Those Lights in the Window

It's a dark winter ahead, existentially and literally, and there's no denying it. So why do I feel good today, despite an annoying upper-respiratory infection?

In a time of looming oppression and likely despair, which it promises to be for many of my friends and colleagues, I step into retirement from full-time work. That's not my source of hope: it's the uncanny circularity of a few events that mark the closing of one door, the opening of another.

Everyone at the university says "hey! You'll have more time at the farm," and this is true. As weather and skills permit, I'll be doing repairs on our house, on vehicles, on farm equipment. I'll hunt next year for deer and fish more often from my kayak. 

Doing these things keep various Hobgoblins and Imps of the Perverse at bay.

Second, some interesting developments occurred at work. My retirement party was delightful, and I was humbled by the presence of so many colleagues and students who came out to bid me farewell. I received Emeritus status, the first ever for a Director on our campus.

Then came good news from an editor; an article that had been accepted, pending revisions, would appear in January, just in time for my student co-author's applications to grad school. And if that were not enough, a London publisher queried me about writing a book on Artificial Intelligence in teaching. That's a long way from Tractorpunk work, but it's a gig, even if royalties on the last book only net about $50 a  year. Such projects are more about service to others and not enriching a writer.

Every small event seemed portentous: grading the final papers, holding the last class, doing final payroll, working with a writer in our Writing Center one last time. The wheel kept turning, of course: my grad class has made for spring, and it will mean one full day on campus weekly. As I told students "they haven't put me in a box...yet." And when asked if it were bittersweet, my answer has been the same "only sweet." Sometimes you need to move on.

On the day of my final one-on-one meeting with my supervisor, a letter (remember them?) appeared in my office mailbox. I recognized the name of a former student and employee who had gone on to affluence in the business world. He's a thoughtful man, with a background in the liberal arts and business theory, now entering middle age. He sent our program a parting gift, a check for $4000 that repeats the gift he gave us a decade ago. I presented it to my boss, and we grinned ear to ear, marking our final exchange with a promise of future rewards: bringing in a guest speaker, maybe hosting a local conference.

Packing is actually momentous, too. I keep finding things as I clean up my office: old books inscribed by deceased colleagues, mementos from conferences I attended, even the stray stapler or binder that sat in my office the day I arrived for work, in 1991.  They are all breadcrumbs leading back to my initial uncertainty when I returned from Indiana to my home town, never intending to stay. The Mountain West beyond the humid East beckoned to me then and still does, but not as my home today.

I'm glad I stayed. My mind goes back to kids I've assisted in finding direction. Today I helped a student whose nation is embroiled in civil war. Some terrible tragedy recently afflicted his family. As a result, he did not do his best work for his final project. I considered an incomplete, but I grew concerned about his Visa status. Were he to return home, he might be snatched by militia "recruiters" as soon as he cleared Customs. Americans should ponder that fact deeply and slowly.

In the best tradition of Stoicism, I changed only the thing I could. I cannot save his family or country, but I could help him. So I reached out, offering him the chance to revise. He had a decent passing grade, based upon earlier work. In the event, I wanted to give him hope and a second chance after the holidays. He was delighted. It made me think of those lights in the window, seen as we rush down the highway.

As I put them in our windows today, I noted how they mark a ritual of passing along a road, metaphorically, to arrive not at an exit ramp but onto a new route that seems familiar. What a strange thing, pagan most likely from Winter Solstice rituals, to put little lights in our windows to shine into the blackness during the longest nights of the year. It's a tradition that transcends the religious ceremonies of various faiths. All lighting of candles are acts of hope. 

Nature, too, sends us her signals. Out in the field sloping below the spot where we buried our beloved livestock dog Vela, little green shoots are coming up. I'd harrowed and seeded the field with winter rye, far too late in my estimation. It was simply too busy on the job to find a day when it was not raining or the soil too dry. Yet up the sprouts came, to be tilled under in spring as a green manure, so I can plant Buckwheat for our pollinators and sunflowers for our wild birds.

They don't despair except, perhaps, when no food can be found. I'm going to help with that and provide them some hope, too. Do what you can. Small acts are going to count mightily.

Pride of Workmanship?

As I retire from full-time work in a month, I have been thinking about pride in one's work a great deal. I have never been fully satisfied with my career, which may be a good thing: too much complacency leads to a numbing of the soul. I would instead invent new directions to pursue. This sort of free-lancing stands at odds with the values of corporatism, including the variety now infecting higher education. Not so oddly, I find the opposite--a sense of pride in serving one's community--in small businesses locally owned. It's a delight in our time of anonymous and virtual commerce to encounter vestiges of craftsmanship and civic pride. 

So often, however, it's just the opposite.

I spotted the worst paint-job in many years recently, pictured, at a roadside place in Buckingham County. I hope the owners did not pay much for the job. The painter, using a spray-gun, clearly cared nothing about putting glossy red paint on the grass and parking lot. Ironically, the paint was not well applied to the picnic table. The finish had run, pooled, and left thin or unpainted spots.

At our own picnic table, not yet "painted," I noticed that the original finish was a good-quality penetrating stain, not paint. Stain provides a better sealant for outdoor furniture, too. It can be renewed easily without scraping, even on the oldest wood, as I found not long ago with the old fence at our rental property.

Yet someone painted over the old stain, and once you put paint over stain, there's no going back. In a year, that haphazard paint-job will peel. The owner will either have to scrape the tables down or, as I fear, toss them out and get new ones. They are not bad tables, either. I'd like to get one, sand the heck out of it, and stain it again.

Usually we take our burgers and go to a nearby pocket-park, a tiny miracle of good craftwork. It features durable picnic tables, nice plantings, and a permeable-surfaced parking area.  You don't see trash on the ground, either. I don't imagine that it cost the county that much to build and maintain. It also speaks to something so old-fashioned we rarely hear its name today: civic pride. The town government does not know the travelers or locals who might stop for a smoke break or a sandwich; the small amenity simply says to everyone "you are welcome."

Pride is a dodgy commodity. "What is the return on investment?" a wily and short-sighted American capitalist might ask.

