The dumbest kid in the world... or is he?

 My new favorite joke:

A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer "This is the dumbest kid in the world.  Watch while I prove it to you."

The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks "Which do you want son?" The boy takes the quarters and leaves.

"What did I tell you?" said the barber. "That kid never learns."

Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. "Hey son, can I ask you a question?  Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?"

The boy licked his cone and replied "Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!"

You never miss the water...

 

It's been a hard day. The sun has gone down and I'm enjoying a long hot shower after a full day in the shop.  Reluctantly, I reach to turn off the water when that suddenly becomes unnecessary. The water stops all by itself.

That cannot be good.

If you live in the city, you take for granted that when you turn on the tap, water comes out. But when you live on a well, you don't take that for granted. First thing I did when I bought this property was drill a well.  Without water, it's game over.

My first thought was that there must be an electrical problem.  It takes two pumps, two tanks, a lot of pipe, and an aquifer 350 feet down in the ground to get water to my shower.  

There are three circuit breakers between the groundwater and me, so I get dressed, grab a flashlight and head outside to check. There's one breaker on the back porch, one at the pump house, and a third one out on the well head itself.

None of the breakers are blown.

This cannot be good.

Nothing to do tonight but put on the jammies and go to bed.  In the morning, one of two things will happen.  If there's water in the storage tank, I need to call the pump guy.  If there's no water in the tank, I need to call the well guy.

Either way, I'm gonna need to call my banker...

As I'm about to climb into bed, another thought hits me.  There is another part of this system I  had forgotten about.  I had installed a timer to control when the well pump comes on.  The pump down in the ground comes on when a float in the tank tells it we're about 500 gallons down (out of 5000), and when the float gets down that low, it turns on the well pump.

Because I can't take electricity for granted out here either, I want the well pump to run only at predictable times,  because it draws a lot of power and it runs for an hour.

So I put on a coat over the PJs and get out the flashlight again.

Sure enough, the dial on this digital timer was blank. I don't know why, but it had shut itself off.  

I flipped the switch to "Manual" and immediately heard the lovely sound of water splashing into the tank from far under the soil of Sábado.

I don't know how many hours the well pump ran that night to refill the tank, but it used up all my battery reserve.  That wasn't a problem, because as soon as the sun comes up, the sky goes to work on my solar panels and gives me the gift of power, so by the afternoon of the next day my batteries were full, and so was my water tank.

Normally, I feel the tank to check the water level.  

The metal is cold until my hand gets up to the water level, and from there up, the metal is warm from the sun.  But I had neglected to do this check for several days.

Never take things for granted in the country...

Today, I rigged up a device that will keep me informed of the water situation by sight.

I drilled a hole in the tank's manhole cover, and inserted some fittings that will allow a rod to slide up and down freely. To the bottom end of the rod I attached a copper toilet float, and to the top, a bright yellow rubber ball.

Now I can see at a glance, even from the house, how high the water is.

Hopefully I won't be having my shower water dry up suddenly any more.  Next time I could have shampoo on my head and soap in my eyes!

Two Birds With One Arrow

 Archery has been an off-and-on hobby of mine since I was a kid; back when the bow and arrow were state-of-the-art weapons...

Over the years I've used straw bales for targets, but they eventually rot and fall apart, so I started looking around for a better solution.  I found several posts by people who have used this type of thing, so I built myself one.  It has plastic tarp pieces for the front and back, and it's mostly stuffed with used shrinkwrap that my pals at the farm supply save for me.  

The other cool thing about this setup, on top of the fact that it's pretty impervious to weather, rot, and mice, is that I now have a place to put all those plastic bags that the grocery store sells me and won't recycle.  I can just open the lid and stuff them in.  Eventually it will get too full, but I'm hoping that as the plastic gets shredded by arrows, it will compact even more. 

Hinges on the back, bungees on the front

The plastic stops arrows really well, but they are not at all hard to pull out.

