|
|
|
cedar outlasting steel
Thursday, August 29 2024
As I awoke this morning, I was dreaming I was in bed beneath the covers with none other than Vladimir Putin. Also beneath the covers was a cardboard tray with rotting human body parts whose stench wasn't so bad so long as the covers were kept tight around my neck. (A "Russian oven," perhaps.)
Throughout the day today, I would periodically go out to the car to look for little cubes of glass that the Bolt has been shedding from its back window. Depending on the angle of the sun (if it was out) or my angle with respect to the cubes, I was sometimes able to find a dozen or more pieces. Then it would look like there were none. But then I'd go out again and find another half dozen or so. This happened multiple times. I also managed to get a tiny shard of it in the tough skin on the sole of my left foot. But I couldn't find it or even feel it unless I stepped on, say, a gravel stone that happened to push in the skin excessively in that one spot where it was lodged. A bath later this evening might've finally dislodged it.
This afternoon as Gretchen was heading off to pilates, she told me to cut the weeds blocking the view of two political yard signs we'd put at the end of the driveway yesterday. (One read "Harris-Walz Obviously" and the other had a somewhat Shepherd-Fairyesque picture of a tie-wearing cat with words reading "Cats for Kamala.") Then Gretchen happened to notice that our mailbox had toppled forward, so fixing that was an even bigger priority. (Aside from straightening out dents inflicted by the snowplow, our mailbox hasn't required any maintenance since January 19th, 2008.)
When I got to the mailbox, I saw that the long steel spike clamped to the bottom of the cedar four by four post had rusted so thoroughly that it had lost its integrity and the post had fallen forward. When I lifted up the mailbox, the remaining steel of the spike tore away completely. It had lasted nearly eighteen years. As for the cedar post (also nearly eighteen years old), it was a little rotten, but only at the very bottom. I took the whole mailbox back to the front of our garage, fired up the welder, and proceeded to weld a 3/4 inch steel spike to what remained of the old spike post mounting system, a clamp made of sheet metal (it was badly rusted, but it had some life left in it). The spike I used was maybe 30 inches long, but I only allowed for about twelve inches of it to stick down from the bottom of the clamp. As I welded, I suddenly realized that Charlotte the Dog and Lester were nearby and probably looking at the dangerously bright light shining from the active end of my welding stick. So I waited for Charlotte to wander away and used my body to block the light from Lester. Who knows; maybe they're smart enough not to look at something so bright. The resulting spike system seemed to work well for holding up the mailbox, though now it can by rotated around the spike. (Perhaps this is a feature, since it means the mailbox can now swing away from things that impact it.)
Then I took the dogs for another walk down the Farm Road, putting some nice flat pieces of bluestone in a pile for me to pick up later in the Bolt and eventually take to the cabin. I noticed that suddenly there were numerous clumps of yellowish-beige gill mushrooms producing light grey shadows beneath them of spores. I later did a Google Image search and determined they were honey mushrooms (genus Armillaria), possibly from a large single organism lying beneath the entire Farm-Road-area forest. (This would account for them all fruiting at once.)
Later this evening I built out a second copy of the Local Remote for my ESP-8266 Remote Control system. I put it in an old cigar box with a piece of copper sheet metal for a lit into which I installed four push-button switches and a all the electronics, include a four-by-twenty LCD display.
My second Local Remote.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240829 feedback
previous | next |
