Shade tree update: Too much stuff going on!

I haven''t been able to post much in the last month or so because, well, dear readers, there's just been so many things happening, there hasn't been time for me to tell you about them.

Much of the business stemmed from the fact that my sister managed to sell our mother's retirement bungalow in the Glamorgan valleys for a good price, after two years languishing on a low UK house market. (Well done, sis!) That meant that I received a modest inheritance. I'd planned to pay off the farm with it, but the recent low interest rates made that unnecessary. We refinanced last year with PenFed (one benefit of being a veteran), now have a very cheap mortgage, and don't owe very much compared to the value of our property.

Which all meant, once I'd paid off some credit cards and put much of the rest in retirement, I had a lot of vehicle work to get done.

There has been an awful lot of vehicle maintenance put on hold for want of time and money these last few years, and indeed, for want of vehicles that had any useful life left in them worth the investment. It was well past time to put this situation to rights.

This is a long story, and has been a major theme of this blog over the years. Aimee and I never have compatible work schedules, and there isn't any kind of public transportation or car pool facility available to us, so we both need our own vehicles to get to work. Aimee gets a reliable car, which in recent years was our lucky Camry. For many years now I've managed to get by using a series of end-of-life junkers, first a succession of Saabs, then the Mazda, and eventually the old Ford Escort wagon.

There's also a need for four-wheel drive vehicles in winter, and for vehicles to do farm work. Our venerable 1971 Land Rover is my winter truck, does a lot of the farm work around here, and will last the rest of my life if I take care of it. But Aimee also needs a winter vehicle, which for as long as we can both remember has been her old Nissan Frontier pick-em up truck. She also needs a vehicle for her summer field work in marine biology.

These are well-documented vehicles. The Nissan Mazda, Camry and Escort are all mentioned in numerous posts on these blog pages. The Land Rover has both blog pages and even a FaceBook page, showing the original restoration work. The most relevant to today's post, however is this one here, where I explain why the Ford needs to go to that great junkyard in the sky.

In all this long saga of beat-up old jalopies, there's one theme: How to get the maximum useful life out of a vehicle with the minimum payment. That's mostly my job, for which I have a significant array of proper tools, a small shop, and big dooryard with the appropriate shade trees for a traditional "shade tree" mechanic.

We've done quite well. The Mazda gave us over 60,000 miles for about $2,000 total, the Ford has managed about the same. The Camry has given us 50,000 for around $5,000 total, but is still going strong and has lots of useful life left in it. The Nissan, which was new when Aimee got it in 1999 while a graduate student at UMass Dartmouth, ran on and on, and gave us 212,000 miles in the end, until I foolishly burned up the transmission.

The plan was, once mother's house had sold, for Aimee to get a new car, as well as a replacement transmission in the Nissan, while I would take the Camry. The first part of this was achieved the first week in April, when we secured a "new" 2009 Toyota Matrix for Aimee. This is likely to be a reliable and cost-effective vehicle for her, and because we got it from a dealer, it even comes with a three-month warranty, the first car or truck I've ever owned that had such a thing. The mileage is especially good, at what seems around 35-40 mpg. We looked at a Prius, but were put off by the low ground clearance, as well as the high cost. The Prius mileage was only touted at 45 mpg, so the Matrix was a better deal. It also has side air bags, stability control, and ABS, all needed because Aimee isn't the world's best driver in the snow.

My experience with Toyotas, having now owned three, is that they have superior rust protection and are easier to work on because of sensible layout

Once the Matrix was in hand, I started driving the Camry. We traded the Ford Escort for a couple days of sheep-sitting from a young person with a little sheep experience. They needed a car, and the Ford can probably serve, if it passes state inspection. If not, the price of scrap is high enough these days that they can sell it and use the money for a different car. They will pick it up tomorrow.

All the cars taken care of or in hand, I then turned my attention to trucks and particularly the Nissan's transmission. With some reluctance I stripped away the old wooden flatbed decking, the result of previous efforts to keep this truck going. My intent was to clean up the frame and replace the decking at the same time as I did the transmission.

But once the decking was stripped away and I got a good look at the frame I realized there would be no new transmission for the Nissan. The frame work I'd done four and five years ago, in 2009 and 2011, had managed to last alright, but there was new rust in different places, while the cab was also rusted out at the rockers. I realized that a new transmission was not going to be such a good investment. I sold the truck for scrap, then looked for a replacement.

Both Aimee and I were a little sad the day the wrecker came. We've had this truck for a long time, and gotten a lot of useful service out of it, but all good trucks come to an end (unless they are Land Rovers).

The knowledge that the frame was gone should have made me feel better about burning up the transmission, but didn't. I hate to waste money, especially with stupid mistakes like that.

But still, I had to bite the bullet and get a new truck, so I started reading the classified and driving around to look at what was on the market.

In the end I got us another four-wheel drive Frontier, just slightly newer, a 2002. I picked it up at a wholesale lot in Bangor for five grand, plus taxes. It needs work, and I have it on jack stands in the dooryard right now, while I go through it, but it came with a cap, a tow hitch, and an extended cab, so it seats five. It has 144,000 miles already, so we know we won't get that many more miles out of it, but it only needs to do a few thousand miles a year. Most of Aimee's miles will go on the Matrix. The new truck's rear frame is rusty, and the bumper rusted out, but it's still better than the old one was when I worked on the frame all those years ago, so If I catch it now with rust converter and the wire wheel on the grinder, spray the heck out of it with undercoat, and use Fluid Film every winter, it should last for at least five years.

Fluid Film is a godsend. I should buy stock. Until I discovered this stuff, all my cars rusted out no matter what I did. It's the only thing that makes sense out of driving in a New England winter, with all the road salt used around here. Even the Land Rover would corrode if it wasn't for Fluid Film.

Plus, it's made from sheep's lanolin. What could be better?

If I get time later today, I'll take some pictures of the new vehicles to add to this post. But yes, I've had my work cut out for me recently. All this and lambing season too. (We now have six, but more are coming.)

Mother would be happy enough, though, with what I've managed to do with all her hard work and savings. In particular, as many Great Farm Diary readers know, Aimee's now expecting. I should think my mum would want her first and only grandchild to be driven in safe vehicles. I should think she'd also be glad to know how much she's helped our family financially. She was a very practical woman when it came to houses and money.

I put a lot of this in my eulogy for her, but it took a while to come true.

Done Roving! (For now)

After much tinkering with a worn-out Zenith 36 IV carburetor, I got the Rover's engine running pretty good, and decided to declare the great Land Rover Restoration Project of summer 2012 finished.

I celebrated with a Facebook photo album of the project, which you can find here:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.520911123971.2012212.120000373&type=1&l=51029d10aa

The original goal, which was to replace the functionality of the 1997 Ford Escort Wagon and the 1999 Nissan pick-em-up truck, can be partly met with this vehicle.

The main barrier to completely meeting the goal is the poor fuel efficiency of the Rover. The Escort gets about 35 mpg minimum, while the Land Rover currently gets less than 20. The Ford will have to keep running for now, since we can save money by using it for me to get to and from work and for non-load carrying trips. I'm hoping to increase the fuel efficiency eventually with a new carburetor.

