The Joy Of CD Player Resurrection

So the first job upon arriving home last night was to attempt some sort of repair on the CD Player of Non-Workingness, that the halls of Chateau Stevie would once again ring with the works of King Crimson, Yes, Fairport Convention, Segovia, David Bowie, John Renbourne, Stan Rogers, Show of Hands, The Beatles, Quantum Jump, Dave Brubeck, Django Reinhart, Joan Armatrading, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Rick Wakeman, The Electric Light Orchestra, Mecca Bodega, The Police, Mike Oldfield, Squeeze, Laurie Anderson, Roxy Music, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Led Zepplin, Paul Brady, Steve Harley (with and without the rebellious cockneys) and a host of others sitting in the rotating CD Storage Tower of CD Storage including whatever crap Mrs Stevie and her henchwoman-in-training, The Stevieling put on it while I'm not there.

I drove home in the rain to put me in the right frame of mind, and upon arriving at Chateau Stevie conducted a survey of how best to excise the unit from the cabinet.

Owners of modern stereos may not remember that in the good old days between the "entertainment center" and the "ghetto blaster" eras, one assembled one's stereo system out of components that stacked, usually inside a cabinet made expressly to house such stuff and that gave access to the top for the record transcription turntable unit, or "record player" in Dadspeke. By the time Mrs Stevie and I bought this one, the state of the art was such that one need no longer buy each unit from a different manufacturer, but could buy matching amplifier/tuner units, cassette decks, turntables and, later, CD players. Our stuff is all JVC and was bought during the late eighties, usually as "last year's model" to get a whopping discount on the price of ownership. The CD player doesn't exactly match the rest of the stack because it came a couple of case revisions after the rest. The display is the same colour, but the buttons are of a slightly different style. I digress.

Our stereo is housed on several shelves to the left of and in the same cabinet as our TV set. The arrangement of the carpet and the furniture means that the unit can only be swung away from the wall by any significant amount at the other end of the cabinet. Not only that, but the way the wires had been tucked up in the cabinet when the stereo was installed, along with the rather miserable cable lengths allotted by JVC to the various interconnecting bits meant that just removing the unit from the cabinet would be a job not unlike that of changing the clutch on a Leyland-era mini - a job in which one works in a space just wide enough for one's hands, in an area one cannot see and therefore must explore by feel.

I erected a small tray-table in front of the cabinet and managed by dint of this and by partially removing one shelf to get the CD player out of the cabinet and disconnected from the sound and s-bus cables¹. The power connection was another matter and required the deployment of some class four swear words to get disengaged from the power tap on the tuner/amp.

Now I had the thing on a portable table it was a simple² matter to remove the case top and disengage the fascia (which contains all the controls and the display and has to come off so you can get at various moving parts) and place it in front of the unit for testing. I would have disconnected it an many points during the evening's "fun" but the ribbon cable was firmly attached at the chassis board.

The mechanism is as I described yesterday. CD slides are pulled back into an elevator mechanism, which lowers the disc to the transport/playback assembly. Take a look back if you want a more detailed description. I can't face writing all that again. Even thinking about it all gives me the shakes.

I could still hear a whirling motor for a few seconds when the thing was powered up, but it wasn't the motor used to spin CDs. Interesting. I postulated that a gear had disengaged from a shaft somewhere allowing a servomotor to spin freely. Now many of these mechanisms involve worm gears as the first step in getting the motion from the motor to where it's needed, which would normally mandate against forcing anything by hand. The worm gears used in this unit, however, were of sufficiently steep pitch that there was little danger provided one was gentle. The motors would freewheel obligingly if a light touch was used.

I discovered that by manually retracting the slide hook I could provoke the elevator to hunt up and down. That was one servo mechanism that was nominally working then. The disc tray would open, albeit not promptly and not every time it was asked to, so in principle that servo was mechanically sound too. That left the one that worked the slide retracting hook. By dint of gently prying open the CD single play drawer and painstakingly searching inside the mechanism with a flashlight, I found what I suspected: a worm gear lying on the chassis floor and a nearby motor with nothing on its driveshaft.

I had suspected something of the sort once I heard the free-running motor since one of the drawbacks of worm drives is that should the gear chain they are meshed with jam, say by having the linear mechanism it drives over-running its travel and bottoming out, the motor will, if it is turning in the right direction, cause the worm gear to climb off the drive shaft. If the motor is turning the other way it simply runs until the worm gear has worn away and won't grip the shaft any more. The dismounted gear was annoying, but not nearly as annoying as one that had self-destructed and forced a search for a replacement for the by-now obsolete original part would have been. I was, relatively speaking, in luck.

I tried a number of techniques to put the gear back on the spindle without dimantling the entire sub-assembly (something I was not keen to try since precision alignments were involved that I had grave doubts I could reproduce with the equipment in my workshop) but they all ended in swear words. I eventually had to remove the drive sub-assembly in order to get enough clearance to work, which involved disengaging a couple of dozen loose wires from snap connectors (JVC cheaped out on plugs to interconnect boards and components). This alone drove up the anxiety to Galactic Ultra Infarction levels. One dropped tool would result in jumbled wires and I'd never get them back in the right order again.

It took forever, but using a modified dental pick³ I eventually managed to persuade the gear end to go over the shaft, at which point I simply pushed gently on the CD slide retrieval hook while gripping the gear lightly with a haemostat and used the gear train to push the worm gear back into place in a reverse of the process that pulled it off in the first place.

I managed, after much cursing, to re-install the drive sub-assembly in the chassis, then had to remove it again because I couldn't reach to reconnect some of the wires. Reconnecting all the wires, I was then forced to work around them while trying to place screws deep into the chassis and get them in the proper holes to secure the player sub assembly in place, which required placing the screws using the haemostat. It was tedious with a capital Teed and I emphatically don't recommend the procedure to anyone.

I powered the unit on and ran a test.

It worked!

The CD loaded, slid into place and was properly positioned in the playing mechanism and spun up. Stopping it caused the CD to unload as it should. Result! I looked at the clock. It was almost 10 pm. I'd been struggling with the bloody thing for over two hours.

I put the case back together and spent several minutes trying to reconnect the power to the tap on the tuner/amp by feel before I was successful, then connected up the data and sound wires and replaced the unit on its shelf. Drawing breath I loaded In Reel Time⁴ and was rewarded with the opening strains of "Reynard the Fox". Mrs Stevie came running out.

"It's working? You fixed it?" She asked in amazement.

"Yes and yes" I answered, smugly

"Took you long enough" she sniffed, and returned to her internet friends.

1. The units communicate with each other and the tuner by means of a rudimentary data network. This is so that when you press the CD button on the tuner, the other units such as the cassette deck, record turntable or radio shut down gracefully. It also enables one to box clever when making tapes, pausing the tape when the record ends and so forth. A really useful feature, long superseded↑
2. Ha!↑
3. Which had to be bent into a new shape using my trusty Leatherman pliers. All this bending eventually broke the point off the pick and it will have to have its point reground before I can use it for the modelling tasks I bought it for in the first place. It all makes work for the working man to do↑
4. Fairport Convention↑

Returning Happiness At Chateau Stevie

There was cake.

I got home around 7 pm, with the weather clouding over and the humidity hovering somewhere between "unbearable" and "intolerable". My feet were cooking nicely and all I could think of was hopping in a shower to cool off prior to consuming the repast The Stevieling had promised to make for me. The house was in darkness, and I thought it possible that once again LIPA¹ had made bad atmospheric conditions immeasurably worse by arranging a power cut so none of the fans in the house would work.

I trudged, sweat-drenched, into the front room and made for the kitchen, there to dump my briefcase before dashing to the lavatory to relieve my bladder, much swollen due to the two pints of water I had consumed in order to stave off dehydration on my commute home.

"SUPRISE!" screamed a choir of sonic assassins comprising of the ringleader and master of ambushes, Mrs Stevie, the until-now dear to my heart Stevieling, The MrsStevieDad and MrsStevieMom, Bil the Elder and his partner in crime, Ms Bil the Elder. I let out a manly shriek, incidentally breaking two crystal wine glasses at the back of the crap storage closet that masquerades as our china cabinet, leapt the customary two feet in the air and span round to face my ambushers. Everyone laughed. Once my heart had returned to what I understand is called "sinus rhythm"and ceased trying to make it's own cowardly escape by way of my rib cage I joined in. A merry jape indeed and not only was my urgent need for the toilet completely forgotten, it was now unnecessary. Thank Azathoth I was wearing dark trousers.

We repaired to the gazebo in the garden, a sort of frame tent with anti-mosquito netting walls, where Mrs Stevie had set up a table and would server a meal of barbecued steak, asparagus, spuds, corn on the cob and I don't know what-all else. It was delicious, and only slightly marred by the heavens opening and delivering several gallons of wet into the ground on which everything stood.

I should explain about the Gazebo. We used to have a very elaborate one with fancy details in the steel corner pieces. We placed it on an area of grass under some shade trees². It was great fun to use for dining at night, and The Stevieling used it to study in most nights. Unfortunately, it caught a strong wind during the early fall and hung itself over our back yard fence, badly bending a couple of the struts. I repaired them and we used it again the next year. That year I was less dilligent about removing the large picnic table from it after use each day and that killed all the grass that formed the floor. Then the tent part ripped and last year I didn't bother with the thing. This year, Mrs Stevie wanted a new one, so I re-sodded the grass area on the site (my plan to deck the area having foundered on the rocks of financial reality) and we acquired and erected a new gazebo on the site. The grass did well, and we opened the whole affair for business on July 4th, when we had a barbecue.

It rained all day.

I had planned for this contingency by adding a twenty-foot by ten-foot tent to the construction, but the land slopes downward at Gazebo point and some lightweight bogs and swamps formed in there. I didn't know since I was galley-slave for the day and didn't get to sit down until the late afternoon. Then we had a July 6th barbecue and the weather did the same. Two days of trampling, dark and wet, in which it wasn't possible to remove the table and let in some light, has pretty much killed the new grass. It is all very tiresome.

