If it Burns...BURN IT

Thank you, farmer-friend Dominic, for the title of this post. He puts on his fake Western Hanover County accent and declares this whenever I'm a bit short of firewood.

Which, at present, I am. It's my own damned fault.  If you heat with wood as I do, you may still want a backup for those cold nights when you don't want to go downstairs to fill the stove at 4am.  Of course, you may have to get up anyhow for other reasons, a consequence of reaching middle age.

That said, it's good to have backup. Our new Trane furnace had a manufacturing defect, a bent connection in the heat-exchanger, so it was blowing only cold air. This happened, of course, in the middle of a Polar Vortex. Our installer was on the job quickly, but his firm had to fight Trane for replacement parts. And the thermometer dropped.

The woodpile dropped, fast, too. My four full cords (a stack that would measure 32' x 4' x 4', stacked closely) was getting to it's final stages. I've been cutting and splitting white oak for 2019-20 since I plan to keep not four, but six cords on hand at all times. We already have plenty of green wood for next season but what to do until then?

I recalled an old run-in back in the woods, a haunt of snakes, full of really old firewood. So off I went to get it.

Surprisingly, a lot of wood was still hefty and not paperlike. I found at least one more useable cord, part of which I've pictured here. Yeah, yeah, I know that the firewood geeks (they do exist) caution against burning old wood. They also caution against pine. One imagines millions of Scandinavians freezing to death, every winter, because they don't have hardwood to burn.

The trick to any wood is to have a thermometer on the stove, to avoid two linked catastrophes that can cost you your house, maybe your life. We make sure that no matter what we burn, we avoid creosote build-up in the chimney or an overly hot stove. It's not hard, and despite popular stories about pine or cedar gumming up a flue, they won't in a hot stove. We've never had, in our annual cleanings of the chimney, reports of excess creosote.

Having seen a chimney fire once at a neighbor's house, I don't ever want to see one again. But if you are careful, if it burns, burn it!

Plan B Skills

All of us dream, right? Of that perfect job, that special place we want to live, that special someone. We know that even with those three ingredients, if we have difficulty, help is a phone-call away. And there's Internet everywhere, true?

Many times it all ends well. But not always. So what are some key skills that every person should have by, say, age 25? Here's a stab at it, without going down the Prepper rabbit hole. Some of these skills would be of NO use in an apocalypse.

I thought of this after hiring Quentin, a man in his 20s who had very good skills with a chainsaw. He impressed my taciturn, highly skilled brother-in-law, too: a real feat. We'll be hiring him again.

So here goes. No, no instructions or lessons. That's your quest. I think we should all know how to:

Build a fire, using matches: The trick is twofold, finding dry wood and building a "tipi" type fire.

Sharpen a cutting edge: Hatchet, knife, axe, shears...it doesn't matter. With a stone or a metal tool. Keeping blades sharp, paradoxically, keeps you from cutting yourself. Mom taught me that one.

Change a tire: This requires learning to use the jack in the car and understanding how to loosen, then tighten lug-nuts by hand. Not every car has run-flats. There's a thing called an "owner's manual" in nearly every car. Read yours.

Jump-start a car: How can it be so hard? Positive to positive, negative to negative. But oh, the results of crossing those wires!

Start and run a chainsaw safely: I use these a lot, as we heat with wood. No need to rehash the advice here, but a novice can learn the basics: Check for a sharp chain and tight chain. Add lubricant for the chain when you fill the other tank with gas (and knowing which tank is which). Learn to use a choke. As for how to cut up a downed tree or how to fell one, that's something I'm still learning in baby steps.

Drive a vehicle with a manual transmission: Guilty! Busted! I'm learning, however. It's been a lifelong goal to own a straight-shift vehicle other than a tractor. I'm going to have one soon.

Find directions by sun or the North Star:  If you know how to find the Big Dipper, you can find Polaris and north. And if you roughly know the time of day, you can find at least one direction by the sun, though it gets tougher at mid day.

Understand investing: Basics here, the difference between equities, bonds, cash, and precious metals. I follow Bloomberg's site regularly. Do you know the difference between the DOW and S&P? Long and short-term bonds? Trends for gold and silver? What it means when the Fed changes the money supply or interest rates?

Do simple math by hand and manage a monthly budget: Here I love it that I learned and can still do long division.  Knowing these basics lets you keep track of expenses and project where you need to be, financially, in a month or two.

