Slightly Off the Mark

 My fourteen regular readers might remember that a couple of years ago I realized some kind of trees were growing up in the middle of our lilac bushes. I had to decide, quickly, whether to remove the trees, transplant the lilacs, or have my back yard declared a nature preserve and let the government worry about it.

If you read my blog from April--of this year--you already know that I reacted the way I often do when faced with difficult decisions: I ignore them and hope they go away.

But maybe that's for the best, because this spring the trees I almost cut down were spectacular.

One of them is apparently a cherry tree:

We base this on the fact that last fall it had cherries growing from it. Can't get nothin' by me.

The other is, possibly, a crabapple tree:

I don't know ... I think I'm crabby enough, without the tree. You should hear it bark.

The lilacs?

The bushes are smaller and I had to clear a lot of dead wood out even before the invading trees showed up, but the lilacs that remain seem to be doing well. We're considering some transplanting work. I'll ... you know ... get around to it.

Before you blame me for not acting sooner, if I had we wouldn't have been able to enjoy some really beautiful spring blossoms:

How did they get there? The same way we end up at car washes: bird poop.

There are three things we really need more of in the world: beauty (real beauty, not that Hollywood crap), peace, and real chocolate with no calories.

I just thought of four other things, so maybe I should just leave it here.

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https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

Remember, every time you don't buy a book, a leaf falls from a tree. You autumn readers should be ashamed.

Just to remind you that this too shall pass, here are some pictures from when the weather was much nicer--in November of last year. Hard to believe anyone would call any part of last year the "good old days", but at least we weren't on the edge of world war. As for weather, I just saw a prediction of a couple of inches of snow for this weekend, which is normal for basketball playoff season.

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I get such a kick out of mowing the lawn in November. It means I'm not shoveling snow, for one thing. This year I got one last mow in before all the ick began, and I took some pictures along the way because nothing says "safety" like holding onto a roaring lawn mower with one hand while aiming a phone in the other direction.

Lilacs bloom in the spring. Except this year, because this is 2021 and Mother Nature wanted to remind us of what we'll be missing for the next several months.

Most of my fire bush died this year because of another plant that grew up and strangled it--which I didn't notice until the remaining fire bush started to turn color. The part that remained after my slashing massacre seems to be doing okay ... so far.

I've never understood why some people hate dandelions. I mean, they're flowers. Those little vines that want to spread everywhere, now those I hate.

Oh, I forgot to mention: growing right with the lilacs were cherries, from a tree I didn't even know was there until late last summer. I'm so bad of this yard thing.

Well, it was nice while it lasted

I'm not as active as a volunteer firefighter as I used to be, because over the years my body has been beat down pretty good ... by doing yard work.

Other than a couple of back injuries, I've never really been hurt on that hazardous job. Firefighting, I mean. Yard work, now that's the task that leaves me moaning on the ground, and not in a good way.

You ever try to mow with this stuff on?

With firefighting, you wear tons of protective gear, which changes the most likely medical problems to heat stroke and heart attacks. With yard work, you wear shorts and a tank top, and in some cases hold a can of beer. In addition, with firefighting you tend to have the topic of safety going on in your mind:

"Say, I'm in zero visibility, crawling over a burned out floor, shoving a metal pike into the ceiling when I don't know if the electricity is still on." It's just an example. I've never pulled a ceiling while crawling on the floor, so don't sweat it.

When I'm doing yard work, I have other topics on my mind:

"I wonder how long I could let this grow before the lawn police arrest me?"

An action shot.

But the biggest reason for this seeming paradox is that fire just doesn't give a darn about me, while Mother Nature hates me.

Oh, yeah. Mother Nature is a vindictive bit ... being. She hears me complain. I complain a lot.

"It's too cold." "I hate bugs." "That's not rain: It's a cloud of pollen!"

Once, as I was mowing in the front yard, one of our trees bent down and beaned me with a limb. It had nothing to do with me not paying attention. It's also the only time in my adult life that I did a full somersault.

But recently I learned a new twist: My furniture is in cahoots with Mother Nature. Much of it is wood, after all, an increasingly expensive resource that doesn't just grow on trees. I'm always shoving furniture around, banging into it, and of course sitting on it. This axes of evil (see what I did, there?) recently tried hard to do me in.

I was mowing in the back yard, near the lilacs I've horribly neglected. If you were a lilac and your caretaker doesn't trim you or keep other trees from growing up in the middle of you, wouldn't you be upset? I don't know, either.

