The Boy on the Burning Deck

 

No, I don't mean the Victorian-Era poem by Felicia Hemans. I doubt many of you have ever heard of "Casabiana," but it was once very popular. It's maudlin stuff today, dreadfully melodramatic to modern ears, or perhaps we are simply too jaded and declined as a culture to appreciate the poet's sentiments. Maybe I'm a barbarian, but I begin to see where Mark Twain got his "Ode to Stepehen Dowling Botts, Dec'd." I stand with Sam Clemens when it comes to hating Victorian verse of the popular sort.

In any case, for Hemans' tale of the doomed lad, I had never been forced to memorize it in school, as had earlier generations. We instead learned the much more durable "Ozymandias" and a few of Poe's poems by heart. For that kid on the flaming ship, I simply knew the line I've used as my title because these past few weeks, I've lived it. The heat broke, for which I'm thankful, but so did a wooden deck in several places.

The past several days have been consumed with removing rotten boards from our rental property's deck. Buried nails, likely from the 1990s, prove hard to exhume, and then I must plane some of the replacement boards down to fit into the empty spots. Of course installation proves a snap, as I use a screw-gun and star-headed screws I can back out later with ease, when--not if--more repairs need doing. I like these new coated screws; while they are not cheap, they hold up. I've backed out and reused several that still look new and do not round off like Philips-head screws can do. I stain all sides of the board too. Rot creeps in from any angle.

At the end of each session, sore to the bone, I am reminded why I despise wooden decks. Why did they get so damned popular? I share a theory espoused by, among others, Western Doughty, that Americans retreated from their front porches after the 1960s. I was lucky enough to grow up in the last years when, on a blue-collar block in Richmond before AC was common, all the neighbors would sit on the porches on hot nights. When you strolled down the street, greetings got exchanged.

It was no utopia; the dark side was that everyone knew your business. Still, the nation could have done better than treated wood, when we retreated to our back yards. 

Wooden decks require the constant maintenance that a sailing-ship needs, lest someone fall through the deck and into oblivion. I've found that heavy, solid penetrating stain works well enough, as it has for a fence I rehabilitated at our rental property, but decks, by their nature, get a lot of traffic. The one at our rental house, for now at least, bakes in the sun. I plan to change that with a strategically planted Willow Oak this Fall.

 The issue with decks of treated wood (were I forced to build from scratch, I'd use the new composite decking) is dry rot. We know that term, but I began to think about what it means on a deck. Here's an explanation for boats, from the Wikipedia page on dry rot (yes, they have a page for everything):

An explanation of the term "dry rot" circles around boatyards periodically. In the age of wooden ships, boats were sometimes hauled for the winter and placed in sheds or dry dock for repair. The boats already had some amount of rot occurring in the wood members, but the wood cellular structure was full of water making it still function structurally. As the wood dried out, the cell walls would crumble. In other words, the wood was already rotten and as the boat dried, the wood collapsed and crumbled, causing the workers in the yard to determine it was "dry rot", when in fact, the wood had been rotten all along.  

Even with good penetrating stain, dry rot happens to decking in time, because water will find a way into a crevice and sit. Cycles of drying and wetting just give dry rot more chances to begin; fungus follows, invisibly, into the hearts of each board. Think of how cavities form on your own teeth. For decks, what may look great may leave your leg broken when you fall through a big, new hole in a seemingly intact board.

I do like one aspect of repairing decks: Whenever I do a rehab, I clog around in my "Jed Clampett" Redwing boots to see which boards are bad. Breaking a board or two is great fun. Replacing them? Not so much. 

Save yourself. Use composite boards or build a damned patio! 

As with horses, sailboats, swimming pools, or lots of vices I cannot name here, it's better if a friend has a wooden deck.  No, that is NOT my deck up top. It's from the Wikipedia page.

Essential Automotive Skills

Decades ago, I let others change my oil and rotate my tires. No longer. I have saved thousands of dollars in the process.

I thought it would be fun to share some skills that anyone with a motor vehicle should possess. 

The idea with these basics involves both agency and thrift. I skip some tedious repairs on modern vehicles, like flushing the cooling system or swapping headlight, tasks I do.

Changing a tire: while rotating your tires is a relatively big undertaking even with a vehicle lift, changing a tire should be easy. It avoids helplessness by the side of the road. My nephew John Ryan insisted that his children should learn, along with learning to drive a manual-transmission vehicle. I mentioned this in an earlier post about avoiding “learned helplessness.

