Jack of all trades

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The first thing was the lawnmower. It needs a new charger, to keep the battery up to snuff between uses. I actually have two of them, but since they’re both Toro machines, just alike, they’ll be able to share one.

It took me a while to find the model number, which is on a sticker that you can see if you take off the grass bag but keep the mulching cover open. Moder 20018, which I thought might be the year and month it was made, but when I thought about it, I remembered that I had bought it before I was married.

I found an online site that sold me a new wall-wart for Thirty bucks, plus another four for shipping. It will get here in a week or two.

My wife asked me to figure out how to get the power washer going, and I spent ten minutes watching the online video and then I talked her through dragging out the garden hose and the extension cord and the washing hose, and putting the detergent in the dispenser. It took off the winter dirt like you wouldn’t believe, and I went on to other tasks while she swept the wand over the deck and the siding.

Next was the string trimmer, which I had started up last weekend, but had only a spindle where the string holder goes. I had found the holder, and the bell housing, so I thought I’d be set, and I went and bought a new reel of cutting string.

THe string feedout mechanism is a lot more complicated than you might think: I spent about twnety minutes figuring out how the thing would feed out new string as I tapped it on the ground. I realized that there was a spring missing, and I had to go over to Home Depot to get a replacement part. .

The new spring cost $4 or so, but counting gas, more like seven or eight. I put it all together and it worked fine, and I trimmed the edges on my front walk and then put it back on the roof hook in the shed.

I put away the lawnmower, and closed the doors to the sheds, and went in to check the Honeydo list for the other jobs I have today.

Plus to plus, minus to minus

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The lawnmowers both have batteries, which can be used to start them if they’re charged. (Guess what comes next, won’t you?)

I can’t find the charger. It was “around”, somewhere, but not in a well-defined place that would be easy to find.

My son, or I, might have put it into a bag of wall-warts that I gave away last year. If so, I’d have to spend about thirty bucks to replace it. I don’t want to admit that I didn’t keep track of it.

Of course, it’s collateral damage: cleaning up the cellar, putting things away, and then forgetting to check for the one wall-wart I’d want to keep out of a whole bag of long-forgotten power cubes for long-discarded cellphones and clocks and who-knows-what.

I have a variable laboratory power supply downstairs. If I hook up the wires with clip leads, I can use it to charge the batteries. I’ve decided to admit that I screwed up and just buy a new power cube.

It’s two-stroke time again

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My son and I opened up the shed, and dragged out the various items: the snowblower, the leaf blower, the lawnmowers, and the string trimmers – how did I get two string trimmers, anyway?

I was astonished: they all started up with no trouble. The lawn mowers were both dry, but the string trimmers had last autumn’s gas in them. My hats off to whomever makes Stabil: that stuff has saved me more repair bills than my old siphon hose ever could.

We took the snowblower, and I added just enough gas to get it started, and we let it run until it was out again, just to have the engine in shape.

I thought I had a can of 32-to-1 mix, but I didn’t see it in the shed. It didn’t matter, since everything started right up, but I was going to pour the gas out of the various tanks and then into my car. The little bit of oil doesn’t bother a car engine: it’s the same stuff sold for “top cylender lubrication” and so forth, so it’s always the best way to “dispose” of old gas/oil mix before the the Stabil stops working.

We put all the engines back in the shed, after mowing the lawn and realizing that the string trimmers were both out of string. It seemed like such a routine thing, it tickles me. It used to be Spring was the time when I’d find out at least one two-stroke engine was going to have to go back to the machanic, but this year, it all worked fine.

All Is Vanity

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Every so often, I look up domains that match my last name. Just out of curiosity, really: they’re always in use by a corporation like “Horne Engineering” or something.

I’m always optimistic in Spring.

Still, there’s always a chance. Horne dot net is owned by Hover, and I pay them the better part of a hundred dollars each year so that I and my brother and my cousin and my wife and my son can use “Horne.net” email addresses. I wish I had registered the domain back in Jon Postel’s office when I watched him roll in the cart that said “I’m giving up control!” on it.

Sigh. It wouldn’t make my email any faster, or my thoughts any more erudite, or my life any less complicated. Yet, nonetheless, I’m vain enough to want some symbol of my presence on the net, in the same way that I pay the Federal Communications Commission to assign me a “vanity” call sign for my ham radio station.

What the hell: I’m always optimistic in Spring.

