Tag: photog’s Corner

photog Reminisces on New England Hurricanes

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New England is a benighted region.  It’s not coincidental that H. P. Lovecraft was from here.  Even though I’m not a native New Englander I have now lived the majority of my life here and so I had the honor to ride the Hurricane Bob Express back in 1991.  Bob was the last hurricane to actually make landfall as a hurricane in New England so it’s remembered fondly.

Back then I was a hot-shot process engineer working for an engineering company that had been purchased by one of the major defense contractors and therefore had plenty of money for plane fare.  We had a processing plant in Cape May NJ that needed an operational audit prior to submitting a proposal to modernize the plant.  You would have thought that a hurricane coming up the east coast was a good enough reason to postpone the trip.  You would have thought wrong.

So, there I was early on the morning of August 19th 1991 sitting on the tarmac of Boston’s Logan Airport with several of my associates waiting to take off for the relatively short trip to southern New Jersey.  Several of the passengers including the fellow sitting next to me on the flight were nervous.  I on the other hand have always felt that since I have virtually zero control over what happens once I sit down in a plane, there’s really no sense in worrying.  So, I was reading a book.

There was a substantial delay on the tarmac while the tower decided whether to cancel the flight.  We could see that the wind and rain were pretty awful outside the plane.  Finally, the decision was made to take off and away we went.  The stewardesses began moving down the aisle taking drink orders when we hit the brunt of the storm.  The sensation was like a mechanical bull.  The plane bucked up and down for several minutes with even a little lateral motion to make it really interesting.  I experienced a giddiness like you get on a roller coaster and actually found myself laughing out loud.  The personal experience of the other passengers definitely varied.  There was a good amount of spirited screaming.  The poor stewardesses got the worst of it.  They were flung out of the aisle onto the passengers.  Their heavy metal cart jumped around but stayed right side up.  The girls eventually beat a hasty retreat to the end of the aisle and stayed there.

But the funniest thing was that the passengers kept hitting their call buzzers.  They wanted their drinks.  Apparently, they needed the booze right away.  Finally, the head stewardess starting screaming over the PA system to order them to stop hitting the buzzers.  It was quite a scene.  I think my neighbor was praying.  He had his head down and his eyes shut.

Twenty minutes later we were back in the sunshine and when we landed shortly after that it was hot and sunny.  The hurricane seemed to have scrubbed everything clean and it was a beautiful day.  We did our work and caught a flight home that night.  Hurricane Bob was long gone but he had left his mark.  There was no power or phones and the bus I was supposed to take wasn’t running.

I ended up taking a subway train to a commuter train to a bus station and took a bus to a stop where I could walk down a road for about two miles to where my car was parked.  By the time I got home Camera Girl had given me up for dead but was willing to break out some food and drink for the conquering hero.  Thus ended my adventure in hurricane bronco busting.  Not exactly Pecos Bill material but highly entertaining.

So now Hurricane Henri is teed up.  Once again, it’s a hurricane with a guy’s name which is sort of disreputable to start with.  And it’s French which adds insult to injury.  It’s going to be a Category One Storm so far.  But the track is going to be dead center on target to where I live which kind of stinks.  But we’ve got a generator, plenty of food and water and an emergency of this sort provides a manly man such as myself with the opportunity to impress his damsel in distress with his prowess at fighting the raw power of nature head on.  Plus, we have pop-corn and a DVD player if things really get dicey.  Well, here’s to survival.  At least I’m not in Kabul.

A Voice Out of the Past – Part 1

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Today I was taking care of some paperwork and a phone call came through.  Now we only have a land line.  No smartphone paraphernalia so I have to go over to the phone to see who’s there.  Well, the phone number was from the New York City area and was unfamiliar so I let it go to voicemail.  When the caller started leaving a message, I immediately recognized the voice and as he started leaving his name, I found out I was right.  It was a guy I worked with back in 1987.  I left the City in 1988 and I guess I never expected to hear from him again.