How To Learn: The best way to learn is to read the owner’s manual. Learn the order of tightening wheel lugs and how to do so correctly.  Next, practice jacking up a car on a level surface. Lower it. With the tire on the ground, see if you can loosen a lug. If not, you may want to purchase a better wrench. I got one from Amazon that I use on cars, trucks, a camping trailer, and tractors.

Simple Safety Props:  Pack a few 10” pieces of 2x6 wood in the car, too. One can be a block to place the jack on, if you find yourself with a flat on soft ground or even the volcanic grit of Iceland, which is where my last flat happened. The second block can chock a wheel on the side of the car not lifted. 

Checking and changing your oil: the former is wise, and though the latter is often dirty work, even with a lift, it is rewarding. It also can save you thousands over the life of the vehicle. I used to do oil changes while lying in the street in front of the house, before I had a garage. 

Tools Needed: You can buy ramps, or go with a good floor jack and jack stands for safety, plus an oil catch-pan. I do this for our Miata, too small for the lift. I set the handbrake and leave the car in gear (park when an automatic) when I have it on the stands or ramps, with those wooden blocks mentioned earlier, set behind the rear tires.

Watch lots of videos first for your vehicle. Draining the oil pan is easy but removing a filter on some vehicles takes research, practice, and the right combination of extensions for your socket wrench. I own lots of cup-style filter sockets. They are cheap and generally perform better than the old universal oil-filter wrenches of my teens.

Learning Those Codes! Some folks panic when the "check engine light" appears on the dash. I get out my cheap OBD-II scanner and my phone. I picked up the scanner for less than $20 and after trying some free phone apps, went with one I think cost me under $10, called OBD Fusion. It reads the codes on your car, using a public network called OBD-II that your phone will detect the moment you plug in the scanner.

You will look really impressive when you go into your local shop and say "my scanner shows an EGR error code" but you'll have to first read the scanner number and look it up on the phone or elsewhere. My 2003 Chevy truck recently showed a "PO165" error code. Luckily, the OBD Fusion software also showed me that it was an oxygen senor, even which of four needed replacing. For me it's a DIY job, but that requires a lift or lots of agility under a safely-jacked and supported vehicle.

A dishonest shop might add extra things to your bill, but if you walk in and say "I need O2 Sensor #1 in Bank 1 changed," you won't be ripped off.

Charging up a battery / jump-starting a vehicle: Think positive to positive, negative to negative, and you have it.  

Tools Needed: Good jumper cables cost less than 50 dollars, but they require the presence of another vehicle. Even better, I keep a portable jump-starter in the shop and haul it in the trunk of our cars when on the road, as well as a basic toolbox. Keeping a battery minder on your car in the garage can be wise for vehicles not driven frequently or in cold weather. They trickle-charge batteries and can prevent the sorts of hard starts that reduce the life of a battery. 

If your battery goes for good (usually a bad cell in it) you can save a great deal by swapping out your own battery. Lots of newer computer-laden cars (I hate 'em) are built to make you go to a dealer to pay big money for this. But you can work around it with a device called a "memory saver" that hooks up to the same OBD-II port mentioned earlier. Check to be sure your particular vehicle does not retain system memory; it varies by year and make. Again look for YouTube videos showing you how to avoid losing all your radio presets and other information that can occur with a battery swap. 

Maintaining tire pressure: I forget to do this regularly, but a decent gauge is cheap. Most passenger vehicles need under 40 psi, save for high-performance tires. Your little bike pump will not suffice, but a cheap electric pump will do. 

Changing air filters: Engine and cabin-air filters can be fiddly but need no special tools to swap. Again…videos for your vehicle. Our Toyota Tacoma took all of five minutes. 

Adding coolant: I check the system on older vehicles and tractors frequently. The trick is to have the system cool enough to open a radiator cap on an old vehicle, or simply watching the fluid level in a newer one. I am stunned by how many folks I know who cannot find these service points on their car or truck.

Reading a paper map: Will your phone always work? I dislike phones generally, but in particular I hate using Google or Apple Maps to tell me where I need to go. Instead, I tend to look at the map and memorize the routes. I rely upon the apps on a first trip or two only or when planning (some apps can show roadwork or congestion in real time). 

After a few trips, the route gets imprinted in my memory instead of making me helpless if my device does not function.

Better still, in case of a dead phone or loss of signal, I keep old-time paper maps in the vehicle. While you are at it, learn where North, South, East, and West are. I test my students about this; almost none know those directions, nor can they read a map. They are slaves to a device, when the device should serve them and help to mentor human skills.

What have I forgotten?  Let me know.

I Can't Get That Part: What to Do?

