Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

We get maybe 60-90 minutes of work time in the late afternoon (more if I'm not busy; less if, like today, I'm still working on something that needs to be in people's hands when they come to work in Chicago tomorrow morning). Today's job was to attempt to put a new pilot string through the conduit from the antenna tower, and then use that to drag a new coax cable through the conduit. The first step went okay, but when we started pulling the coax through, it got hung up. We tried dragging it the other way through the conduit, and it got stuck at roughly the same place. Lisa's conclusion: the conduit has cracked and partially collapsed. The very thin pilot string is still getting through, but anything bigger is getting caught up in the partially-collapsed conduit. A contributing factor is that the original conduit was apparently not heavy enough grade plastic in the first place.

Lisa says the only real solution here is to dig up the conduit (about eight meters or so between the buildings), pull out all of the cables (there are six of them in there already), and lay a new, stronger conduit. Unfortunately, we probably are not going to have the time to do this during this trip. On Friday I have to take her to Portland and I leave on Saturday afternoon, and furthermore, it's supposed to start raining again tomorrow afternoon. Maybe if we'd started at the beginning of the trip, but not now. It's going to have to wait until later.

Yesterday afternoon, Lisa and I decided to move the pile of split poplar, it being the worst of the log-pile eyesores on account of it's in the front yard. (The other two — maple and cedar — are in the middle field and not immediately visible from the road.) So Lisa got the John Deere and wheeled the utility trailer over to the pile. Working together, it didn't take us too long to shift the wood into the trailer, but as we did so, we had to keep knocking mud, worms, and such from the wood that has sat there for some months, and we could see that everything on the bottom of the pile was still pretty wet. This log pile has been sitting in a place that doesn't get direct sunlight for much of the year. So rather than move it directly to the woodshed, Lisa drove the trailer into an exposed area of the yard and parked it. With no rain forecast until Thursday at the earliest, we'll let the logs sit in the sun for a couple of days before stowing them.

I have some hope that we might also get the maple logs moved as well, which would leave only the split cedar to shift. I'm afraid I'll probably have to leave that to Lisa to do, which is unfortunate because it goes more than twice as fast with two people doing it than with one. Although I'll not get any more wood split on this trip due to my injured thumb (it's really difficult to swing the splitting maul when your right thumb doesn't want to grip), I'd feel better if we got all of the already-split wood under cover for the winter.

I've observed that I've been much more willing to do the hard physical labor of keeping this property maintained these past few years than I was when I was in my thirties. Probably if I'd been less lazy then, I'd have to worry less about diabetes now.

This afternoon, I did two roughly hour-long stints splitting wood and cutting brush. I got two or three more of the cedar rounds either split down to burnable size or at least to an unsplittable state (because of too many knots) that I can move it to the area within range of the electric chainsaw for later reduction.

Some of you may remember my stories of the 2008 Christmas Storm in Mehama that among other things made this mess when the fir tree dropped a pile of branches on the path. As I've mentioned, I cut a few branches from that tree a few days ago. I cut several more today, including one that could have fallen on the pump house. I'd rather drop it in relatively controlled circumstances after trimming the brush from it with the pole-axe. I hope that Lisa and I have time for her to cut it into burnable pieces before I leave on Saturday.

I am pretty worn out, but there was a bright side to it. My blood sugar dropped so low after I did the post-lunch tree-splitting that I felt comfortable having another one of the delicious chocolate brownies that Lisa made yesterday. Mmmmm. It almost makes the aches and pains worthwhile.