Rolling On One

I lost a couple of posts that I had written, because of some server update. I guess I wrote the posts when the data was partway transferred to the new server, but I posted it to the old server, and it never got transferred. Or some such. So I need to reconstruct what I had.

One was about the Idaho trip, when we went over the Victor grade to Jackson and a few miles into Grand Teton National Park.

The other was about a Lego set that Arlene & I found at a tag sale in Otisfield back in early July (or it could even have been late June) on the day of the Casco tag sale.

There’s a big tag sale / fleamarket in Casco every year to benefit something in the community — I think the church in the town center. We didn’t get an awful lot this year, but on our way home we saw a sign for another tag sale at the Otisfield community center and, being in the tag sale shopping mindset, continued down the road to it. They had two immense Lego sets there for $5 each. That’s more than we normally spend for any one tag sale item, but these were big, complex sets. We took both. They’re both Technic models, which means moving parts. One is the Enzo Ferrari 8653. The other is the 4×4 off roader, 8466. We thought at first that Gena’s boys would someday like them. I said, “I’d better build them first myself, just to be sure all the parts are there.” I thought that was pretty obviously not the real motivation — I just wanted to play with them myself.

I didn’t do anything with either until three weekends ago, when Charley and Patsy were in Maine with us. Charley took one look at the models and said, “Don’t let those kids TOUCH those until they’re lots older!”

Both the models had been started. We decided that it would be too hard to figure out where the original owner had left off and that we would be better off starting from the beginning. The Ferrari had its instructions and the 4×4 didn’t, so it seemed to make more sense to start with the Ferrari. Charley took it all apart, and we got to work.

Legos are after my time. I had never built anything to speak of with the Technic (nor Expert Builder, which it was called when Charley was a kid) sets. Fortunately, Charley knows how to read the instruction books, which are all pictures so as to be equally accessible regardless of the builder’s language (assuming you are familiar with Hindu-Arabic numerals, and understand “X” as a multiplication sign, either that many parts or build a sub-assembly that many times).

Charley and Patsy did some internet research on the set and convinced us that even though we thought $5 was a lot to spend on a tag sale item, the sets were a steal. The original price of each was more like $80 to $120. Each set has over 1000 pieces.

Charley and I working together — one of us would pick out the parts for the next step while the other was assembling the previous step — did not get the model built before he and Patsy left to go back to Somerville, but I did finish it on Sunday evening.

I didn’t realize how much moves in a model like that. The steering rod (not the steering wheel, but a rod that comes through the top of the model so you can play with it) turns the front wheels with a rack-and-pinion steering mechanism. The wheels are all mounted on shock absorbers, and go up and down as well as around. The rear wheels are connected to a differential and then to a V-12 engine which has pistons that go up and down in their cylinders as the rear wheels move. The doors open. And we put it together so it all works!

I got started on the 4×4 the weekend of Aug. 22. Charley wasn’t there, so I’m on my own for this one. I got my work area organized with the smallest pieces sorted out in an egg carton and an ice cube tray, and the other pieces sorted into styrofoam meat trays.

Here’s what the 4×4 is supposed to look like when it’s done.

Something online about it says “five speed transmission.” I know it has three differentials, one for the rear wheels, one for the front ones, and one to allow the front and rear ones to move at different speeds I guess. When I’m finished with it I’ll probably have a pretty good idea how a differential really works.

The Ferrari turned out to have all its pieces. I’m missing at least two pieces of the 4×4. Also, the 4×4 doesn’t have its directions with it, so I’ve had to find them on the interwebs. That turns out not to be a serious problem, but it does constrain me to build the thing right next to the computer so I can look back and forth at the directions every few seconds.

Last night Arlene & Charley & I went to see an open dress rehearsal of the play, C. P. Taylor’s Good,  that Patsy is directing at the Boston Conservatory. Pix here at Charley’s photo blog. It’s about how someone goes from being a reasonably good person to a Nazi.

It was in the Zack Box theatre, a fifty-seat auditorium at the Conservatory that’s used for student productions. We were three of ten people in the audience — but as I said, it was a rehearsal so we can hope that more people come to the real performances.

The play takes a lot of attention to follow, as it jumps without warning between the main character’s memory to the present (I mean his present, in the 1930s or 40s) to the imaginary music he can’t get out of his head and which accompanies everything he does. The acting was way better than I expect from a student production.

We took the T home — the first time in about 2 years that Arlene or I have ridden it. We’re not used to all the electronic signs in the cars or the stations, nor to the fare card machines.

Last night we got together with Anne, Matt, and Charley for dinner at Koreana in Cambridge. It’s around the block and across Prospect Street from where Anne & Matt live. There’s lots of construction on their street (which is a little surprising for this recession) and the area is getting significantly upgraded. We could see spiffy touches like stairways with cable strung along for banisters as we looked in the windows.

Koreana was busier than they expected, and busier than they were ready to handle, for a Monday night. We thought it was because of all the students moving in (or rather, their parents treating them to a last non-dining-hall big meal before the start of school). Service was so slow that they brought us complimentary desserts, a little scoop of ice cream wrapped in rice paste.

Yesterday S & S Abatement LLC removed and disposed of approximately 105 linear feet of asbestos pipe insulation from our garage and main basement using the glove bag method.