I immediately picked up the call and we started catching up.  Apparently, he retired last year and was cleaning up some old letters and photos from the time period and he decided to try and look me up.  We did the usual back and forth talking about the people we worked with back then and it was amazing how many details were at our fingertips even after thirty-four years.  As it turned out both of us left the field we were in at the time.  Which is not surprising.  He and I had separately drifted into the securities industry by getting our Series 7 license to work in Manhattan’s Wall Street district during the bull market of the 1980’s.  The fact that we both left after the 1987 crash is hardly surprising but it is gratifying to know that he also found a safe haven in the economy of the time.

Well, we swapped stories about what had happened to us since that time and then we asked each other if we knew of any of the other people we worked with.  But mostly we had lost touch with a former life.  And then we reflected on that life.  We agreed it wasn’t a place you would want to stay in for long but that it taught you a lot about people and a lot about yourself.  We exchanged info and we plan on getting together for a reunion.

But it’s got me thinking about some of the things that went on back then.  And some of them are pretty good stories.  I think they’re worth relating.

I got involved with Wall Street when I ran out of money to complete the last few credits of my engineering degree.  I had a wife and three young kids and bills and things that needed buying.  So, I decided to become a “stock broker” and make my fortune or at least get enough money to finish my degree.

That was a different world.  You see the retail brokers of back then were being replaced by the “discount brokers.”  And shortly both would be replaced by electronic trading that would sweep away the old Wall Street completely.  But back then we still had accounts and clients and commissions and had to wear suits and ties.  We had to know the floor brokers and know how to deal with the various options exchanges and we had to at least hint to the customer that we could do magical things with his order.  There was a definite P.T. Barnum aspect to the customer relations side of the job.

And this bull market was a magnet for people looking to live in the New York City area and wanted to “get rich.”  Almost all of the brokers traded their own accounts and many of them dreamed of building up a stake and making a living day-trading.  And it was this powerful force that ensured that the entrants were a motley crew.  We had all kinds.  And some of them were quite colorful.  Some were actually crazy.  This was partly due to the drug culture of the time.  Several of the people I worked with had a cocaine problem.  One fellow in particular named Joe eventually was forced out when he started having real problems.  Joe was a colorful character.  He was always using small exercise devices to strengthen his hands and wrists and he was constantly throwing karate punches and blocks in the air around his desk.  He was quite a sight.  On Halloween he brought in a black velvet bag that had what looked like an actual human skull.  And one evening when his supervisor Rich was berating him for not handling his fair share of the work load Joe picked this little man up by the forearms and walked him over to one of the windows and asked him if he’d like to be thrown out.  Joe was a pretty big guy and we were on the 15th floor of an old building that had old style windows that could be opened.  Nobody thought Joe would throw Rich out the window, except maybe Rich, but it was a serious breach of office etiquette to say the least.  Luckily for Joe, Rich never said anything about it and afterwards gave Joe a wide berth.

Later on, I was Joe’s supervisor and he came to me to complain that people were talking about him.  You can imagine I wasn’t particularly surprised to hear this.  So, I took him into a conference room and asked him to tell me about it.  He said that he heard them talking about him in the lunch room.  He was sitting next to the soda machine so he was sort of hidden from the rest of the room.  He heard some comments about himself that were very insulting.  They made him pretty mad but rather than start a fight he came to me.  I complimented him on his restraint and then asked him who made the comments.  He said, “The soda machine.”

Well, that slowed me down.  I said, “Joe, I’m going to have to kick this upstairs to Bill.”   Bill was the senior manager for the brokers.  I said, “Bill deals directly with all vending machine related issues.”  Then I told Joe that he looked a little tired and considering what he had been through I thought he should take the rest of the day off and get some rest.  He thanked me and went home.  When I passed this along to Bill his eyes bugged out and he told me to leave this to him and not mention it to anyone.  Joe never came back to the office.  But about three months later he called me at home and told me that the company had helped him find a good rehab program to get off the cocaine.  And he had left Wall Street behind and was working for his uncle who had a printing business in Brooklyn.  He sounded as happy as I’d ever heard him.  Joe may not have been the craziest guy I worked with on Wall Street but he was surely one of the most colorful.  And he had one of the happiest endings to his story there.