Though one of the primary rules for this blog has been "no politics," I am going to sound out about tariffs, in general. In my Macroeconomics class way back, we studied how they tend to punish the populace of the nation that levies them, especially when import-substitution may take years or decades to accomplish. 

Our 2006 Honda needs bushings for the rear differential. Our 2003 Silverado needs oxygen sensors. Both are DIY jobs, but the Honda's work will be tedious so I asked a mechanic doing some brake-work to replace the bushings.

 "Sure, if I can get the parts," came the reply.

That prompted me to order the Oxygen sensors for the pickup NOW. I'm certain they are Chinese made. I think lots of Americans are panic-buying ahead of the tariffs taking effect, hedging their bets against chaos. Costco the other day was rather feral.

But let's play along with our so-called leader for a moment. In particular I want to test his crazy notion that we can bring manufacturing back home fast.

Let's say I wanted to open Tractorpunk Bushings LLC tomorrow. I'd apply for a loan, find a location in a light-industrial park, purchase equipment. In theory, I might get my first bushings molded and listed for sale in a year. But how many could I produce, even if one could 3D print them in polyurethane or rubber? And how would I buy rights to bushings patented by major manufacturers, domestic or foreign?  Where might I find employees skilled at running the machinery, which these days requires computer skills? I'd need someone to manage the advertising, shipping, and order fulfillment.

And how many vehicles in need of bushings are on the roads and in the fields of this nation?

 As a Distributist, I think we should have local manufacturers: tens of thousands making and selling things from open-source designs licensed in the Creative Commons. I could even foresee a galaxy of small firms building a hundred cars and trucks locally each year, based on low-tech utilitarian models with good pollution controls and safety features. Customers wanting high-tech or luxury in their vehicles would pay more or pay a specialist to come to Tractorpunk Cottage Motors to install that infotainment system or leather heated seats.

My idea goes back to something I wrote about before: vehicles have gotten too complex and it's best to buy a really old one and fix it yourself if possible. YouTube makes that work. Where do you think I learned to change O2 sensors and bushings? The best videos come from small companies that sell the parts. But where do they get them?

My Distributist alternate reality for a million cottage fabricators would be even harder than the Free-Market, patent-driven Capitalist model I described. 

So for now, stock up and watch YouTube. You may have to DIY things for a while. If you are serious, invest in jack-stands, a creeper, work light, and a good set of wrenches. You are going to need them.

Plant a garden too. Learn to can and dehydrate. Save seeds. Think about how to defend yourself. Meet your neighbors and share work, without talking politics or religion. Put down the phone on which you are doom-scrolling, turn off the TV for a few hours, and learn a craft for making, mending, sewing, knitting, building.

These are troubling times. I don't see them improving without a crisis of the sort we in the States have not witnessed in many, many decades.

This post may be one of the gentlest slams on our leadership, such as it is, as you will ever read. Maybe we should be screaming. I think we will, once the real price of arbitrary tariffs sink in and cut into our household budgets.

Big-City Visits and Me

How did 40 years go by so fast? I'm approaching the anniversary of leaving the US (I hoped for good). 

I loved living in Madrid, if only for a year, but that was so long ago....okay, yesterday. In a quiet neighborhood between Plaza de Cuzco and the once-village of Tetuán, an area that metro Madrid had eaten up in Franco's time, I figured I'd found the best possible combination of quiet repose and urban energy. To quote from a blogger who lived in my old neighborhood 6 years ago, Tetuán remains the right sort of un-hip place that is authentic without being dangerous, as well as affordable since "most of the young international people here in Madrid really want to live closer to the center. They want something 'vibrant' – whatever that means – and full of youngsters like themselves."

I figured Plaza Mayor and Puerta del Sol were only a short metro ride away on the blue line. Our furnished apartment, at $350 US then, was a real bargain. We only had to pay a finder's fee of one month's rent.

Now, in a visit to Baltimore's Little Italy, a neighborhood that recalls my old Madrid haunts, I realize how much life in the country has changed me in just over 12 years. I came north on Amtrak (my way to travel the NE corridor) for the big annual meeting on academic writing, CCCC. Someone not present asked why I didn't stay at the conference hotels. Simply put, the food is awful, the prices high, the scenery 1970s oppressive in a Logan's Run sort of way. Maybe that explains the conference nightmares that I have nearly every week: from burning hotels to drowned rooms with my laptop still inside, to lost directions and meanders around a strange city to find the Hyatt Regency's Crabcake Room.