As I pushed the mower around one of the bushes, it reached it's driest, deadest branch out and clobbered me in the arm.

The evidence.

The above photo is my arm, just so you know. Now that I think of it, maybe this is what the far side of my forearm always looks like--I usually can't see it. But no, my wife takes great joy in pouring peroxide on my fresh wounds, and when they're old I don't scream like that.

The very next day, I noticed the TV remote was missing. (Just hang on, it's connected.) No big deal: It can always be found by sweeping a hand between the cushion and the inside of the couch's side. We put it on the arm, it slides down, and Bob's your uncle.

(That's just an expression: I don't mean to offend anyone who actually has an Uncle Bob.)

Now, the couch is only a few years old, and we really like it. It has two recliners, something that's always seemed like rich luxury to me, but boy, am I glad for them--especially on bad back days. But when you recline and unrecline and plop down on something all the time, there's bound to be some wear and tear.

As near as I can tell, a nail popped loose and just hung there, between the side and the cushion. Waiting. For me.

I swept my hand down there, just like I always do. What happens when something suddenly stabs into your hand? You withdraw your hand, don't you? Which I did, but the nail had already embedded itself into my finger. I'm pretty sure it bounced off the inside of a fingernail.

I'll spare you the photos.

Have you ever bled so much that you couldn't stop it even with pressure, elevation, and cold? It was just a finger, for crying out loud, which is exactly how I cried. Out loud. Luckily no one was home, but that meant I had to do the peroxide thing myself, and it's not nearly as much fun that way.

Two injuries in two days, on the same arm. And what swung that nail out to grab me? That's right: the couch's wooden frame. I got even by bleeding on it, but still. Also, I hurt my back again jumping halfway across the living room while waving my hand wildly, and later I had to clean up that blood.

Luckily I'm used to cleaning up my own blood.

Don't doubt the connection: The truth is out there ... and in there. Mother Nature is out to get me, and there's nowhere to hide. Today the couch--tomorrow the bed.

There's a thought to sleep on.

When I'm going to give blood, I prefer advanced notice.

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(Note: I just spent another weekend going through this all over again. It's a good thing I wrote this blog before that, because I've lost all sense of humor since then.) 

There came a certain point the other day, when I dropped to the ground in exhaustion and told my wife, "I don't think I can do this."

Get your mind out of the gutter. Or maybe not, since I'm talking about routing out a sewer line.

You may call it a sewer snake, or a router, or go with the trademarked Roto Rooter, but any way you look at it, it's a crap job. Despite my well-known lack of mechanical ability, I've used routers numerous times, back when roots were growing in my sewer. (By the way, the stuff you flush down that's called "root killer" is really, I suspect, root fertilizer.) But several years ago a true professional came in, put a giant trench in my back yard, and replaced the old ceramic sewer line with brand new, professional grade plastic. I've had no problem since.

Until last weekend.

And it always happens on a weekend, in order to maximize your troubles. Emily and I were preparing for an author appearance, and I headed to the basement for a folding table. There it was: two pools of water over the lowermost drains.

Indoor swimming pools are only fun if you can control what kind of water goes with them.

Ah, but now the good news: While replacing the line, the pro guy put in something called a cleanout, and its purpose is to give you a place to put in the snake/router/out-of-control-metal-tentacle-monster if you need to clear a blockage.

The router I rented weighed six thousand pounds, but it was way easier using it outside than trying to work it through a drain in the basement. I put fifty feet of writhing, hand-smashing sewer snake into the line. It did absolutely nothing.

Which is pretty much standard with my home maintenance jobs.

So, Emily and I hoisted the whole 6,000 pound unit down the outside stairs to the basement where, no matter how much I tried, the snake wouldn't fit into the hole. ("That's what he said." I know you're thinking it.) Then we hoisted the whole 6,000 pound unit back up the basement stairs and into the back of our SUV.

Have you ever heard a car scream? It's not pretty.

But the place I rented it from (Doc's Hardware, downtown Albion), traded me a smaller unit for no extra charge. That one, with maybe a bit of effort, did go into the basement drain. After about twenty-five feet of pretending I was my house's doctor giving it a colonoscopy (now it knows how I feel), the router bit came out with a substantial amount of yuck clinging to it.

It sounds so much easier than it was. I'm not just talking about the pushing and pulling, and the invention of new curse words. To get the router bit in I had to lay on the floor, stick my hand into the drain, and physically force it around a bend in the pipe. Yeah. You know what was in that drain? Yes. Yes it was.