The Dog Day

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It’s a hot one, a scorcher.  I was out there trying to get some shots of hummingbirds and I think they were watching me from the shade of the trees saying to each other, “Is he crazy?  We’re not going out in that sun for a little sugar water!”

But this is real summer.  You can see all the moisture the ground has soaked up over the last month or so rippling into the air as currents of chromatic diffractions of the solar photons pummeling the ground.  I put on my floppy hat and brave the noonday sun in quest of photographic knowledge.  And there’s scant little of that.  Even the usually reliable bees and butterflies and even the dragonflies have taken refuge out of the sun, the cowards.

Camera Girl and Princess Sack-of-Potatoes took to the pool after lunch and of course as soon as I went in for lunch, supposedly, the hummingbirds were everywhere, on the flowers, at the feeders, even hovering between the girls at the side of the pool.  I shouted out, “Fake News!”  But her haughty sneer let me know I wasn’t fooling Camera Girl.  I knew she spoke the truth.

I will go back out after four.  At that point the sun’s blast will be merely Saharan and therefore survivable.  I will say that this tracking autofocus function still requires a fair amount of skill, of technique that I am sadly lacking.  But persevere I will.  I must know the answers.  Are my old lenses useful or ballast?  I will find out.

After conferring with my grandsons I recognized their seasonal anxiety.  They sense the end of summer vacation.  They reminded me not to waste the days that we have left.  Labor Day is right up the road and after that there’s nothing on the horizon until Halloween.  So I must get out there and see what I can see.

I think tomorrow I’ll head for the local lake.  I want to see if any water birds are around.  That would be a nice tame autofocus-tracking target.  I’m tired of trying to capture Larold running at full tilt.  The camera doesn’t stand a chance.  Last year there was a bald eagle at that lake.  I don’t suppose I’ll luck out and it’ll be there but you never know.  In an unrelated photographic idea there is an old colonial graveyard nearby and I thought I’d go over there and do some closeup photography of the old stones.  Nothing that will show the whole stones but more the texture of the erosion on the carving.

Haven’t seen much wildlife this summer.  There was a bear on the property recently but he didn’t do any damage surprisingly enough.  Last year he flattened one of our bird feeder polls.  And speaking of birds Camera girl has been reading about some mysterious bird ailment that is killing the birds.  So of course the first thing they tell her is “Stop feeding the birds!”  Blah, blah, blah.  I told her do as she pleases.  If feeding the birds is going to cause the apocalypse then let her rip.  I figure it’s bird COVID.  So why shouldn’t they get a taste of it too?

Well, the silly season is ending in three weeks or so.  Then we’ll have the atrocities in Washington to bemoan, only I’m all out of outrage for the inevitable.  I figure codified election fraud is in our immediate future so bring it on.  But it will wake up a mess of normies.  Maybe that will do some good.  So enjoy the rest of the summer and I’ll be here when you get back.

And here is the dog himself Larold the Wonder Dog.

Wayne’s World

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Ah, the joys of domesticity.  Today, in anticipation of the weekend barbecue, I am working my way down Camera Girl’s list of chores.  I have swept and mopped the front deck, washed the windows, cleaned the lawn furniture, bought a new toilet seat, bought some stuff I needed to install a couple of air conditioners, bought some stuff to clean the cars and dug out my ladder to clean the first-floor gutters.

Yesterday unexpectedly, the roofer, Wayne, showed up out of the blue after three weeks of radio silence and said he was ready to look at those couple of shingles that had come loose during an EF5 tornado that had moved the house onto my neighbor-across-the-road’s property.  The neighbor’s been real good about us living on his land.  Of course bringing the plumbing and electrical services under the road cost me a good deal but I was looking for more interaction with the neighbors anyway so it’s been a great experience, all in all.