 So now when I go to conferences, I look for lodgings a short walk away, usually in a traditional B&B that costs less than the conference monolith. I don't really care for Airbnb or Vrbo unless I'm somewhere longer-term, so I can prepare some food. Going to a supermarket in another country is an unalloyed joy to me. I had a great Vrbo experience that way in Fredericton, NB last year but a recent short-term stay in Winchester, VA, made me want to run back to a classic downtown hotel with a martini bar or old-school, owner-occupied B&B.

Baltimore's Little Italy seems my sort of spot. It's a short stroll to the dreary presentation rooms and throngs of professionals still on the rise who need to network. I'm semi-retired and so past all that. I met a few old friends for a drink in a boring and overpriced hotel bar, then left for something more authentically local but not twee or tarted-up. The hipsters with the parents' money or swank jobs are all in Fells Point; it's lovely but curated in a way that bothers me. On the other hand, north of the harbor, parts of Baltimore get sketchy fast. That too reminds me of certain neighborhoods not far from where I once lived in the Spanish capital, or for that matter, the block in Richmond where I grew up; the joke in the early 70s was "who beat you up today?"

These days I don't really want hip, curated, sketchy, or blue-collar urban. I don't want "busy" at all anymore. Traffic noise wakes me after living so long in a rural place. But more profoundly, it's the nature of how transient things are in a city, apart from preserved historic buildings.

Walking by myself on a rainy Baltimore day, the wind trying to destroy my umbrella and my pants cuffs getting soaked, reveals something I don't see when the sky is French blue and the colors in window-boxes call to me. 

In a city, even one where we have friends, we really are loners. Erasure of our lives lies never far away; once we are gone, our apartments will be occupied by someone else, our belongings not taken along scattered. I recall our final day in Madrid, leaving our apartment; we had piled by the curbing things we could not foist off on friends. Manolo, the building supervisor who really never seemed to like us much, did come out with a rare smile to say goodbye. He was inscrutable, but that day he seemed happy, maybe because the young and pesky Americans were finally going home.

An old Roma man with a horse-cart came along at first light a few times a week, to gather the sorts of things we abandoned. Soon our passage would be erased, like a busboy clearing a restaurant table.

You won't see old men with horse-carts in Baltimore, but the vibe is the same. You move on and it's as though you never existed. Little Italy, though charming, is not really the tightknit ethnic place it was half a century back, when children of immigrants lived there and talked to neighbors on the front stoops, as in a Barry Levenson film. The restaurants are still superb and folks friendly in businesses there and on Federal Hill. I went back to Byblos, an excellent Lebanese place I'd visited before, where my "cousin" Sami the owner recalled me, my wife, and two students who had visited him the last time. But the sense of impermanence still hung in the air as surely as over any cul-de-sac suburb. The architecture and patina of history make a cityscape more interesting, but turn a corner and you find a tragically ugly new high-rise that has erased a block of old houses and stores.

One gets erased in the country, too. Even if you have a large family with children, in a generation or two you will simply be a name and a fading photo on the wall, whatever your legacy of genetics or property.  

Maybe that's why it's healthy to visit a big town once in a awhile. I know rural folk near me in Goochland County, often older people, who have not been to downtown Richmond in decades. They still think it a crime-ridden, run-down place. It's not. But if they were to visit the hipsterific areas downtown, it might be worse than confirming old prejudices.

They'd see how quickly life moves on without us. They do miss the innumerable charms of city life: great museums, galleries, urban walks, live music, bespoke and funky-downmarket dining options. 

Yet I can still get that, plus a sense of ennui over time's passing, during a short urban visit. The woods beyond our garden? Those are not eternal, but they provide a different scale of time that stretches beyond our little lives.

Semi-Sufficent? Is that Enough?

I've written here about the folly of trying to be self-sufficient, instead turning to the notion of self-reliance, an Emersonian virtue I embrace.

Recently I read a fine post from Kirsten Lie-Nielsen, a homesteader, that she and her spouse have left farming largely behind, at least as a full-time, rural venture. This experience, one where she attempted to become an influencer but met hostility for her left-wing political views, gave me pause about how I approach rural life. 

These words in particular strike me as wisdom: 

We have no aspirations towards self-sufficiency, but a desire to experience varied aspects of life while remaining connected to our food sources. I now have a set of skills I can draw on if I find myself in the kind of calamitous situation that sections of the homesteader community are prepping for. I feel a deep appreciation for the labor of food production. I’ve also learned to embrace the freedom of progress.