I really don’t know why I bother

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I found myself looking at the Ebay listings, again, searching for “KWM-2″.

I don’t know why I bother, really: I know it’s an old unit, older than I am. I used one when I was in the Army, but that was a long time ago, and I wonder why I’m still looking for one.

Long before there was an Internet, there was MARS: The Military Affiliate Radio Service. It’s how GI’s like me used to make phone calls home from overseas: ham operators in the states would hook up their radios to a phone line, and dial collect calls to wives and sweethearts and parents thousands of miles away, back when the DC-8 and the 707 were still being used, when the Air Force still had Phantoms, at least in some Guard units.

No matter, now: the soldiers are given access to Internet “chat” applications, and they can talk to, and view, their families just about every week, without anybody listening in. Most don’t even know what “MARS” meant.

The KWM-2a, which was the military model of the KWM-2, was indestructible. It had 6146 tubes in the “final”, and they could take anything misadjustment I could dish out. The thing just worked, even with the tiny PM-2 power supply that MARS used to use on them, and they always got through.

I don’t know why I bother, really. The new solid state rigs are quieter, easier to use, and they have receivers that put the Collins gear to shame.

Still, every now and then, I still look. Maybe some day.

Only you can prevent forest fires

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I put a match in the pile of tinder, just to get started on the three or four times I would have to do it again, and wondered if I should dump some old oil on it this time.

It started up just like I was watching a training film, and I realized that all those weekends I spent out with the Boy Scouts really had taught me something. A nice, small fire, in the fire pit at the back of the house, with a pile of brush and branches ready to burn, ten feet away.

My wife came outside, and yelled “Telephone!”, and I trudged back to the house. I said “Watch the fire” as I went by.

The phone call lasted about twenty minutes, and I went downstairs, thinking that I doubted that company would invite me for an interview, and I grabbed the garden hose, opened the bulkhead, and went out in the back yard.

The fire had spread to about a twenty-foot radius from the origin, burning the top cover of leaves, and I looked around and realized that there was nobody there.

My wife was out in front, planting flowers. I ran up and grabbed her away from the Azaleas, and we set to work, she with a kitchen pot that would hold about a gallon of water, I with the hose.

There was no hose gasket in the garden hose, and the ones I had put aside at the end of last year crumbled in my hand when I took them out of the tool chest, all brittle from dry rot. The hose didn’t have a gasket in it, but I hooked it up without one, and although it sprayed a bit at the spigot, it produced a good flow of water. I clipped on the plastic spray nozzle that I had stored under the back porch, and turned the water on full blast.

The nozzle sprayed sideways, in a fountain of water going every direction but forward, and then it came apart in my hands. It seemed that there was water in it when I put it away, and the winter had cracked the plastic.

Without the nozzle, the water wouldn’t reach the fire, even when I tried to put my thumb over the end of the hose. I ran and got the other hose, which I had put in the shed last year, and rolled it out and hooked the two together. I had to use the vice-grips, because the female end of the spare hose was deformed as if someone had stepped on it, and I couldn’t get them to mate without the wrench.

I went from hotspot to hotspot, using my thumb to direct the flow, and I found out that every time I turned or went around a tree or flicked the hose over a rock, it would kink and shut off the water.

All told, there’s about fifty feet of burned grass. My wife said it was scary, and I took the opportunit to lecture her about watching the fire when your husband asks, but in truth, it was scary. Another ten minutes, and the fire would have gotten into the trees.

I went up to the hardware store, and bought a better hose, and a real brass nozzle just like I used when I was a kid, and I gave the old hose away.

Leakage current

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I told Alex to put all the circuit breakers in the “off” position, and to plug in the electrical cord again. He did, and the GFCI popped, again.

My sister bought the thing for about five thousand, and it’s got about 80,000 miles on it, and so she didn’t do too badly. The guy who sold it to her had a 220 volt air conditioner in it, in place of the heater, since the roof-mounted unit was dead. My sister can’t complain: he told her that before she bought it.

The heater was just lying under the bench seat, though, and it has to be reconnected if she’s going to use the RV in the winter. Hell, it needs to be connected if she’s going to use it, period. It’s the kind of thing that I look at, and I wonder if the former owner had some special need. Nobody rips out a heater from an RV, you know what I mean?