Anyway, Wayne (by the way all roofers in my experience are named Wayne) came over with the ricketiest wooden ladder I’ve ever seen and set it down against the house.  Now, the spot where he wanted to climb slopes at about a 45-degree angle and he proceeded to even it out by piling a couple of boards under one of the ladder’s feet.  I’m looking at this and thinking, is this guy insured?  Wayne’s assistant has the job of putting tension on the rope attached to the ladder.  Looking at this I’m trying to form a diagram in my head of the forces at play in this little scene.  Wayne’s weight, Bob’s tension on the line, the frictional force between the boards and the soaking wet grass underneath them and the absurd angle of the ladder and the ground and the force of my blood pounding in my veins watching this insanity.  I felt like I was participating in a Three Stooges routine in real time.  I suspect I was Moe but I wasn’t completely sure.

Miraculously every one walked away alive and intact including my repaired roof shingles.  Wayne charged me a paltry eighty bucks and I felt like I had gotten off easy in the lottery of life but vowed to find another Wayne in the future.  Unfortunately, Wayne’s perambulation on top of my house woke up my granddaughter who was taking her mid-day nap and this didn’t endear either myself or Wayne to Camera Girl.  We already had a previous roofer named Wayne that she despises due to various offenses against the code of acceptable contractor conduct.  So this only reinforced her hatred for contractors in general and specifically roofers named Wayne.  I will say in defense of the earlier Wayne that he is a staunch fan of Donald Trump and even placed an enormous Trump sign on the side of his work truck.

Of course the danger with outside work in New England is you invariably discover some new and worse damage to home and environs.  I am always fighting a losing battle against snow and moisture damage.  I recently replaced and painted some external woodwork (stairs and railings) and already I saw rotted sections.  But not being someone who quits easily, I am formulating a plan that involves wrapping these areas with waterproof tarps during the winter months.  This seems kind of crazy but the alternative is to replace the wood with something impervious to snow and rain.  I’m guessing concrete or stainless steel are the only sure bets and that would be very expensive.

And walking around the yard I noticed the deer finally put me out of my misery by eating every last one of the daylily flower buds that were growing in one of the more remote beds.  Blah, blah, everyone has to eat, blah blah.  I’m going to move those damn things this autumn and put them within stone throwing distance of my house.  I hope they bring wolves back to New England and they eat these deer into extinction.  Yes I do.

So today was a useful day.  And doing outside work kept me from thinking of Dementia Joe and how badly our country has been damaged.  Tomorrow I’ll return to contemplating the end of western civilization.  But today I got the chores done.

14JUL2021 – OCF Update Mid-July Report

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This will be an outrage free day.  Even though Bastille Day is not my idea of a holiday worth celebrating today is a joyous occasion in my house.  I will therefore accentuate the positive.

I think I will initiate a series of posts devoted to various facets of Western Civilization.  I’ll range over history, culture, ethnography and geography.  I’m tempted to start from ancient historical and geographical facts about the region and then move forward through time introducing the various actors as  they appear on the scene.  Now do I start with the Neanderthals?  Finding out they were red-heads means the Irish may want to claim then for their own.

I will include information on the Yamnaya who appear to have been the mythical proto-Indo-European tribe that expanded East and West and spawned the languages that now dominate half the planet.  Not bad for a bunch of bronze age horsemen from the steppes.  I’d like to touch on especially some of the lesser known nations of Europe, the Georgians, the Lithuanians, the Letts, the Finns and others.  this will serve the dual purpose of allowing me to produce interesting and upbeat content and at the same time satisfy my curiosity about things I’ve always wanted to know.

But just to show I’m not an Indo-European chauvinist, (well actually I am), I’ll include information on the Basques.  These seem to be the descendants of the oldest inhabitants of Europe from a time before the Indo-European ancestors came on the scene.  Or at least before their languages began to dominate.  And I won’t neglect our neighbors to the east.  The river valley civilizations of the Near East were the source of agriculture that was the basis for organized human life on the planet.  So I’ll throw the Sumerians in just to show I’m a sport.  Do I have to include the Egyptians?  I guess I might.  Without them we wouldn’t have had those mummy movies.  Well, we’ll see.

And I mean to trudge on through the third season of Star Trek.  I’ve been dragging my feet because it is a terrible season.  But I’ve promised myself I’ll finish it.  As I’ve mentioned I intend to review Jackie Gleason’s classic 39 episodes of “The Honeymooners” series.  But I probably need to at least start into the Star Trek work to allow myself the reward of watching something fun like the Honeymooners.