This is why, during our after action review, Emily poured two gallons of peroxide and then three gallons of alcohol on my hand. You see, so much skin had been skinned (thus the term) that, had it been broken (as at one point I thought it had), the doctors could have examined my bones without doing x-rays. Emily was, quite rightly, concerned about infection. (I mean, we do know where it's been.) She was also rightly concerned about the neighbors calling 911 after all the screaming, but I suppose they're used to me by now.

I felt like I was victim #3 on an episode of Game of Thrones.

(Note: We need to buy more peroxide and alcohol, and maybe drinking alcohol, too.)

I don't remember at what point I told Emily that I wasn't sure I could do this. It was fairly early in the process, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm in my fifties, and last time I routed a sewer line I was in my forties. I don't feel any different--except for when I try something like this.

But we did do it, and it took less than twenty-four hours. (Note: The first time.) As of this moment, only two days later, I can flex my hand again, the scrape on my abdomen has stopped oozing, and I can use my arms as long as I don't lift them over the level of the scrape on my abdomen.

I'm going to call that a win.

 It really wasn't that bad, see?

It was a strange day, in that I did home maintenance work, but didn't get hurt.

Not exactly.

I closed all the storm windows, and replaced some screens. I still have creases in some of my finger bones from doing that in previous autumns.

I started up the furnace without so much as a single explosion. Our furnace uses hot water heat: Nice, even heating, without the pain and dust of blowers and ducts. However, it was constructed during the Nixon administration. Turning it off in the spring is kind of like a cliffhanger at the end of a TV season, when you're not sure if the show's going to be canceled.

I climbed on the roof to clean out a gutter, which drains water from the second floor, and eventually, onto my head. This requires me to stand on a rubber-coated flat portion of my roof. The last time I tried that when the roof was wet, I did an uncanny imitation of Charlie Brown trying to kick Lucy's football, complete with "Aaaarrrrgggghhhhh!"

All went boringly well, which I found very exciting.

To clean the other gutters I had to climb a ladder. As a firefighter of over three decades I have a great deal of experience climbing ladders. I've climbed ladders with fifty feet of fire hose draped over one shoulder, while carrying an ax in my other hand, with a forty pound air bank on my back, in zero visibility and zero degrees temperature. At no time on a fire scene have I ever had a mishap on a ladder. At home, while cleaning the gutters, I once had a twenty foot extension ladder fall on my ear.

The gutters are now clean. No life-threatening incidents ensued.

Honestly, I was beginning to despair of having anything to write about as I finished my fall prep work and went inside. There my wife asked me to get some frozen meat out of the garage freezer.

So I guess it's her fault.

My garage is presently junk central. I know what you're thinking, and no, yours isn't as bad as mine. It presently has in it three lawn mowers, due to past misadventures. There are also four giant cardboard boxes, the kind you put major kitchen appliances in, which we'd procured to build a fort for the grand-twins. There are several lawn-sized trash bags full of aluminum cans--we save them until we get over a hundred pounds, which gets us a better price at the recycling place. Out of room, I'd balanced one of them on my wheelbarrow. There are more tools than at Doc's Hardware, of the variety you'd usually find in a medieval torture chamber, and half of them are on the floor. There is 250 feet worth of extension cord and 50 feet of garden hose. For all that, I have never, ever fallen in my garage.

Until I had in my hand four packages of frozen meat, weighing perhaps fifteen pounds in all. For the record that included hamburger, sausage, chops, and steak.

I closed the freezer door, turned, and fell over.

It was pretty much as simple as that. Something got behind my feet, and that was that. On the way down my upper thighs hit a lawn mower, which made the rest of me go down that much harder. My head caved in a large wire animal cage which, I'm happy to point out, was unoccupied.

The good news is that the concrete floor broke the rest of my fall.

Then the huge cardboard box slowly tipped over directly toward me. It was full of bags of aluminum. Well, it was.

The whole thing was right out of a Home Alone movie.

So I lay there, taking inventory. Something (the mower's gas cap, I think) was jammed into my upper thigh. The bags had not broken open, so I hadn't suffocated in an avalanche of pop cans, and the bags were easily thrown aside. I was still holding three of the four frozen packages. The other problem was that, with my legs flung over the mower and my head jammed against the cage, I wasn't at all sure I would be able to get up.