A great deal, I'd answer, but not something to measure in dollars and cents, the false American god of our era. Especially in the mad rush of Black Friday.

Today, of all days, on Black Friday, our water heater decided to start leaking heavily. The unit, at 12 years old, still looks great, but that's the outside. Not wanting to brave the crowds at the suburban asteroid-belt of big-box stores, I went to our local hardware. They had a heater more efficient than our old one and with the same volume. It took me all day to finish the job, but we have guests arriving and they'll want hot water. "Calling some guy" would not suffice, and I've installed two smaller electric water-heaters.

I needed a few tools not in my plumbing box, one a crimper for the little copper rings that make watertight seals on Pex pipe. A novice can learn this sort of plumbing, as compared to expensive mysteries of sweating copper pipe or the cheap, easily broken PVC pipes that I find mostly good for building hoop-houses nowadays.

A young man helped me find the fittings for the new heater, after I discovered that my old pipes were about 3 inches too short to reach the new tank's inlets. The new hardware was cheap enough, but the crimp-tool cost 60 dollars, almost 10% of what I'd paid for the heater. Yet I needed the tool, badly. The young man looked it over and said "This is a nice piece. You take good care of it and it will last the rest of your life."

I joked about only needing 30 years, but his remark stuck with me. I want to hear more of that in a time of disposable products and bad paint-jobs. I do indeed take very good care of all my tools. In the end, our new water heater is no thing of beauty, but it is firmly placed, not leaking, and looks as if a professional installed it. I'm proud that by sundown, I could have a martini and say "job well done" as hot water again flowed from the taps. I'd done it myself, probably saving 500 dollars. 

You could, too.

Newfound Tastes? Or Rediscovered Ones?

 I have a strange and newfound appreciation for American cheese.

 And Iceberg lettuce. And Bologna Burgers. And, yes, at least annually, Spam.

 What the hell is wrong with me? I'm supposed, by education, travel, and reading, to be a gourmand. A connoisseur, an aficionado. And so I remain for many things: gin, malt whisky, beer (Light Beer is NOT beer; get a *#%ing Lager, people), hot dogs, pizza, lamb, most seafood, most bread, deserts, pasta.

My mother said that one's sense of taste changes every 7 years. Okay, so at 63, mine changed. A casual Web-search reveals no solid evidence in support of mom's claim, so I'll say "I remain skeptical, mom." Slinging about Occam's Razor, my go-to way to resolve conflicting explanations, tells me that something else likely triggered this interest in comfort foods of my childhood. No, not THAT man. He only makes me want to vomit. His name goes unspoken here.

Let's start with cheese. Lord knows, the right Stilton remains my favorite partner for crackers and a dollop of homemade jam.

Yet, folks, a soft inexpensive cheese brings delight for certain dishes, including grilled-cheese sandwiches, quesadillas, and hot dogs (Hebrew National, thank you) with cheese. Even a bit of heat makes the moisture-laden slices of American melt, including a palate-pleasing sensation that returns me to the solace of "hot lunches" at St. Benedict's School, the only thing I miss about my eight years of bullied Catholic imprisonment at that place.

As on Thursday St. Benedict's "hamburger days," American cheese adds perfection to a cheeseburger at a place called Riverside Lunch in Charlottesville, VA. That remains my world-beating favorite cheeseburger.

Now, for the bologna, or "baloney" if you wish. I cannot eat the childhood Oscar-Mayer stuff; it reminds me of something pink that would come from Play-Doh's Fun-Factory. My baloney has a different first name, thank you. Fried Lebanon, German, or Kosher Bologna, sliced thick, topped with that American cheese, and nestled between sliced of white toast with Iceberg lettuce and mustard?

Oh, yes.

Iceberg lettuce, I'm told, has zero nutritional value and adds no appreciable fiber to our diets.  WebMD notes the value of its Vitamin K, for blood-clotting. Otherwise, zilch. But that crunch!

I love bitter, healthy greens, too. For salads my favorite is neither bitter green nor Iceberg: It's Red-Leaf or Green-Leaf Lettuce, but for BLTs and other sandwiches, I want a head lettuce, preferably Iceberg.

Did my tastes change? No. Maybe my snobbery waned.

In difficult, complicated times, these comfort foods help to sustain us through heartbreaks ahead, all the while saving money.

What is NOT to love?

Spam needs its own post, as does meatloaf, so I will stop there. 

Just find something to eat that brings you comfort and enjoy it in moderation. Your soul will thank you.

Image source: Wikipedia Commons

MTB: A Modern Problem

I want to follow up on my post about why we should buy and maintain really old vehicles.

Folks, we are being had. "MTB" came up in a Facebook discussion about how rotten most modern smart appliances are. It means "Made to break." Thanks to Sam Baird for sharing the meme included above.

We have been told that touch-screen controls are what we want. Granted, that seems to be the case when we are not in motion at highway speeds.

This tech fails miserably when in motion.

In a Jetsons world, I'd be able to say, as I do to Generative AI, in natural language "Car, it's a trifle hot in here. Set the AC to compensate for the human-caused, slow-motion catastrophe  of climate change beyond our little bubble, no matter what the Republicans and other logic-challenged deniers say. Make it cooler, in short. Focus first on my fogged up windshield, made that way by my rage over the recent election."

Yet we don't live in George and Jane Jetson's world. In our janky beat-up world, especially in a newer car, I must navigate a series of menus.

No. I want to reach down, touch a dial I know by muscle memory, and set it without my eyes leaving the road.

Why we came to this impasse I don't understand. Enlighten me in the comments.

It's a comfort to me that Honda reverted to haptic controls on their once-small H-RV, now the same size as my 2006 C-RV. When my first 2004 Honda got totaled, I looked at some of these newer cars, but I cringed at the idea of adjusting vital functions by taking my eyes off the road. Luckily for this curmudgeon, a 2006 Honda came my way.

The company must have heard from other grumps, because they soon reverted to the tried-and-true dials we Honda-lovers have used for decades.

I'm not an utter Luddite. The right backup camera can save lives. The crappy afterthought ones (I've rented two cardboard-box quality Chevy Malibus) appear afterthoughts included to meet some regulation.

