Spurious

 

The Rover only just fits in my shop with the plow on!

The Land Rover starter has been giving trouble all winter, and I've been trouble-shooting it as we went along.

She always did start hard when cold, and often needed a jump and even a block heater when the mercury was below zero. This year the old girl was starting just fine up through the fall, but when the temperatures dropped below 10 F, we began to have the same kind of trouble and then yet more trouble. A jump start would almost always work in moderate cold, but once when we were well below zero, even a jump wouldn't turn the very tight, newly rebuilt engine block over, even after the block heater had been on for several hours.

Naturally, I suspected the starter. The battery was comparatively new, only three years old, while the starter was forty-five years old, and the engine was of course very tight after the otherwise very successful rebuild. But the new part was expensive so I waited. Eventually I had a a little extra cash left after paying the bills and shelled out nearly $300 for the replacement I needed.

Unlike most other spares for the series Rover, starters are expensive. On the recommendation of my Rover parts guy, a jovial Brit called Trevor who lives in Arkansas but used to live in Maine and operates the "Rovah Farm" parts house, I went for a brand new replacement "gear" starter. These are devices designed to give more and faster turns of the engine, especially in cold weather, which would probably make life a lot easier in winter. A sun-and-planet gear is used along with a modern motor to provide high rpm and greater turning power. A new old stock or reconditioned original Lucas-type starter was equally expensive, so it would be silly to opt for inferior but original equipment.

The new one is the shiny bright thing on the left. The nasty old black Lucas starter is on the right.

Unfortunately, once installed and despite the shine, the new starter wouldn't work. I pulled it out again and bench-tested it with our spare shop battery, a brand new truck-size unit, and it worked fine, so I put it back and tested the cables one-by-one.

It was while testing the cables that I finally noticed my multi-meter was over-reading. There was one point that the voltage available at one particular connection was 17 volts. This is essentially impossible for a nominal twelve volt lead-acid battery using six two-volt cells to provide. The battery voltage all along, since the fall, had been reading 15 volts, which is very high but not completely impossible, the kind of reading you might get with an exceptionally good twelve volt battery, and perhaps a voltmeter that was a little "off" but not completely unserviceable. This was why I hadn't suspected the battery. I immediately tested the voltmeter with a known voltage, a new AAA battery.

A new AAA should read around 1.6 V, and this one read 2.25 V.

Here's the key shot of this particular experiment.

My meter well and truly faulted, I ran to the parts store to get a new one. Then I compared the two against the AAA. Actually, it read 22.5 V, and I had missed the fact all along that the decimal point was in the wrong place.

That 15 V reading that made me think I had such a great battery? It was actually reading 150 V, but my mind had inserted a decimal point in the "right place". (Later, after moving the meter inside and warming it up, the point went back to the right place, which makes me suspect the 9 volt battery in the multi-meter. But that's another story.)

This led me back immediately to fault the battery, which I switched out for the good new one I had in the shop. I also replaced the cables for good measure.

Now everything works just fine and my Rover is a lot happier starting. It should be, because almost every component in the starter circuit is brand new!

In other news, we're sneaking up on lambing season, and at least four sheep appear to be "showing". We aren't so very sure about how many lambs we'll get this year, because our new ram "Garfunkel" is such a baby still. He had five to breed, so if he managed four, we'll be well pleased. In the fall the ewes had to encourage him a great deal to get his job done. The lambs should come in about a month.

Finally, our kid is doing well, growing like a weed and learning new words all the time. She loves to visit the barn and feed the sheep and chickens, which is good because we all have to spend a lot of time in there during lambing season.

More snow and very cold

It's cold. The high today may have been as much as 10 F here on the farm. The low last night was -7 F.

That's too cold for hens, dogs, and babies, so the hens have a heat lamp, the dogs only go out for short spells, and the baby doesn't go out at all except to a car that is already warmed up thoroughly.

The sheep just get an extra bale of hay and are fine with that. They don't even come in the barn at night, although they have an entrance and can do just that. They don't seem to mind how cold it gets. They do come in the barn for snow sometimes, and always for rain.

The Rover, which is supposed to plow the snow, is giving starter trouble. Part of the problem is the newly rebuilt and "tight" engine, which is hard to turn over when cold even with a good starter motor. I'm looking into getting a new one, but the replacements for the old Lucas "Prince of Darkness" motors are expensive, probably around $300.

Given that it will warm up to 40 F on Tuesday, and give rain, I'm not too worried. No new big snowstorms are forecast. Indeed, we haven't had a real nor'easter all winter, a typical El Nino year. Yesterday it snowed all day but only managed a few inches. I eventually got the Rover started and running today with a heat lamp, a magnetic block heater, and a jump from the Nissan, and plowed this small snowfall in a few minutes.