The endless rain here in New England continues.  I’ve adapted to the annoying reality of it but I do hope that the second half of July returns to the normal hot dry summer I prefer.  Well, we’ll see.

So this may be a slow day.  I’ll write what the mood provides and enjoy a dinner out for once.  I’m bringing Camera Girl to our favorite Chinese restaurant and we’ll embrace the Orient for a change.

12JUL2021 – OCF Update – This ‘N’ That

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Another very rainy day!  But I decided to make necessity a virtue.  Camera Girl has given me a list of chores to get done before the party on Saturday (or else!) and first thing was bring out the trash pails to the road.  Apparently, the holiday weekend caused us somehow to miss the pick-up last week and a mistake now would be catastrophic, so out I went.  I had rain pants, rain coat and rubber boots.  After moving the trash and putting the mail in the box I was free (for the moment) and outside of the reach of the female of the species and took the grand tour.  I have never seen the grass and the shrubs so green in the middle of July.  I feel like I’m somehow in Brazil along the edge of the Amazon jungle.  I half expected a caiman or an anaconda to spring out of the undergrowth and clamp its jaws on my shin.  The world smells warm and alive and I expect the rabbits and the deer will take this occasion to eat some more of my daylilies even in the middle of the day, curse them.  I went looking for that young mantis I saw near the pool, but he was gone.  The rain seems to be keeping the deer fly from attacking me or maybe that’s just the rain gear.  Either way it was peaceful and invigorating to be out in the pouring rain.  Camera Girl’s vegetable gardens are lush and growing.  Some of the plants could probably do with a little more sunshine but so far nothing has drowned.

My attempt to grow elecampane (Inula helenium) from seeds three weeks ago may not have failed after all.  I put a packet of seeds in two different gardens and in five or six cardboard flower pots in a raised bed.  None of the seeds on the ground did anything and I presume they are dead.  But I think two or three of the little pots may be growing something.  It’s a big yellow (of course) flower that I’ve wanted to add to the garden for years but could never find for sale.  But with the advent of the internet, things like obscure plant seeds are just a mouse click away.  It turns out elecampane is a “medicinal herb” that can cure evil humors if applied to the patient by a Gaian shaman or crone.  “¡Ay Chihuahua, cuantos Apaches, cuantos Indios sin huaraches!”  But anyway, they may be growing after all.

The blueberry bushes are actually weighted down with unripe berries.  I fear that the deer are just waiting to swoop down and devour the whole crop just as it ripens.  Ah well, as Camera Girl says, “Everybody’s gotta eat.”  Whatever.

I was reading the ZMan’s Monday posts at his site and Taki’s.  They were depressing takes on bugmen like David French and their pernicious embrace of critical race theory in the schools.  It made me think that what will be needed is instruction in the true story of Western Civilization.  Parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts who are interested can point children to older books that reflect the actual story of how we got here.  The history books from two generations ago are full of the true stories of our ancestors and the adventures and tragedies that make up western history.  The Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and the other peoples who have collided and mixed and fought and produced Michelangelo and Mozart and Newton and Maxwell and Edison and all the things that they have created.  Biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, medicine, electricity, engines, nuclear weapons, space travel and computers.  Imagine being ashamed of the people who made these things.  The absurdity of the midgets who want our children to prefer the cultures of people who lived in mud huts and ate each other for dinner.  We should be ashamed of ourselves for even tolerating these people who are ashamed of the civilization that made their lives rich beyond the imaginations of people only a hundred years ago.  I’ll have to start identifying old books that can be used as resources for teaching the young.

Anyway, it’s going to be a busy week.  As I say I have a list of chores to perform before the party and Camera Girl will brook no nonsense from me.  She’s not concerned with my crusade to save America.  She wants the porch swept and the chairs cleaned off.  My ambition is to clean off the grill.  I have some rib-eye steaks to cook on Saturday and I’d like them not to taste like old hamburger grease.  But I promise not to neglect the site and I’m sure I’ll have outrages to comment on and sage advice to distribute to the world at large.