Be on time & be neat: Quentin really impressed me here. When he ran a little late for an understandable reason one day, he contacted me. He smokes, and like a soldier on a five-minute break for his squad leader, he cleaned up his cigs after. Compare that to the "friend" of a house-sitter one summer, who ruined one of our watering cans with hundreds of butts. Better than putting them in our yard, but that sitter was not hired again and we docked her pay for the cost of replacing a nicotine-ruined watering can.

Load and fire a handgun, shotgun, and rifle: Controversial, but I'd claim that knowing how to operate a semi-automatic handgun or revolver is a life skill you never wish to have to use, but if so...I'd add bolt-action rifle to the mix. Semiautomatic rifles can be more complex, but the "manuals of arms" for most pistols and revolvers are similar enough. Hitting a paper target with any of them at 30 feet is also needed for basic competence.

What skills have I left out? This might become a series!

The Cold, Clear Light of Day

I recall my mom's advice when frustrated or scared, "It will look better in the clear light of day."

That's great advice for anyone struggling with rural life. I didn't grow up with it and am still very much a city boy. I may always be, deep inside, despite all the skills I've slowly acquired.

Yesterday was one of those awful days. I had struggled with a large rotary mower I use several times a year. We'd had a great success clearing a large patch of Tree of Paradise, amid a jungle of vines. I wanted to mow them before the snow flies again, as it's about to do today. We are talking about enough piles of vines, cut and still attached, to overflow two 8' pickup beds.

Everything seemed aligned, cosmically, until the tractor's PTO shaft would not align with the mower's drive shaft. It's a tedious, heavy job that involves pry bars, cinder blocks, and cursing. In fact, I increasingly see why farmers have multiple tractors for multiple jobs. My dedicated bush-hog tractor, a Ford 8N, is simply too fast in reverse to trust near hills, and it lacks a seat belt or roll bar.

As I tried to connect the mower, the light faded from the sky. I put the tractor on a slope, with the loader bucket down, to increase the distance between the connections. No dice. Nothing, including adjusting all the linkages, would make something fit that has fit many times before.

As it got dark, I recalled my mom's advice. I put up the gear and then it hit me: the next day I would shorten the drive shaft about an inch. I was bone tired and needed a stiff drink.

I did that early, with a reciprocating saw. Then with my Dremel I beveled the edges. The shaft fit, the tractor cut the vines, and I was done in 45 minutes.

If you push yourself too hard when tired, a friend advised me once when chainsawing, you are going to end up in the hospital.

Good advice at twilight. Wait until the clear, cold light of day, then get back to work.

Urban Flannel? How about Chamois Cheapass?

I have long hoped to use the word "cheapass" in a blog post. Now you have it.

For as many years as I've been interested in outdoor recreation, I've sworn by chamois cloth shirts. It began in Indiana, where my former father-in-law, a dedicated hunter of deer, ducks, grouse, and geese, gave me my first L.L. Bean shirt.

It and others that followed, from Bean and a firm called Five Brother that is still around (thank God), seemed as durable as plate armor. They wore in over the years, gently, to become as comfortable as any garment you'd want.  They were cotton flannel, a type of cloth, in woolen form, that may date to the 16th Century or earlier. There's more on the history of the cloth here.

Now, however, I find that Bean has gone for a look that is outdoorsy rather than really for outdoors work. My last chamois from them, worked moderately actually chopping wood and hunting, ripped after only 10 or so wearings in two years.

Ah, but to look like a lumberjack without doing work! In the photo above, note the unused axe. Sure looks good, though, walking into the microbrewery! I suppose Lumbersexual urban men with their skinny jeans, spotless boots, and groomed beards look great in thin chamois cloth. To quote from City Pages, where I copped the image:

He's old enough to grow a beard, but not so old as to hold hints of salt in the black pepper. He longs for the days when life wasn't complicated by big-city dreams, when a man could eke out a living off the land. But the closest he's gotten to downing a tree is stuffing his face with bûche de Noël.

 That's some great writing, but these shirts are not worth a damn.

I'm chopping wood today, and it will be in a Cabela's shirt. Now that Bass Pro has acquired that firm, I expect their chamois cloth to take a dive, too.  A friend wisecracked that "if Cabelas is the redneck L.L. Bean, Bass Pro is the redneck Cabelas."