When this blog began, I thought that I might use my writing skills to follow the path of a farmer like Joel Salatin. Now I've my doubts, and not because Salatin and I are very different animals when it comes to politics and religion. I deeply respect the way he manages the property at Polyface Farms, and I've had two nice chats with him about how one can run a farm sustainably. I no longer follow his blog, however, because of right-wing extremism and Doomerism, mostly by his readers, a similar pattern that led me away from another writer who once used to visit my classes to discuss his work. 

In case of a national disaster, no one is an island, no matter how many generators, solar panels, firearms, or cans of food on hand. Only community and self-reliance might ease the troubles, though I'd prefer we search for ways to avoid them altogether.  

I'll employ a simple example of semi-sufficiency here: the other day, my brother-in-law and I skidded two 12' long poplar logs out of the woods. A huge twin-trunked tree had split in a storm; we wanted to save part of it for his sawmill. Poplar is a delightful wood to work. I've made a good bit of weatherboard for our farmhouse from trees we cut, milled, and planed in years past.

I could never handled that sort of job alone. We used two saws to cut the logs (for when one saw gets pinched and stuck; it happened once to me). We then used a long cable and electric winch to skid the logs across a wet-weather stream at the back of our property, with me walking beside the skidway with a Peavey Tool to roll the logs around when they got caught on something. Finally, I got on my tractor and hauled the logs the final distance to a trailer.

No one person I know could do this. With my spouse still recovering from a broken leg, she couldn't help. So in hard times, who can you count on to help with rural work? My other best helper, who lives nearby, voted for the other side, but we get on well.

Community, despite adversity and personal differences, keeps the Amish on the land, but influencers have followers, not co-workers.

That's the mistake too many misty-eyed homesteaders make who want to be famous. 

What a BOIR from the Feds

It's enough to make me a Libertarian. 

After having filed papers dutifully for years with our State Corporation Commission, I now understand that the Federal Crimes Enforcement Network, under threat of fines, will make LLC owners file even more paperwork. It's a free process but a tedious one, and the online interface is predictably awful in a manner only the Federal Government could design. It did not let me file because the portal would not let me click the final "I agree" button. With some efforts, I used method B and sent them a PDF filing.

Yes, it makes one wish--almost--for the giant axe coming in January for lots of Federal agencies. I just wish I could pick which ones to cut.

The madness for small farmers and other businesses comes from something called The Corporate Transparency Act. Sounds good on paper; we don't want firms hiding illegally obtained money. That said, large corporations can give unlimited campaign funds to candidates, anonymously, since the People United decision by our Supreme Court. I suppose that legal largesse does not extend to little LLCs.

A Texas court blocked implementation of the plan, noting that "The CTA, by its very language, does not regulate any issue of foreign affairs. It regulates a domestic issue: anonymous existence of companies registered to do business in a U.S. state and their potential conduct." I sighed in relief.

 But then our extension agency noted that the stay had been lifted, and we had to file. Yet on the Federal site, it said, essentially "oh, don't file yet until the court case gets decided. But you can file."

Then, my tax guy's office said it's been halted again!

So I filed anyhow and I got an official-looking certificate from Uncle Sam. Our little LLC is honest and not laundering money. We have nothing to hide from any state or Federal agency.

I'm hoping that one day the horrible People United decision will be reversed, and laws like the CTA struck down as unconstitutional blocks on interstate commerce.

Governments build good infrastructure. They protect us from foreign and (we'll see in 2025) domestic enemies. They protect, in theory, our natural spaces.They assure minimum common standards. I like the green cash money they print, too.

But making little farms like ours file above and beyond what the State of Virginia asks seems burdensome and meddling. Here's to The CTA getting struck down for good and little folks, not just huge corporations and billionaires, having some say again.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Occam's Razor, 2023

Once again, I applied the idea that given competing solutions to a problem, start with the simplest. I live by that rule. It's logical, elegant, and usually a cheapass solution to expensive issues.

As I wrote here before, most problems with any machine involve fuel or fire. 

We own many used vehicles, not including tractors. I work on almost all of them. The use of Occam's Razor never failed me yet, but William of Occam never met a modern electrical system's ground fault or short circuit. For those without coursework in electrical science, I'm talking about the way any charged circuit "goes to ground," with current going to the frame of a vehicle because of a chafed or broken wire. This slowly discharges the battery. It's not dangerous (generally) in a 12-volt DC system like the Mule has; once the current of 20-40v from the engine reaches the voltage regulator, it steps down to trickle-recharge (rather than blow up) the battery. Thus arranged, a new battery can last a decade in a car; in a farm vehicle, fewer years because of all the moisture and hard use they encounter.