But with the addition of a solid farm trailer, we'll be able to do everything we do with the Nissan, when that vehicle finally poops out as it must in a year or two, at the most three. I think we'll eventually scrap both Nissan and Ford and replace them with a fuel-efficient sedan or hatchback of some kind, possibly a second-hand Prius for Aimee to drive, while I take her Camry into its second 100,000 miles. 

There are a few things we can do with the Rover that we couldn't do before. One is to carry dogs very easily. In fact, the dogs really like it in the back of the Rover. They have their own rug on the floor and their own windows to look out of. We can also install a section of fence back there, pull out the rug, and carry sheep and piglets without the need for a livestock trailer, which will be very convenient.

And, as long as the Nissan keeps running, when the snow flies Aimee can drive the Nissan, while I drive the Landy, allowing us to keep different schedules even when the weather is bad.

The total cost of the Land Rover, including parts, registration and new tires, was somewhere between five and six thousand dollars, which I think is not bad for a four-wheel drive truck that can last for many years. We spent about that much on Aimee's Camry a couple years back.

Hill farmers and green growing things

We have five days, including today, left of our Spring Break "staycation."

At least for me it's been a staycation. Aimee went to a marine science conference in Savannah, GA, where she presented a poster with a write-up of her rockweed study so far. She has photos posted on her Facebook page. She had a nice time, and was in good spirits when she came back, despite the fact that we still have snow on the ground here in Maine, while Savannah is of course several weeks into the spring growing season already. I think we'll make it to Finals Week and Graduation, although it's going to be insanely busy.

I was a little jealous of the flowers she saw, and the warm weather, but of course I get to go to conferences too, so there's not much point being jealous. I used to live in Georgia, and didn't like it much, so I was happy enough to stay home and watch for lambs.

We rarely go anywhere together (except to see Aimee's family in VA once a year), since someone always has to stay home to look after the animals.

So, I was "it" this time, and stayed home and looked after the animals, and vehicles, and house, and even did some college work, a large important report that will need to be polished up some today.

The Ford passed its safety inspection yesterday, rust and all, sailed through in fact, as did the Nissan pick-em up truck. Another year of legal driving for both. I'm not sure if I'll get another year out of the Ford after this one -- those Maine rust mites will eventually spread to a major undercarriage mounting point and that will be all she wrote. The Nissan has some rust on the body, but nothing terminal, while the frame and undercarriage are still solid. I'll wash the salt off it as well as I can, drive it only sparingly this summer, spray it with Fluid Film underseal in the fall, and she should be good for another sticker next year.

The Ford will have to be replaced with another daily driver when it rusts out. Something that gets good gas mileage, is what we'll need. I'd like to get an electric car or a hybrid, but we probably couldn't afford one as they remain still too expensive (except possibly a secondhand Prius or Insight -- we'll see). More than likely, we'll get another newer car for Aimee and I'll take her Camry into its second hundred thousand miles.

The Nissan is not scheduled to be replaced, except by a large agricultural trailer that the Land Rover can pull, to carry hay and transport heavy equipment and building supplies. I imagine I can get a few more years out of the truck before I actually need the trailer, but if I see a nice one going cheap enough, I may get it early just to make my haying a little easier.

Spring is coming more slowly this year in Maine than in past years. We're scheduled for another snowstorm today, albeit just a dusting. Our lambs are staying firmly inside their mothers, and I don't blame them. The gestation period for a sheep is five calendar months, give or take a couple days either side. I checked the sheep book to see if we had ever had an early lamb, and there was one year where twins were born at something like 142 days, but never any earlier. The online lambing calendars (yes, even shepherds have online calculators these days) all point to March 29th as the due date for the ewes that were bred first.

There are some pretty horrific stories in today's paper about hill farmers in Britain losing thousands of lambs to the cold weather they're having. An old service buddy, Geoff A., is a freelance press photographer in North Wales and he has some pictures of snowbanks on his Facebook page that are more like Maine than Wales.

The farmers that are losing lambs are the ones that don't lamb indoors and don't lamb in the in-bye pastures, usually because they don't have lambing sheds or enough in-bye. These are the hill farmers that still lamb on the fell, and still use the traditional and hefted breeds that can handle that kind of treatment.

Here in the hill farms of Maine there's no such thing as a hefted flock, the weather sucks for lambing early, and all we have is in-bye and woodlot, no fells, so we lamb indoors. The Womerlippis are extremely careful about this, with night checks and constant vigilance this time of year. The minute a sheep shows signs, she's pulled into a pen by herself and kept there until she lambs, or proves to be a false alarm. So far we've had one false alarm, and as a result poor Molly spent a night in isolation with nothing to show for it. 

The hill farmers in the UK would ordinarily be able to handle a spring snowstorm, but they've also recently had an outbreak of Schmallenberg virus over there, a midge-borne illness that causes abortions and birth defects in the first few years, until flocks become immune. This bad weather comes as a second major blow, and unless the government does something, many hill farmers will have to sell out and go on the dole. Ordinarily a UK government could be relied upon to help farmers out in any situation like this with some kind of compensation or insurance scheme, but this current government of the "feral elite" is a nightmare. Despite most of them living in rural Oxfordshire, at least on weekends, they make the stupidest decisions about rural affairs.

The RAF is dropping feed from helicopters to try to save some lambs, but the government just made the decision to privatize my beloved SARForce in 2016, a stupid, stupid decision, considering that the current Sea King squadrons are the pride of the country, especially since Prince William joined SARForce. The RAF Mountain Rescue community is bemoaning the decision today, all over Facebook and the blogosphere.

Happy seventieth anniversary, RAF SAR! 

Seventy and out. Brought to you by your friendly coalition government. I've half a mind to write to my MP, but since the MP for Sheffield Hallam, my home ward, is bloody Nick Clegg, the Deputy PM, I don't think I'd get very far.

I'd like to see them get Bristow, the US firm that won the contract, to drop feed to sheep in winter.

Here in Maine we still have snow, but it's melting rapidly and should be gone by the end of next week.

The Womerlippis do have some green growing things despite the cold, albeit under glass, with heaters and heat lamps.

Here's our spring plant start set-up in my den, where there's a south-facing window.

 

The picture is blurry, I know, but you get the idea. We invested in new lamps this year, not cheap at $14 apiece, plus between $10 and $15 per bulb. We used to get by with small bulb-holders, not strip lights, but the plants would often be spindly as a result, and hard to transplant later. I had to go to four different hardware storees to find all eight bulbs (two per unit), since these are not common items. I expect we'll get a visit from the Maine DEA, since this is the kind of operation the local nasties use to grow pot. We're of course only growing tomato starts, plus a few brassicas and squash. We don't plan any new nefarious business enterprises, just a slight improvement to our veggie operation.

Once the plants get going, they can go out to the glass greenhouse, which has been refurbished with new plastic sheeting inside, as well as some floating row cover, to trap the air and cut the light intensity. One thing that happens this time of year in Maine, with all our snow and sun, is that there's often actually too much light for plants that have been begun inside, and when the full March sun is at the zenith, an unprotected glass greenhouse will actually get too hot for most plants.

 

I think I may have spent all of $80 building this greenhouse years ago (pictures here, here, and here). It was cheap because I used all the leftover storm window glass we had, after putting all new double-glazed windows in the house. After a while though, the storm windows cracked and had to be replaced, and lots of air leaks opened up as the cheap wooden frame shifted around. The plastic sheeting solved the air leak problem, and this year it seems to be working well. 