Anyway, we all had a very nice dinner and things weren't too bad until an impromptu monsoon chose to visit us. In no time at all we had to abandon Gazebo and return to the stifling environs of Chateau Stevie, where Mrs Stevie announced she had coffeeand cake waiting. I let everyone bolt, but I had to move the table out because the ground was so soft now it would actually start sinking into the lawn if I didn't, so I got much soaked before I could seek refuge from the rain. It was pitch dark by now, but fortunately the lightning playing around the sky provided enough illumination for me to finish the task. I reflected that at least I was finally getting the shower I so desperately wanted and needeed.

I joined the others and attempted to lighten the mood with some music. This was a mistake, and things began an inexorable slide into fiasco and recrimination from that point.

On Saturday I had come into the house in the afternoon to discover that someone had turned on the stereo, and that it had been cooking itself for hours. The glass door to the stack was hot to the touch and there was no where for the heat to go since the ambient temperature was Swelter Factor 9 and had been all day. I let out a yelp and grabbed the X10³ remote I use to control the various appliances in that room, and cut the power. This was also a mistake, because I wasn't aware that Mrs Stevie had been listening to a book on disc and had paused the CD player rather than stopping it.

For those who have never seen the inside of a rack-mount CD player, I will explain. Our unit, a JVC player of 1987 vintage, has a single play drawer and a six-disc magazine. The magazine has six slots containing slides which hold the discs. The single play drawer also has a slide, though you could be forgiven for not knowing that since it looks like part of the drawer when it's open.

When a disc is inserted in the unit and the drawer closed (or magazine inserted) the disc simply sits in the slide and the slide sits where it was put. When the "play" button is pressed, an elevator is positioned behind the slide, either one of the magazine slots or the single-play drawer, and a hook extends and withdraws the slide (with its disc load) inside the elevator. Once the slide is inside the elevator, the whole assembly descends to the transport mechanism, which spins up the disc and contains the laser transcription head.

It is all very interesting to see and always induces colly-wobbles of no mean magnitude in your humble scribe when he contemplates the shear number of micro-switches, elaborate gear trains and electric servo motors needed to pull it all off. Not only is there the obvious motor/reduction gear/rack and pinion affair necessary to just open and close the drawer, there is another to pull out the slides and a motor/reduction gear/spiral rack and pinion arrangement needed to drive the elevator. That doesn't include the simple solenoid that ejects the magazine, which only has about four moving parts and is therefore a model of mechanical brevity where this CD player is concerned.

Back to the party.

When I powered up the CD player, the display showed gibberish. It said it was playing a disk, but that there was no playable surface under the head (it said it in different terms, but I'm an old hand at interpreting Hi-Fi displays and translating to real world conditions and I'll spare you the blow-by-blow account of the display, which would require several diagrams copyrighted by JVC and yet more of this interminable drool). I ejected the single play tray, which wouldn't eject at first, then coughed up the disc Mrs Stevie had paused so many days ago, which had a gratifying amount of filth on it, being a public library disc. I loaded In Reel Time, a fake live album by Fairport Convention that is always popular, turned the volume way down and pressed play. I was rewarded by the sound of a fast spinning motor and no music to speak of.

Five minutes of fiddling did nothing but persuade me that the CD player was now hors de combat and drive my temper a little south of bad. Mrs Stevie denied all knowledge of course, then fessed up to pausing her disc "to take a phone call" on Saturday. I slipped into being lightly livid. It is one of my bugbears that the women in my house treat our technology as both indispensable and indestructible. They treat it like it was Lego or Playmobil and look completely surprised when these delicate precision instruments respond by falling apart. Mrs Stevie would have none of it though. She wanted to serve the cake and was not going to put up with any nonsense just because the CD player wasn't working. I loaded the disc into the DVD player and grumpily went to do the candle thing.

Though I wasn't in the mood for cake any more, I was considerably cheered when Mrs Stevie unboxed it only to find that the icing had sloughed off the cake and formed a puddle around the base. This was a temperature-related infrastructure failure that anyone could understand. The cake now sported upon its upper surface a sort of Dali-esque message of felicitous wishes me-ward, distorted beyond anyone's ability to extract the original sentiment, bare sponge-cake sides and a stylish crater of buttery goodness gluing it all to the box it came in. To this, Mrs Stevie added two or three handfulls of decorative candles, which she lit. The heat from these was so intense I was forced to improvise a Red Adair-like shield from aluminum foil and the lid of the cake box in order to blow them out in the time-honoured tradition of spreading one's respiratory infections to all who wish one well. Even so I lost a half-inch of hair (already in short supply) and both eyebrows to the blaze before it was extinguished.

At the height of the recriminations my sister called to gloat that she was still almost three years younger than me. Apparently, this is a source of yearly amazement to her. I conveyed my traditional wish that her house wastepipe be struck by lightning while she was bathing and she hung up so my mum and dad could have a turn. I don't remember the details of their call other than that they still loved me and would continue to do so no matter what I did. I thanked them for that and they went back to whatever they do when they are out of sight of sane people.

Eventually everyone went home and left me to wonder how I was going to resurrect a dead stereo. I'm not sure, what with the preponderance of mp3-based music currently fooling those who either don't care about music quality or who can't hear it no matter how Hi the Fi, that affordable rack-mount CD players are still available. I got blindsided by the overnight disappearance of the LP in 1987⁴ so I take nothing for granted any more.

But there was cake.

1. The Long Island Power Authority, the source of electricity for the poor bastards who live under their evil dominion↑
2. One of which was the incorrigible niusance that I half cut down two episodes or so ago↑
3. A way of using your house wiring as a control network for your lights, radio, anything that plusg in. I can operate a number of living room things from a single wireless remote control↑
4. Which is why we bought the CD player in the first place - you literally couldn't buy an LP any more in Deer Park or its neighbouring towns. I went out to get a record and ended up having to buy a CD player. It took weeks to get over the shock↑

HBTMHBTMHBDMHBTM

This morning I was surprised out of a sound sleep by Mrs Stevie.

I was a bit muggy and feather-brained as it was a very-much needed sleep indeed, but I still managed to get into a respectable defensive posture in three seconds or so, rolling myself in the mattress so as to present nil areas of vulnerability to the vile haridan's fiendish attack modes while warning her off with my trademark falsetto warshriek. From inside my stifling antiballistic posturepedic carapace I could just see she had brought in reinforcements - The Stevieling.

This gave me pause. Mrs Stevie is in an almost constant state of strife with The Stevieling. It simply wasn't possible for them to form an alliance to do me harm, since they would never be able to shelve their own deep-seated differences long enough to co-ordinate maneuvers vis-a-vis my good self.

Which was why I actually complied with the demand to "stop being stupid, unroll and pay attention, idiot!"

Mrs Stevie handed me a glass of orange juice, which I naturally viewed with deep suspicion. I sniffed it, but didn't expect to detect the odour of bitter almonds since Mrs Stevie is far too sophisticated to introduce smelly pollutants into my food or drink. No odour. I thought for a minute but the only poison that was odourless that I could remember with any clarity was Iocaine powder, which has the singular property that it doesn't exist outside of the film The Princess Bride. Oh, I knew there were real odourless poisons, I just couldn't remember them.

"What's this?" I asked, stalling for time.

"Orange juice!" said The Stevieling. "We brought it for you as a treat."

I sipped thoughtfully on the juice as I formulated my witty response. Did the child think I was foolish enough to drink juice I hadn't witnessed being poured? I brooded silently, then handed Mrs Stevie the empty glass, still not sure how I would handle the situation.

"This is for you" said The Stevieling and handed me a bag containing a new Risk game for my collection. What on earth was going on?

Mrs Stevie then handed me an envelope that proved to contain a greeting card and three tickets to the last-but-one concert the reformed Police will perform, at Jones Beach.

What the hell was going on? Perhaps Mrs Stevie had done something she was apologising for, but that would be unheard of. Not the doing, the apologising. The Stevieling then insisted I come to the computer to watch an animation she had written staring an anime version of myself, which I did and which was charming and startling seeing as no-one showed her how to use the particularly twisty version of Flash I own. I never mastered it myself.

As the credits rolled it became obvious what the whole affair was about. I had quite forgotten.

I hope there will be cake.

Poles Apart

Well, not so much, really.

You, dear readers ¹, probably assumed I'd forgotten to tell you when the men from the telephone company took down the badly cracked pole leaving me with only one. Maybe you thought that the results of the pole-guying fiasco I had prophesied had not come to pass and that I was quietly letting the story fade away from your collective memories.

You will be happy to know that the badly damaged pole is still standing outside, next to the "good" pole, which seems to be being undermined by hydraulic run-off. The "good" pole has, as predicted, adopted an alarming lean due to the guy wire being not in line with the pole-to-ground-cleat tether. Fortunately, the broken pole, still holding up cable TV wires ², has been secured to the "good" pole by a couple of loops of old rope someone had in the truck.

It's good here, innit?

1. Three, at last count↑
2. I have no doubt the CTV crews, which use spiky shoes and a rope sling to climb the poles, took one look at the splintered foot of the old ³ pole and said "No bleeping way!"↑
3. A relative term, said pole having been in place a mere 18 months after replacing the pole knocked in two by another stupid kid in a car who thought you could just sit there and the car would drive itself like they do on TV↑

On Newtonian Inspiration Towards A Universal Theory Of Gravity

It doesn't look that hard to do.

Shut up brain.

No, really. See the way it splits at the eight foot mark? You could cut it there with your polesaw.

It's more like ten feet. The polesaw is only just ten feet long.

The polesaw is a majestic twelve feet long. It will reach easily. Have it done in a flash.

Literally if it brings down the power line when it falls. Nope. Not doing it.

It won't come close to the power line. You cut it here. See? It will swing in a graceful arc like so and miss the power line by a good two feet.