I quickly formulated a plan. I would text to my wife: "Watson, come here; I want to see you". This was the first thing said by Bell on the first telephone call, and I figured she'd appreciate the humor. Too bad I'd left my phone inside.

So it took a little while to get off the floor, but eventually I did, and the rest is anticlimactic. Ibuprofen, muscle salve, literally rolling out of bed the next morning. If I had a buck for every time my back hurt, I'd buy a chiropracter. I still can't sit properly, as the gas cap seems to have actually bounced off my left upper femur.

 The irony there is that I was assaulted by the same mower I wrote about a few months ago, the one I had so many problems with. Revenge?

Or just one final indignity?

That one.

This home "improvement" sent me into physical therapy.

So ... kind of a sucky week.

Actually, all of July kind of sucked, and the first few days of August just went along with it. Come to think of it, 2017 as a whole hasn't exactly been stellar.

But never mind that, let's go to the lawn mower. I never did get this out on all my social media, so you might not have seen it:

For the record, the tire is not supposed to go that direction.

This is the same mower my stepfather repaired for me after the carburetor crapped out. A carburetor is a ... thing ... that does ... something ... in an engine. According to my wife's research, the carburetors in this particular engine brand are now made out of plastic. Plastic in a piece of equipment that's designed to burn stuff under pressure. Yeah.

Now, this would be the same mower that gave me other problems, including a gas cap that wouldn't stay on and other small pieces that seemed to fall off at random. In addition, the little bar that stops the mower from running if you release the handle kept it from starting at all, until I bent the control wire in an un-designed direction. In retrospect, I should have known it was a lemon from the get-go, but it didn't become clear to me until after the warranty ran out.

And now there I was, pushing the mower across the yard, when suddenly the cut became uneven. It became uneven because one of the tires came off. And it wasn't just the tire: The whole assembly that held the tire to the mower deck just peeled away, like wet cardboard.

(I checked: It wasn't wet cardboard. It was metal that looked like web cardboard.)

So, for the second time, I didn't get to finish. I showed the above photo to my wife, and began my prepared speech, which was to be, "If you want to have someone fix it, that's fine, but you've got one week to get it done before I trash this piece of--"

I didn't get beyond "If you want" before she said, "Oh, we're getting rid of that thing."

My wife is a consummate researcher. It's because of her that I know about plastic carburetors, and what "consummate" means. It's in the dictionary. Who knew? Within days she narrowed down the new mowers, and then we went shopping.

For years I avoided mowers with grass catchers, because they fill up after about two passes. It took longer to mow a lawn than it does for me to assemble furniture, and I don't have that kind of time. But now we have a compost heap, which loves grass clippings, so Emily found a mower that could change between a rear bagger and a side discharge. Not only that, but it has four working wheels, and a three year warranty. Heaven in the grass.

It only took me a few hours to get it put together. And I needed to get on it, because the last two times I mowed, only about a third got done before disaster struck. It had been so long that the part already mowed needed it again, and that's where I started--a flat section, where I could get used to the new equipment.

I was being careful, you see.

But I didn't take something into consideration. I accounted for the new mower,  but not the extra weight of the bag filling up. So, when I went to turn a corner on a hill, the mower zigged and my spine zagged.

I'd mowed a third of the lawn--the same third I mowed last time--before my lower back went "twang!"

It didn't sound exactly like that, of course, but that's kind of how it felt. And that's why I didn't go online much for awhile: It hurt to type. It hurt to walk, sit, lay down, lift a finger, swallow, think ... well, it hurt to think about the pain, anyway. It hurt so much that I came to appreciate my  chronic back pain. Sure, that hurt all the time too, but it didn't feel like the red hot barbed tridents they use in Hell.

But my wife, through experience, has become a very good nurse. Three days later I was able to go back to work, and if you ask me I did a pretty good job of hiding the fact that my pain had only been reduced to agony status.

What have I learned from this, you ask? Well, first, always keep some of the good pain pills around the house. More important, either get a goat, or hire someone to mow your lawn. I'm leaning toward that last--I can only imagine how badly I'd get hurt dealing with a goat.

When I opened my Blogger account this morning, I found that all my visitor stats had disappeared. (They popped back into existence a few hours later, having apparently undergone some kind of existential crisis. I've been there.)

One would be tempted to blame Blogger, or the internet in general. However, in the last two days I've broken a brand new pipe wrench, a washing machine, a copper water pipe, a vent hood, my back, and the entire water supply to my house. Can't speak for the new water heater: I haven't advanced to the point of igniting the pilot.