I should think that one day we'll want to demolish this old thing and buy a nice new metal framed greenhouse, but for right now this is doing just fine.

The tomatoes and squash will stay in here until they're quite large, then get planted out and in the new hoophouse, built only last year. We'll grow early and late toms in the hoophouse, and the main crop out in the garden.

The brassicas can be put out in the hoophouse anytime now. I have a soil thermometer out there and the soil temps about 40 degrees F in the early morning, even after a hard frost.

And so begins another year's round of modern small-scale agriculture on the Great Farm of Jackson, Maine. 

1806-2013, not out.

Wassail and Amen to that.

Keep watching. Lambs will come soon.

Failed the test!

I should know better than to invite wifely ridicule by posting this story, but I would hate to deprive a few readers I know of a smile or a laugh, so here goes.

I wanted to get my motorcycle license endorsement. This was very silly of me, according to Aimee, who has no place in her cosmos for the humble motorized bicycle, but nevertheless I wanted to get it, against all wifely wisdom and economic common sense.

I had previously owned a motorcycle license, and even a couple of different motorcycles, when I lived in Montana, but I was literally so broke when I came to Maine to work at the college all those years ago, still struggling to finish up that expensive education, that I couldn't afford the extra twenty bucks to transfer the license over.

At the time I told myself I was done with motorcycles anyway, that from here on out such frivolity would be disallowed, that instead I would work hard and marry and raise a farm and maybe a family, and so it wouldn't matter that I didn't have the twenty bucks for the permit transfer.

That was before the price of gas went up. And I had forgotten how pleasurable it could be to ride a motorcycle, especially one you've repaired yourself.

The fact of that matter is, I just like fixing things that go. I always have, since I got my first motorcycle at age 15. A very silly Italian 50 cc two-stroke trail bike, it had a major problem, a broken crankshaft, and so I only paid fifty pounds for it, but I replaced the crank and, miracle of miracles, made it go, and thus began a major career of repairing everything from excavators to fighter jets.

I'd actually rather repair airplanes than cycles, and there are even a couple of flying clubs around that I could join, but cycles are cheaper. I enjoy classic cars, but they take up a lot of room, and you pretty much need to keep them in a building here in Maine in the winter. I like old tractors, but only really need one tractor on this farm, and I have that already. I'm definitely going to get an old Land Rover to replace the Nissan farm truck when it dies, but that Nissan seems to want to live on forever, no surprise given the love and care it gets, and so the Land Rover will have to wait.

A man only ever needs to buy one Land Rover in his life, anyway.

A major Nissan brake overhaul is going to be required this fall, as soon as I have the money for parts, which job I'm already looking forward to, but we're not ready to do that job yet, because when we do the truck will be off the road for a few weeks, and we still have some summer farm chores to do and the brakes still work.

So, motorcycles are the best alternative, and getting my license just a step on the project road.

I suppose I could fix lawn mowers, but that seems a little low, don't you think. Another of these crusty old Maine guys that tinkers with lawn mowers and has a shed full of them, always for sale.

I'd have to smoke a pipe too, if I were to do that. Those fellas always smoke pipes. And Aimee wouldn't like that.

Anyway, a guy can dream, can't he? I'd really like to have some old British bikes. One of these days I'm going to build a really superb workshop here on this farm, a bright, clean, heated, fully electrifried, epoxy-floored palace, a veritable Taj Mahal of maintenance technology, and when I do, I'll have a BSA or even a Matchless to love and feed and water in that workshop.

Just because.

Aimee of course sees all such occupations as a total waste of money and a complete and utter diversion from what husbands should be doing, which is all the heavy work around the farm, and the endless honey-do list.

But a guy can dream, can't he?

Accordingly, a couple of years ago, and against wifely advice and instruction, I took the Motorcycle Safety Class and got a two-year learner's permit, which in Maine makes you legal to drive any motorcycle without a passenger within the hours of daylight. But at the end of two years, or before, you have to take the road test, or at least take another written test and get another two year permit

My two years were almost up, and so I scheduled a road test. It seemed best, a better investment than another two-year jobbie. I didn't have a bike, but thought to borrow or rent one. I found a buddy at work with a scooter, and was able to get the loan of it to take the test.

The great day arrived.

And rapidly went haywire.

The first blow to my plans was that the Internet (bloody FairPoint again!) was down at our place and so I couldn't look up directions to Belfast Methodist Church, which apparently doubles as a Maine DMV road test center during the week.

Still, I thought, I have time. Lots of time.

I didn't want to have to drive such a tiny scooter all the way from its home in Thorndike to Belfast, where the test was scheduled to be held, and so I went looking for the motorcycle ramp I had made a couple years ago, when I was tinkering with an old Yamaha Virago. Then I drove the farm truck over to my buddy's house and we loaded the scooter, a 125 cc Yamaha with Vespa-like styling. He showed me how to get into the storage compartment under the seat where the inspection sticker and registration were stowed. I drove away with plenty of time to get to the test site and unload and drive around a bit to get used to scooter. Organized, on time, thought-through. Going well.

So I thought.

It was as I was driving away that I realized I'd left both my Instruction Permit and my Motorcycle Safety Class certificate in my den at home. These silly slips of paper were on the list of official documents I needed to take the road test.

Looking back, forgetting these slips was the actual moment I failed the test. Everything else that went wrong was just a cascading chain of events from this moment. I just didn't know it yet.

I could have stopped right here and saved myself all kinds of trouble.

So, watching the time now, I drove back home first to get the stupid slips. This was about an extra fifteen miles of driving on a bad Maine road, and I began to feel the cortisol flooding my system as I bounced down the stupid rutted back road short cut, hoping I'd strapped the bike on well enough, watching it in my rear view mirror.

I hadn't, of course, and so another five minutes were wasted with ratchet straps. I don't know how you feel about ratchet straps, but I like them fine, until I start to get stressed, and then they don't work so well. I was all fingers and thumbs.

Things were not looking so good.

Then there were the durn roadworks.

Maine has two seasons, it is often said, winter and road-mending. Our harsh winters do for our roads and so they must be fixed every year, more or less. Added to this imperative, the famous or infamous stimulus package came with a lot of bridge money, and so pretty much the whole road system of the great State o' Maine is under bridge repair right about now.

Tourists be damned, The tourists come anyway. They must like sitting in two-mile long lines of traffic on Highway One. I suppose it's a much more scenic traffic jam than they can find in Jersey or inside Boston's I-495 or, increasing, from within the M-25 London beltway.

(What was it Bette Midler said in "Big Business"? Eurotrash!)

Two sets of bridge works on Route 7 ate up my last ten minutes. It was just 10 am when I pulled into Belfast, and I still didn't know where to go! More stress hormone. I knew that the best place to get directions to a road test would be the downtown parts store, and I was right, but it took ten minutes, and the silly church wasn't even really in Belfast, but across the bridge almost in Searsport, and so by the time I pulled into the church parking lot, my hands were shaking, and I hadn't even unloaded the cycle yet.

The official ladies behind the desk in the church's community room were polite but firm. I was late. I'd better go get my sticker and registration pronto or my test would be cancelled. I tried to explain that I needed a moment to clam down, but they didn't seem to get that at all.