 The Japanese, as usual in their cars, strike the right balance.

 

Thank you, Honda. Now would the rest of the auto-makers take notice? Think about it when you next need to reset the vehicle's clock for daylight-savings time.

My Teeny-Tiny Internet

I'm not known for my online habits or TV watching. I do know who is in the World Series this year, mostly because of a friend who is a diehard and rather rattled Yankees fan. Sorry, man. These things happen.

Other than distantly following that contest, I don't look at sports results. I began to think recently about how little time I spend on Web sites of most sorts, less still on social media: dipping into Facebook daily for about 1/4 hour. I don't use Snapchat, TikTok, or Instagram; I read the news (and play Wordle) via The New York Times, visit the BBC, check the weather at NOAA, look at some space-news sites. I think my regular haunts could be counted on my hands and still have fingers remaining. For long-form story, I read my print edition of The Atlantic but also check their site.

What else do I follow? Sites related to my hobbies: working on cars, reloading ammo, building scale models. I participate in a couple of forums related to these activities, as if it's still the BBS era of the 1990s. Most of my time online relates to doing things with my hands or brain.

As for influencers? I don't follow any. Not a one. Too much is about consumer culture, fast fashion, pop culture. I recall a woman in the DC Metro, in a long pink sequined dress and matching phone on a selfie-stick, narrating her life loudly, amid eyerolls of others on the platform, as she waited for a train. She wanted so badly to be famous. I felt sorry for her.

She and a million others.

Instead of chasing that ephemera, my influencers are are folks known for their work in old media, like writers Willa Cather, Wendell Berry, Virginia Woolf, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams. Filmmakers like Werner Herzog. Thinkers like Locke, Jefferson, Nietzsche, and Lao Tzu.

I keep wondering what our world would be like, in this era of shallow and reactive thinking and blind partisan rage, if we all spent more quiet time with our intellectual ancestors or with folks who are not constantly shouting in anger? What if sought out folks online who helped us learn new things or improve what we know already? What if we only looked at carefully curated resources, slowly and methodically?

In short, what if we made our Internet use tiny? What if we focused our attention on those things that most influenced our daily lives, including our passion projects? I began thinking about this a long time back, but on Inishmore, Ireland this summer, I saw folks who joyfully live slowly. They don't seem to miss much. Internet access and obsessing over celebrities does not appear to be the focus of their lives. Granted, we talked to mostly middle-aged Irish, but they are a sagacious, thoughtful lot. That they can stay on an island and recast their economy around tourism without ruining the place astounds me.

Can we do the same with our islands online? I've a sense that making Internet use reflective, rather than reflexive, might lead us back to some semblance of a reasoned life. In a season of fear related to America's election, that's the best answer I can give: make your Internet small again. 

Revel in the Joy of Missing Out. Join the Slow Living movement.

Image: Inishmore Ireland

You CAN Grow Apples Here

This year marked the second when we harvested apples from the four trees in our little orchard. The fruit was small, sometimes lightly speckled with cedar rust, after peeling more useful for cooking than eating fresh, but still. We have enjoyed half a bushel of apples for each of the last two years. Ours come in very early, in late June and July, in the midst of some of our hottest, most humid weather.

The conventional wisdom in Central VA involves it being too far east into the Piedmont for apple trees: bugs, humidity, and ever-warmer winters are not good for the fruit. All true, yet somehow three of our four trees have produced well. We found three things have helped. 

I've written here about pruning and also controlling Eastern Tent Caterpillars. Yet that's only half the battle. The most important change we made involved a timely application of an organic spray of copper sulfate. The product reminds of chemistry-set ingredients from my childhood, and it does need to be applied properly.  

Lately I've used Bomide's Captain Jack brand, simply because it's what I can find locally.  You don't want to drink the stuff or let it puddle where animals might sample it. After an early-morning application with a sprayer attached to a garden hose, I kept our dogs and chickens out of the orchard from all day. 

Organics are not without human-and-animal risks, yet copper sulfate proves far less harmful to you or wildlife than something like Captan. I did use it once, before we had animals near the trees. No longer.

You'll want to do some reading, but if you try to grow apples in a damp and warm climate, you will mostly likely need a fungicide applied once or twice after the tree stops blooming. 

We got enough fruit to experiment with spiced apple rings (wonderful) and our usual batch of canned apple sauce (also delicious).

It's apple season! Get picking!

Image courtesy of The Virginia Apple Board.

Chainsaw Logic: That One Little Wire...

I think this post constitutes part of a series. I've written often here about Occam's Razor, and in this instance it and the old "For the Want of a Nail" allegory.  

It's easy to forget the simple, in our age of wonders, how one simple technical issue can make everything stop. Right now, I am streaming a BBC World Cafe concert with Gillan Welch and David Rawlings. My 1980 self could not even fathomed that as possible.

It's a form of magic, following the precepts of Clarke's Law. Remember, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." We get baffled when the technomancy suddenly halts, the screen locking up or the phone "bricking," even a damned advertisement on the YouTube concert-feed popping up mid-song, despite my ad-blocker. The spell is broken, though in my case that stupid ad lead me to the NPR ad-free original. 

Until we fix things, we sit like our primate ancestors before a sacred stone, bewildered at the departure of our gods. Yet sometimes we can bring fallen technological deities back to life.

Recently a friend of my wife's had an enormous Red Oak tree fall in her yard, nearly hitting her house. It would have totaled the place, frankly. now it lays in her yard, some 70' of tree with 40' being straight and nearly 36" in diameter. It's what furniture-makers would call a "veneer log" for the lack of hollow core, lack of limbs, and straightness. Yet we cannot get any log buyer to look. Apparently these folk want a bunch of such logs (worth several thousand dollars each) before driving out.

After inspecting the tree, I came back with my little "firewood" saw and The Big Dog, a $1000 Husqvarna 365 with 5hp and a 20" bar.  I had planned to keep the beast the rest of my life.

"Woof Woof!" said this Big Dog, until it would not bark for me, let alone start. 