Still, that recharging battery is magic! That's all fine and good until one has a short from corrosion in a connector or a mouse-chewed wire somewhere, leading the battery to slowly discharge over time.

Of all our vehicles, the most thrashed, and most useful, is a Kawasaki Mule 610 we got when Nan broke her leg in 2015. It makes getting tools and supplies a snap on a large property, not to mention moving 50 lb bags of feed for chickens, bed-loads of mulch or gravel, and more. At our age, we could not get by easily without the Mule.

Until we had to do so. Something was draining the UTV's battery.

The Internet forums for these vehicles abound with complex and often contradictory advice. I've come to the conclusion they these light-duty UTVs all have a weak-spot in their electrical systems.

So I began with the cheapest, easiest fixes. After testing and ruling out expensive stuff, I replaced the $12 ignition switch (trivial), $20 voltage regulator (a bit fiddly). Still, the machine continued blowing a 30 amp fuse and the battery would not hold a charge. The battery was fairly new, so it was either 1) damaged by all the jump starts and draw-downs or 2) not the culprit.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that a parking-brake "idiot light" had a short. I simply eliminated it from the circuit and bought a new $60 battery. Now the Mule runs like new. I then spruced it up with new tail-gate and hood-release cables, cleaned the frame and engine compartment, did an oil change, cleaned the air-filter, and repaired a tire with a slow leak. I have a few more things to do before the 500-hour service, none of them major work. 

If the fuse blows again, I'll shell out $150 for a new electronic control module, a computerized device that regulates where current goes in the Mule's innards.

I cannot say that I won't thrash the Mule again, but I plan to stick to the service intervals and check my electronics more. With 400 hours after 8 years, the Mule has been used heavily by us. We don't want to have to replace it.

So as 2023 closes shop, what else have we been thrashing, aside from our poor planet and our sense of community? What if we applied Occam's Razor to some of those problems?

Here's to hoping that 2024 is bright and full of hope.

Call Some Guy? When Do You Do That?

After the remnants of a tropical storm brought 5 inches of rain to us in two days, our well-water again grew cloudy. Our well-house, below ground level, had flooded. 

Living with a well is always an adventure. 

Was it time to call some guy? My old man, whose tool-kit consisted of a claw-hammer and 16D nail, would say that if those two items did not fix something. "Boy, we better call some guy!"

I have done this thing myself, DIYer that I am. We have had this water issue before, after an earthquake (!) knocked a huge chunk of concrete out of the well's casing. Silt would pour into the well with heavy rain. I called some guy.

That time we spent thousands of dollars to get the casing repaired. Those repairs included a pallet-load of cement to fill a void as large as a closet and a UV filter installed for the water line. 

This time, we rode it out. Here's why.

Rural life involves lots of trade-offs, not least of which involves the expense of getting work done by others. Most of the time, to save money and remain as self-reliant as possible, we "make do or do without," so we have filtered water for a week as the ground-water level dropped. 

The well was, after all, undamaged. To have a firm come out and pump out the well house would cost a lot of money. I have a jet-pump, but I also have a day job that has gotten very busy of late. So out came the water filters for camping. 

No amount of self-reliance equates to self-sufficiency, a pernicious American myth I've critiqued here before. I put down my test of tests to this: is the cost of the repair vs. the time I'd need to do it myself so high that I am willing to surrender X hours of my time, bust knuckles, maybe risk an injury?

When the answer is "yes," I get out the tool box. If "no," I call some guy. That is not a defeat, but it's also not an invitation to be helpless and not learn skills.

No offense, but when something minor goes wrong at the rental property, my tenants never fix things that I can fix in ten minutes. First, they have me and I work just up the street. Second, there is fear of making something worse. My current tenants have some "skills" and can at least diagnose problems. I've had others without even a screwdriver or pair of pliers in the house. It's a form of learned helplessness I simply do not understand, but at least the rent gets paid by these good folks.

So learn some skills, but learn your limitations, too.

If you are an entrepreneur, I strongly recommend setting up a handy-man firm called "Some Guy" with the motto "Got a home problem? Call Some Guy!” That’s 1-800-Some Guy or  callsomeguy.com." 

That URL is not taken, so get busy. There's a fortune to be made.

The Joy Begins When the Wrench Stops Turning

Yesterday, while changing spark plugs on our 2006 Honda, I said to no one in particular, “I hate this!” I had dropped a magnetic tool that lifts plugs out of the deep wells in the engine’s head. The tool clattered into the inky depths of the engine compartment, to lodge itself about 1" beyond my reach. Even with the car on the lift, it took me 30 minutes to get the magnet as well as the tool that tried to retrieve it, after I dropped that too. 