Back out on the bed of the truck, straps all askew, I tried my hardest to get the durn luggage compartment open, hands shaking, mind a blur. There was a trick to this that my buddy had showed me. You had to turn the key back to a special position, push, click, and that was how it was supposed to happen. Pops right up. Right under the seat.

Neato. Or so it seemed in my buddy's driveway.

But it wasn't happening for me. I prayed. I twisted. I turned. I tried every combination. I finally realized if I just forced the seat up, I could slip my hand in and grab the plastic bag with the sticker. I ran into the building with my papers.

But the testing lady wasn't having any of this. Too late. Couldn't do it. Very sorry, but you were supposed to be here, ready to go, thirty-five minutes ago.

More to explain to myself what the heck it was that I was going to do now, I said despondently if that was the case, then I probably wasn't going to take the silly test, ever. It was just too much trouble I said, to take the stupid safety class, and find a borrowed bike, and get over here to this stupid out-of-the-way site, to take the silly test. And of course, in the back of my mind was what Aimee would think of all this. And I suppose I must have seemed pretty downhearted.

Miracle of miracles, the test ladies relented.

If I could get the bike off the truck in the next two minutes, I could take the test.

Now, if you can at all imagine, a 250 pound guy who spends his summers splitting wood and wrangling 80-pound anemometer tower parts can always find a way to get a little tiny bike like that off a truck in two minutes, but that probably isn't quite the way you want to watch him get a bike off a truck.

And it certainly didn't do anything for my nervousness. Neither did the two-way helmet radio they gave me, with the somewhat shrill test lady instructions ringing in my ears. Now I know what it's like to hear voices in your head telling you what to do!

Voices other than Aimee's, that is. I hear her voice in my head all the time.

Never mind the fact that I'd never ridden this bike before. My pulse rate must have been a hundred and five as I fired up the bike and ran through the light checks.

None of it mattered in the end. It wasn't my road handling of the unfamiliar bike that killed me. It was forgetting to look over my left shoulder when moving from a right hand to a left hand lane in a one-way system.

Do you know how many one-way systems there actually are in the great State o' Maine?

Not many, that's for sure. So, of course I forget to look over my shoulder. I checked both mirrors. I used my flasher. I kept the proper lane position in both lanes. I remembered to cancel the flasher when I got done with the lane change.

But I didn't look over my stupid shoulder.

Actually, I though I did pretty well myself, especially on the so called "hill start". This is where you need to be pointing diagonally uphill, with your back wheel against a curb as if parked, and then move out into the road. The test designers probably don't know about automatic clutch scooters that have to be turned off and rolled if you want to go downhill backwards, and neither did I as I tried to follow the instructions, but I figured it out totally on the fly.

I was strangely calm as I received my test results. The test lady was unfailingly polite. I was polite in return. Very British. Stiff upper wotsit. Manners are everything in moments of stress. The Queen would be proud. I told myself another two years of a learner's permit wouldn't kill my motorcycle fixer-upper plans, if ever I could find a few hundred extra wife-free dollars to buy some kind of fixer-upper project anyway.

I began the project of righting my keel, metaphorically speaking. I did it very deliberately, the stress hormone antidote. I loaded my scooter much more carefully than I unloaded it. I strapped it down extremely carefully, making sure to appreciate the ratchet straps fully. I very slowly did a couple of other Belfast chores. I even got myself a cup of coffee and a slice of pie at the food coop, ignoring the flipping tourists dawdling around in the aisles.

(Why do they have to stroll so slowly, and annoyingly, through our food store? One somnambulant tourist family in your supermarket would be enough, but we get ten or fifteen of them at once, and it's a very small store. One of these days I'm going to go to their store, wherever that is, and leave fifty untended shopping carts with broken wheels in their aisles, at 6.30 on a Friday evening, when they're desperate to get home with dinner. We'll see how they like it! Is this madness? Do I need to see a doctor?)

Then I drove to my buddy's house. Luckily he was out, so I didn't have to tell anyone how badly I'd done. I unloaded the scooter yet more slowly and carefully. I drove home very slowly indeed. I fed the dogs and tended to the sheep and pigs and chickens. I stashed my motorcycle test papers away nicely. I even read through the form to apply for another two year permit.

And I took a very long nap and slept it off.

And then, and only then, I told my wife.

Lamb daze done and other news

Wednesday was shearing day at the farm, the biggest sheep management day of the spring season. Our shearer is Edi, a UMaine agriculture student with a talent for efficiently and gently removing all the fleece from a ewe or ram. First up was Shawn, who met his match and lived up to his name. Then we ran through all the ewes and ewe-lambs, finishing with the last three thought-to-be-pregant ewes, only to find that all was not as thought to be.

In fact, they were not at all pregnant. Not even a little bit.

So much for Shawn the home-grown ram. Growing your own is clearly not always better.

But poor Shawnie. He's probably sealed his fate at that. No-one will buy him if we can't point to a good lambing rate, so he'll have to go to be ramburger. He has one more season on the farm, but we won't want to keep him around after that. Even if he does better he won't live long enough for us to find out how well he did. It's just too much trouble to keep a ram you don't need anymore.

If Shawnie had done a better job, he would have had a better chance of being sold on to another farm.

Before another horrible anti-farming, anti-meat activist sends us snotty comments, think it through. This is not as horrible as it sounds. Our experience is that sheep tend to die pretty painful deaths at eight or nine years of age, if you keep them around to die of old age. A few good years of good health, all the feed and sunshine you want, the chance to reproduce, and then a quick clean unsuspecting death is not all that bad. And where do you think the manure comes from for the compost used in organic farming?

As for me, I get to sleep through the night now, after nearly five weeks of night checks every night.

 

Here's Quinn with her two black lambs, one boy and one girl. I only have pre-shearing pictures because my camera batteries died. I need to pull out the charger and charge up some. Still, you get to see how strong the lambies we do have are doing. They're very sturdy, all the troubles with white muscle disease left far behind.

 

Here's Flamie very excited by the sheep and lambs being put out to graze for the first time the other day. The grass has taken quite a while to grow, and is not at all up to snuff, but we decided to let them have a go at the island paddock. They were getting very tired of hay.

Finally, here's the "new" Nissan pick-em up truck on jackstands waiting for a new muffler, having failed inspection on that count.

I'd asked the mechanic, Mr. Thompson on the Valley Road in Brooks, if he would weld the muffler while he had the truck on the lift to change the tires, but it was cracked in more than one place and he gave up on it, telling me I had to get a new exhaust system from the catalytic converters back. Then followed a fairly hectic few days of mechanical work for me as I tried to cut the old system off, and then locate all the pieces needed to make a new exhaust system.

The problem is, as a long bed and four-door model, this truck's body style is fairly rare, and there are several different after-market exhaust system configurations, some of which don't have the same parts. The Nissan place in Bangor was no help. They didn't have as much as a single gasket on hand. In the end I went to CarQuest in Bangor for the muffler, tailpipe and intermediate pipe, ordered online for the crossover pipe, went to NAPA in Belfast for one gasket, all they had, and Autozone in Belfast for gasket material with which to make my own second gasket.