I gnashed my teeth. I pulled at my beard, having no hair on my skull. I cursed the gods of Sweden and two-stroke internal combustion, to no avail. I considered the expense of even a diagnosis at the dealer, looked at (heresy!) a $500 Stihl "Farm Boss" saw, ready to spend MORE money. 

No. I was doing what an academic colleague calls "catastrophizing failure," meaning that I assumed a small setback would lead to an utter and permanent disaster. 

Realizing then where I went wrong, I began replacing Husqvarna parts myself, starting with the simplest parts and least expensive that can lock up a saw: a new spark plug, a kill switch, then an ignition coil. Still, Occam failed me. The saw would not even "burp." A second wave of self-doubt followed as I watched more YouTube "how to" chainsaw videos by burly men with Southern US, Scottish, or Scandinavian accents.

Then $30 later, I fixed the saw and it fired right up. Even that 30 could have stayed in the bank. I checked the electronics, working backward, to my new spark plug. What if the wire that attaches to the plug had turned sideways when I pressed on the rubber "boot" that covers the end of the plug? 

With a razor blade I cut open enough of the cover to see that the wire loop connected to the plug. It's the little metal piece shown in the image at the top of the post. I slipped it over the plug. Then I pulled the cord.

"Woof! VROOM!" The Big Dog barked!

I've learned from working on engines a little bit, whether on old tractors or late-model cars: a single wire can bring done tons of working metal. So can a pinched gas line. So once again, Occam proved right in the end. This is why we pay a mechanic 25 cents for a screw, and $50 for knowing which screw to replace.

Now back to that tree. I just felled a section the size of a normal tree in 30 seconds, a task impossible with my firewood saw. 

Never give up working on stuff. A fix may be simpler than it seems. And now I have some spare parts for the saw. 

I was about to put the saw on a pagan altar and make offerings to it. Clarke was right but so was Occam. Keep moving up the chain of causality to the problem, and one can fix nearly any machine (and maybe large societal or environmental woes, as well).

Why You Should Buy a Really Old Vehicle

Yesterday I walked into a chain auto-parts store (there being no other options) for a cabin-air filter and set of wiper blades for our 2003 Chevy Silverado 1500. It's a truck we bought from my father-in-law's estate, and it has been lightly used, sporting just over 76K miles. We don't plan to sell it; I can do a great deal of mechanical and electronics work on it myself.

A small annoyance of my shopping trip involved the parts books in the shop; they only go back to 2004. A grumpy manager explained to me that "the companies don't care much about vehicles more than 20 years old." Well, they better.

A recent story from S&P Mobility shows that older vehicles are getting more common on our roads and in repair shops, with light vehicles 16 or more years old increasingly common.

Therein lies a problem, as used cars "will be increasingly loaded with sensors for infotainment, communications, and advanced driver assistance systems like adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning and collision avoidance. Adaptive cruise, in particular, has been on a steady upward penetration trend since 2015; it is projected to be in nearly 70 percent of model-year 2023 vehicles, according to S&P Global Mobility estimates." 

Our Chevy, like our 2006 Honda C-RV, lacks a backup camera, touch screen, or lane-departure sensors.

Good. It's harder and harder to find minimalist vehicles. Convenience and Comfort are wicked deities; they make our lives easier 95% of the time, only to leave us stranded and helpless. There must be a better way.

I don't want any of that stuff. On the other hand, I do want passenger, driver, and side-impact airbags, antilock disc brakes, and power steering. I also don't want components that require dealer-specific software. A relative's new Ford Explorer became a brick after the assisted-parking feature broke. The dealer not only quoted an outlandish price but a months-long wait for repairing this (to me) frivolous feature; one should learn to park, not let a car park for you. Luckily, a local shop agreed, if our relative purchased the $1500 Ford-specific software. The repair still proved far cheaper than the dealer's price. The Ford is back on the road.

I'd recommend that for a daily driver, you shop for a low-mile vehicle in the sweet-spot between about 2000 and 2010. These cars and trucks are out there. If you can turn a wrench, excellent. But first go to drivers' forums to ID common issues for DIYers. My wife's Volvo S60, a 2013 model, had to go to the dealer for a battery replacement! I grumbled but have a pal at the service desk who showed me the song-and-dance routine to reset the car's computer. All the dealers know I'm a self-trained gearhead, and Nan is a mechanic's daughter who bought lots of parts for Big Ed. She can tell a scam in the service department when she hears it. She since sold the Volvo, not without some lamentation, for a 2017 Mini S convertible, a very cool car but so complex that it gives me shivers. I can change the oil, filters, and rotate the tires. That's about it. We'll see what happens when the warranty expires. One option? Sell it and buy an older low-mile Volvo C70 convertible with the simpler soft-top, not the retractable hard-top.

I also found, for instance, that in 2004, GM (in their infinite lack of wisdom and abundance of greed) moved the fuel filter from under the Silverado into the tank, so a DIYer must really work hard to replace it. Mine can be changed simply and quickly, with the vehicle parked on the ground, as long as the fittings have not rusted solid. I spray-painted mine after a shop had to change the locked-shut filter for me. Now, at every DIY oil change, I fix any rust on the chassis of each car and touch up the paint there.

You can get parts for the types of vehicles I advocate driving, too. You will need to know parts numbers and specifics if the clerk at the register cannot help, which will be likely given the state of hiring at these stores.  I don't tend to recommend specific franchises, but NAPA seems to have the most knowledgeable helpers. Pity that our local NAPA is staffed by grumps! I go to one in town.

Some innovations have surprised me pleasantly. I replaced a window motor in the big Chevy truck easily and for $75. A few YouTube videos showed me how to remove the door panel and swap out the plug-and-play electronics. Once I was a staunch crank for crank-windows. Now I'm good with power. Likewise, when my dash went out on the truck, a mail-in repair shop that advertises on eBay replaced all the "stepper motors" that control the dashboard lights, speedo, and other gauges, with shipping for that same magic number of $75. The truck could still be driven while I waited for the instrument cluster to be returned. I got it back with better backlights, too, and I installed it in five minutes with simple tools.