I took a look at the innards of the electrical panel, and I realized that there was an obvious problem: it needs a separate bus for the Neutral, which some home handymen don’t put in. There didn’t seem to be any other major snafus, but the panel was at a ninety-degree angle to the interior of the van, and I had to sit on the toilet seat to get to it, so I told my sister “Maybe in the spring”, and gave her a two-prong adapter that would prevent GFCI trips, and went back inside where it was warm.

Not quite what I expected

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I answered the phone a few minutes after Nine: it was the call I had prepared for, from a manager at AT&T named “Tony”.

I had a list of all the questions that I expected him to ask me: my best asset, my biggest weakness, times I got something done by following procedure, things I wish I had done differently. He didn’t ask me one question from my list.

There were questions about fiber-optic cable, wiring, the different kinds of Raid arrays, and what “hot swappable” means. I expected to answer questions about the difference between “Wye” and “Delta” power feeds, or how to find which server in the rack was blowing fuses, but just as soon as it had started, it was over.

Tony told me that he could tell from my answers that my résumé was accurate, and that I had told the truth on it. It’s the kind of thing that always throws me: I mean, of course I told the truth, you know? He told me that some people just make stuff up, and I guess that’s something that a hiring manager must see a lot of.

Tony told me that he’ll talk to his boss and get back to me. He asked me to send him references, which I did, and now I’m going over it again and again in my head, wondering if there’s something I could have done differently or something I could have said that will up the odds I get hired.

I was always an “inside” tech: I heard a lot, here and there, about how nice it was to be outside, and in charge of your own time, and going from place to place. Every summer, I’d think about bidding into the installers or cable, and every winter I’d remind myself about how nice it was to be inside. I think I have a good chance of going back to another “inside” job.

Everything you own has a space in your head

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The guy from the company knocked on the door and asked me how far over I wanted them to spread the loam. I told him to go up to the trench, which we dug to hold the electric wires for the new pumphouse, which was on its back at the head of a stretch of dirt that used to be my swimming pool.

My sister told me something, years ago, and it has always stuck with me: she said that “Everything you own has a space in your head, and possessions take up your mental energy like a nonpaying renter”. Her words came to mind while I looked out at my newly-minted backyard, now void of the money pit which has been a constant reminder that I’m not a hydraulic engineer and that pool-maintenance companies do business with the idea that anyone who owns a swimming pool can afford whatever they choose to charge for fixing it.

Now, it’s gone. I feel its presence, as if I still have to finish connecting the wires and the new pool pipe and the ever-so-much-a-pita pool skimmer and the on-again-off-again pump. I’ll give away the parts, and be done with it, and the “new” pool house, which we just built, will do service to hold the snowblower I’m also eager to be rid of.

For now, I’m enjoying the extra space in my head.

A good kind of tired

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The alarm rang at 6:54. I went and knocked on my son’s door, and got a couple of grunts out of him before I went to make coffee. I got some farina and boiled it up, along with some OJ and the caffeine.

We started at around 8 AM, and he took the wires out of the “new” pool shed and rolled them up and got them out of the way before the demo crew arrived. I attended to emails and the Telecom Digest and another few job announcements. The wire had to be done: they’re demolishing the pool, and if I didn’t move it, it would have gone in the dumpster.

After that, we tackled the furnace. I’ve had a problem with it for about a year: there was a check valve that wasn’t checking, and so my “family room”, which is on a separate zone, was always too warm, because the other two zones would backfeed the family room. I had to keep the rest of the house at 64 degrees, just so the family room wouldn’t go about 68.

There were lots of problems:

  • The torch head my dad gave me was too small for the brass valve: my son couldn’t get enough heat to open the pipe.
  • The replacement valve has an aluminum mechanism, and I was afraid a bigger head would melt something.
  • I found a larger torch head and clipped it in place and told my son to use it. (It worked fine).
  • A lot of the radiator bleed valves were corroded shut: they were original with the house, but I hadn’t thought to get replacements.
  • No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t get the boiler input preasure up above 14psi, which is usable but not what I wanted.
  • The only roll of solder I could find was 50/50, not 95/5 like my dad taught me to use. My son told me nobody bothers anymore.

It took about three hours, counting the time for draining the system and refilling it and bleeding all the radiators. My son went back to New Hampshire, where he has some interviews with plumbers, and I went back to my job applications, feeling the good kind of tired you get after working all day and getting stuff done.

I checked, before I went to bed: all three zones were within one degree of each other. Finally!