And after the geometry ambush you pulled four years ago resulting in a mountain of topsoil I only just got rid of last Fall you expect me to trust you with life-threatening trigonometry? Not a chance!

"Geometry ambush?" I don't recall any...

You had me calculate a volume of topsoil in cubic yards which possessed only nine cubic feet instead of the more customary twenty seven! Don't play stupid with me!

Oh that!

Yes that.

An innocent mistake. I was tired and you know full well I don't work well when I'm not fully rested.

It was first thing on a Saturday morning!

Ancient history, irrelevant to the case at hand. You know Mrs Stevie wants the thing gone. She abhors it.

Although being ferried from that harridan's embrace by Charon has often seemed an attractive option, I am feeling happy with my situation at the moment and not at all in the mood to do myself in by dropping a tree on my head. The answer is no.

Look, it's true there isn't the usual safety space recommended in the chainsaw manuals...

Are you kidding? This tiny space directly under the tree is the only place I could stand owing to the fact the polesaw isn't long enough. Not only is the pole too short, I shall have to hold it by the very end of the pole, recipe for disaster straight out of the saw's manual. Everything about this job you are so eager to have me do is clearly depicted in the "never do" section of the manuals for my 20" Poulan chainsaw, my 14" Sears chainsaw and the polesaw. The Poulan manual has a particularly graphic illustration to drive home the point. I felt queasy for days after reading it.

Hyperbole and exaggeration included by the Poulan legal department in order to avoid frivolous lawsuits.

That's as may be. If the power line comes down she'll do her nut. It'll be way worse than a summer of "have you cut that tree down yet?" I'm picking my battle and I pick the one where I don't end up flattened under a tree and where Mrs Stevie has internet.

Oh don't be ridiculous. It's wood for Azathoth's sake. You're talking like it's made of pig iron.

Bloody tree wood is denser, more massive and therefore heavier than you would expect. I know this because you've tricked me into carrying it on more than one occasion and now have the spinal discs to prove it. I'm not so stupid I don't know that that damn tree limb will behave like unto a speeding anvil when it is severed from the trunk. I've dug enough pieces of that accursed maple from the now-cratered wreck that my once lush front lawn has become of late. All due to vertically-translating high-velocity tree parts.

I'll bet the limb will swing down gracefully to smash into these dendritic fern things here, and that you'll have plenty of time as a result to retire from ground zero. Why don't we just work out how long that would be...

Oh no! No. Nonononono! I'm not letting you loose with S=UT + ½at² and 2π Cos θ! You must think I'm mad!

If I were you I'd be less concerned about what I think and more concerned with what the next-door neighbour thinks. You've been standing, staring at the tree for about ten minutes, all the time muttering to yourself.

Good point. I'll get the polesaw.

Later

The tree is about fifty feet high, with a bifurcated trunk that splits into two equally sized limbs at about the seven foot mark. Mrs Stevie has hated it for years on account of it dropping fruit that resembles blackberries (but isn't) all over the yard. Sometimes the berries are red, almost like raspberries but not actually raspberries. This year it was specialising in horrid maggot-white ones, something out of a Lovecraft story. This had finally gotten me to wander into Mrs Stevie's court for a bit.

She wants the tree gone, but there are several obstacles. The one limb is balanced to drop into Crazy Joe's yard, something to be avoided at all costs and I had no hesitation in putting that job off to the end of the year. The other limb looked good to go, but was threatening a power line in such a way that simply cutting the limb at the seven foot point was not an option. I would have to start higher in order to shorten the radial swing of the severed tree limb enough to clear the wire. This would require the use of the polesaw, which is nothing more or less than a ten-inch electric chainsaw of exceptional sharpness mounted on an extending pole allowing an advertised reach of from six to twelve feet. The weight of the saw is enough to pose serious control difficulties when the pole is at full extension. Did I mention it is razor sharp? I naturally had to own one of these unfeasible tools if only to see if Mrs Stevie would ban my ever using it. I normally choose gas-powered tools over electric owing to the need for extension cords, but even I'm not stupid enough to attempt limbing a tree with a gas powered pole saw. Yes, they make such things.

The problem with using the polesaw to bring down the tree in question was that firstly, the extension cord was just long enough but no longer, and that the last foot of the pole couldn't be extended without it sliding back into the handle again. This meant that I was holding the saw by the end of a ten-foot pole at arms length while standing directly under the limb I was cutting. In order to maximise the excitement this arrangement was generating in your humble scribe, I eschewed the recommended tree-felling gear of hard hat, heavy clothing and steel-toed boots for a soft sun hat, tee shirt and swimming trunks and sneakers. With my heart in my throat I activated the polesaw and began to cut. At which point I stood on the extension cord and pulled it out of the polesaw's receptacle. Reconnecting the cord involved placing the polesaw on a picnic table located nearby and plugging it back in, a job requiring both hands due to the large quantities of chain oil that had coated everything making every surface almost friction free. I repositioned the saw and stood on the cord again, and had to reconnect it yet again. Then I did it all again. And Again.

A nagging voice was suggesting that this was in fact not the usual anti-handyman deamon activity that accompanies so many of my jobs, but an anti-incompetence angel trying to prevent a terrible tragedy. I naturally ignored it. I long ago learned not to do things The Voices told me to.

Eventually I managed to get things organised long enough for the polesaw to cut entirely through the branch at the highest point I could get to with a convenient crotch for guiding the saw. The branch severed. I struggled with the pole and managed to retain control, all the while watching the tree limb and trying to figure out which way to jump.

Which turned out to be backwards.

The branch swung in a graceful arc just long enough for the outermost branch to pluck lightly at the powerline like some Segovia-inspired Ent, then it came down like an express train to land right in front of me, in the spot where I had just been standing.

"Great Heavens!" I exclaimed¹ and the tree fragment rolled over, cudgeling me cruelly about the head and shoulders before trapping me in a woody cage of inescapable captivity.

I used a few of my better Words of Power, stripped the polesaw and detached the chainsaw from the pole, then got busy making matchwood of the tree. I won free of my arboreal captivity after a titanic struggle in which I trod on the extension cord and yanked it out of the saw no less than seven, possibly eight times. It was all very tedious.

Having removed the greater part of the mass of the limb, I re-assembled the polesaw and went about cutting the other branch from the main limb, the one I had used to guide the saw the first time. Once again I positioned the saw. Once again I trod on the cord. Once again I did it all over again.

Finally I cut through the branch and it came clear of the limb. With a mighty squeak of sheer terror I leapt for the safety of anywhere but where I was standing, but came up against the edge of that picnic table I was using to reassemble the saw/power cord arrangement and inadvertently used up a number of class three swear words I was saving for an emergency. My right kidney felt like it had been thwacked by a picnic table, which was, coincidentally, exactly what had happened. I madly spun around looking for the fallen tree part, but it was nowhere to be seen.

Until I looked up, that is.

It had fallen into one of the dendritic fern things and the other limb of the tree it once belonged to and was firmly stuck. I studied the situation with a jaundiced eye, noting in passing that the power lines were still oscillating but hadn't as yet pulled out of either the house service entrance or the transformer tapping. One in the win column then.

I pulled hard on several outer branches but all that happened was that I got showered with nasty white berries. I ended up cutting the thing a second time with the polesaw in an attempt to get it to fall out of the tree but every time I got the branch almost cut through it would shift so I couldn't continue the cut. I eventually lost my temper, grabbed a handful of branches and pulled, at which point one of the cuts I'd made broke though and the main branch snapped in two.

I fell backwards as the piece I had in my hands came crashing down. The cluster of small springy branches that made up the main branch's underside bent under it as it came to rest in front of me, then released all their stored energy, catapulting the whole springy mess at me like some demented possessed tree spirit. For the second time that day I was thrashed about the head and pinioned by a woody fiend.

I fought my way free of imprisonment, staunching my new wounds with a filthy shred of paper towel I had used to mop the oil from the polesaw and stood glowering at the fallen branch.

Which was when the remaining piece chose to fall directly behind me, cartwheeling to the ground in order that my back might feel the maximum number of blows from subsidiary branches.

I dragged the fallen debris out of theater while chanting some restorative charms, then surveyed the remains of the trunk. There was now just a four foot long piece of wood about as thick as my thigh (and I have manly thighs of Herculean build I might add) that I would cut from the body of the tree, leaving only the limb leaning over the fence and balanced to fall on the neighbour's yard. That limb I would not cut under any circumstances, as I explained to the pouting Mrs Stevie who had come on the scene just in time to advise me how I had done it all wrong. She wasn't happy that I wouldn't free her of the intolerable berry menace, choosing only to reduce it by half. She wasn't impressed by my fervent explanations of the dangers posed nor by the freely bleeding wounds I had over 90% of my exposed skin. She would, however, live with the decision since she was not about to try using the polesaw herself.

Not after she saw what it's use had done to me at any rate.

I was happier about this last cut because by extending the polesaw to it's maximum I could stand off to one side and, for the first time in the whole business, adopt a safe place to work from. I made a detailed study of the limb and confirmed there were no surprises waiting in the form of branches I hadn't seen, then cut the log from the remains of the tree. It cut fairly easily and broke free from the trunk to fall vertically to the floor, about seven feet or so, enough to dig a decent sized hole when it landed. It crashed down, hesitated for a moment before falling towards me in a graceful arc. I wasn't worried. I was well out of the reach of its four foot (or so) length.

Unfortunately, I wasn't out of the reach of the long, thin, single branch growing from the back side of the trunk in such a way that it couldn't be seen before the cut was made. The green, springy wood lashed back and forth striking me several good blows on the shoulders and face rather in the manner of a bullwhip before I could take evasive action. Worse still, the neighbours were alerted to my plight by my manly howls of anguish and by the sardonic laughter of Mrs Stevie.