I'm looking forward to reading Matthew Crawford's Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. I met Matt and had a few interesting chats with him when he lived in Richmond. I love his book Shop Class as Soulcraft. He argues passionately for us being doers with skills, not consumers who press a "pay now" button. Like me, he favors old, if inconvenient and less comfortable, rides. You, your sense of purpose, and your wallet might, too.

There are other kooks like me or Matt out there: we might own a handful of cheap used vehicles; if one breaks, we use another while we fix the other one. It beats a car payment and you can do most work with jacks, stands, or ramps. So much can be done with the hood open and nothing else. Maybe we need a new automotive deity: Self-Reliance?

Grandfather's Hammer and Keeping Old Things in Service

Some of you may know the Grandfather's Axe paradox. I encountered it a few years ago. The paradox asks us that if every part of an item is replaced one by one, in the end, is it still the same item? I heard it stated as "this is my grandfather's axe. Since he used it it has had two new handles and one new axe head."

So is it the same axe? The empirical, scientific answer is "no." Every molecule of the original item has been replaced, even if it looks identical.  I'm a Humanist, so I'm going to sail off in a different direction.

The paradox stretches back to ancient Greece, where it was called The Ship of Theseus. I really enjoy logical paradoxes, if you cannot already tell. I am not going to give you my philosophical opinion, right away, but I will talk about an item that evades the paradox because it is pretty much the same as when my grandfather used it.

He was a junk-dealer by trade, an immigrant from Hatay in what is now the southeastern corner of Turkey. Arriving in Richmond in 1911, in time he acquired an old truck and combed the countryside for scrap metal, old broken tools, furniture, or anything that might have some intrinsic value. Somewhere along the way, he found an old claw hammer, or at least the head of one. He fixed it to a length of metal pipe and used a giant nail to hold the head to the new handle.

I found that hammer when cleaning out his basement in Richmond, a couple of months after his passing in 1982. It went into an old tool box I still have in my barn, but the hammer recently re-appeared in my shop, when I found myself in need of something for driving masonry nails in the cinder-block wall for hanging tools, old tin signs, and other bric-a-brac. The old hammer works like a charm.

For years, every time I saw it, my Type-A, rationalist side would say "that old hammer needs a proper hickory handle," but somehow I never quite got around to it. I'm happy about that now. I'm slightly less Type A (and probably less rational) after a dozen years in the country, since farmwork requires a certain amount of clutter and temporary disorder when, say, the garden is bursting with food as it is right now.

We live in a time of fast food, fast fashion, disposable electronics. No thank you. My anti-consumerist, Humanist side wants to stake a claim to keeping old things that work well around as long as possible, even if, especially if like The Ship of Theseus, every single part has been replaced at least once. I recently put new front wheels on an old Woods belly mower that my late father-in-law slung under a 1951 John Deere M tractor he purchased new. In the years that I've been custodian of the machine, I restored and repainted it, replaced the seat, swapped out a new wire harness and battery, put in an electronic ignition. I bought a new mesh inner panel for the grille, a gas cap, and lots more.

Is it the same tractor? Mostly, yes, and it does exactly what my father-in-law did with it. When I'm gone, a grandchild or great-grandchild will get Grandpa's tractor, and one of my nieces or nephews who has a taste for DIY work will get my grandfather's hammer. Perhaps the paradox becomes meaningless if the object's purpose remains the same, and that object gets passed from generation to generation. I hope they don't just use the John Deere for parades or the hammer as garage-art.

It will help if I can get someone to form a bond with the tractor or the hammer, telling the story once a younger person shows interest. Luckily, the interest is there for lots of things that have been family heirlooms, but most of those objects I've handed on have not been tools. To merely hang the hammer on a wall (as I did the mower's old wheels, one of them still quite usable) seems to break a chain.

I don't have a fancy philosophical name for this but "the thingness of things" has been my go-to. I feel the material presence of my forebearers when I get on that tractor, hammer a nail, use a biscuit-cutter that belonged to my late mother-in-law. My favorite skillets are cheap and thin Taiwanese-made ones my mom got me at a Roses store in the summer of 1982, when I was returning to college and an apartment for my final year. I use those pans daily now and think of my mom, gone nearly two decades.

So look around the shop and house at old things your ancestors used to make life simpler: a rolling pin, a favorite casserole dish, the old Buick sedan that grandpa loved so much. Look at the well-made furniture that is not modern chic but still perfectly useful.

Could you still use those things? Why not?

Avoiding "Learned Helplessness": Yes, You Can Do It

I'm back from holidays and going about my chores as much as the sultry, even murderous, summer permits. Yet when in Canada, I didn't take much of a break, helping my cousin's husband fix deck-boards, replace the screen on a door, and weed-whack their lake camp's herb garden. My sister, who shares our mother's love of gardening, wondered how I can "do it all" on our farm where the tasks are endless.

First, I have a wonderful partner who has skills that compliment my own. Second, neither of us follow sports or watch TV beyond, at best, an hour weekly. Third, we don't stay glued to phones. Time opens up like a Spanish fan if you ignore those chronological vampires.

Those factors didn't really impress my Sis, who said "okay okay, no sports or TV. But how did  you learn to fix things and make things?" 

That stumped me. I fumbled for an answer, noting that when something interests me, such as how to properly run a circular saw like the one we used on the deck, I get obsessive in learning every single detail from print and Web sources. Nota Bene: beware YouTube advice-gurus. Watch a BUNCH or videos first to get a consensus. I mentioned by belief that while self-sufficiency proves impossible, Emersonian self-reliance should be our goal. I've written about it here before.

Gradually, however, I realized that my OCD personality and life philosophy are only part of the answer: at a certain point, I decided to never succumb to what plagues too many of my students, a "learned helplessness." You can Google that term, but to me it has meant that folks facing a problem turn to others right away instead of trying to solve it on their own.

Here I am thinking less of emotional or medical problems and more of the daily routine that can suck up so much of our time: cutting the lawn, servicing that lawn-mower, changing a car's wiper blades, rotating the tires yourself. 