I still need what looks to be (from online parts diagrams) a long-bed extender pipe, which no-one seems to supply. But I also noticed that the old muffler, not original but after-market, had used a second intermediate pipe for this purpose, so wonder if it isn't just the same thing, and that's why no-one has it. If I do this I need to cut the rear flange off the crossover pipe, but I think it will work. We'll find out when all the parts get here.

In any case, all the work came to a temporary end after I managed to get a hot shard of steel embedded in my right eyeball. I needed to grind off the rusted bolts on the old muffler with the angle grinder, but at one point forgot to lower my goggles. This is an easy mistake. Getting middle-aged as I am, I can't actually see that well for close work anymore with either my glasses and googles on, so I'm in the habit of pausing work and lifting them from time to time, to be able to actually see what I'm doing. Sometimes I forget to lower them again. In this case I was rewarded with a very nasty injury to my eye.

This was a particularly painful splinter, as I couldn't get it out for several hours. It was tiny, but had penetrated the cornea and was stuck hard. Aimee, with her usual good timing, had left for the day to do fieldwork with her friend Pam, and so I had no-one to help me. In the end, after a couple hours of sporadic attempts to clear it, interspersed with attempts to continue work, it came out after a lucky swipe with the edge of a towel soaked in hot water, but the eye was still very sore.

It didn't help that the second job I wanted to do, with the muffler all off, was to spray phosphoric acid on the rust and bare metal, where I'd been using the wire wheel on the hand grinder to remove the big flakes. The breeze was light but variable and the acid mist kept drifting my way, coming through the holes in the side of my goggles. In the end, after washing off several times, I persevered and got the whole frame properly etched and ready for POR 15 paint, but I probably added slight acid burns to hot steel shards on my list of eyeball injuries.

You really need a full protective suit for these kinds of jobs. And a lift.

After a particularly painful evening in which I resorted to lying on the couch with my eyes closed listening to a radio play -- Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood on BBC Wales -- rather than watch TV, I went to bed with some Ibuprofen, and awoke to be much better although still not a hundred percent. Today is graduation, so I think I'll take it easy. But it's also a good day for transplanting starts, so we'll see.

This is a lot of effort to go to for this truck. I'm starting to think I made a mistake. The price given for this truck in the Kelly Blue Book, assuming good order, 144,000 miles, and no major defects is $6,800, for a private sale. I've invested around $6,700 already, and still don't know if the timing belt was properly replaced at 120,000 miles.

Still, with a bit more work I'll have it where I need it to be, assuming my eyesight holds up. If nothing else shows up to confound my plans, we'll not be too far over the target price. Certainly we'll be under the dealer price for the same truck, and I'll have the security of having confidence in the work, having done it all myself.

The Great Land Rover Hunt of '12

(Photo, courtesy Jim "Fergie" Ferguson's Facebook, of the RAF Leeming MRT Troops with a Series III LWB RAF Land Rover Ambulance, circa 1981 or 1982. Me on the far right.)

I'm looking for an old Land Rover to fix up. Call it nostalgia, although my excuses are many.

The main theme I'm using, in this art of wifely persuasion, is that a solid Land Rover at this point in my life would be the last truck I ever bought. But we also need a replacement four-wheel drive farm wagon for our thirteen-year old Nissan Frontier, which, after great efforts, is still rusting out, and whose engine is too complicated for me to rebuild when, as it surely must after 215,000 miles, it finally conks out.

I could put the same amount of effort into an older Land Rover as I've put into this Nissan over the last few years and be repaid in decades, rather than years, more service.

So the plan is to find an old Series I, II, IIA or III Land Rover and repair the frame, rebuild the engine and, if necessary, the gearbox, and do all the brakes and suspension in one big rebuild project, to essentially strip it down to nothing and build it back up again.

I looked at one today, a Series IIA for just over $6,000. It was a pretty good prospect. The main problems were in the bulkhead and bodywork, the frame having already been welded and undersealed some years ago. But six grand was a little more than I want to pay right away, so I'm still looking.

Although I've worked on dozens of type of cars and trucks over the years, I've not worked on Land Rovers.

(I wrecked a couple while I was in the service, but never repaired them, not even the ones I wrecked. There's gratitude for you.)

So far, from reading the web pages and on-line manuals and watching You Tube videos, I like what I see. Everything comes apart with simple tools, and the whole body can be removed in pieces to give excellent access to the engine and the frame.

My Haynes manual, my first actual purchase towards this project, should come in the post this week.

What does Aimee think about all this? To begin, she was quite negative. Another crazy husbandly idea.

But I showed her some pictures of how good finished trucks can look after the rebuild process, and pointed out some of the technological advantages for our situation, such as the ability to tow farm machinery and hay wagons, or the fact that I should be able to rebuild everything on the vehicle with my current endowment of tools and skills, and pointed out that we could actually save money (over the very long term), she seemed to come around.

Or resigned herself. I can't quite tell.

Anyway, if anyone knows of a good Land Rover, legal for use in the US, and otherwise capable somehow of reaching Maine, let me know.

A very stupid place to put an alternator

We've been busy around here. Earlier in the week we'd taken delivery of two hundred bales of Amish hay, as well as the last and final load of pig feed. The firewood was in and drying nicely. I'd gotten the extension project as far as I could without spending money we don't yet have on lumber.

But all good things come to an end. I got done with back-filling the foundation hole yesterday, had some lunch, took a short nap, and then, finally, had no remaining distractions or excuses not to start a job I'd most definitely not been looking forward to -- switching out the alternator on the old Nissan pick-em-up truck.

This truck is superannuated by now, having gone past it's 220,000 mile point. We long ago switched out the old rusted-out truck bed for a wooden flatbed -- which project, although I did it from necessity, to pass inspection, gave the truck a whole new lease of life and more usability, since the old 6-foot metal bed was not very good at carrying hay or plywood, two items we have frequently to carry around here.

I'm very happy with the "new" wooden bed, now three years or more old.

Since replacing the bed, we've used the truck for no more than two or three thousand miles a year, pretty much all of it load-carrying, except for a few miles in the deep snowdrifts each winter. I expect to kep it running as long as I possibly can, and have maintained the frame, suspension, and brakes accordingly, but one day a major engine problem will surface and that will be all she wrote. I could rebuild that engine, or even put a secondhand one in, but I'm not going to. Too much trouble. That will therefore be the point at which we scrap this old truck.

The plan is, one day, when this truck finally dies, to simply get a large trailer that the Land Rover can pull, and not need a pick-up truck at all. I fully expect to keep the Land Rover running until I die.

In the meantime, keeping the old truck running well is a fine art. In particular there's a small oil leak from somewhere or other, and a tiny coolant leak near number four spark plug, that shorts out the plug every three or four thousand miles, so you get a misfire, and then the plug has to be pulled and cleaned or replaced. One oxygen sensor is out on each side of the exhaust system. Both are essentially unreachable without some special tool. There's also a tiny brake fluid leak inside one of the wheel cylinders. I'm not sure which one, but whatever one it is, it's not sufficient to wet the drums or discs and reduce the braking power, so we just top off the fluid every two months or so. The wooden tailgate on the home-made bed is tricky and requires a secret special "thump" in just the right spot to get it to work well. And the whole under body gets a good thick coating of Fluid Film underseal every winter.

It was a bit of a setback, then, to have the alternator on this truck go out, just when we most needed the vehicle to run.