That was it! I marched back to the garage and dug out my 20 inch chainsaw, last used to reduce a maple tree to sawdust and firewood. In a matter of about 45 minutes it was all over for the abusive and incorrigible tree.

At least for the half I cut down, anyway.

1. I believe those were the words I used though truth to tell I was a bit busy at the time and hadn't prepared anything in advance↑

Dead Air

This blog has been silent for very long periods of late.

Why?

Because I took stock and decided there were a number of things I had to do that had to take precedence over struggling to render the tedium that has been my life of late into entertaining form so that you Dear Reader may indulge in shard 'n' froyder at my expense. Shard I can take any day, but relentless froyder has exhausted me and I find my priorities now set to more important matters that are taking up the time I normally use to write the blog.

Like watching seasons one through three of the excellent Boston Legal on DVD.

When I'm done, around the end of the week, I'll get back to you.

Barbecues and Swimming Pools: Ban Them Now!

The weekend was fun.

Oh, wait a minute. No it wasn't. Mr Brain must have blanked it all out in a rare bout of humanity. I remember now. It was wall-to-wall, shag-pile tedium with a side order of inconvenience.

First of all, it was hot. Spring was non-existent this year and we went from cool weather characterised mainly by the aquatic nature of the air to roasting hot with no air at all. The weather did vary a little during the first five months of the year; the rain sometimes came in horizontally and on at least one occasion upward. Mrs Stevie took one good hard look at the sweating walls of Chateau Stevie and cancelled my plans of making myself scarce and getting some quality time in at one of the local bars (where they have air conditioning and ice-cold beverages for the tired man about town) for an alternate one in which I drove her around every Sears, Blowes and Home Despot in the Greater Metropolitan New York Area¹ while The Stevieling moaned quietly at the injustice of it all. Thank Azathoth the Steviemobile has A/C. What a shame I had to sell a kidney in order to pay for the gasoline. I digress.

Sometime during the previous week Mrs Stevie had come into a) a small amount of cash and 2) the frame of mind in which nothing would suffice but to spend the spondulix on a new barbecue grill. I couldn't see the point since we didn't barbecue at all last year² and we have a perfectly good two-burner barbecue already. Of course, the little swing grill that you use to warm stuff and cook hot dogs on has gone completely rusty and I haven't been able to replace it since the barbecue is about 12 years old and the hardware chain that sold it to us was driven out of business by Home Despot, the lavarock has seen better days⁴ and the piezo-electric igniter no longer works reliably at all⁵. I expressed my "we already have a barbecue, dear" viewpoint, but Mrs Stevie countered with her irrefutable and fiendishly reasoned "shuttup, idiot!" argument, so we set out on a four hour voyage of barbecue discovery.

Gas barbecues used to be fairly straightforward affairs. A metal box housing the burner assembly (a sort of "H" shaped thing of folded metal with holes drilled into it to let the flames out), a grate to hold the lavarock briquettes which the flames heat to provide a more diffuse area suitable for cooking and which catch the fat drips to provide flare (now deemed carcinogenic and a threat to democracy by the Barbecue Police but still highly prized in La Cuisine De Stevie), and a box-shaped lid with a lot of headroom for cooking a whole pig or a significant portion of a cow without propping the lid open and letting all the heat out. The whole thing was black so that the chef-de-barbercue could get an object lesson in black body radiation and an insight into what the pig/cow/whatever was going through.

Not now though. A paradigm shift has occured in Gas barbecue design aethetics.

Now, nothing will do but to have three or four burners. Mrs Stevie was agitating for four and it was her money and what did I know and would I please knock off the sulking before "someone" knocked it off for me, so four it was. All barbecues are now made of stainless steel, which looks nice until you touch it after which it needs polishing. Polishing materials are in aisle 5 next to the barbecue tongs. All barbecues now have low-profile, aerodynamically sloped lids, which is good if you wish to mount the thing on the front of your Lamborghini but gives you a bit less space for Mr Oink to sizzle into deliciousness. All barbecues now come with spiffy battery-powered electric spark igniters, removing the need to furiously crank the little knob or jab repeatedly the button that works the spring-loaded hammer affair that provokes the crystal into making a spark. In other words, they've ruined all the fun.

It was love at thirty-first sight for Mrs Stevie who was deaf to my bewildered cries of "but it doesn't have a window to watch the food cook like our old one".

"There is so much crap on that window that you couldn't see a magnesium flare cooking on our old barbecue" snarled the harridan, rolling up her right sleeve while maneuvering to get behind me for a cowardly rear-assault.

"Nonsense!" I protested. "A quick session with my trusty razor-blade scraper and it will be clear as a bell"

"For how long?" she sweetly insinuated

"About half a burger's worth is about standard" I said, simultaneously attempting to break her strangle hold.

There then followed a frank exchange of views that visited a wide variety of territory, mostly at my expense, and I agreed that a new barbecue would be a fine thing.

What could top the events of that Saturday for disruptive inconvenience and expense?

Sunday decided to have a crack at it.

It began with me deciding to open the swimming pool. Twenty four hours at a mean temperature approaching that of the solar corona had me hallucinating about floating in crystal clear, cool water, my hair turning slightly green from having jumped in the pool before the shock had burned completely off. I looked at the piles of wet leaves still drying on the cover.

I had raked the leaves out of the shallow layer of green slimy rain water (the majority of which I had siphoned off on Saturday morning) to dry on the black pool cover, but despite the torrid heat and merciless sun beating down all day they still were soaking wet and stinking up a treat. Apparently there is some science that is waiting to be done here. Smelly science, I'll admit. Very smelly. In fact, on a scale of 1-10 where 1 is odourless and 10 is sceptic-tank sludge wagon in high-speed collision with Ammonia wagon, this science is destined to be a good 8.5. But it will be worth it, for if the secret of deodourising can be gleaned and the mysteries of the limitless wetness under extreme dessicating conditions can be illuminated for all, not only is there a dead cert Nobel Prize for Extreme Science in the offing, but no-one need ever dehydrate in the lines at Universal Studios (Fla) ever again. Specially trained staff could apply a deliciously cool, damp layer of leaf mulch to each ticketholder as they enter in the morning.

Where was I?

Oh right. You may remember that removing the cover is problematic since the water level is down about a foot and a half (Approximately 0.75 Napoleons in metric) and it becomes impossible to get the cover off without dumping the filth into the pool unless the cover is squeaky clean before I start, which was about as possible as Federal Income Tax being repealed after the pool spending last winter and what passed for spring under the trees. During spring, as I have mentioned, there had been much rain. Indeed, every time I drained off the pool cover it refilled within hours.

I pondered, and Mr Brain suggested I connect the filter pump and fill the pool before I removed the cover. It was so brilliant an idea that I failed completely to spot the sneaky trap I was falling into. No doubt you can sense trouble looming, but I imagine that even you only have a hazy idea of what the nature of the fiasco in the making was, so cunning was the setup.

I got all the bits I needed out of the shed. The pump. The hoses. The extension cord with wire as thick as my little finger (and I have got fat fingers). The timer that plugs into the extension cord and drives the pump. Later that afternoon I was to search the garden from one end to the other several times without finding that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned timer. But I digress.

Around lunch time I was in a position to start the filter pump (sans timer) and add the shock treatment. During this operation Mrs Stevie arrived in theater and announced she had bought the barbecue grill she wanted, and would I please unload it from the car and put it together and I should take the bits out of the box first because it had taken four burly men to load it into her car and she didn't want me to drop it and damage it.

I wandered round to the driveway muttering some protective charms under my breath and casting humorous dark looks at my wife. There was the car, springs groaning in protest, with the largest, heaviest-looking box I've seen since Troll The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness was delivered. I pulled out my trusty Swiss Army Knife and hacked and slashed at the box. In a mater of only ten minutes I had managed to saw through the impervium ribbons it had been banded with and gained entry into the inner core of barbecuey goodness.

There were about six hundred bits in that box

Mrs Stevie went out "to buy groceries" leaving me to ponder the mysteries of barbecue construction in a World Gone Mad. I unwrapped panels, grills, grids, handles, and plastic bags with small parts in them. I also found the card with the screws, washers and a couple of tools bubble-wrapped to it. What I didn't find were the casters for the base.

I opened the instructions. Step 1: Fit casters

I hunted high and low for the damned things and eventually turned them up in an unlikely-looking flat box hiding under a pile of discarded wrapping and packing materials.

Screwing the casters into the base, a job a crack-deranged monkey could have done blindfold, was complicated by the special "caster wrench" they had supplied to snug the casters down with. It was machined so that it was impossible to get the wrench to reliably grip the hexagonal base and allow it to be screwed up against the stop. I ended up using my self-adjusting pliers and consigning the wrench to the bucket o' genuinely useless tools. This thing had to be the second most useless and pointless tool in exsistence (pride of place going to the contour gauge that was so monumentally unsuited to the task of transfering a contour that I walled it up in New Bog in disgust).

Then I fitted the sides and the front door. I was disappointed to find that after that the clearances were so tight I couldn't use Mr Battery-Powered Drill to drive the screws. It would have saved some much-needed time.

The most unlooked-foreward-to bit was the hoisting of the actual barbecue, lid and all, onto the base. It had been packed as a single piece and couldn't be easily broken down. It was supposed to be a two person job but I managed to get the damned thing in place and bolted down on my own with only a ten percent overspend on level four swear words. When I discovered that the washers I had fitted at this stage by means of turning myself into a human pretzel had stuck together causing me to double up the parts used which required me to undo everything and recover the extras I wandered briefly in fields of level three swear words I admit.

But I was coming along nicely and had only the side burner to fit when the heavens unexpectedly abruptly opened and we had some high speed vertical wet. Mrs Stevie had just re-appeared and so she, I and the Stevieling leaped around gathering parts and covering up the barbecue while soak happened and decorative lightning bolts struck all around.

It was at this time that some of the screws became separated from the card.