Yet would I do it again? Or call some guy?

I would do it again myself in a heartbeat. Here’s why.

I look forward to reading Matthew Crawford’s book Why We Drive. I met him a few times and talked mechanic-talk when his wife Beth worked at my university. Our philosophy about being gearheads and DIYers is similar. I think he has a Distributist bent, as I do. We seem to both disdain US corporate capitalism, where billionaires own most things and pay the least, as well as communist ideals of "workers controlling the means of production," which so often means a different elite concentrates ownership of capital while duping those workers. As I currently understand Distributism, we all ARE the means of production. In an ideal world of this economic model, we'd all build our own cars or have 100 co-ops doing this to achieve an economy of scale. We'd grow our own food and build our own houses. We'd do a lot by barter.

Think Amish with more tech, though the Amish I've met are very savvy capitalists.

But back to DIY work. Matt enjoys working on vehicles more than I do. That said, we share a passion for knowing our machines. Modern vehicles are fiendishly complex, designed to force us back to the dealership’s overpriced service department. Yet there exists a sweet spot between the Model A Ford's knuckle-busting simplicity, with its concurrent lack of safety and environmental features, and today's computers on wheels. For most of these vehicles from the 1940s-early 2000s, most wrench-turners can do routine repairs and service at home with the help of the parts store and YouTube.  

When I'm done and things work well, I then enjoy the result. My passion to do more gets rekindled.

Yes, I have the enormous advantage of a full tool kit and an automotive lift. But I didn't start that way, when Uncle Carlyle and I first changed the oil on my original 1974 Buick Apollo: we used ramps, a catch pan, shop rags, and a small set of wrenches.  Today, oil-changes are easy for me and often I have them finished in 15 minutes. I feel great satisfaction, too, knowing I used the best components for less than a quick-lube shop would charge me for hasty work and bargain-grade lubricant.

You may have a vehicle that is very complex; these are modern vehicles that I've yet to have break on me, though my wife's 2017 Mini has a control panel that terrifies me. It's a $9500 fix, but for now, it is under warranty. For these complex cars and trucks, feature-creep that means every system on a vehicle gets monitored by sensors and subject to proprietary software that costs thousands of dollars, if a company will even share it (not all states have right-to-repair laws). In consequence, a clerk at Advance Auto, while selling me a battery for a car, told me they no longer can help with most vehicles after the 2013 or 14 model year; they have to be taken to a dealership to have the computer reset.

That's far beyond my skills, though I can read and reset Check-Engine codes with a 20-buck OBD II scanner and my smart phone. We do what we can, but overall, I'd still purchase the most minimalist technology I can to avoid the expenses of dealer-mandated service.

I want to invite each of you reading to this fix something instead of saying "call some guy!" My old man, whose tool kit consisted of a claw hammer and a 16D nail, would say that constantly when his two tools could not fix something. I refused to comply with his orders regarding repairs. After my Uncle showed me how to change my own oil, dad told me to have "some guy" at an auto shop check after me. I told him "hell no."

Now I want to start a handyman service called "Some Guy Repairs." Our motto: Call Some Guy Right Now!

You may well break the item you try to fix the first time. You might get it half-way right. You may lose parts. But as a colleague at work always reminds me, "don't let perfect be the enemy of good."

Start with a simple item; I don't recommend you trying to repair a home HVAC system or your car's brakes, but you might fix the cord on an electric fan or figure out how to change your own tire, so you can take the flat to the shop instead of having the vehicle towed.

You will end up with dirty hands but a sense of accomplishment.

Gigantism, SpaceX, and von Braun's Nova

What? A post about going to the Moon here? This is a rural-life blog, true?

True. That said, I enjoy considering how the tools we use, from a good framing-hammer to a Moon rocket, reflect and reify deeply cherished cultural values.

Right now, many of us Americans seem to value huge things: McMansions, burgers that weigh nearly a pound, super-tall skyscrapers, hulking SUVs and lifted pickups guzzling gas on ten-lane superhighways. Add to that list the massive Starship Rocket Elon Musk wants to use to build settlements on Mars. While I'm not a Musk fanboy, I acknowledge that his engineers at SpaceX and Tesla have made some enormous contributions to technological progress. Moreover, they understand how failure teaches us to improve our work. I use lessons from SpaceX to encourage my students, many of whom have never experienced any sort of personal or academic failure; their first shuts them down, emotionally.