When the alternator light came on, I wasn't exactly sure what was happening, since the air bag and automatic transmission temperature lights also came on. I pulled the codes just to see if that told me anything, but the computer didn't say anything different about anything, except the stupid old oxygen sensors, so I bit the bullet and ordered a secondhand alternator from an online junkyard sales place. It cost only $95, and came quickly enough in three or so days, but I was still crunching to get the concrete work done with the rented cement mixer, and after that trying to finish out the joist structure, so I just set the new unit aside, for nearly a week, and made do as best I could. It slowly got buried under building materials in my workshop

In the meantime, I had to keep fetching such materials on almost a daily basis, so we either used the Land Rover to get things, if they would fit in a Land Rover, or we charged up the truck battery and hoped for the best.

I guess, also, I just wasn't looking forward to trading my clean light, breezy, airy workspace on top of the floor decking for the underside of a nasty greasy truck.

Finally, I knew I was getting serious when I pulled the Chilton's manual from the pile of automotive manuals we have in my workshop. That was Friday night. Saturday afternoon, I started the job.

I needed the manual because this particular alternator is not exactly visible from the top of the engine. I knew more or less where it was, but I didn't know how to get at it.

Usually alternators are easy to do. The Land Rover's alternator would probably take me less than four minutes to switch out. But the Nissan Frontier makes you jack up the vehicle, put it on jackstands, take off the sump plate, and then lay on your back with your arms at full stretch working on connections and bolts you can't see.

The whole underside was greasy due to the oil leak. My hands were stiff from building work, and kept getting cramps, while me poor old fingers had lost a lot of their mechanic's sensitivity as a result of working with rough boards and concrete.

To top it all, since I've been getting older my glasses have to be off for me to see close work, while I can't see that well with goggles on, and so grit kept falling in my eyes.

It wouldn't have mattered had I been made blind. You could only actually see the heads of a couple of the bolts, and none of the three wires. I needed to use a mirror to figure out how to dishook the final connection.

But eventually, after much ado and quite a bit of cursing, we got the alternator switched out. I tried a quick test start before putting the sump plate back on, and got a satisfying 14.25 volts at the battery. It took only two hours.

Considering that I'd just spent three weeks essentially in a hole in the ground sweating daily, I have to say I took it quite personally that my alternator went out at this particular time. And that it was such a nasty, hard job to replace it. I know it's character-forming to have to face adversity, and I know that long ago I made a lifestyle choice to be self-reliant and less dependent on the rest of society, but this particular job wore my patience, and my body, out pretty good.

Still, I expect it saved us at least $300.

After celebrating with a run to town for a milk shake, and to have the old alternator tested at the chain store auto parts place, just to make sure it was completely dead (it was -- diodes, field coil, and rotor were each burned out), I spent much of the rest of the day sleeping, and went to bed at 8.45 pm.

I plan to take it a little easier today.

Rusty old Ford

That old Ford car of mine will "never get to heaven," as our old boy scout song went.

I'll be lucky if it will get me to work for another winter.

I shouldn't complain. This car had 124,000 miles on it when we bought it for only $1,200. It now has nearly 160,000.

I was searching the Great Farm Diary trying to find out when we actually bought it. I think it was in the spring of 2009, after our old Mazda finally and very similarly rusted away and had to be junked.

So, if I've driven it for four years for only $1,200, plus a pair of rear strut mounts and some paint, underseal, plugs and plug wires. That's only a little more than $300 a year.

Other people pay as much per month.

Even so, I do hate that I can't keep it decent. The salt we spread on our roads in winter in this part of the world just eats cars away, no matter how careful you are with washing and underseal.

In the Ford's case, the damage had been done before I ever set hands on it. The rust had already reached the flakey stage in quite few places. I tried to slow the rot with red oxide paint, body filler, and underseal, but the chassis is now full of holes where previously it was just flakey.

You can slow the inevitable, but you can't stop it.

These cars don't have a proper frame that could be welded like the Land Rover or the Nissan, both of which have well-patched frames by now. All there is, is a pressed steel sheet that makes up the underside of the car. This is called monocoque or unibody construction, and it's a death knell for cars in New England. The steel panel that makes up both the floor of the car and the chassis is too thin, and now too rotten, to weld, so there's very little that can be done.

In fact, I tend to think that at this point if I were to pay too much attention to the underside of this car with the wire wheel on the angle grinder, the normal preparation for any welding attempt, I'd simply find myself abrading off much of the chassis along with the rust. It would need dozens of small fiddly patches for which no repair panels are available. It would take days, and even then the rust would just continue to eat away at every spot that hadn't been repaired.

The New England rust mites don't just affect the chassis of your car or truck. Suspension parts and brake parts also suffer. These can't be ignored. As long as you check it every once in a while, a chassis can be left to its own devices, until it becomes actually dangerous, but brakes and struts have to be repaired.

I heartily dislike working on cars when it's cold outside. Metal tools are too cold to touch and your fingers lose their feeling. So when the brake lines sprung a leak, a few weeks ago, in the coldest part of winter, I pulled the car in the shop for a diagnosis, but as soon as I saw how rotten the pipes were, I just backed the car out of the shop and right into a parking place and left it for several weeks, trying to forget about it, allowing it to get covered in snow until the weather decided to cooperate.

I knew I'd have to replace all the rear brake lines, which would take at least a half a day. If I was going to spend that long underneath a car in the middle of winter, I at least wanted the outside temperature to be above freezing.

Yesterday, off work for Spring Break, and with the daytime temperatures now in the upper 30s and low 40s, there was no excuse. I cleared the tractor and some other gubbins out of the shop, pulled the Ford in, and took a set of tin snips to the brake lines to see how much needed to be cut away.

This is the result:

 

Each of these pieces is a stretch of brake line that was almost completely rusted through. Although there was only one actual leak, there would have been others later. All the corner bends were particularly rotten. 

The pipe bending process at the factory is the cause. It affects the paint on the raw pipe, causing it to weaken wherever there's a tight bend. The rust does the rest.

Both rear brake lines would have to be replaced as far forward as the back seats. I set to.

 

Life wasn't made much easier by the fact that the car was dripping water as well as brake fluid. At one point a drop of cold water hit my trouble light and exploded the bulb, sending glass flying around underneath the car. 

Yuck!

 

I used a double flaring tool to prepare new pieces of line, and to flare the cut-off ends of the old line to accept the necessary brake line nuts and unions.

 

Here's the rear driver side union, joining the good section of the old brake line to the brand new section.

Aimee is away for a few days at one of her science conferences, so I was missing my brake bleeding partner. This is a two-person job, and she's fully trained up by now. I tried the one-person improvised method, whereby you run the bleed line into an air-lock made of a couple inches of brake fluid in a can, but as usual the results remained a bit spongy. 

Still, we now have brakes, so the car can be driven, and they can be bled to perfection when Aimee returns. Indeed, in older cars where master cylinder seals are a little weak, sometimes the brakes bleed themselves after a little time driving. 

The total cost of the repair was about $98, most of which went to pay for the flaring and cutting tools, which I didn't have already, and some extra line, nuts, unions, and brake fluid. I have enough to do several more such jobs in the future.

Although I'm tired and a little sore from scrauming* around on the floor all day yesterday, I was pleased with my day's work, since I can now begin to wear out this old Ford again, instead of our more expensive four-wheel drive vehicles which I had been using to get around. 