When the rain had stopped I recommenced the barbecue build, and was alerted to the possibility of lost fasteners by stepping on one in my bare feet. I found all the parts but one nut, which was used to secure a hinge and so could safely be left off for a bit while I located a new part, and I declared the barbecue open for business. I transplanted the gas cylinder from our old barbecue to the Silver Machine, and Mrs Stevie lit it up. It took about two minutes to reach 350 degrees Fahrenheit, something our old grill could manage in about five minutes, and I grudgingly admitted it was A Good Thing.

Leaving Mrs Stevie to turn groceries into dinner I went and examined the pool to find that the throughput of the filter had dropped to almost nothing. I pulled out the filter and could see even in the dim twilight that it was completely green.

Not good

I had lost six weeks of the hottest part of the year to a persistent green algae problem last year. Apparently it had not cleared up as I had thought but just lain dormant. What a shame I didn't actually look at the water before topping off the pool, eh?

I got out a Maglite flashlight and, prizing up the cover, shone it into the water.

I couldn't see more than a couple of feet.

That was it. I was done. I shut it all down and on Monday night, resolving not to get caught in an endless cylce of cleaning and filtering and sweltering but on no account swimming, I removed the cover and began syphoning off the thousands of gallons of green soup. A quick but thorough cleaning with extremely chlorinated water, followed by a complete rinse and draining with the wet-dry vac if necessary and I'll replace the water so carefully nurtured into a decent buffer over three years with new, untainted stuff from the tap and start over.

Stupid pool.

1. Which, for the uninitiated also includes bits of New Jersey and Connecticut though they don't tell you that of course, just sometimes hint at it playfully with the euphamistic term "The Tristate Area"↑
2. The first time that has happened since my happy union with the woman of my dreams³↑
3. Mrs Stevie, you dolt! The fact that the dream became, as so many do, a nightmare from which I desperately wish to awaken is not germane to the story at hand. I wish you'd keep up↑
4. But despite "expert" opinion to the contrary, that can be remedied by the simple action of leaving both burners on "medium" all night. In the morning the now grease-free lavarock will be coated with a fine ash, the barbecue wheels will have melted and the neighbourhood will smell absolutely delicious (and will continue to do so for hours). Not only that, the barbecue will be about as clean as it is possible to get it without a sandblaster. When gas came in at $17 a cannister that was an almost economical mistake plan. Now, I believe it is cheaper to buy a whole new grill than get the gas refilled↑
5. This is common, and caused by hamburger grease, pig fat and gosh knows what else dripping onto the igniter for a year or so↑

Too Much Information, LIRR Style

The LIRR has fitted spiffy new signs in each station on our branch, including Wyandanch (Pearl of the East).

Hanging from Olde Worlde cast-iron posts remeniscent of something one might see in Main Street, USA¹, these signs are composed of matrices of amber LEDs that can be illuminated or not to form informational phrases.

There is an open book on how long they will continue to work and another on how long the Wyandanch onse will actually remain in place (stuff of any percieved value tending to wander at that location when no-one is looking) but that isn't what I want to relate today.

No, today I want to tell you of my Friday morning commute, which was spiced up by the sign telling me that the train would be arriving 6 minutes late on platform 1A. This came as a relief to every passenger waiting on the platform

Wyandanch is a single track station ².

1. In The Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World↑
2. This ties in with a time about ten years ago when a lady, obviously not a regular commuter, approached me at Wyandanch and asked if the New York train arrived on "this track". I was so confused by her Dadaistic question I forgot to say "No love, you need the other one" to see what she would do↑

Whacking: Off

Well, it's been a busy two weeks here at the Steviemanse.

It started with the grass deciding to start growing again, necessitating mower-oriented activity, sprinkler deployage and a session of one-on-one, sudden-death smackdown with Mr Weedwacker.

I drained the fuel tank of Troll The Snowblower of Supreme Spiffiness and used the gas (almost five years old, salvaged from the original Steviemobile) to coax the lawnmower into life. The gas manufacturers¹ would have you believe that after six months in a can, gas turns into sulphuric acid and will kill an internal combustion engine in seconds flat. Only a cynic would believe this was a tale concocted to promote sales. Colour me cynical. The mower runs fine and does not explode, spew corrosive vapour from its exhaust or even puff black smoke. It even cuts grass.

I broke out the sprinklers and found that three of the four rainbirds² were busted. Two of them showed the signature damage that indicated a mower drive-by, but the other had simply lost the little pin that holds all the moving parts together. A quick session with my Leatherman Tool and I had pried the pin from one of the busted units and effected a repair.

Then it was a simple matter of turning on the water and fiddling with the jet so it would water the lawn and not the road and the job was done. This time i remembered to remove my cell phone from my pants pocket so that it wouldn't be damaged when the sprinklers contrived to shoot ice-cold water up the leg of my shorts³. Of course, I had neglected to do that last year, with the result that the phone will no longer charge its battery, so that was an exercise in futility, really. Still, it's the principle of the thing.

Once that job was done it was time to break out my old nemesis, Mr Weedwacker. Over the years we have done battle with the weeds and each other (mostly each other now I come to think about it) and this blog is littered with tales of wounds sustained and humiliation delivered in public by that Anti-handyman demon-infested thing, but even so, there is really no better way to rip out unwanted on-property greenery while at the same time being hit in the face with supersonic gravel. That day, another problem with the wretched tool was to manifest itself.

Oh we went through all the old standards. The pulling on the string while varying the configuration of the choke and throttle in the vain hope the engine will fire for more than 5/8ths of a second at a time. The realisation upon finally getting the damned thing running that the gas tank was almost empty so the engine would have to be switched off again while refueling ops took place⁴. The opening of the gas tank to discover the little gas-cap retaining chain had broken again and was somewhere inside the gas tank where my fingers couldn't get it without draining the remaining gas. The refueling followed by the realisation that the gas cap was not where I left it ten seconds before. The ten-minute hunt for the gas cap to the accompaniment of my very best swear words. The location of the cap and the suspiciously easy restarting of the engine. The prompt exhausting of the string on the spool, necessitating another three feet be cut and laboriously wound onto the spool. The hunt for one of the two reels of trimmer cord I have somewhere around here, I know because I saw them only two months ago while I was looking for the yard broom which turned out to be in the shed but where is the gbleepd-dbleepd wheedwacker cord gbleepd-dbleepm it? The finding and cutting of said cord.

It was and is all very trying.

The new variation was the discovery after all this rigmarole that the bump-knob for the spool was worn completely away.

For those not in-the-know, a weedwhacker of the older type has a spool of nylon cord⁵ of a given thickness (Sears colour-code their brand according to heftiness. I use green which indicates a manly yet not testosterone-fueled level of weed whackerism) that is driven by a motor of some kind (mine is gas-powered, but I also have a smaller electric one). The cord is flung out of each side of the spool by centrifugal force⁶, forming a surprisingly effective cutter. The problem is that the string wears away, especially when it impacts concrete, such as during edging operations, but the wily weedwacker designers have thought of this and provided for the contingency by including a cunning escapement mechanism into the spool such that bumping it on the ground while the spool is spinning causes the inner reel part of the spool to unwind a length of cord. It's dead clever.

The problem was that I am a little over-aggressive in the use of the weedwacker for those operations which damage the cord, and so have had to bump this one a few gazillion times. The bump is taken by the knob used to hold the real in the shroud and although it is made of special hard-wearing plastic it eventually does need replacing. The problem was, my weedwacker was a McCulloch and, unbeknownst to me that day⁷ the firm had ceased trading at the end of the 1990s. A lengthy search of the web failed to turn up any parts for my model weedwacker.

Tiresomer and tiresomer.

I tooled around every Home Despot, Blowes and Arse Hardware in the area but couldn't find a reel with the same fitting or a knob that would do as a substitute for the old one. The nearest I could find was a Ryobi reel, which had the wrong sized bolt to hold it onto the shaft but did have the same hexagonal drive mechanism. I was pretty demoralised by all this. The weedwacker isn't otherwise in need of replacement (the anti-handyman demons infesting mine are par for the course and any new weed whacker will probably come factory-installed with a set of its own). It seemed a shame to use up a tool-acquisition opportunity so unnecessarily.

A sharp pain lanced across my forehead. Fireworks erupted in each of my eyeballs. The scent of burning chocolate flooded my nose. For a brief instant I could taste colour, see sound and hear funny-bone pins-and-needles. I knew these signs: an idea was forming.

I would use Mr Brain and some tools to fabricate a new reel from whatever I could find in the stores that almost worked.

I grabbed a Ryobi reel and a spare Ryobi know in case my first cut was less-than-stellar and returned home. The Ryobi reel had the wrong sized bolt. It was too fat, so I would use the one from the old knob. The Ryobi knob's bolt was hexagonal headed, the original was square-headed. No problem, a quick session with Mr Dremel tool fitted with a cylindrical cutting burr and I was able to sculpt a square hole from the hexagonal one. I tested the arrangement.

The end of the weed wacker got red hot.

The reel was rubbing against the outer shaft of the weed wacker, but a session with Mr Hacksaw fixed that. It almost worked, but not quite, and the total bugger is that I don't know why.

I think the problem has to do with the length of the bolt in the new knob. The mechanism needs the bolt to "bottom out" in the screw-fitting in the shaft end while the knob "floats". As it is, to do this the knob has to be screwed in so far the escapement mechanism is compromised. The way the escapement works is that when you bump down the reel advances half of the distance it wants to go, then hits a stop. When you release the bump, the reel is allowed to turn to the end of its cycle. I think the fitting I made needs to have a deeper hole for the bolt or a longer bolt because when the knob is screwed all the way down the escapement is "bumped" in and cannot advance. Whatever.

All those dead brain cells for nothing.

I might as well have drunk rum all day⁸.