Granted, they may bore you. They may be tedious. You might rather do other things. But being a cheapskate, I began to tally up how much of my green money would be going to "some guy" for each of these tasks. Imagine how much you'd save if you went out to eat only a few times a month and bought fewer prepared meals, and instead learned to cook from scratch. Try it for a week, with simple recipes, and keep track of how much you spend on good groceries versus a typical restaurant meal.

There are some chores I won't do: the chimney cleaner was at the house today and for $195, our stove and flue got a clean bill of health for the next heating season.

No, I don't want to be on a hot metal roof in 100+ heat. But then I also didn't want to give the guy who put a new windshield in my wife's pickup another $70 for new wiper blades "on special." My scowl and words about the shop's no-brand blades' price as compared to the Bosch I install ended that discussion.

You can change wiper blades in two minutes, and most of these skills listed earlier are within the reach of a typical human with enough flexibility and stamina; an elderly neighbor used to rotate his tires in the driveway without a lift such as the one I use. Conversely, many of my students have never changed a single tire. They "call some guy," presuming that guy will be around.  My nephew John's kids, on the other hand, are tractorpunks: John made them learn to drive a manual transmission car and change a tire as part of "adulting." He's my hero.

Sometimes it only takes a mentor to urge you to DIY. In Iceland, we had a flat on our camper van, and after setting the jack in volcanic soil hard as packed gravel, I found that the wimpy tire-change wrench would not budge the overly tight lugs. I caved. I called some guy. Specifically, I phoned the camper office and a friendly Scandinavian who runs the place said "oh just jump up and down on the wrench." And like that, I changed my tire.

So the next time your mower needs the blade sharpened, or an oil change, or the car's cabin air-filter is due for replacement (read that schedule in the owner's manual!) why not watch a few YouTube videos and give it a go?  You will feel more in control of the small things. That TikTok video of some parasite influencer can wait. That glamorous cipher will not make you less helpless or live a second longer. Again, start small. Eventually you might be changing the car's oil, rotating the tires, or installing a microwave yourself. You can do these things. Yes you can. Give our consumerist culture of learned helplessness the middle finger.

I should have changed my cabin air-filter sooner. I think they hid Jimmy Hoffa in there.

Old-School Tools: Barge Cement Update

 

I do not place advertising on this site. In a time when many driving down what we once called "the Information Superhighway" looks like a tacky highway full of ugly, intrusive billboards, I hope you appreciate that.

I do, however, endorse products that have worked well for me. One of them is an old-timer, Barge Cement. In its original formula that I have written about here, it has saved many a shoe from the landfill, as I found when a pair of slip-on work boots nearly lost their sole. With the parts cleaned and clamped, Barge provide me with years of service beyond what would have been the end of the boot. Here's the form of Barge you might find on brick-and-mortar shelves. 

 

Check the web site listed below for specialty versions, like one I've recently ordered online.

Recently I've another tough job needing adhesives, fixing weather-stripping / dent guards on a farm truck, before I repaint them. Regular Barge, the shoe adhesive, will not bond to all plastics, and who knows what GM used for that piece? Enter Barge Super Stik. I learned that the firm offers a range of cements with differing set-up times and curing times. I recommend checking their chart to verify if the materials to be bonded will work with a particular adhesive.

Fixing stuff is at odds with the ethos of Huxley's Brave New dystopia that we seem to inhabit, but I'd rather mend it than end it. That applied to a 1951 tractor I got back in service a decade ago; I changed the oil and mowed grass with it this week. It applies to shoes and other things, if you wish to say no to a consumerist "paradise" of cheap goods meant to wear out and be tossed into our brimming landfills.

So be subversive: go out and fix something. Barge is a premium product at a premium price, but if you follow directions you will not be disappointed.

Saving an Old Fence

When we lived in town, I always felt the pressure not to have the worst fence on the block. Now I don't worry about that at my home, but I sure do at our rental.

My tenants are fine folks. One of them used to work for me, so he knows I'm a fuss-budget about fiddly things. When their neighbors got a new fence, part of ours was so rotten (the ground there stays wet) that posts snapped off. The fencing company put up a 4' picket fence but I wanted all the fence to match the 6' privacy fence that we inherited when we bought the place a decade ago.

Treated wood ages like other wood, and soon enough, that fence looked like the set of a horror film. While I don't place advertising on this site or endorse products, I cannot speak highly enough about Behr Solid Deck Stain. We'd used it to preserve the house's deck, and it's a tough product. The company makes lighter-duty stains for siding, but the deck stain seemed a good, if slightly more expensive, option. I'd found that it made old wood look as good as the new replacement boards next to them.

So this post is short but clear: if you need to renew old wood, try this or its competitors. I found Valspar a little more expensive. But to hide the old dark weathered wood, go solid, not transparent.

Keep in mind that you cannot put stains over paint. They will peel. I never use paint on decking or fences, anyhow: I've found that on new or old unfinished wood, these heavy stains last a decade and best of all, clean up with water.

Happy repairs!

One Little Fix Made All the Difference

 I've written here before about diagnosing equipment problems, boiling matters down to a question of "Fire and Fuel," and I've discussed how critical our Kawasaki Mule 610 UTV is to our farm business.

The business goes well, with some income on a steady basis for egg sales from nearly 100 hens, but the poor Mule continued to give trouble until recently. I'd been haunting motorcycle and ATV forums for ideas, and after a long time pondering and replacing parts, at long last I hit on a solution for slow drain to our battery.

For you non-gearheads, apologies if I get a little wonky here. For you REAL wonks, I commend you to "History of the Humble Automotive Fuse," here.

Many Mule owners winge about the battery-drain issue. I did many things they too tried: replacing the ignition switch, putting in a new voltage regulator. I bought a new battery, but that drained after a while, too. It was maddening. I figured that rough usage or a mouse had led to a short in the wiring. Taking the Mule apart one panel at a time, I verified the integrity of every wire I could see.

Then I did the non-cheapass thing: I bought an original Kawasaki Mule Voltage Regulator, not a dubious Chinese-made aftermarket part (for 100 bucks versus 20). Suddenly the Mule ran like the proverbial scalded dog of Southern simile.  I also installed a battery shut-off switch, marking the "on" position with a yellow paint-pen. With it off, no current would trickle in the circuit after we ran the vehicle (thus avoiding any load on the battery from a short I could not see).