Full disclosure: beard oil really is useful. Thank you, Lumbersexuals. Now help me bring back good chamois. I've ordered a very Lumbersexual-correct plaid from Five Brother, in their "Brawny" line of shirts. Not a solid color (my preference) but it looks promising. We'll see if they have cheaped out, too. I'm hopeful that the answer is no. The company still has separate listings for "Jeans" and "Dungarees." It's also a good sign that 1) Their Web site is not fully functional and 2) They don't pick up the phone on Saturday.

Probably gone hunting.

Planet Lumberjack Oldguy, here I come.

Superfluous Roosters

One problem about hatching your own poultry: you are going to end up with too many roosters. The one pictured above was a "keeper." He's doing his work, watching out for his girlfriends so they get to eat and nothing sneaks up to eat them.

But what if you have to eat a rooster?

Next year, a slightly higher temperature on the incubator should result in fewer males, but this year, we had six roosters. Four were mean birds, that charged you and pecked at you, no matter what. Their fate?

Butchered and eaten, or in the euphemistic sense, "sent to freezer camp."

I'd never done this before, so I enlisted the help of a theoretical physicist and his architect wife.

Yes, on paper that sounds very unqualified, but they both grew up in Romania under Communism. One advantage of that otherwise dreadful system was that city kids often learned rural skills, and my friends are no exception. Of course, our grandmothers were all laughing at us for the grand production we made of "processing" the birds.

Except for the first rooster, I did the worst part: the quick dispatch.

No, there are no photos here. Yes, we tried mightily to get the extra roosters adopted. If you belong to any lists about poultry, you'll find lots of handsome males up for adoption. Nearly all are listed as "sweet tempered."

We were lucky to have two roosters survive. Both are defensive of their harems when it comes to predators, but they let me pet them and their ladies. They eat out of my hand and come up to talk to me.

That's the only thing better than eating a rooster. Coq au Vin is, however, excellent.

So, if you are faced with no other options, here are some excellent resources I used:

• how to humanely butcher and clean a chicken.
• an excellent Coq au Vin recipe from New York Times.
• how to clean chicken feet.

Electrical Devices: Simple is Best

I cannot believe how two months rolled by since my last post, but the muggy summer, a weekly blog for my employer, and lots of projects simply got in the way of blogging here. That said, the tempo may pick up at Tractorpunk with better weather and the transition to Fall work.

We had lightning strike very close to the house, destroying an over-engineered, gadget-laden Samsung French Door refrigerator that no service tech would work on. That also goes for LG appliances around here. The reason? Complexity and expensive parts.  So after an insurance claim out went the fancy machine and in went a Maytag top-freezer with nothing fancier than an ice-maker. For cool water? Keep the pitcher filled we used when we were filtering water for a month. The Maytag is highly rated and US built, from their plant in Iowa. I'm not the "buy American" sort but when a US-made item is superior and at a good price, that's my preference.  The new "icebox" (a term I love) has so far provided sterling service and if (when) the ice maker breaks, replacements for a DIY fix can be had for $50.

I'm not quite ready to go back to my parents' defrost-twice-a-year Frigidaire, a unit they got in the heady days right after WWII ended, and dad came back from the Navy to a Postwar boom and his and mom's first home. They kept that icebox for nearly 30  years. For those who don't recall Postwar fridges, check Denis Byrne's The Antique Refrigerator site. The claim there is that these old units are getting trendy again. One reloader in my acquaintance uses one to store gunpowder (it's not plugged in).

We will see if defrosting a fridge gets trendy again. I rather doubt that.

Speaking of reloading, recently another over-engineered device, my electronic scale, began to show "drift": the powder-charges shown were varying to unsafe levels, even after the scale had warmed up. I found myself checking every load with a balance-beam scale of the sort used for decades.  Now that the manufacturer is going to fix or replace my electronic scale under warranty, I plan to sell it and keep doing things the old-fashioned way. It is just as fast, though I ordered a set of "check weights" to be sure my mechanical scale always gets properly zeroed and calibrated when I load ammo.

I used the balance-beam scale recently to reload a batch of .38 special. It was just as fast as the electric. 