High Summer Triumphalism Collides with Amateur PVC Plumbing

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I woke up this morning with a song in my heart.  Midsummer Day, blue skies, ethereal luminous landscapes, birds singing, flowers blooming, all that crap.  And as I dawdled over my coffee and bagel Camera Girl did what all wives do best.  She toppled the towers of my fairy tale castle.  Report from the kitchen was that the repair I did to the drain line of the sink had failed catastrophically.

I was outraged!  Just a week ago I had disassembled this piece of pvc pipe and its associated o-rings, gaskets and nuts, cleaned it up, inspected the parts.  And finding them good, I reassembled it and using a very satisfyingly heavy monkey wrench I socked the brass nut down on the iron sink drain with authority.  This failure irked me.  So, I gathered my righteous wrath and got my tools out of the garage and descended on that drain line like Thor.

But the brass nut was now a brass ring and a threaded cylinder.  The damn thing had split apart.  It was almost as if someone had overtightened it.  Knowing this to be impossible I explained to Camera Girl that defective Chinese brass was the culprit.  I sighed a manful sigh and after shutting the water valves to the sink and collecting the spool piece and its attendant fittings and specialty items I headed off for replacement parts.  I was going to go to my local hardware store but since this pvc stuff only came on the scene thirty years ago I thought maybe I should try the plumbing supply place that I had seen nearby.

And it was lucky I did.  The friendly and competent employee behind the counter eyeballed the wreckage of a fitting and instantly handed me a new one.  But when I tried to install it on the pipe, we discovered a very strange situation.  The guy who owned the house before me was a very do-it-yourself kind of guy and what he had done was capture the nut between the flange end of the pipe and a tight 90° elbow that he glued up behind it afterward.  Because the old nut split apart, I could get it around the elbow.  But the new nut wouldn’t get by the elbow.  I grumbled some very uncomplimentary remarks about my predecessor but the hardware professional was unphased.  He noted that the pvc nut that tightened the other end of the pipe in place would fit over the elbow with only light violence and I could use my new metal nut on the other joint.  I thought about this for a second.  Metal to pvc?  Sure, why not?  The worst it would do was loosen and I’d put some Teflon tape on it.

I thanked him and asked him how much for the nut.  He said free.  I said, “I can’t just get it for nothing.”  He said, “Think of it as a sales pitch and come back again next time.”  I assured him I would and it wasn’t a lie.  That guy knows how to run a business.

I got home and sure enough the pvc/iron connection fit like a glove.  I made a point of not socking it down with my wrench and determined to check it periodically to see how much it loosened.  The other metal to pvc joint was equally clean fitting and wouldn’t give me any trouble.  I cleaned up the sink area and returned it to Camera Girl’s jurisdiction with noticeable gratitude on her part.  Hail the Conquering Hero.

In celebration, we took a walk around the gardens and admired the Black-Eyed Susans and roses that were blooming.  And just at that time the guy came returning my lawn tractor from repair.  I wasn’t expecting it back for at least two more weeks so this was definitely manna from heaven.  Even with my 20” push mower working again having the sit-down mower would save me four hours of sweat on a hot July morning.  So, things were really going my way now.

Knowing that good things always come in threes I checked the news to see if maybe President Trump had been recognized as the actual winner of the 2020 election while I was busy.  No soap.

Well, it could’ve been much worse.  Trying to get a plumber in my neck of the woods is difficult.  Leaving Camera Girl without a reliable and convenient kitchen sink would be suicidal.  So, this was indeed a best-case result.

So Midsummer Day was interrupted but not ruined.  Now where was that summer idyll I was dreaming of at breakfast?

O mio babino caro!

The Sorrows and Further Sorrows of Small Engine Repair

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So, I have this relatively new lawn tractor that I drove over a big damn rock and knocked off half of the blade.  Since it was vibrating awfully, I sent it to the professionals to fix and they said they’d be keeping it for the better part of the month.  So, I figured I’d fall back on Plan B, my old 20” Murray push mower.