Oh, how I basked in my gearhead pride until the Mule would NOT start at all. 

At least I knew that came from the incredibly flimsy, easily jostled 30-amp glass fuse near the battery. You do need a fuse of that amperage, to avoid damage to the electrical system in the event of a power surge. Yet Kawasaki chose something so badly designed that I'd have figured they pulled 1980s General Motors accountants out of retirement to advise them on how to save 30 cents on each Mule.

Fuses come in two varieties these days, as shown here. A "bladed" fuse to me is much less prone to breakage from jostling, and it's less likely to slip loose from its holder.  

The price differences between the two types are negligible, but the fitting to hold the fuses probably costs more for the bladed design. Thanks to Amazon, I got an entire bag of bladed-fuse holders for 10 dollars, putting one holding a bladed fuse in place of the crappy glass fuse.

And yes, it worked. No pride this time, just a wary, sideways look at the Mule now and then to see if anything else breaks. At least I now feel that I can fix it, when (not if) that happens.

Asleep yet? A blog can work better than Valium. But seriously, if you own a UTV and have intermittent problems with your battery going down, try that I tried.

Eastern Tent Caterpillars: Living With Them

Last year, for the first time, we had a harvest from our apple trees. Partly that occurred after I sprayed them with sulfur following bloom. Partly because I paid attention to a leaf-eating native insect, the Eastern Tent Caterpillar. They love to form nests in the crotches of trees.

One of our biggest trees got completely defoliated in just a few days last year; it did leaf out again but no apples came from it. I consider it my control, since the trees that I did manage yielded a good harvest.  So this year, I used a long stick, or a telescoping pole with a brush on the end to remove the webbed nests.  Advice from professions such as Penn State's Extension service recommend dropping the nests in soapy water. I did that last year but this year I just put them on the ground and stomped on them.

Penn State gives advice for pesticides, but I don't see the need for such a small and non-fatal infestation; I think that I have removed a dozen nests from three trees.  Our cherry tree escaped this  year, the the caterpillars show no interest in our figs.  I hope that we will again have homemade apple sauce in the larder for 2024. I put put about a dozen jars last year.

In the woods, wild cherry trees are full of the nests. I leave them be, so birds will have plenty of moths in their diet.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

When Retirement Nears, Making Plans

Back in 2017, I attended a workshop at a national conference in Portland, Oregon. We were there at the national meeting to discuss writing pedagogy, but I figured I was within 10 years of retirement. I then went to a session on how we find meaning when our day jobs end.

The other day, 3 years ahead of schedule, I notified my employer that I'd be ending full-time work for the university at the end of the year. I'd just harrowed the hillside below the spot shown above; we'd buried our first livestock guardian dog, our beloved Vela, at the top of the hill. Life is short. In 2017, Vela had been with us 2 years and was in her vigorous middle years. Now, she's resting.

Big decisions when to retire are naturally fraught with emotion, but honestly, it was the happiest decision I've made in a long time. I don't hate my job or colleagues, but unlike many of them, I have a Plan B waiting. It differs from many retirement plans I hear such as "I'll travel more" (great!) or "I'll be more active in my church or community" (fine!).

I'm neither religious nor able to travel as much as other academics do. Luckily, I find my joy in work with words, machinery, and plants. For so many years, I realized that I love the solitude and hands-on experience of writing, gardening, forestry, and tending to land. I'm happiest on a tractor for many hours on end, coming in the house to share lunch with my wife and discuss what we've been doing that morning. My favorite pastime involves fixing and maintaining machinery and equipment; I find it much more rewarding than dealing with the messy intricacies of classroom or office. I'm getting more social, because it's healthy, but generally, others wear me out. 

As my late father-in-law put it, when done with a task "I like something I can put my hands on."

In Portland we discussed how a mere hobby would not be enough to fill the hours that require intellectual company. My farm-work is not a hobby in the same way as, say building models or restoring an old car, but I got the message. I took it so to heart that after the conference, I began a book project that saw publication in 2019. Nowadays, my plans are less grandiose, but I plan on more fishing and hunting. Those hobbies are great fun but don't quite fill the bill for a healthy retirement.

Having given lots of thought to this transition since 2017,  I'd advise any of you thinking of joining me in the long twilight of a working life to take stock of what brings you joy physically, emotionally, and intellectually, especially as your physical abilities will begin to taper off. A guy named Mr. John Deere helps with that, to a degree, as I find it hard to hire day labor, even for $20/hour in cash plus gas money and lunch. But no pay will buy me intellectual debate over a lunch table.

For that reason, I plan to teach part-time in retirement in my university's Master's Program for continuing students. Most of the work will be full-remote for small classes, allowing more time to help my students develop intellectually. Given my research and writing interests, I plan to be on campus weekly and that will include lunch with old colleagues, attending arts events and seminars, even going to a professional conference every few years in areas where I'm still writing professionally.

All that without the messy things: committee assignments, office hours for undergrads, lots and lots of grading.  That means more solitary time on the tractor or behind a chainsaw or at a work bench. I've lots of ideas about managing invasive species, cultivating land for pollinators and native wildlife, and more.

You'll read about them here.

The Forgotten(?) Art of Pollarding Trees

Topping trees to encourage growth has a bad name among tree fanciers like me. The conventional wisdom that it shortens the life of a shade tree has a lot of merit, but then again, don't we prune trees constantly?

As I do most of my heavy pruning in winter, especially late winter, I wanted to talk about a time-honored way of harvesting firewood without cutting down an entire tree. I've begun to practice it in my own woodlot. 

The photo above, from the Wikipedia entry on pollarding, shows a beech in Epping Forest, England. In the old world, where ancient forests long vanished, second-growth trees needed careful management to avoid vanishing. Legal rights to pollard a certain amount of wood were granted to locals.

Pollarding provides a safe and sustainable method, and carefully pollarded trees can live a very long time. The beech above has not been cut in a many decades, whereas a regularly pollarded tree will not produce the huge side branches shown.  For those working with willow for crafts, pollarding leads to a nigh-endless supply of material.