These two very different, and differently priced, devices taught me an important lesson about unneeded complexity in the equipment we use. This blog began with a post about the virtues of simple farm tractors. I have been rightly accused by being a throwback, not wanting power locks or windows on my cars; I "got off easy" for $240 having the door-lock actuator in the driver's side door of my Honda C-RV replaced. That sounds fair, until you consider that I can replace the door lock on my '74 Buick project car for a quarter that price and do the work myself.

Then consider that the Honda has three other lock actuators.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Water Water Everywhere

And not a drop to drink until you boil it 5 minutes or run it through a filter.

If you get your water from a well, you are effectively a water-quality manager who oversees a water-treatment facility.  And when things go wrong, you learn about hydraulic engineering, geology, and pathogens.

For the past three weeks that has been our life, since seven inches of rain fell in a few days' time. Our dug well had developed a crack and a bit of missing casing, most likely from the earthquake of 2011, and that meant fecal coliform bacteria in the drinking water rose to levels that are not necessarily healthy. We had a water test last year, through a Virginia Tech extension agency program, and that proved marginal for coliform. The heavy rain changed things, fast.

Soil filters rain water, and coliform bacteria are present in most soil. Yet that can present an issue for Dug wells, commonly found on older properties, which are more prone to contamination; I understand that some banks will not issue a mortgage to a home that does not have a modern bored, deep well.

That's not us. Our well is only about 30 feet deep and 3 feet in diameter. I tested again when the heavy rains made our water cloudy. Test kits are cheap, and the consequences of not testing regularly? Serious illness in the worst cases.

In my home test after the rains, we failed. So what to do if you suddenly find yourself living in the 1840s? Digging a new well or even repairing this one would cost many thousands of dollars we do not have handy.

Time to boil and filter, as I would on a backpacking trip or, more ominously, after some disaster.

There's an entire section at Cabelas I call "The Doomsday Aisle" full of "survival" rations and gear, including some serious water filters and purifiers. The the distinction is critical; the latter remove bacteria from water. Most simple filters do not. I have used prefilters when camping, if rainwater has debris. An old Melita coffee filter does the trick.

I suppose The Doomsday Aisle gives suburban preppers the same false confidence that a backyard bomb shelter provided in the late 50s or, today, a seldom-fired handgun tucked in the nightstand or worse for the untrained, waistband. But I have found that these same folks also vainly try to "tick proof" their manicured lawns, killing helpful insects in the process, and panic at every tick bite; I keep a jar of the four or five that get me, weekly.

Thus I have decided to give up on telling such people that you cannot buy skills. But if you are still reading, here's a tip: only buy gear that you actually use sometimes, not tuck away in the utility room. The test of such supplies and, in our case, water filter, need not be the coming of Mad Max. It might simply be a hurricane that interrupts power and potable water for two weeks, as happened in 2003 during Hurricane Isabel. My nephew Chris, with Homeland Security, gets blue in the face trying to explain that two weeks of supplies are all one needs to mean the difference between life and illness or death.

That photo is so reassuring looking, isn't it, to those fretting about apocalypse? Yet no supplies will help you without potable water. I got a $60 purifier at Cabelas, made by Sawyer; I like their backpacking purifiers a lot. Like the smaller units, the big one is reverse-flushable and good for 100,000 gallons. More than enough! I like that it could be mounted to a bucket and gravity fed into a container to drink.

The first step in addressing problems such as ours was to "shock our well." Those of you on city water may imagine me sneaking up and yelling "boo" into the well house, or telling an off-color joke to the plumbing. As the Centers for Disease Control's site makes plain, however, it's a rather lengthy process.  You make a bleach-water solution (in our case, 3 gallons of bleach), pour it in the well, wash down the inner casing, and run the taps. A lot.

Eventually the bleach smell vanishes, and our shower tiles were cleaner. But a week later, I tested the water again for bacteria.

Another Epic Fail.

We had our well service visit, the folks who fixed the well several years ago. They suggested that short a very expensive repair, we install a UV light in the well, at the cost of $1100 and with an annual maintenance fee of $150.

Of course we said "yes. NOW." As for timing, we are still about two weeks out from installation, perhaps another from when I test the water again.  We have gotten adept at filtering drinking water nightly, using tap water to wash pots and pans, and running the dishwasher on "sanitize." So it's less 1840 and more an inconvenience. We could, in theory, go on this this forever.

But I am thankful that we do not have to.