Inside all possible sources of heat are on, electric baseboards, the oil furnace, and the wood stove. It's nice and cosy. I don't like burning oil, and indeed try to burn very little of it under most circumstances, but I like frozen pipes even less than I like burning oil. I'm letting the old bathroom sink run a little to protect against freezing, and keep checking the temperature in the new crawl space under the extension, but that is steady at around 44 F.

Postscript: The well pump did eventually freeze during this cold spell, because the bulb that is supposed to keep it warm popped. That night it was -17 F, according to Aimee's car's dashboard temperature read-out. The well pump thawed after a half hour of an electrical heater. I'm going to fit a second bulb holder in there.

Here's your "moment of Zen", little Edana trying to make a phone call.

Making omelets

We like cheesy omelets for breakfast. And we like being given the bowl of eggs to whisk, so we can help make omelets.

But we can't say "omelet" yet.

Sled head

Our kid loves to sled, it turns out. As long as she doesn't fall in the cold, cold snow, in which case she cries like a, well, like a baby. The solution is for mommy or daddy to pull her along on the easy ground. No falling, no screaming, no worries. Fun for all the family.

Of course, there wasn't any easy ground earlier in the day, what with a good eight or nine inches drifting up in the dooryard.

The landy needs a starter solenoid, and so needs to be jumped constantly if it's cold. Luckily, she's not prone to stalling out. The solenoid is ordered, from the yUKe, but it must be on the slow boat. Maybe sailings are off for the winter.

Once started, she does as good a job as ever. So much nicer being able to sit in the warm cab than on the back of the cold tractor. We still need the tractor for a couple hard-to-reach spots, like just in front of the garage and in front of the barn, but ninety percent of the work can now be done with the Land Rover plow.

Happy man.

And then there were lots of places to pull a sled without depositing our darling daughter in the snow.

There and back again

We're just back home from an eight day trip to Virginia to see the in-laws. It was almost a nine day trip, thanks to American Airlines, but that's another story, the only hero of which is the Washington DC National Airport authority, who thought to provide a small sanctuary for parents of screaming babies in the form of a privacy room for nursing mothers, wherein we all took a nap and retreated from the madding holiday airport crowd. There was also an heroic American Airlines clerk called Sterling that finally ended our limbo by overriding a glitchy computer system -- after two other clerks had failed.

We were in the DC airport from eleven am through nine pm. By my count there were six departure delays involved, caused by one broken plane and one late plane, plus the aforementioned computer glitch. We even climbed onto the bus to go to the plane once, to be turfed off again.

We'd like to say we're not flying this FUBAR airline anymore, but it is the only one that goes from Bangor to DC.

I told Aimee that the whole episode was a deliberate plot on her part to get me to stay up and see in the New Year for once! I'm usually in bed by nine pm, even on New Year's Eve. When you live in a different time zone, on a different continent than the one where you were born and raised, it's hard to draw a line where one solar year ends and another begins.

The purpose of the visit was of course for the kid to see her uncles and aunts and grandparents. This was duly achieved, as were a number of home improvement projects. So I shouldn't, and won't, complain. But I'm quietly ecstatic to be home. It was the best of luxury after our poor tired cranky kid was finally put to bed, past midnight on New Year's Eve, and after a nice shower in my own bathroom, to sleep in my own bed. Today I got up and did my own chores in my own dooryard, and was a very happy man. I don't know what is such fun about feeding sheep and moving snow and firewood, but to me, it's infinitely preferable to traveling.

I also had a number of car and truck repairs to begin this morning, the partial result of a comedy of errors that took place the night we left. I had loaded our ancient Camry with all the luggage, but once wife and baby were also duly loaded, the headlights wouldn't come on, even after changing the fuse We switched the luggage to the Matrix and took that to the airport, but not before backing the Camry into the pick-up and smashing the bumper cover. Not a great way to start a trip. Additionally, I'd managed to back the truck into a tree at the daycare place, smashing a lamp unit, which was ordered and arrived while we were away. Then there's the small matter of our "new" but slightly broken Honda Insight hybrid, but that interesting wee beastie can wait for a post all of its own.

For today, after feeding sheep and moving the snow that had fallen while we were away and digging out the firewood pile so we could switch off the oil furnace (we don't allow our house-sitter to run the wood stove, for fire safety reasons), I switched out the lamp unit on the truck and got that vehicle working legally again. The Camry, whose engine had been running all this time to warm up the icy snow that was attached to it, had meanwhile somehow fixed its own headlights. Go figure, but they now work. I'm going to check the wiring diagram to see if there's a headlight relay and switch that out for a new unit, if there is one. That's the best explanation, other than a faulty switch unit. But I was happy to have this vehicle serviceable again too.

Tonight, we will celebrate with family homemade pizza night.

There now follows an interlude of a couple weeks before the semester in which my attendance at work is not strictly required, but after the New Year's weekend is over I'm going to go in anyway, just for the pleasure of it. Several colleagues and I have a new building to move into, for research and teaching, essentially a purpose-built sustainable energy demonstration laboratory, and am greatly looking forward to moving in, as well as rationalizing, repairing, and sorting all my teaching demonstrators and research and other equipment before the new semester.