1. I'm not sure if it is correct to refer to such people as "crackers", though that's what they do↑
2. The sort of sprinkler that has a swing arm that hammers against the jet to make it walk around in a circle, first one way then the other↑
3. Always a favourite with the neighbours, who greet each falsetto shriek with raucous laughs of sympathy↑
4. It is a physical impossibility to refuel it without switching off the engine since even at tickover the centrifugal clutch is partially engaged, causing the spool to spin quite rapidly. Attempting to fuel up by, say, wedging the fuel tank in, say, the chainlink fence running down the driveway will only result in the tool acting like some sort of Dali-designed unicycle and having it go for your shins while throwing two-stroke gasoline all over the wife's impatiens, killing them outright and fueling a season of domestic unbliss the likes of which you haven't seen outside of certain American situation comedies↑
5. Newer weedwhackers often have fixed lengths of much tougher (so they say) plastic strip that clip into a different style of head. Sometimes they have a one-piece assembly with short plastic scimitars hinged on a driven hub. I want nothing to do with such new-fangled flummery↑
6. Yesyesyes I know I know, there is no such thing, it is really centripetal force blahblahblah. When scientists start calling their spinning machine of colloid separation a centripete you can call me out on this one↑
7. But knownst now↑
8. Something I used to do almost constantly but banned since 1991 by Mrs Stevie↑

A Horrible Day

Well, I'm glad today's almost over.

It started with me offering to mow the in-laws' lawn. My father-in-law is a demon when it comes to keeping his lawn looking good, but he recently had an operation and the aftercare means no strain whatsoever. The man being the way he is, he ignored that advice, burst his stitches and nearly bled to death. After that, he was willing to trust his now badly overgrown lawn to an amateur like me.

You must understand, my father-in-law thinks I am a walking waste of quantum mechanics, and I don't spend any effort to disabuse him of that view. My lawn is often a tangle of waist-high dandelions that when I eventually do get round to cutting turns out to be made almost entirely of brown grass. I have half a lawn of that grass that turns brown in winter and goes green again in spring, but mine takes its time about getting out of bed and so is often still brown in July.

I estimated two hours for the job and agreed to be there around 10:30 am to 11 am.

Then Mrs Stevie discovered that either a raccoon or a possum had used our front cedar deck as a latrine and so I had to wash the entire deck with soap and bleach (the stench from these droppings, which I find on our land once or twice a year, is truly mind boggling and Action was Called For). There went the first half hour of that schedule.

Then I proved incapable of starting the MrsStevieDad's weed-wacker without help. Mine has a centrifugal clutch and you start it by messing with the choke, pumping the priming button a given number of times, wedging your foot against the cutting head and pulling like mad on the string. The MrsStevieDad's weed-wacker had no clutch, and so when I jammed my foot on the cutter head and gave the starting string my signature pull (the same move is used by Kung-Fu masters for breaking the ribs of attackers to the rear with their elbow) I almost dislocated all the fingers of my right hand at the first joint.

"That's the ticket" I cried, and gave my sneering father-in-law an ad-hoc demonstration of improvisational Folk Dance which he probably didn't appreciate to the fullest, being a philistine.

Once the weed-wacker had been mastered, it was time to meet the lawnmower, the architect of my agonised right arm. Like my mower, it was a Sears model. Unlike my own mower, it wasn't self-propelled. It was quite small and light, however, so that would compensate until the bag filled with clippings. We gassed it up and checked the oil. Everything looked good.

It started after only eight or nine pulls on the cord.

I noticed that the mower actually took more effort to start than my own, despite having a smaller engine. Said engine also ran with a disconcerting "hunt¹" which if I didn't know better was the signal of something Not Right in the works.

"It always runs like that" said the MrsStevieDad.

I got almost his entire back lawn done before the mower conked out and refused to run. We pulled the spark plug, which was black as the ace of spades. The engine was running rich, or had been when it was running. The MrsStevieDad ran it through his wire-wheel to clean it while I pondered the problem. Too much gas could mean too much gas or it could mean too little air. The former would probably be caused by the automatic choke not working properly. The latter by a blocked air filter.

The air filter for this mower turned out to be a piece of sponge dampened with oil. First order of business would be to replace that and see if it magicked the engine back to life. I jumped in my car and set out for the local Sears.

I don't know why I did that since they never have anything I'm looking for. I drove to a non-local Sears, then an Ace hardware before giving up. When I got back I told my father-in-law that it was probably easier to get parts for the Space Shuttle than his mower, and he would have to order one. I refitted the filter and pulled on the string, and the mower sprang to life in a cloud of black smoke.

I'll do the front lawn while it is still running" I yelled, and got all but a 5x20 foor section in the middle when the mower quit again and refused to start no matter how many times I pulled the starting cord.

I looked around and rehearsed quitting on the MrsStevieDad. It had now been almost four hours and the job was cursed with a capital cur. I could wait another half hour until the mower engine was cold whereupon it would most likely start (my current theory is the busted choke one) but it was looking like rain. I wanted to quit but much as this man cannot stand the sight or sound of me I couldn't find it in my heart to leave his lawn with a mohawk. The neighbours would have a field day at his expense.

A new plan sprang into being in the cortex of Mr Brain (who was so fed up with the state of affairs he had uncharacteristically been working for me rather than his usual modus operandum of thrusting improvised spokes into the wheels of my plans. I would use Mrs Stevie's car to carry my lawn mower to his house².

It was beautiful. It was elegant. Mrs Stevie agreed and I drove home and swapped cars with her.

I unscrewed various things and managed to fold the mower up, and by the cunning artifice of sacrificing three or four vertebral discs I got it into the car. I climbed in, turned the key and fired up the engine. I was just saying goodbye to Mrs Stevie when the most gadawful racket erupted from beneath the hood of the car. Then stopped. Then restarted. With a weary sigh I popped the hood and we looked inside to see what was about to ruin our day³. Fortunately it was nothing trivial.

On the Ford Taurus there is one belt, the so-called "serpentine" belt, that provides mechanical oomph to everything possessed of a rotary input requirement. Power steering, alternator, A/C compressor, it all gets driven by the one belt. I took a look in the left hand side of the engine bay and saw the problem⁴. There was a pulley with a clutch that allowed it to either idle or supply drive to what I suspect is the impeller of the A/C compressor. When the clutch was disengaged everything was noisy but not excessively so. When the clutch engaged the whole pulley shook so much I thought it was about to come off its spindle. The bearing that the shaft was running in had obviously disintegrated.

Gritting my teeth I prepared to ask the age-old question husbands have asked their wives since time began: "How long has this been happening?" to which the standard answer is "How long has what been happening?⁵", but Mrs Stevie couldn't possibly have not noticed this so I had to surmise the demon-infestation had occurred about the time I put the key in the ignition and the question died unasked on my lips (which were actually busy trying out some new combinations of my favourite swear words, car engines for the use at).

We decided that the engine would probably hold together for the trip to and from the in-laws' place, and we were out of options anyway, so I drove to the MrsStevieDad's place in a car that periodically made loud noises that, judging from the looks of on their faces, convinced my fellow road users that the car was in immanent danger of exploding in a ball of shrapnel. The way the day was playing out the shrapnel shredding would come as blessed relief.

I unloaded my mower, pumped the primer a few times and pulled the starter cord with a wince - my arm had been strained by pulling the other mower's starter about a jillion times that day. My mower burst into life at the first pull and I was finally able to finish the wretched lawn.

I went home some five and a half hours after the job started.

If the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain were still in operation, I could probably get into the worst attempt to cut grass classification in their handbook⁶.

1. A rhythmic speeding up and slowing down↑
2. I cannot carry large machines in the trunk space afforded me in the fabulous Steviemobile↑
3. Or ruiner it, I suppose, since it was already ruined from where I limped↑
4. Yes I know, technically it is "a" problem and there could be more but this day of anti-handyman demon infestation has to end sometime and I'm being optimistic because if the thing I'm looking at is what I think it is it will cost mucho deniro to fix thus satiating the evil spirits that have plagued the day's events↑
5. It never fails. I get in my wife's car and begin to drive it. Some new aberrant behaviour of the machine will show itself, such as the windshield falling out when the wipers are activated, the airbag deploying when the horn is pushed or flames shooting out of the heating vents while attempting to defrost the windows. "How long has this been happening?" I will ask. "How long has what been happening?" Mrs Stevie will respond, beating out the flames in her hair and clawing the passenger side airbag from her face↑
6. The Book of Heroic Failures↑

The Agony and the More Agony

Last week I started in on the six months of misery that is summer.

I suffer from allergies, have done since I was 17 and suffered a summer at the university of East Anglia in Norwich, England where the pollen count hit a record high ten times the national average, and stayed that way for several weeks. You looked outside and it was like a yellow blizzard. From that summer on I had the most terrible trouble with Hay Fever, though I'd never had a hint of it before.

When I first came to New York I had a couple of summers with no allergies at all, which I put down to the urban eden stamping out the agricultural blight for miles around and the air conditioning that filters everything except Legionair's Disease out of the air inside the buildings and pumps pollen-repelling hot air out of the exhaust. The Manhattan thermal on any given summer week day is a thing to behold and I remain convinced despite the lack of any scientific surveys to support me¹ that it actually changes the weather. Each weekday rain in the summer months becomes a rare event, yet each weekend, when the offices are closed and the A/C powered down the rain rolls in. I digress.

Over the course of the years my allergies once again re-asserted themselves.

For the first twelve years I owned Chateau Stevie I had a post nasal drip and a throat so sore I nearly went mad. It only cleared up when we went on vacation and I becoame convinced we must have a toxic mould problem in the house.

Then Mrs Stevie's cat² died, and I discovered that I was allergic to cats as well as pollen. Some cats, at least.

This had a somewhat amusing coda in that The MrsStevieDad bought a cat soon after ours died. He meant well. The Stevieling, upon whom he dotes, was missing our cat very badly but I was able to swallow without pain for the first time in years and wasn't going to go back to that place again on a bet. We went round to his house and within minutes of the new kitten rubbing my trouser leg I had eyes like E.T. and was hissing and wheezing like Darth Vader. I've never had such a strong reaction to anything in my life. I said that I was going to have to leave soon.

