That Mighty Fine Old Hose

 Joke coming. Leave now if you wish.

"How many Virginians does it take to change a light bulb?"

"Only one to change it and five more to talk about how mighty fine that old bulb was!"

Lots of truth here. So when a 40-year-old garden hose finally gave up the ghost, I had my next blog post.

My father passed 21 years ago, and that seems like yesterday. He bought a house in 1975, on Fitzhugh Avenue in the near West End of the City of Richmond, and I only lived there for four years before college, but I came back for a year and a half after. Those were very happy years for us all. About that time, in 1984 or so, he redid the yard and went to a local hardware store. He bought the best garden hose they offered. "Real rubber!" he said, still house-proud a decade later. He as no yard-guy, but he believed in keeping up appearances on a block where the neighbors often went all-out for their little 1/3 acre city yards.  That hose was astounding; it coiled up naturally without kinks and was easily to move around.

Yes, a mighty fine hose it was.

I miss the old man immensely, for all his difficult personality tics. After a life of hard toil behind the wheel of a truck he'd made it, owning a produce warehouse with his cousin Leroy. He was a beloved boss, too. Maybe he treated his employees so well because he remembered terrible privation.

He grew up in desperate poverty in the Great Depression, served in the Navy during World War II, raised a family with my mom in a little row-house. A detached two-story home in a neighborhood full of assistant bank-managers and insurance salesmen, with an Olds or Buick out front? The American Dream. I miss that too. It's gotten so super-sized since dad's day. I am rather glad he's not around to see things now.

That old red hose? It moved with us after mom passed away, and I used it for years until we moved to the country in 2012. Then it served well in our garden, with some fraying finally catching up to it near the end. I used a special leak-stop tape but that only bought me a  year. This summer, the old hose had to go.

Why do we fret over material things so much? In my case, that old hose told a story that only mom and I knew, and maybe my oldest sister. Sis and I are the only ones left. Now I am telling you.

Funny thing, though. This tale has an ending not only happy but sustainable. We found that most of the old hose is just fine, still flexible and intact as ever. I cut off 10 bad feet or so, then another 20 good feet from the far end. That length will help me water trees, attached to the water tank I carry around in my UTV for saplings when the weather here goes into a prolonged dry spell.

 

If the hose lasts four more decades, it will outlive me. And there the story will end, happily in fact.

Applesauce! Yes, You Too Can Can This

You need not be a can-can dancer, though that might be fun, to put up applesauce.

Our trees produced about a bushel this year, a record. We were proactive with copper-sulfate spray to thwart blight, and I will try it again next year, 

We also head to Fruit Hill Orchard in Palmyra VA a few times in September and October, as their harvest comes in. We end up with lots of apples.

I found this recipe, perfect for the novice canner, at The National Center for Home Food Preservation, my go-to for safe canning advice. You can can applesauce in either a boiling-water or pressure canner. It cans fast and, in my pressure canner, with only 5 lbs pressure. How fast? I wrote this post while the sauce sat in the canner.

Nothing from the store tastes as good.

Doesn’t that sound like more fun than looking at a screen? So print the recipe, go pick a bushel, and make some sauce. Now.

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.

What Could POSSIBLY Go Wrong?

My osteopath, an otherwise sane man who helps me manage my arthritis, was all aglow about a new tool on his horse farm (PhDs keep veg gardens; MDs have horses). I stopped him right in his tracks.

"One-hand chainsaw? You are going to kill yourself, doc!"

These battery-powered tools are all over the search engines, and they scare me far more than my monster Husqvarna 20" bar tree-feller. Why? 

All saws kick back at some point or other. "Kick back" often happens when a saw binds up in a fallen tree. It can meant horrible injury or instant death if said saw hits one's femoral artery or cranium. That's why I wear Kevlar chainsaw chaps and a forester's helmet when I go to drop a tree or cut one up that has already fallen.

The dude in the photo above sure looks smug. I see absolutely no chain-brake on his little deadly toy. The brake has saved me from time to time when a chain slipped off the saw's bar. It instantly stops the saw when it kicks back or loses its chain.  

I can imagine home-owners going out to trim small limbs and not even wearing thick gloves. Oh, what could possibly go wrong? Look here for one horror story. Here's to hoping  you don't own one of these crazy things, at least until the Federal Government regulates them so they have the same safety features as full-sized chainsaws.

My recommendation? At the very least buy a helmet with face guard and a pair of chainsaw gloves. Heck, get the chaps too. The store near me does not sell spare legs or fingers.

Better yet? Get a small conventional chainsaw that is battery powered. All the manufacturers make them now. If  you have the mobility and strength, get a good pruning saw. My Felco is awesome. Be safe, please.