I don't worry about wearing a thousand dollar Ford out too much. It's hardly an irreplaceable item. I can find another one in a few days if I need to, on Craig's List or in Uncle Henry's. It would take weeks, and big bucks, to find another Land Rover, or an affordable four-wheel drive pick up truck in good nick.

Not only does this save money, it conserves the remaining working life of the pick-em up truck and the Land Rover. 

Now I have to run this old Ford down to Brooks town and get a State Inspection, since the old one expires this month. 

Next week I'll repeat the process, more or less, fixing the emergency brake on the Nissan and then getting a State Inspection for that vehicle too.

Luckily, there's no inspection item for rusty chassis panels. As long as nothing vital is rusted away, no strut mounts or other main mounting points, and as long as there are no jagged edges of metal visible, you can get the sticker.

In other news, we had another big snowstorm Tuesday and Wednesday. About a foot of fine powder fell, blanketing the yard and forcing the freshly sheared sheep back under their heat lamp. 

I took the dogs for a walk, but Flamey balled up with snow, poor pup!

 

Ernie, for his part, was sleek and snow free.

I guess Australian Shepherd fur is designed for barbies on Bondi Beach, not for New England spring snowstorms!

Maybe Ernie is actually a New English Shepherd, not just an English Shepherd.

*"Scrauming" is a Sheffield and West Yorkshire dialect word for crawling around. Just one of a whole bunch of words I grew up with that are not known to Google Blogger spell-checker. See this old dialect book here.

Sheep and vehicles

 Because that's all I've been doing lately, apart from work.

Uma is the oldest lamb, and a big strong girl. She'd win prizes if she was a purebred Romney or Corriedale. As it is, she's a likely keeper. We like them big and strong around here. None of your girly girls.

 

The sheep get outdoor hay, but the last batch we bought was not so great, so they waste a lot of stemmy stuff. We plan to make a lot of compost this year. Normally a pile this big would be a half-day job for the little Kubota tractor, but I have a secret plan: Our buddy Tim has to come by with his John Deere to put in the septic extension that was a condition of our plumbing permit, so we'll pay him a little extra to scrape up all the waste hay and make some nice compost piles.

 

Quinnie's two black lambs are also growing like weeds. The black ones don't show the dirt as much I say, just like cars and trucks.

Requiem for the old Nissan. Poor old truck. But the engine was still going strong. The wrecker driver was surprised to find that it would start. 

That old flatbed served us well, but only extended the truck's life for four more years after the bed rusted out. The new one has rust in all the same places, but not nearly as bad, and now I've discovered Fluid Film, it doesn't worry me.

 

Here is the new truck after a work-over yesterday and the day before. I cut off the rusted bumper and ordered a new one, as well as a tailgate latch, removed and de-rusted the trailer hitch and re-fitted it with new galvanized bolts, removed the rear wheels and checked the brake pads and drums, fixed a muffler leak, fitted a battery hold-down, did an oil change, drilled out some broken bolts in the sump cover and fitted new, self-tapping ones. Now all it needs to pass inspection are tires and the new bumper. Pretty good truck for $5,000, I'd say, and certainly a useful one, being a four-door extended cab as well as having a cap, and a solid, heavy duty hitch for towing a trailer.

And here's Aimee's "new" 2009 Matrix, which doesn't need any work and can't have any as it's still under warranty. I don't want to void the only warranty I've ever had! But once we get to 3,000 miles or three months, whichever comes first, it's getting new brake pads all around.

If I know Aimee she'll burn through 3,000 miles in way less than three months.

A storm approaches

The local (Bangor, Maine) TV news and weather team was on full alert last night -- they did that thing they do when a storm is coming or overhead, where they go first to the weatherman, instead of telling us about all the latest house fires and murder trials.

That means the weather itself is top of the news.

In this case, the NWS is calling for a couple feet of snow in our part of Maine in less than 24 hours. It's supposed to arrive later today, rapidly get worse, snow all night and Saturday morning, and then clear out for Sunday.

Two feet of snow is a fairly regular occurrence around here. It happens maybe once a winter, say two out of every three winters, or something like that. I can remember several two-feet snowfalls since we moved to the Great Farm.

And it doesn't seem like class is going to get cancelled. The snow will arrive later this afternoon or evening, after school is done for the day.

But still. Best be ready. I put the generator battery on a charge last night. I should now switch the charger to the tractor battery. The tractor's fuel tank may be low. I'll check that today. I may need to buy some kerosene for the tractor on my way to work.

This might be a good day to drive the Land Rover to work myself, and have Aimee drive the four-wheel drive Nissan pick-em up truck. I've been driving the truck every day this week, since the Ford Escort sprang a brake line leak. I haven't had the time to fix the Ford, and I doubt I'll do any such thing this weekend or for several weekends to come. It doesn't make sense to me that I should hurry up to lie on the frozen ground under a rusty old Ford car to change a brake line, when I still have a Land Rover and and pick-up truck to drive.

I'll be glad to get home from work later today. Not only is it a Friday, but with a blizzard coming, this is no day to have to go anywhere.

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.

With a great roar...

... and a rather volcanic outburst of black smoke and soot and even solid fragments of carbon that had been lodged in the muffler, my massive Lister-Petter TS3 genset came to life Saturday. It took about half a bottle of starter fluid -- note to self, buy more starter fluid -- but after a short while the injectors bled through and were primed and then it ran just fine all on its own, putting out 117 volts at each pole of the three-wire connector.

Well within the tolerances to run this old house the next time we get a four-day power cut.

Here's the home movie I took of the second start-up. This one lacked some of the drama, but I wasn't going to be futzing around with a camera if it exploded during the first attempt.

All said and done, I was fairly pleased with this result. It's been a while since I got this deep into an engine project, and it was fun to dust off mt skills.

There remains a little work to do on the Lister. It clearly needs a new muffler, for which we'll adapt a cheap bit of car muffler from the parts store. There's the small matter of a new oil pressure switch to replace the one I managed to burn out while trying to sort out the electrics the other week. And I ordered a large external fuel tank, one that comes on wheels, so we can take just the tank and not the whole genset to the gas station to fill up. And it needs wiring and connectors to connect it to our power distribution panel the next time we get a big outage. 

I haven't decided where to put it yet, either. It really needs it's own permanent shed, some distance away from the main house in case of fire, but I may also just find a good solid secondhand trailer and fit it to that, after which it will be possible to move it to other places around here that may need power.

As the most recent power emergency showed, there just aren't enough generators in the county when the power goes out. Most of our public buildings were closed, and eleven public schools were completely dark, and even some of those that had standby-generators couldn't get them running, because some key experienced people had recently retired. If I fit this big genset to a trailer, it may one day be of some help at someone else's house or for some other useful purpose.

In other mechanical news, our big "new" Nissan four-door pick-em up truck needs a starter motor. At least, I think it does, and will have to change out the starter motor before I know for sure. It has the dreaded no-crank, no start condition on cold mornings, until I hit it with the 200 amp starter, then it goes just fine. The rest of the day, it takes one or more turns of the key. This beast has the same Nippon Denso starter that the Camry had, the one where the copper contacts wear out after a while, producing these kinds of symptoms. But a bad neutral safety switch will do pretty much the same. I ordered a reconditioned starter, and will soon find out which one of the two possible causes it is.