The nice thing about being your own photographer is that you can remove all 'extraneous elements' from the subject before you take the picture...😁

Getting to be that time of year

 I save my dryer lint. To a mental health professional, that could be cause for concern. Unless the good doctor heats her house with wood. Then it makes just as much sense as saving your egg cartons...

About this time each year, I get out the lint, the egg cartons, and a couple blocks of paraffin wax, and make my handy fire starters for the woodstove. 

A pinch of lint in each egg cup...

A pot of melted wax...

A cup of coffee and maybe a bit of homemade bread...

A little rainy-day Norah Jones on the Alexa...

Ready for winter.

In other news, my 'new' 1954 tractor Myrtle was kind of a hillbilly when I got her, because she only had two teeth. Rancher Rick up the road gave me two more out of his goodie pile.  Had to modify them a bit, but now the Old Girl looks a little more respectable.

Another annual chore has been replacing the windsock on top of the water tank.  They last about a year before rotting and falling apart.  Got tired of doing that this year, so bought me another nifty weathervane.

Dragonfly design

Couple more shop cabinets...

And it's time to relax by the fire.

The Many Personalities of the LRT*

 *Little Red Tractor

Most people mow with their yard tractors.  I do too.  Five acres, several times a year, just to keep the weeds down for fire protection. 

But this LRT isn't content with just mowing...

She's almost never this clean

Today, I installed a trailer hitch for moving the boat around.

 

But she can still tow her own trailer

And haul the trash out to the street

And carry a spray rig

With her headlights and a couple cool added LED lights, she can do all this stuff at night too!

She's also good for running down to the mailbox when I'm too lazy to walk, and maybe even making hay... Click on the video!

Betty - 30 days, 6600 Miles in a rented van

First of all, it wasn't me. I ain't that crazy.  Or young.  But Daughter number 1 Jami is.  Every year she goes to Saranac Lake in upstate New York to visit good friends. This year, covid19 made airplane travel and staying in hotels problematic, so she came up with the brilliant (or insane) scheme of renting a van for a month, having dear old dad throw something together to make it livable, and setting off.

Betty

Named for the beloved, fearless, and somewhat wacky Betty White, this Dodge rental van is about to undergo a fast transformation.

Since the furniture had to be installed quickly and removed even more quickly, we had to come up with a unit that could be pre-built and attached to the van framing with velcro straps.

The rental agreement was for 30 days, and not a moment more.  The Hertz pricing algorithm wanted to add hundreds of dollars to the price if she was one day late returning the van.

Here's what we came up with.

And here's the real thing.  Fresh water pumps out of the Sparklets bottle and the sink drains into a five-gallon jug. Jami's brilliant idea of plastic tubs meant secure storage on the road without the need for cupboards, drawers, and doors.
 

The white thing in front is a wastebasket

The trip was not all play.  She works mostly remotely in this covid time, so with this little workstation setup, she could get some work done using a WIFI hotspot.

The plan was for a standard twin bed to be placed opposite the cabinet, made up all the time so she could just flop in after a long day's driving, but at the last minute, sweet cousin, housemate, and fellow adventure traveler Lisa offered to come along and keep her company on at least part of the trip... .

...So the twin bed became bunk beds.

This presented a little problem, because that upper bunk really limited elbow room and the ability for two adults to move around in the van, so...

We came up with a solution. In the daytime, the upper bunk swiveled up and hooked to the ceiling beams with rope clips. Made moving around much easier.

The Master bathroom

Somehow all this needed to fit...

In this...

But she made it work.

Can you tell this is a girl's van? Hint: the rack on the door is for shoes! 😍

With Chewie for a privacy curtain...

And R2D2 for a mascot.

The two road warriors had a cozy little home.

3700 miles out

2900 miles home

   

          Across Lake Michigan on the ferry

Destination: Saranac Lake New York

In the words of songwriter Robert Earl Keen, 

The road goes on forever, but the party never ends.