Two Amish Dudes Save Our Pantry

I wrote last year about how silly it is building an economy around going out to eat. It's terrifying to think about my students, with parent-provided credit cards, eating out several times per week.

I still hold that idea that a foodie economy is doomed in the long run, though I'm a "foodie" and love nice meals. I also love eating in restaurants. Yet it's too easy, when worn out from work, to say "oh, let's get a pizza." That way lies going over-budget for the month. Even where we live in the country, a really nice pizza place is no more than 20 minutes away.

So what to do? I find it hard not to scream at them, when friends tell me "oh, today we went out to XYZ and had the delightful ABC." I can imagine the $40 tab per person, for lunch. At dinner? Might be $100 per diner.

Nope nope nope. Spending that much green money on a regular basis is insane. So what do we do? Do we eat franks and beans nightly, like Ralph and Alice Kramden? Children, Google that or have your AI explain who they were and why the Kramdens were once culturally important.

No, though I enjoy both Hebrew National Franks and Bush's "Country Style" beans, one need not eat them nightly to pinch that penny until it hollers. There is the Amish option. We can our own produce quite a bit, but it does not tend to be green veg. Imagine my delight when I found Jake and Amos products at The Cheese Shop near the farm where we buy all of our chicken feed. Once per month, we drive to the Shenandoah Valley to get provender for the birds and side-dishes for us. 

I contacted the company, headquartered in Myersville, PA, to find out if Jake and Amos are real. If they did not exist, we would need to invent them.  As of this post running, no reply.

 Tonight (yes, Hebrew National Franks!) we had pickled asparagus, beets, and mushrooms. Dinner issues? Solved. And what taste! For most of my life, I've associated canned food with limp, lifeless veg. That's doubly so since I began home canning. We cannot do it all,  however, so it was a joy to find a product to fill in where our garden cannot.

Fill that larder. Say no to expensive restaurant meals, making them a well-deserved and rare reward on special occasions. The Amish would approve.

Bonk! Flashlight Smack-Down On The Farm

Remember your parents' D-cell flashlights when the power went out? If your dad was a Postwar Prepper sort, he'd swap the batteries before Hurricane Season and stock up on more. Maybe he had one of the big plastic lights that held a 6-volt battery? 

I loved those. It was a manly thing. My dad was manly, but he was Type B about tools (unlike me). If we could find the flashlight, it almost never worked.

When Maglite hit the market, I got him a four-battery monster. He loved that light and took good care of it. He hated getting gifts, but that was one he not only accepted from me but actually talked about. It was as purposeful as a cop's nightstick. A paramedic friend said he had to use his for exactly that purpose. Nuff said.

We've had a bit of a revolution since the 1990s, featuring small flashlights with LEDs.  Forget that nostalgic Rayovac in the bathroom closet. It might throw 30 lumens, fine for finding your keys, when the cat bats them under the sofa.

The new LED lights often recharge with a USB cable, are light, waterproof, and rugged (or so the makers promise).  They can also blind someone, so be careful where you shine the things.

But how well do they work? I have owned a couple and here are a few basics:

Size: Lads, it truly no longer matters. Some of the smaller lights produce blinding light at long ranges.

Power:  These new lights provide illumination of 1000 lumens or more (a lumen is the light of a birthday candle) but no more hunting for batteries. This benefit comes with reduced run-time for rechargeable lights. Read on for more thoughts about that.

Function: Generally, these lights all feature a quick on/off button on a "tailswitch," a high/low beam and with some meant for self-defense, a strobe feature.  

Cost: Prices run $40-$200 or more. But do you get what  you pay for? Let's see.

Streamlight  & Four Sevens

Streamlight was king of the hill for a while, without any competitors.  I bought what I thought was an early model because a policeman recommended it to me. It turns out to be a (now discontinued) Four Sevens model called a Maelstrom MMR-X. It ran me about $75, new, at a sporting-goods store where I buy most of my reloading supplies.

For a few years, it was my constant companion, spotlighting paths after dark and one half a dozen occasions, showing me a Copperhead ready to bite me when I had to go out to the chicken coops or garden after dark. For that purpose, it was small enough to hold in my off hand while my shooting hand held a big old Ruger revolver for doing what big old revolvers do best. It has hi/low/strobe lighting.

The range is stunning: up to 100' on high with perfect illumination, for it and a bona-fide Streamlight I picked up last year while the Maelstrom was out of service.

Both Four Sevens and Streamlight focus on the military/police end of things; many have rounded points on the front fork, for breaking a car window when you are at the bottom of Loch Ness, then bonking Nessie on her reptilian head. That weaponized feature seems a constant with flashlights now, especially the Four Sevens line. I dislike the militia-look of the gear, but the light is a darned good companion.