I have high hopes for this new building. Essentially I want to make it the cool, go-to-place for sustainable energy information in Maine and even New England, and am very excited about the prospects.

There'll be more, much more, on this new era in my professional life later, here and on my teaching and research blog.

Done

One thing about teaching college the way we do it is that the semester comes grinding, shuddering to a halt at the end of the sixteenth week, whether students and professors wish it to or not.

Our jobs currently require our attendance only thirty-two weeks a year, divided into two 15-week semesters, with a week of in-service professional development at the beginning of each. There's the small matter of summer and winter break course prep and research, for which we're evaluated even if not paid. But that's a mild quibble.

I got done with my semester's teaching Monday, and my last meeting yesterday, and, except for student conference, which is more of a pleasure than a chore, my attendance is no longer required at work until January 12th. I have a show-and-tell on solar and wind power at a local grade school Thursday, and then, apart from grading, that's it for the semester. Grading gets done at home, so that doesn't require my presence at school.

Aimee got done teaching yesterday, but may still have a meeting or two.

Now we get to shift gears and adopt a more domestic lifestyle, my favorite kind. The reason we live on a farm is that we like living on a farm. And, thanks to El Nino, there isn't even any snow on the ground. We can still work outside, and even still eat our carrots and parsnips, and leeks straight out of the ground.

About those leeks. We grow a barrow load each year. I love them. They're by far my favorite vegetable to cook. My Welsh granny would be proud.

But they're giving me gas.

Three times now, a meal including leeks has resulted in the worst kind of gassy bloat, with an accompanying case of the runs.

What's a (one-quarter) Welshman to do? I thought about feeding them to the sheep, which would make said sheep very happy. But it occurs to me that there's probably a way to reduce the leeks to soup stock, and then freeze them, and it may be that this process cooks them for long enough to reduce the gas. And even if I can't eat them, Aimee will be able to. She likes my leek-and-barley soup. I also need to pull the carrots and put them in the bottom of the outside fridge, where they'll be good until January at least.

The parsnips can be left in the ground until the thaw. They survive the winter. Once it freezes solid, we won't be able to dig them, but it's nice to have a spring vegetable.

The firewood pile seems likely to last the winter, as does the potato stash in the cellar, but the haystack does not. We've just used too much already. Luckily, this year's hay is good enough that the sheep are eating it more thriftily than in previous years, so it will last longer than it otherwise would have, but we'll still need to get a trailer load or two before the term starts.

We're short on eggs, the chickens having discovered some new hiding place to lay that I have not yet found. The other week I found a clutch of twenty or so in the hay loft. I found them the hard way, in that they were on top of a bale that I couldn't see, and so when I pulled the bale down, the eggs came flying, breaking all but a couple. That was a waste.

Now one chickie at least is laying in the hay crib, which egg duly rolls out while the sheep eat their hay, and I can find it on the ground if I rummage a little in the waste hay stems. But that's only one egg a day, not enough to keep up with breakfast and baking needs, especially when daughter Roo has discovered a liking for cheese omelettes. Something has to give here.

I've conceived a project to make new nesting boxes. Maybe that will entice them to lay eggs where I can find them.

Our baby daughter, to whom this farming life is just a fun opportunity to practice her animal noises on real animals, and to go for short walks with mommy and daddy to feed sheep and chickies and pull carrots and wotnot, is enjoying her first Christmas as a more sentient human being. Last year she was too young, really, to appreciate any of it. This year, she has enjoyed the tree, and even a few Christmas carols and songs.

The tree is a special favorite. Like daddy, she's a sucker for pretty lights. She and I make a ritual of turning them on, and she gets excited and happy and says "twee" contentedly. The carols, well, she just likes a good old sing-song, whether it's a special Christmas song or not.

Our daycare place took Christmas photos of all the kids and posted them on their FaceBook page. Apparently our wee precious was the only one who wouldn't smile for the camera.

As doting parents, we're actually quite proud of this achievement. It shows her already-strong resistance to the overbearing superficiality of today's society.

Besides, mildly quizzical is a much better look for the long term, dontcha think?

Nearly there

We're helping mommy wrap presents and package them for shipping!

This is tricky work. Gotta concentrate.

A little quality time.

Getting ready for the Christmas holiday, Aimee and Roo wrapped and packaged presents for shipping, while I just took photos. For my part, I plan to find a tree today for the presents to go under, and then to decorate it with my kid. She's still too young really, to properly help, but I think she is ready to appreciate the pretty lights and all that good stuff, so this should be fun.

At work, we have only two weeks left of the semester, and the second of those weeks is usually relatively easy. I'm feeling that "over the hump" feeling. 

Rolling down the back side!