I'm just hoping the starter arrives before the next snowstorm, but it's not looking good.

As for baby Roo, things are pretty swell there most of the time. Aimee is still very sore from sleeping with her own personal parasite more or less firmly attached all night, but Roo is getting better and better at entertaining herself and us. She has begun to "talk", by which we mean coo repeatedly, having "conversations" with us. She also now likes her baby gym, and can entertain herself there for anything up to a half-hour.

Done with interesting

Life has been interesting -- as in the Chinese curse -- since the last time I posted. About a week ago I was getting some drywall up in the new extension and girding my loins for the last anemometer tower lower of my two year campaign.

That much was routine -- I raise and lower these towers each summer, crunching the data in the fall and winter. What was not routine was that this was the weather, which has seen us with on-and-off torrential rain for much of July. We seem to get a few days calm weather then a serious period of rain, often several inches, much of which is subtropical. It's not the weirdest weather, but it is unusual. July is usually hot and humid in Maine, with thunderstorms every so often, but not that much precipitation. We managed to get the tower down safely enough, but not without getting wet a few times, as well as stuck in the mud of the farmer's field where the tower had been sitting. I was pretty tired by the end of last week's work on anemometer towers. The experience was just a bit too interesting. In fact, it took me a few days to recover from how interesting it all was.

Then there was, and is, the slight problem of the Nissan pick-em-up truck transmission leak. This leak sprung while on a trip to get a new lawnmower.

(I finally broke down and decided to get one. I hadn't mown the lawn in several weeks, because the old ones had both quit. This sounds terribly untidy, but it wasn't actually that bad around here because the sheep do most of our mowing for us. But I'd had enough of our shaggy front lawn, as well as the many thistles that had sprouted. It would be important to get these before they matured and the thistle seed flew.)

So, off to Newport I went, except to realize along the way that I was having slight transmission trouble -- the truck having a hard time pulling off from junctions and revving high in first gear. Recognizing the symptoms, I put in a quart of transmission fluid, but in an act of pure denial like any alcoholic or climate denier, I managed to convince myself that the pool of oil under the truck when I parked up at WalMart to look at lawnmowers couldn't possibly be from my truck.

I guess I wasn't interested.

That was my biggest mistake. My second biggest mistake was not having my cell phone.

Accordingly, when the transmission finally quit completely, having lost all it's oil, I not only had a broken-down truck on a blind bend on the side of a road in the middle of Nowhere, Maine (or at least in the middle of Dixmont, which is much the same thing), but I also had a brand new lawn mower still in the box, and no way to call home. Interesting problem.

People are generally honest in this part of the world. The climate and lifestyle require dependence on your friends and neighbors, so Mainers, for the most part, are inclined to be decent to said friends and neighbors. We're also less impacted by youth culture and urban fashion than the rest of the world, both of which tend to tilt society towards criminality. If I'd broken down in Sheffield, or even on a farm road outside Sheffield, that lawnmower box would have been gone in a trice.  In Maine it was probably safe.

Even so, I managed to fit the mower box in the truck cab, at some cost to my back. Then I hoofed it about a mile or so to the Dixmont Corner store, where I bought several bottles of transmission fluid and called Aimee. She came to get me, we poured the oil in the truck, made it back to the Dixmont store, and then went home and called AAA, who called a tow truck driver, who towed the truck home.

All's well that ends well, except I need to find the leak if I can and pronto, since our new roof for the extension will be ready to pick up tomorrow and I need the truck for that. Fixing the truck will be today's job. It will probably be interesting.

The next interesting thing that happened was a search. Although my team, being composed of college students, is stood down for the summer, I remain part of the Maine SAR system, and when a second system-wide call-out for a missing elderly woman was initiated Sunday, our resources were getting thin, so team or no, I went to the call out. Technically I wasn't required to, but I felt I should.

Arriving at the command post, a Maine Warden's Service truck in the driveway of the summer cabin where the victim had been staying, I found some very tired Wardens, many of whom had been up all night. I was assigned to go with one, Warden Tripp from Deer Isle, and drive the roads that marked the southern boundary of the search area. As we were just getting done with one of the roads, we received a cell-phone call from the CP asking us to go collect the victim, who had been found by a Warden searching the lake shore by boat.

It was as we were driving back and I was chatting with the victim and gently ascertaining how affected she was from staying out all night that I discovered that she was a famous academic in my field, author or co-author of several books I use in class. Small world! I'm not going to mention her name since I'm sure she prefers her privacy, but this was quite the coincidence and everyone on scene commented on it.

Even so, the weekends exceitement was all too interesting, and I was glad to get the Land Rover home early Sunday afternoon, and get back to routine stuff like taking the trash and recycling to the transfer station, and mowing the lawn with the new mower.

None of that was very interesting.

Thankfully.

Waiting...

We keep looking at our two sheep-mountains, ewes Quinn and Quetzal, as they waddle around, wondering when they'll pop. They are so huge! But nothing ever seems to happen. Night checks are tiring, and so I try to fit in a nap during the day, but that's impossible on Mondays and Wednesdays when I have a late class. Hopefully they and the other three smaller pregnant ewes decide to give birth soon. I need more rest!

In other news, Aimee now has the long-planned "new" car, a Toyota Matrix with just under 60,000 miles, in very good shape. This, the culmination of about three weeks of car shopping that began in earnest during our spring break. That means I'm driving the Camry now, while the Ford, whose rust has become almost terminal, is up for sale.

Accordingly a couple weeks ago I listed it on Maine Craigslist. I wanted at least $600, and so turned down a couple of offers of $500. Then I clumsily missed a gear one day while making a left turn and caught the unmistakable whiff of clutch burning. At 167,000 miles without ever having had a clutch job, this car is well overdue. And no-one in their right mind would put a clutch in a car whose body was so rusty.

At about the same time a young person with some sheep farming experience called about the ad, and so one thing led to another. The Ford had to be discounted, on the grounds that I couldn't sell anyone a "lemon" without full disclosure and a price reduction, while we needed farm help with watching pregnant ewes and lambs on Mondays. In a series of email exchanges, we agreed to discount the price of the Ford to a couple of day's of sheep watching, throwing in a promise of mechanical help with the sticker.

Since the car can probably pass the Maine State inspection after a couple of small jobs are done, and if not, has about $150 scrap value, this seemed like a fair deal.

Since then a neighbor dog appeared and sniffed around the perimeter fence before being chased off, so we are even more concerned to have the coverage.

Three more full work weeks and a few days of grading are all that is left before our three-month summer vacation. Already the list of projects is growing. I plan to finish my ongoing trailer project (of which pictures will come later), switch out the failed transmission in the Nissan truck, complete the insulation project on the main house, hang T-111 siding over the new insulation and the extension and finish it with UV-proof wood finish, build a deck, grow our usual massive vegetable garden, and on and on.

This weekend so far has been pleasant, and I've made a start with the trailer. But it's inevitable that we're in wait mode for so many such projects, as well as for the ewes to give birth.

What was it that Dr. Seuss said about the "waiting place?"

“For people just waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or a No or waiting for their hair to grow.”

Unfortunately, with sheep and summer breaks, waiting is inevitable.