Newer Streamlight products don't appear quite so fierce, but they remain the Maglites of the 2020s, minus the heft and size. Cops seem to love them, and for good reason. They are rugged (with one exception).

Therein lies the problem with the rapidly changing market for lights. My Maelstrom broke its tail-switch after trouble-free years of being dropped, left out in the rain once or twice, and used continually. It worked, but the button needed to be held down for it to function. Not good in an emergency. Here's the pesky switch that broke.

Most of these lights get activated by pushing a rubber-covered button at the back of the light. That's handy for a light mounted on a rifle, something most of us won't ever need to do. The tail-switch, to me, proved the weak link on this light. A tiny bit of plastic broke in there, rendering my light less than optimal until I found a replacement part, not an easy process.

Four Sevens no longer stocks the parts. It was tough sledding: Searches for "Maelstrom" turned up a new Four Sevens line. Luckily, an eBay seller's picture matched my light. It was listed as a Four Sevens MMR-X tail cap. 

As fate had it, the switch fit. As the part is no longer manufactured, I will order another one ASAP since it seems the only part likely to break or wear out under my rough handling. $16 costs less than a new light. I should be good another 20 years, as the rechargeable battery can be replaced easily. By age 82 I'll just hire some burly dude to carry my next light and bonk offenders with it.

My second Streamlight, still in production, is a Stylus Pro. It runs about $50 at Amazon. No milsup pretenses here: just a light the size of a dry-erase marker. Same tail switch. Nice little heavy nylon belt holster. We'll see if this light lasts. It's very solid, but the switch worries me.

Nebo 

Was a brand new to me, but already we have two of their lights: a larger hand-held light called a Slyde and a headlamp for my wife's work in the chicken coops. 

The larger light works beautifully, with more lumens than either Streamlight. The switch is on the side, and the entire light slides apart to reveal an area lamp, which shuts off the front beam. That's a nifty feature for working around my dogs in the gloaming. I don't want to blind them, but opening the light just a little throws enough ambient light to see their bowls, the holes they dig around their shelter, and the young dog that loves to get tangled up with me until I fall down.

You can see the area light here. I'm not sure if Nebo fixed what we call "accidental discharge," after a line by a flashlight-geek in a YouTube video. We say it with a laugh but it can be an issue when the light slides open accidentally. Nebo should have included a small release button. Perhaps newer models have that. 

I do like the magnetic base, so the light can double as a small shop-light on a vehicle's frame. I stuck it to the trunk lid of my Miata just now, to jump the car's weak battery with a portable jumper-pack I travel with.

This Nebo runs down its battery quickly, but a USB-C cable tops it back off overnight. Given its short run-time and weight, it's not a light I'd take backpacking. It has replaced the Four Sevens in the drawer by the back door. On the trail, however, the Four Sevens or Stylus Pro would be all I'd need.

Nebo's Slyde too has the "bonk 'em on the head" front end, though the feature is not so pronounced. More of a "dope slap" than a baseball bat's wallop, perhaps? I picked up the Nebo hand-held for about $50, on sale during a special event. It now costs considerably less.

I think our headlamp ran $65 at Amazon. It is the finest headlamp I've encountered. My wife confirms that she's not had to recharge it yet, so it bests the bigger light in that department.

These lights, like the Steamlight, seem very rugged. Again, with the switches, time will tell.

Maglite 

This US manufacturer has not broadly embraced the "Tacti-cool" look of competing newcomers, but their current lights do feature LEDs. What I love most? Maglite sells models like those I recall from 20 or 30 years ago, which means I can get parts easily. Before LEDs, I only recall replacing bulbs, never a spring or a power switch.

Maglites are US made, too. That warms my heart as someone who favors American-owned manufacturers when possible (save for cars; my rotten experiences in the 80s and 90s soured me on our Big Three for the duration). Beyond nostalgia, I have a lot of love for their lights, especially the rugged switches. You can still get their biggest mambo-jambo with the four D-Cells, which the company calls "an iconic design, not one of those ugly flashlights!"

Yeah, Maglite dissed my ugly lights. Bonk bonk on the head with my Maelstrom! When, not if, I buy a new Maglite, I'm going to opt for a rechargeable one with the USB cable. I might split the difference with their model that can be recharged or, in a prolonged outage, run three C-Cell batteries.

Whichever I get, I'll write about it here, as well as any solar chargers we get. Even with a week's worth of propane on hand for our generator, it would be wise to have a backup to recharge flashlights. Light matters.

Wait...they have a Mag-Tac rechargeable with a 2.5 hour run-time, recharger base, and "crowned bezel" top (for bonks on the head). 671 Lumens, "throw range" 185 meters! I feel more manly already.

Except I cannot find my flashlight. Bonk!

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.