I use pollarding on our fence-lines, where gums, poplars, and other shade trees occur. Some I cut down to a stub 3  or 4 feet in height. The trunks get cut into small rounds for the woodstove, after seasoning a  year. The branches and twig I drag away to make brush-piles at the edge of the woods, to shelter wildlife. Sometimes I pollard very long stems to make beanpoles.

Pines, of course, cannot be pollarded, and once cut, do not return. I knew that but didn't know it as an ancient threat by Croesus from the Persian/Greek wars. Thanks, Herodotus.

If you burn wood in  your fire-pit, fireplace, or wood stove but live where you don't have a ready supply of large logs, you may want to begin pollarding trees. You might find it most handy for trees under power-lines as well. Keeping them short avoids the sort of awful slash/pruning power-companies often do to protect infrastructure. Pollarding provides a way to keep a tree like that gracefully shaped.

 

Image courtesy Wikipedia

Slow and Fiddly Hobbies, 2024

Back in 2017, I reported on my passion for "fiddly" and slow hobbies: mostly the solitary pursuits of building models, fishing, gardening, reloading my own ammo. It was a time of political disaster then, with a megalomaniac careening us unchecked toward a dark future, packing the courts so things he ruined could not easily be undone. It could happen again. I could have fled the country or gone mad, but instead I continued to find solace in slow hobbies and not living by the dopamine fixes and doom-scrolling provided by addictive smart phones. I grew up regarding golf as a hobby for old white rich people, but really, it would be a fine sport for me if it were more sustainable, environmentally.

Not long before that dark time of American dysfunction, a tremendously interesting series ran three seasons (in British parlance three series) on BBC Four, Detectorists. We don't watch TV beyond an hour weekly, but this one was so great that after streaming the first episode, we decided to buy the DVD. It's good enough to own, and hard enough to find to never, ever lend to others who might not return it.

We joke with others that we love "cottage porn," British TV that commemorates a simple rural life free of the hateful political stickers on clownishly lifted pickup-trucks now haunting America's countryside. Think of how twee All Creatures Great and Small is, as comforting as a mince pie. Detectorists, on the other hand, not only rejects escapism but moves its story to the present while adopting a wistful, resigned tone. The duo behind the detectors, Andy and Lance, are looking not just for metallic treasures under farmers' fields but for meaning. The show has a surprisingly existential bent, though not a lugubrious one. By adding gentle moments of humo(u)r, creator Mackenzie Crook manages the nigh-impossible; the characters' failures and modest successes remind me of the balance struck in the two excellent original Charlie Brown animated specials. Consider Linus' angst in the pumpkin patch, when the Great Pumpkin never arrives, or Charlie's moment of doubt and pain over an already-dead cut tree when he cries out, "I killed it."

Like the Peanuts characters, those in Detectorists do find solace, unlike Beckett characters or most of the Beat writers. Yet their regrets remain. That makes the show's comedy unique. One message? Bear adversity with a wry, even sardonic, sense of humor. Aside from a running gag about Simon and Garfunkel, the humor is sidelong. One sees the "Finds Table" with a carefully lettered but amateur sign at a meeting of the comically under-attended Danebury Metal Detecting Club, it's such an instance: pull tabs from beer cans, pence coins, old buttons and shell casings. Yet, sometimes, gold. It's still out there.

Rural life for more than 11 (!) years has taught me that thus philosophy works. I employ it when others tell me of their favorite "must see TV." Usually it's too silly for our cultural moment or so violent that it provides not even a slight respite from the news. Yet the philosophy of Detectorists, ultimately aligned with classical Stoicism, might work broadly beyond rural America, as we lose and find things in years ahead.

It's fine if you watch an episode and find it too slow, as some reviewers did when it ran. Slow is my favorite speed now.

I have yet to buy a metal detector, though we have talked about getting a pair of entry-level models to look for things on our property in Buckingham County. 

At least I will buy the DMMC T-shirt.

January is My Favorite Month

A recent op-ed in the New York Times, from a fellow lover of winter, got me to consider why January, called fondly "dim and a bit lonesome," and February are my favorite months. I've written about the second month here, before. That post is full of advice from writers I admire. I'll repeat "Time itself is nothing; the experiencing of it is everything" by Dutch novelist and travel-writer, Cees Nooteboom.

Now let's give January its due. It's 1/12 of your year, after all.

It's no secret that I am not a people-person. I try to cultivate Stoic Marcus Aurelius's equanimity toward others while admitting their their trauma lies beyond my control. He found that one must "end your journey content." I find too many humans "energy vampires" and lost souls glued to screens full of fluff and worse, poison. As I glide toward retirement in 2025, I am letting go of some of their borrowed anxiety about their needs, or even mine. I just can say "I hear you. We'll work on that" and enjoy the passing show.

It's different at what I consider to be my "real" job, working on the farm with our animals, equipment and land. In that case, while the demands are constant, the best season for doing certain things, in our changing Mid-Atlantic climate at least, falls during winter. The days are shorter, the ground often sodden, yet the sky! At the zenith in late afternoon, the sky is almost an ultramarine Klein Blue some days. The temperatures can be in the 50s, perfect for outdoor work without freezing or dehydrating. I can put in fence-posts, chop firewood, till the soil if it gets dry, do work on buildings that does not involve painting.

Walks in the quiet woods here invigorate me, with their vistas and their revelations of what lies at ground level. After late spring, all those details of old cemeteries, tumbled walls and fences, and building foundations vanish in the undergrowth. Speaking of that, there's no better time to take chainsaw and loppers to trim or remove saplings, fell larger crooked trees, or do pathwork.

Why don't more of us love the first month? If you don't enjoy chores but can travel now, do it. You'll find prices to non-skiing destinations at their lowest, with restaurants and lodging eager for your custom.

I cannot do that, yet, so I'll get outside instead. The temperature will plummet this weekend, not rising above freezing, so it's just the time to bush-hog half of the six-acre field we will are using to cultivate habitat for ground-nesting birds. 

I'll wrap up and have a blast.