So for the moment I'm not prepared to blame anyone else for stuff going wrong in my  vicinity.

On an all-too-related note, you might not be hearing from me for a few days.

The short version is, a sinkhole opened up in my back yard. More disturbing, it was only a few feet from the side of my house.

Not to worry, though—it was just a small sinkhole. At least, until I got too close and my foot went through, making it a slightly larger small sinkhole.

"Dude, I had nothing to do with this."

There are two things you can do at a time like this: Fill it in, or dig it out. Why dig it out? Why, to find out why, and what; it’s called curiosity, people. Get some.

Also, there’s the fact that I still have a pile of broken brick bits from when I demolished my chimney, which actually stood about ten feet away. So I had a pile of something I needed to get rid of … and a hole. But what was the hole? Cue me, with a shovel.

The hole, I now believe, was a cesspit. That’s a temporary collection tank that looks similar to a well, except you do not want to dip a bucket into it. It’s designed to collect … um … stuff, from a home’s plumbing. When I was a kid, my dad had to periodically empty one at our rural home; it was about the same distance from that house, and also near the back door. Often they’re not sealed at the bottom, allowing liquid to eventually leach downward, while the … er … solid would build up and occasionally have to be emptied. Emptying is not fun. 

In addition to being the right location and size, it was lined with concrete except for a layer of bricks near the top, and I could see where a pipe once entered it from the direction of the house.

Oh, crap.

And you thought all the cesspits had moved to Washington, D.C.

On a related note, the home’s original outhouse (according to an old fire insurance map) was directly behind our garage, which was a carriage house at the time. The cesspit was further south, and the present sewer line further south still. The guy who dug up the sewer line to replace it missed the cesspit by maybe five feet ... talk about hitting a pothole.

Here’s my theory: Sometime in the past—decades ago—someone filled in the cesspit when they installed indoor plumbing (which they did badly, but that’s another story). Over the years a layer of grass, tree, and bush roots grew over it, but underneath the fill dirt began to settle, causing a cavity. Guess it should have flossed. The impact of me throwing all those bricks down when I demolished the chimney weakened it, which just goes to show how my home maintenance jobs turn into a sitcom-like string of unintended consequences.

This is what happens when I hang upside down to take a photo inside a cesspool. That's the fill dirt on the bottom, and for perspective you can make out a spider on the concrete wall. What it was eating down there, I have no idea.

Out of curiosity—and to free up room for the bitty brick bits—we began shoveling out what turned out to be heavy, wet, mostly clay fill. Yes, sometimes items are found in cases like this. There’s a whole science behind researching the contents of old outhouses, and garbology is the study of modern garbage; the phrase was coined by a guy going through Bob Dylan’s trash. I didn’t expect to find anything valuable, but I did expect to find something, such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle we found buried in the old back yard sandbox.

A toy. Not a real turtle. Sheesh.

The thingy from the hole. Which, ironically, is the title of my new book.

First came a flowerpot, potting soil still inside. It was plastic, which dates the fill period to … sometime after they started making plastic flowerpots. Then came a really interesting item: Kind of a spool, possibly ceramic, with a hole through the middle. I’m thinking it’s a hollow ceramic spool. I’d guess it’s manufactured by a company called Superior, based on its markings, which say “Superior”.

 Call me Sherlock.

(After writing that, I sat down to do some research, code-named “Google”. It appears to be a ceramic insulator bushing spacer. I was so close! And get this: I found those things on sale on Etsy for seven and a half bucks. “Vintage Home Décor”, they call it.)

Now I just have to decide if I want to shovel out any more of that cesspit, which was more fun than watching politics on TV but all-too-similar. Maybe, as in politics, there's free stuff down there that was actually paid for by someone else.

Or maybe I can just keep digging, and start a survivalist bunker. That would fit the theme of everything going into the crapper.

The hole's covered on the left, with my new dirt pile on the right. Off to the far right you can see my "new" flowerpot.

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

            With the purchase of a brand new lawn mower, only the third new one I’ve ever bought, I said goodbye to my conservative lawn mower.

            (So named because it stopped working whenever it tilted to the left.)

            It had a good, long run. In fact, the conservative lawn mower wasn’t one of the three bought brand new—I got it used, just like my house and my cars. If it’s good enough for Pontiac/Ford/Dodge/Buick/Chevy/Nissan/Ford again, it’s good enough for Briggs and Stratton. (The less said about Renault, the better.)