"What's wrong with him?" Said the MrsStevieDad to Mrs Stevie, talking past me in the third person and making it clear that his opinion of me³ hadn't mellowed over the two decades we'd known each other.

"He's allergic to cats" snifed Mrs Stevie, sending the subliminal message that she concured mostly with her father's opinion. "Apparently".

The stunned look that greeted this announcement made everything clear in an instant of clarifying clarity. The MrsStevieDad had been expecting us to leave his house with the new kitten. I could see the visible manifestations of a plan going nails-up bigtime on his face. It was good to be able to see what that looked like from the outside for once.

It turned out to be a lucky escape because this cat was Evil Made Manifest. It stripped off yards of embossed wallpaper that was irreplaceable and of which the MrsStevieMom was inordinately fond. It shredded furniture, drapes and humans. It would beg to be petted and bite you if you were stupid enough to fall for the ploy. It was not a Nice Cat. It bit the MrsStevieMom so badly she ended up in the emergency room of Good Samaritan Hospital.

Twice

After the first time I offered to "find a farm" for it to live on. After the second the MrsStevieDad did so, and peace returned to their home.

Anyway, the allergies were kicking in again and I was begining the trip into the place I go before I end up begging for an appointment with Doc Rubberglove to see if he can fit me with a working set of lungs and eyes. I don't just get itchy eyes and sneeze a lot. Well, I do get all that, but I also get what the doctor calls "cobblestones" under my eyelids. The skin under there apparently⁴ gets all knobbly and the lids start oozing a sticky pus that glues my eyes shut overnight. I also cough. A lot. And then my windpipe starts to close up. Apparently the allergies induce athsma, and I usually have to suck on Doc Rubberglove's Patent Electric Medicinal Vapour Bong for 15 minutes or so just so he can hear my reaction to his bill. It is all very tiresome.

This year I thought I would get a head start in the war against nature, and so I scheduled myself for an allergy shot on Saturday (yesterday). The only problem was that Doc Rubberglove doesn't do Saturday's any more, at least any of the Saturday's I've attempted to see him on. I was informed that Doc Rubberglove's partner in crime was on duty. This partner goes by a different name than "Rubberglove" but I happen to know that she is actually Doc Rubberglove's spouse. Since they would likely share many of the same interests, medically speaking, I generally reschedule under these conditions since having a lady squeeze my "trouser" parts or shove a latex gloved hand into the places I can't see without a cunning arrangement of mirrors has a context I prefer to keep firmly in the area of Mistress Alexa's House of Pain⁵, but in this case I couldn't see the harm.

The doctor, a disarmingly pleasant person with no trace of the maniacal gleam Doc Rubblerglove's eyes habitually show the world, chatted a bit, prescribed a nasal spray and gave me the shot, which I didn't feel at all. Not so much as a needle sting.

My hackles immediately rose. I did a quick survey - intra-muscular shot⁶, no immediate pain. This was definitely one of Doc Rubberglove's moves.

"Wow Doc", I said conversationally. "I didn't feel a thing. Is this like the cortisone shot where it hurts like heck in ten minutes, by any chance?"

"No, it doesn't hurt at all" she replied with a disarming smile, and sent me on my way.

I left the practice a little bemused at the lack of discomfort the entire proceding had inflicted. It was a first.

Then, as I was crossing the car park, someone rammed a white hot branding iron into my arm, and twisted it. I manfully bore the pain for about a quarter of a second then screamed for mercy. It did no good.

I staggered around the carpark smashing into cars, lamp-posts and passers-by, vision paling with the pain all the time begging for death, until the pain subsided enough for me to regain control of myself. I checked my watch. The doctor was right, the shot wasn't like the cortisone "ten minute delay" shot. It was more like five and the pain was orders of magnitude worse. Lesson learned there then.

Doc Rubberglove's technique is childish compared to his wife's fiendish and sophisticated methods.

1. All the scientists being far too busy worrying about Pluto not being a planet and Lake Huron not being a "real lake", as if anyone who deals with the bloody thing on a daily basis cared↑
2. He never admitted that I had any right to be in the house with Mrs Stevie, and would enact small deeds of terrorism at my expense on an almost daily schedule↑
3. Which can be summed up as "Thick Dick Shirthead"↑
4. I can't see it myself↑
5. Offering executive correction for the delinquent businessman in discreet surroundings↑
6. And yes I do still have them thank you very much, even if they are a trifle relaxed these days↑

The Rule In Abeyance On Project "Fence"?

I've been asked by a reader to explain why I didn't apply The Rule¹ to the weekend's fence rebuild and acquire a gas-powered post hole auger or a fuel cell driven power nailing gun or somesuch essential tool.

In short, I did, sorta.

The taxman had recently stripped the Steviewallet of several hundred tool-acquisition dollars and rendered anything but essential tool purchases impossible, but even so I would normally have indeed justified finding $350 from somewhere for that nail gun² had I not snuck out of the house during one of Mrs Stevie's previous absences two weeks ago and acquired a replacement for my recently self-destructed router.

I had made the descision to go with a Sears model again because:
a) I had actually liked my original Sears router very much.
2) I could not afford to buy both the expensive 3.5 horsepower plunge router I knew I needed³ and a fixed-based router
þ) The Sears 2 horsepower router I had my eye on was getting good reviews
♥ The Sears 2 horsepower router cost well under a hunnerd bux.

Of course, once I had actually visited a Sears the plan got altered a bit. I like to try out the plunge router plunge mechanism on each plunge router I see up close, and when I tried the el-cheapo Sears 1.75 horsepower model the springs were the softest I'd ever experienced. Call me A. Nidoiot but it makes no real sense to me to make the springs on a plunge tool so strong they could double as truck suspension parts. If you are trying to operate a tool , the moving part of which is razor sharp and zooming round and round more than 300 times a second, the last thing you need is to be fighting to overcome the resistance of the springs that are really only required to lift the bit clear of the workpiece, not catapult the hapless craftsman across his workshop upon releasing the plunge lock at the end of the cut.

Now I was torn. Fortunately Sears had a solution. They offered the fixed-base router I wanted with an exchangeable plunge base, and put it all in a nice case too. I verified that the plunge base was the same as the one I'd just tried and it was. Sold!

Or not.

Sometimes, the staff in Sears can be a bit dense. If you read the entry on trying to buy a cab for Troll, The Snowblower Of Supreme Spiffiness you'll see what I mean. Once again I was allowed to stand in a store while three members of staff ignored me. I wouldn't have been surprised except that I picked this particular Sears because it normally is the only local one that doesn't suffer from this problem. I was intrigued and in no particular hurry to buy so I went home. During the next week I made four trips to this Sears on the way home from my train to conduct a little unofficial research. Each time I allowed ten minutes to elapse before I left the store unhelped by any of the gossiping 20-something staff. I finally went into the store and found some elderly guys manning the fort and was, at last, helped.

Or not

It turned out that although the computer to which the national Sears website is connected and from which it was possible for me to order ahead (though I didn't) said there were four of these router kits in stock, the real value was zero. Even the display model wasn't a complete set and so they couldn't even offer to sell it to me.

Eventually I remembered there was a Sears in Hicksville, drove over to it on a Saturday night while Mrs Stevie and the Stevieling were safely out of the way, and found that they had one which they were happy to sell to me. The whole deal took about 30 minutes.

The router is all that I hoped it would be, and I used it to machine the 2x4s that I used to repair the fence between me and Crazy Joe. Given the shortage of folding cash in the Stevievault, the happiness with the New Router which, being a replacement, was acquired outside the strictures of The Rule and the lack of any real need for a new tool for Project Repair The Front Fence Before It Falls Completely Over And Kills Someone You Nitwit⁴ (which by itself is actually no barrier to tool acquisition, indeed, is actually the point in some cases) I couldn't justify the cost.

The new router has twice the power of the old one for chewing up wood all the faster, electronic torque control to stop those annoying motor stalls that make flames shoot out of the router louvers and pop the circuit breakers, variable speed so the larger raised panel bits don't fly apart and embed shrapnel in the Steviebod, slow start so we'll have no more of those embarrasing "dropped router" or "accidentally routed workbench/bystanding item/limb" incidents upon switching on and integral worklights so that when the urge to route with the workshop lights off is overpowering I can just go with it.

Why the money saved on trips to the emergency room alone should pay for the thing in only five or six jobs.

1. No Tool, No Job↑
2. Not a waste of money inasmuch as I would then have spent the next day fixing every single defect in the fence to try out the tool, a job that will take several days to do by conventional hammer↑
3. For something as yet not actually defined↑
4. Title kindly provided by Mrs Stevie↑

I Am Become Even More Famouserer

A quick check on just how famous this authoritative commentary on everything important¹ is has revealed some long-absent and long-deserved recognition in the Interweb At Large.

A search on "The Occasional Stevie" proved what I've known for yonks: that I am #1 on Google, the Search Engine of Choice. I'd thank them, but really they are only stating the obvious and giving me my just dues. The people has spoke and when they want to put "the", "occasional" and "Stevie" together, they invariably want to end up here and who can blame them? This righteous recognition had not, however, formerly extended to the other search engines out there.

Until now that is.

Yahoo, upon being given the same criteria that for months have returned this location when using Google, has finally seen the light and begun sticking up a grudging link at the top of the possibilities. No longer must one laboriously remove "Ray Vaughn" or "Nicks" to even see a link to this blog. Took you long enough, Yahoo. No wonder Microsoft won't meet your asking share price. Thrrrrrrp!

Icing on the cake was to discover that Ask.com (aka Ask Jeeves) is also bowing to popular demand and at long last disregarding the elitist cliques that for years have kept any mention of "The Occasional Stevie" off the first page of results from a search for "The Occasional Stevie", and now they position me at the top of page one where I belong. Finally. Well whoop de do. Like anyone actually uses Ask.com anyway.