Yet as someone who wants us to explore space and eventually settle on other worlds, I'm concerned about the gigantism embodied in Starship.  Other objections to human exploration of the Moon and Mars, be those environmental, social, or economic, may have their day and their place, but I want to look at the problems of gigantism here.

Musk's dream, it turns out, is nearly 70 years old. In my first-year seminar, "The Space Race," we divide our time between considering the Soviet-US race to the Moon and the plans to return today. One chapter in that earlier race gets lost as we discuss NASA's plan to land humans there again: Wernher von Braun's massive Nova rocket. 

He dreamed up this design in the 1950s, refining it until NASA canceled the booster in 1964.  Budgets began to scale back America's space plans, as did some reasonable qualms about the danger of such a rocket exploding on the pad with the force of a tactical nuclear weapon.

Nova would have flown directly to the Moon, with its top stage, some 65' tall, landing on the lunar surface.  No complex dance of lunar lander and command module in deep space needed! As Michael Neufeld's magisterial biography of von Braun notes, the German engineer really intended to build a Mars rocket with Nova. That had always been his goal, as is Musk's in developing the Starship/Super Heavy Booster stack.

What an impressive sight Nova would have been, lifting off from Florida. Yet at the same time, what an improbable task, landing its final stage, the height of a six-story building, on difficult terrain. Then imagine doing that while seated at the very top of that building. Aldrin and Armstrong, during the Apollo 11 mission, found themselves improvising their landing when faced with boulders the size of automobiles. A larger lander than their small LEM (its outer skin was little more than foil) would have certainly toppled over had it landed poorly.

Today, NASA has a Moon rocket but not a lander, opting to have a version of Starship called HLS descend with crew for touchdown. Granted, we have better computers than anything Project Apollo employed. I doubt any human aboard would fine-tune the automated landing. Moreover, SpaceX has shown again and again that its smaller boosters can land for reuse, even on an automated platform at sea.

Why then was I so queasy when Starship's latest prototype blew up on its maiden voyage?  

Musk's company went through similar glitches with its Falcon 9 rockets. There is, however, a key difference that troubles me: the Super Heavy Booster for Starship sports a cluster of 33 Raptor engines to develop full thrust, as compared to the five F-1 engines in the Saturn V's first stage. The SpaceX design reminds me of the failed Soviet N-1 Moon rocket, a multi-engine behemoth that kept exploding on test flights. Finally the USSR ended the program, ceding the first landing to the United States.

Given the failure of Starship/Super Heavy's first launch (whatever SpaceX claims to the contrary) as well as considerable damage to the launch pad from all that thrust, I wonder if NASA will see any of its astronauts set foot on the Moon in this decade. If Starship continues to lag NASA's SLS, would we do what we might have done in the first place, stop subsiding Musk's Mars dream and instead land the components for an inhabited lunar base with several small vehicles, launched from Earth by smaller rockets?

Those of us who dream of settling the Solar System's other worlds have seen the price of gigantism before it got so scaled back that no sustainable infrastructure survived into the 80s. In consequence, since 1973 our species has been stuck in low Earth orbit.

Even if Musk's booster works, there's landing HLS safely. SpaceX's lander will stand 165 feet tall. Here it is, reminiscent of the single-stage rocket from  Irving Pichel's 1950 SF epic, Destination Moon. As in the film, people and cargo will be lowered from the nose on an elevator.

Thus I have some questions:

• why did NASA opt for an enormous lander so similar in concept to von Braun's, rejected 60 years ago?
  
• will SpaceX send a robotic excavator/roller to prepare a perfectly flat landing spot on the Moon?
• how soon will the company be able to test the Super Heavy with lander before the Artemis III mission?
• when would a robotic HLS practice landing on the Moon and then blasting off again?
  
• what plans do NASA and SpaceX have to get astronauts off the Moon if the Starship lander fails to relight its engines?

To be fair, for Project Apollo no rescue plans were feasible.

My questions may come to naught with successful tests of each component, until Starship is human-rated for flights. I also suppose that my final question, "what could possibly go wrong?" will answer itself. One troubling outcome of American gigantism played itself out with fire and debris last week, 24 kilometers above the Texas coast.

Perhaps, if Chinese astronauts set up housekeeping first on Luna, we'll see it a sad rebuke to America's infatuation with the gargantuan. 

This blog promotes thinking small; getting the Moon is big, building a permanent settlement bigger still, but if we choose that path as a species, how big need our tools be to get the job done safely and sustainably?

I don't use a sledge to hammer nails, or a backhoe to plant a new raised bed, after all.