no response. So that’s 3 strikes, so I’m out. It’s too bad: I would have liked to work on that bike. Some day, it would be fun to know how this played out on the other end. Did he get any of the messages? Did he get all of them? What went through his brain? And maybe he’s right?!
When you buy steel at the steel yard, it comes coated in “mill scale” that’s harder than the steel, and it’s really hard to grind off. But once you get rid of it, you can experiment with scratch patterns
Struttin’ thru the neighborhood
wed aug 24
I took my shower last night, and the water wasn’t hot. Last time this happened, we figured it was a fluke, induced by lightning. But there was no lightning this time, so there really is something wrong with the furnace.
Great. Just fabulous. We’re supposed to leave town in 2 days, and I’ve got shit to do. Fuck.
So I called the plumber who put the system in in the first place, and he’s got 2 numbers listed: -7049 and -7094. One is disconnected, and the other one just rings.
So I called another plumber, and they took it in stride and sent someone out, and if all goes well, we’ll have hot water by the end of tomorrow. Meanwhile, I stink.
Here are the symptoms of the motorcycle not running well:
It runs good when I run it hard on a highway, and it idles fine when it’s rested, but it idles really fast after I’ve worked it hard.
And here is my theory: I think it’s got a vacuum leak, and it’s running rich.
Engine gets hot -> vacuum leak gets worse -> more air gets into cylinder -> so more of the gas in the rich fuel mixture burns -> so combustion burns hotter -> and it idles faster.
We shall see…
(This is actually my second theory, but my first one proved to be false.)
mon aug 29
We went to Maine for the weekend. Mary has been going nuts with cabin fever and wanted to get out of Dodge and go to the beach.
What a fucked up mess. We had a good drive down, but the hotel messed up the reservation and they were real dicks about it and we had to find another place to stay for saturday night, and we ended up at an earnest, but slightly seedy dive in Portsmouth.
I tried swimming in the ocean, but the water was cold, and my nuts went North and my swimsuit went South.
We sat on the beach and, as the tide came in, it pushed us back, 2 feet at a time, until there was no sand to sit on, and we gave up.
Next morning, we spent 30 minutes in a line waiting for our free breakfast. Talk about ‘over hard’ eggs!! “Breakfast: worth paying for.”
We went to the local lighthouse, but it was closed to the public.
We tried to visit the John Sedgley Homestead, but Google said it was in Pennsylvania.
We drove to the top of Mt Agamemticus, and looked 100 miles in all directions.
We got ice cream at some famous place and nobody but us wanted to eat their cones outside on a beautiful day.
We antiqued (that’s a verb) and bought some cool crap.
We walked around Portsmouth, watched the drawbridge go up and down, and admired the flowers in the park.
We went to the Crocs Outlet, Pottery Barn, and a shoe store and, when they didn’t have Mary’s size, we went to a shoe store in another town and struck out there, too.
We ate clams, scallops, two kinds of fish, lobster, mexican, lobster, and then one more lobster for good measure.
I was glad to get home, and the cat was glad to see me.
They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
This is as close as we could get to the lighthouse.
Looks like Mary is not the only one taking my picture!
On top of Mt Agamemticus, there are 4 cell towers: 1G, 2G, 3G and, behind me, 4G.
tue aug 30
The nicest days of summer are ticking by, and the motorcycle doesn’t work.
That ain’t right.
So I spent the morning working on the motorcycle, checking for leaks in the vacuum system. I checked it 2 ways and, bottom line: the vacuum system looks really good. I re-centered the sync, put it back together, and took a ride. Remember how it idled fast when it was hot? Now it idles slow when it’s hot. So whatever was wrong with it is still wrong with it, and I’m back to scratching my head. I’m starting to think maybe I’m not much good at this after all.
The vacuum system is not the problem.
Everything was going well until I welded the angled seam, when it warped and some of the spot welds broke.
The pumpkin plants finally decided to settle down and make babies. Better late than never.
Instead of planting sunflowers and giant pumpkins, I’m thinking I ought to try pumpkins and giant sunflowers next year.
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