What does this mean to you dear reader, to me or to this literary instrument through which I address the world?

For one thing, when one or the other of you asks me for a link to "The Occasional Stevie" I can snarl "Google it for Azathoth's sake!" in the very best web 2.0 tradition, safe in the assumption that this will not result in Stevie Nicks's website being slashdotted.

Other than that, I can, with some justification, claim that not only am I number one, but that all others are number two or lower². I've held that opinion for many years in point of fact, but now I have some statistical evidence to back it up.

But with fame comes the worry that it will prove ephemeral and I shall wake up one day to find one of the other Stevies has had some sort of occasional happening that thousands of people want to read about. I urge my three, possibly four readers to read and re-read this blog often. Several times a day should crunch the search engine stats enough to offset that new Stevie Nicks boxed CD collection being issued.

Of course, I don't want to lose the eclectic feel that only being accessed once a month gives to my work, since that ups my academia street cred and makes me that much closer to a Pulitzer.

1. to me↑
2. Yes I stole that. If you know that, you also know from where so there's no need for me to mention the wonderful movie Mystery Men or The Sphinx↑

Post Post Posting

I finally decided to get my finger out and replace the newly-snapped fencepost today.

While I was at it I thought I'd add three new fence rails to the back of the panel that joins the two broken fenceposts¹ and nail the pailings to them in situ as opposed to doing the job right and dismantling the fence panel and rebuilding it. I assembled a small kit of tools consisting of:

• My 14v battery-powered drill fitted with a quick-change chuck
• A quick change screwdriving bit
• A set of quick-change drill bits
• A freshly-sharpened chisel
• Mr Hammer
• Mr Hammer Drill²
• A ginormous hammer drill bit
• A box of galvanised, resin-coated 3½ deck screws
• A box of hot-galvanised fourpenny common nails
• A spirit level
A couple of pencils
• Mr 25' Tape Measure
• Mr Chopsaw c/w brand spanking new carbide-tipped blade³
• A couple of those one-hand-operated pump-to-close clamps with yellow jaws

The Plan: It was now 10:30 am. I would unhook the 8-foot long gate from the post, then unfasten the screws and allow the post to fall over. I would use Mr Hammer Drill and the ginormous hammer drill bit to dig out the rotted stump from the concrete, leaving a socket into which I could drop the new post. I would unscrew the hinge pins from the old post and screw them into the new one before rehanging the gate. I would clamp Pressure Treated 2x4s to the fence rails and screw them into the posts at each end with deck screws. I would nail the pailings to the new fence rails thus formed with hot-galvanised fourpenny common nails. I would pack everything up, shower and go for lunch.

What happened: I unhitched the gate and undid the fence panel. The fence post fell over. I did a bit of drilling, but it turned out the stump of the post was entirely replaced with soil, which was a bugger to scoop out of the socket as the hole was a little narrower than my hand. I slotted the old post into the socket in the concrete pig I had poured around the original post some 12 years ago, to see if my "drop in post" theory was sound. It was. Or rather, it was until the weight of the post broke the concrete away from the patio slab and then cracked it through. The Plan was toast.

I pulled out all the fragments of concrete I could, but just as I suspected, there was enough concrete still securely embedded in the ground that I could'nt just dig a new post hole. It took a pickaxe, a sidewalk scraper, a mattock, a clamshell post hole digger and some of my most carefully hoarded antique swear words to get the bloody stuff out of the hole, which had grown to about a foot in diameter owing to the various adits I had to sink to loosen the damn concrete from its bedding.

I then made a quick dash to Home Despot and bought the best looking cedar post and three unbent, non-twisty Pressure Treated 2x4s and it was time to start rebuilding before the threatened rain happened.

When putting a fencepost in the ground you have three major choices.

You can dig a hole, prop the post up in the position you want and pour in concrete to anchor it in place. This was what I'd done before, but now had discovered was contra-indicated for cedar posts.

You can pound in a metal socket-on-a-spike affair and drop a sawn-off post into the socket. This worked well for a couple of places on the fence I put in between me and Crazy Joe. I did it that way because there were tree roots preventing a real post hole being sunk. You cut down the post because you don't need 18 inches-2 feet of post in the ground. You need a bit of the post for driving in the spike too. You put a block of wood in the post socket and pound on it with a sledgehammer (which I didn't have, but The Rule⁴ meant I could have one if I wanted it badly enough) until the spike, itself between 18 inches and three feet long depending on the design, is completely driven into the ground. Then you mount the post in the socket and tighten the socket's collar bolts and Bob's your Uncle. I couldn't use this method because I had doubts the post would be secure enough to serve as a gatepost.

That left the standard method of digging a hole just big enough for the post, dropping in some gravel for drainage followed by the post itself, then the earth that will support the post firmly. In order for the post not to loosen up, it is crucial to pound the earth until it drums when you hit it. The only way to get this sort of packing is to pound the earth as you go, using something thin enough to get in between the post and the hole sides and flat enough to squish the earth down. I usually go with either a piece of 2x4 or a piece of 1x1 for tight spots. Here the hole was bigger, but I had to get behind the post to pack the earth under the slab that had collapsed during concrete removal ops.

The earth itself was no problem even though I had to make up a few cubic feet lost to excised concrete blobs since I still had piles of it left over from the time I ordered topsoil for Project Put Up The Bloody Swimming Pool You Idiot⁵ and Mr Brain had used a moment's lack of attention to detail to inform me that there are 9 cubic feet in a cubic yard instead of the customary 27. I had stashed this earth around the property cunningly disguised as molehills and explained the inferred size of the moles that made them as the inevitable result of the Love Canal and Three Mile Island ecological disasters, along with certain regrettable side effects of the Staten Island landfills.

I managed to get the new post bedded in place with only the usual wrist sprains from having to pound earth with a sawn-off 2x4, and began the removal of the hinge pins from the old post.

These are basically an L-shaped piece of iron. One leg is the pin on which the hinge sits, the other has a huge screw thread milled into it and forms the anchor. The thread in question is over a quarter of an inch in diameter and about three inches long, and they have to be put into tight pilot holes because the cedar is soft and you don't want the pins letting go of their grip by stripping the thread of the hole. Needless to say, this meant that it was extremely tedious with a capital teed to get them out of the old post. I ended up using the stem off an old ladder-type truck jack as a tommy-bar, slipping it over the pin to form the lever. Because the resulting affair drew out a circle some three and a half feet in diameter, life didn't get very much less tedious after applying this solution, but I did get the pins out.

I used the gate to guestimate where the new holes had to be and drilled them into the post. I made the bottom hole a bit bigger than the other two (three hinges on this gate) because I knew I wouldn't have the room to swing my tommy bar - the drive was in the way. I reasoned that the top and middle hinges would take the lion's share of the strain anyway. It actually worked out rather well, apart from straining my elbow and shoulder rather more than I can stand these days. Then it was time to rehang the gate.

I heaved. I hoed. I cursed. I swore. Eventually, I constructed a cunning machine I call "the bloody great pile of wood under the gate" and used it to hold up one end while I wiggled, dropped and finally engaged the hinges on the pins at the other. I estimate this would be an easy job for three or even two people at a pinch. It almost killed me doing it alone (Mrs Stevie and The Stevieling were off playing miniature golf). Still, it only remained to nail up some 2x4 fence rails and I was done for the day.

The rails in question had, of course, to be cut to length since the panel they were for was less than full length. For this I used the newly re-bladed chopsaw, a venerable veteran of my outdoor construction projects. I almost cut my fingers off because since changing out the blade from the original high-speed steel one that essentially rubbed its way through the wood, I'd only cut maple, a considerably harder wood than the pine the Pressure Treated 2x4s are made from.

The new blade cut through the 2x4s effortlessly. I mean that quite literally. I was expecting, from several years working on PT wood with the saw, to have to supply some small amount of oomph with my right arm. The new carbide blade went through the wood like a hot knife through molten soft ice-cream. There was literally no resistance at all and the entire 3½ inch cut took about a tenth of a second⁶. I was totally unprepared for that and almost fed my hand into the saw as a result. I did some manly grunting at my new mastery of all things Pressure Treated and got back to work.

I got the first and most important rail installed under the original so it would support the weight of the panel, drilled out the pilot holes and screwed it into place. Then I got busy with Mr Hammer and nailed the fence to the rail at each pailing. No w the fence was secure I could mount the next two rails with a bit more ease.

Unfortunately, while I was drilling one of the pilot holes I snapped off one of my quick-change bits.

I was mad about that. First off, the bit simply hasn't been worked that hard. I was making pocket cuts that involve starting the hole then carefully swinging the drill to an angle of about 45 degrees. The drill was still factory sharp and shouldn't have failed, but it did. The problem is that I don't think I can obtain single quick-change bits from this manufacturer. I'll probably have to buy an entire set if I want to replace it, and I do. The quick change drills snap into a hexagonal socket and lock in place. They can be released by pulling on the outside of the quick change chuck. It saves valuable time and you don't get drills slipping in a poorly tightened chuck. One of the most wearying facets of a job like this fence thing is the need to keep swapping between a drill and a screwdriver, or between two drill bits. Some people use two drills, but that just means more to put away after the job is done. These quick change fittings are one of the best ideas I've personally used in over two decades of tooly stuff. Oh well.

By the time I'd managed to get everything back on track and finished the nailing I was groaning from all the muscle pains and I barely made it up the stairs to the shower.

Still, the fence looks good now.

1. The one I'm about to describe the replacement of and the one in the corner that I don't want to get involved with. Keep up!↑
2. It's a drill that hammers. The best of both worlds↑
3. It turns out that in normal operation the saw should not fill the room with clouds of choking blue smoke and leave scorch marks on the workpiece↑
4. No Tool, No Job↑
5. Project title kindly supplied by Mrs Stevie↑
6. Memo to self: Only carbide blades from now on. Steel ones are not in the same league.↑