I used it for about a half hour and it sounded like it was running out of gas so I headed back to the shed for more gas.  But when I looked in the tank there was still plenty of gas.  So, I topped it off and pulled the cord.  Nothing.

So, I’m stumped.  This was the first use of the year and I’m trying to guess if maybe the gas had some water in it.  But I’m thinking, “It ran for a half hour.”

But a simple mind likes a simple story so I go twenty minutes each way to the gas station and buy some dry gas.  I put it in the tank and try to start it.  Nothing.

Okay, not the gas.  But maybe the old gas over the winter has clogged the carburetor.  So, I started taking it apart and then I realize I don’t know what I’m doing.  Plus, maybe it’s better to just buy a replacement.  So, I do what any red-blooded American man would do.  I check for a YouTube video on my carburetor.  And what do you know there are several.  So, I watch them and become an expert.  I take the thing apart and clean out the jet and disassemble the hinge on the float and clean the plug.  I reassemble the carburetor and reattach the fuel line and the linkage and close it up and it actually coughed into life and then stalled out again.  But it wouldn’t start after that.

So, I took off the top and checked the action on the rotor.  It moved smoothly.  Next on the agenda was the spark plug.  But I didn’t have a spark plug wrench so I headed to friendly neighborhood hardware store and an hour later I was pulling the plug and sure enough it was covered with carbon and corroded.  So off to AutoZone and an hour later I have a new plug and install it.  Nothing.

Now I’m starting to get annoyed.  This has been a very aggravating process for which I have made exactly zero progress.  Plan C buy a new push mower.  But I notice that these formerly cheap machines now go for two hundred and fifty bucks and that seems ridiculous since I have one in front of me.  Plan D is buying a reel mower and remove the yearly ritual of winterizing the mower and worrying about the vicissitudes of small engine repair.  But overnight I decide that maybe I didn’t do everything I could have done with the carburetor.

So, the next day I take the stupid thing apart again and clean it till it looks brand new.  And then after I reassembled, I tried it again.  Nothing.

So I did a little experiment.  I checked to see if the spark plug was wet with gas after trying to start.  It was dry.  Now I was stumped.  With the carburetor clean it should at least get gasoline to the spark plug.  Now I was sure I must have put the carburetor together wrong.  I was ready to give up.  Plan D sounded about right.  A hundred bucks would get me a reel mower that would last for twenty years and give some exercise too.  But just for luck I decided to try starting it one more time.

So, I primed it three times, put my hand on the stop bar and pulled the cord.  Nothing.

But then by accident I looked down the stop cable and notice that the cable looked screwy.  It had a couple of strands of the cable sticking out and the plastic cable cover was bent at the linkage at a funny angle.  So, I played with the bar and realized that plastic cover was cracked and caught against the frame and the wire strands were also interfering with the mechanism.

I fiddled with it to free the cover from the end connection and bent the loose wires out of the way.  Then I primed the gas, held down the bar and pulled the starter cord.  And it started up with a roar.  I got my wire cutters and cut those strands away and got my black electrical tape and made a temporary repair to the cable cover and started it up a half dozen times and the repair held and worked.

There was great joy among the peasants and a holiday was declared.  Meanwhile I ordered the cable from my local dealer and it should arrive in about a week and a half.

Now you may be asking what the moral of this story is.  Well, the only one I can think of is that if you really need something fixed stick to a professional mechanic.  But I will say that when I finally did get the damned thing fixed, I felt like Wiley Coyote, Super Genius.  And I’m already thinking about what my next project should be.  I’ve put in an order with ACME and between giant magnets, rockets, giant magnifying glasses and roller skates I think I’ll be able to achieve cold fusion by the Fourth of July.  Hail the conquering hero.

In the Merry, Merry Month of May

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This week and next are the last two stay at home weeks left for me.  After that I’ll be half time in the office.  And since Monday is Memorial Day I’m feeling very lazy and am looking for an excuse to think about non-political subjects.  So today I made a point to take a little time and be at play in the fields of the Lord.  I noted that the birds of the air were quite active.  In particular I noted that some swallows have appropriated the bluebird house.

This accords with the low opinion I have developed toward the bluebirds.  To borrow a phrase from the President they’re low-energy losers.  But we have had some indigo buntings around this week.  They are even bluer than the bluebirds and I think much more heroic.  I noted a number of hawks flying above the fields and saw how this disturbed some of the smaller birds.  I assume they were worried about the hawks attacking their nests.  A couple of rabbits were spotted frolicking outside the former goat pen.  What with the circling hawks I thought this surprisingly bold.  Possibly they read Watership Down and took it to heart.

I noted a goodly number of frogs and salamanders drowned in the swimming pool which we opened last Friday.

The idea of amphibians drowning in water also leads me to a low opinion of their fitness to survive in the highly competitive future that we know is over the horizon.  A number of years ago we had some blue spotted salamanders around the property.  They’re good sized and I’d love to see them again sometime.

A very large snapping turtle was cruising around the pond and I was wondering if the mallard family might be at risk of losing a duckling if they weren’t careful.

The painted turtles were all hanging out on a fallen tree and looking fairly useless.  I wondered if maybe they were afraid of the snapping turtle too.  But more certainly the bull frogs and small fish were likely on the menu for grandpa snapper.  I went to inspect the remains of the beaver dam that was abandoned when that buck toothed rodent disappeared last year.  Well, it’s all gone now.  And the pond is at a low ebb.  More like a puddle than a pond.

There were a goodly number of deer travelling through the woods in the last week or so.  They were grazing on the stringy weeds that cover the shallows of the pond but none of them were around today.  Neither did any of the turkeys wander by as they have been lately.

After that black bear or Lovecraftian monster or whatever it was flattened our bird feeders last week I’ve been using the game camera to see what’s going on at night.  The only thing unusual was a red fox.  Last year we had grey foxes but this is the first red one I’ve seen.

Southern New England Gray Fox w/ Sony A7 III w/ Sigma 150 – 600 mm Contemporary lens on Sigma MC-11 converter, at 150mm focal length

After finding that hatchling milk snake I moved my tin to another location in hopes of finding some snakes near the rock wall.

Eastern milk snake, Lampropeltis triangulum triangulum

The garter snakes I’ve been seeing near the retaining wall have disappeared.

The warmer weather must have allowed them to disperse from their winter hibernaculum in the wall.  There was a northern water snake near a vernal pool last year but he wasn’t around today.  I’ll hope to find him again this year.  What I’d really like to find are some larger snakes, a black racer or even a black ratsnake.  But we’ll see.

Insect-wise we have plenty of bees around.

There are the usual honey bees and bumble bees but also the always annoying carpenter bees.  Because of the very extensive wood work on the structures on the property I am at perpetual war with these bees.  We have had our first butterflies.  There have been a number of painted ladies and today we had our first tiger swallowtail.

Minolta 200mm f\4 Macro lens on Sony A7 III

I noted with pleasure that the three small Giant Sequoias got through the winter well.  They join their older and larger cousin in the southwest corner of the property.  My own personal grove.  The two metasequoias have also grown tall in the last five years.

Minolta 200mm f\4 macro

The bristlecone pine tree I planted last fall unfortunately hasn’t done as well.  It looks dead and I’ll have to replace it soon.

The Compound Attacked by One of the Great Old Ones

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Last night abysmal horror stalked the home base.  A Lovecraftian abomination was on the move unleashing its mind shattering power on my corner of New England.  It was Cthulhu or maybe one of the Deep Ones.  The horror, the horror.

Just see the damage caused by its irresistible strength and titanic weight.  Behold!

 

UPDATE!!!!

We cowered in fear during the night time attack.  Finally this morning I gathered my shattered sanity and my courage and I ventured out to assess the damage.

I found this massive print

And finally I found this titanic creature lurking in the near by swamp.

Do not be fooled.  Those green growths are actually massive pine trees that the monster crushed with it’s cyclopean bulk.  What you are seeing is Ralsa Whateley, the hybrid spawn of a human woman and one of the batrachian Deep Ones.  Grown tremendously large from ingesting all of Camera Girl’s bird seed he now rests before once again attacking humanity with the ferocity only capable by one of the Great Old Ones.