Last autumn (or was it a year before that?) when we had a heating system tune-up the repairman said that our boiler was pretty old and would need to be replaced one of these years. Before that could be done, we would need to have the asbestos insulation removed from the steam pipes in the cellar, because the installers weren’t allowed to make connections to asbestos-insulated pipes. So we’ve been thinking about getting that cleaned up.

A couple of months ago Arlene got the name of an asbestos removal contractor from the gas company, phoned them, got an estimate, and made an appointment. We spent most of our evenings for the last week cleaning up the cellar so the contractors could get to the pipes without danger to our stamp inventory and materials. Finally the day was here, yesterday. They were due at 7 AM. We set the alarm for 5:45 and were ready. The truck was outside our house at 6:45 and they got going.

The abatement people (it was a three-man crew) brought a four-foot-long carton to the cellar with a roll of plastic sheet with rubber gloves attached every three or four feet. The plastic goes around the pipes, gets taped together to form a bag around the pipe, is sealed at the end, and the disposal workers work with the rubber gloves so the hazardous material is always enclosed in the bag. They wet it down so there’s no dust produced. Here’s the boss. He takes this work pretty seriously. Even with the wet glove bag, he’s in hazmat coveralls.

A closer look at a wet glove bag:

… and here are our lovely asbestos-free pipes after they spray-painted them with aluminum paint for at least minimum insulation:

… and the shelving unit ready for us to clear off and put stamp stuff back on:

I don’t usually leave my photos so big, but I liked this one so much I did:

It doesn’t even show up full size in my browser. Right click or something, download it, and check it full size!

Chesterfield is sort of a ghost town Mormon pioneer farming community. It was a small but busy town in the late 1800s through around 1950. Its citizens had hoped that a major rail line would eventually connect it with the outside world, but when the railroad was built it, and later the highway, ended up about twenty miles away. That was too far, and Chesterfield couldn’t survive as a town. Now it’s nine miles from Bancroft, which is to say (with apologies to the good people of Bancroft) nine miles from nowhere. Go ahead and google map it, and you’ll see what I mean. There’s a beautiful picture of it in the winter on Google Maps (but no more beautiful than my picture above 🙂 ).

Chesterfield is being lovingly restored as a historic site. It will never be the Sturbridge Village of the West, if only because it’s not on the way to anywhere else. Even Bancroft isn’t on the way to anywhere else except Chesterfield.

We found our way easily, partly because I remembered the road from five or six years ago when we had first been there, and parked by the Barlow Log Store.

There were two teenage girls in there and two women about our age. One of the women is a guide for the place. She got us a sarsaparilla soda from the cooler (sounded right for the old West) and asked what we’d like to see. I said my first priority was the tithing house, since that was something unique to the Mormon history of the town.

When people started to restore the town, they almost gave up on this building. The mortar was falling apart, and they didn’t know what to do to keep it together. A man who knew something about construction happened by and couldn’t get the building out of his mind. He figured out a way to hold it together with T-shaped bolts — a threaded 5/16″ rod about the length of the thickness of the wall, with a short rod welded across one end. There are now over a thousand of those holding plywood to the inside of the bricks and keeping the bricks from falling out on the outside. There are just two rooms in the building. I guess the outer one was a waiting room. The inner one was the bishop’s office (a whole bishop for a town of that size!), where people paid their tithes or requested help from the community (or more likely asked for help on behalf of friends or neighbors who might have been to proud to do so themselves).

The only other thing we had time to see was Denmark Jensen’s cabin.

“We have a joke here,” said our guide, “that when your mother said, ‘Now, you go straight up to bed!’, she meant straight up!” That ladder is the only access to the second floor.

Our guide said they have 10,000 visitors a year. That sounds like a lot to me, but maybe. They have a lot of church youth groups that come out, go on camping trips in the hills, and help with some work around the place. I can see the attraction for Mormon kids who might want to see what the intermountain West looked like when their great great grandparents were settling it.

All right, it’s isolated out in Chesterfield, but isn’t it GORGEOUS! I’m not listing it on my top ten things to see in Idaho, but I do really like it.

In bullet points —

• Wednesday Aug 5: Chesterfield ID
• Thursday: Jackson WY
• Friday: Shoshone – Bannock Powwow
• Saturday: All Shook Up
• Sunday: Breakfast at Perkins, walk dogs on AMI trail
• Monday: Lunch with Lorenzo and Jo, Scout Mountain, and block party

Details and pictures to follow — ciao

This is one of the shirts that I started several years ago. It turned out that all this one needed was buttonholes and buttons. I remembered that buttonholes are ridiculously easy with the Necchi, and there was no excuse. That makes three of those four done. The last one of that batch has the front, back, and yoke done, and the collar on the band; so it needs the collar put on, sleeves put on, underarm seams done, hems, buttonholes, and buttons. The indigo one that I’m discharge printing with adinkra stamps still needs the back printed, and then it’s not as close as the last of the old batch.

Once I started seeing water snakes at Cutler Pond, I kept being able to find them. The weather has been a little colder than I think they really like (or maybe I’m just projecting my own feelings) so when it IS sunny, they hang out in sunny spots. I’ve had a camera a couple of times, but gotten some of my best pictures with my iPhone camers. This is my favorite picture, though. Can you find the snake? That’s what it’s like walking and looking for them; they’re less conspicuous than my hazel seedlings. You have to be tuned in to the scaly texture, and then you do find them.

If you haven’t found the snake yet, look at the right edge of the picture, about a quarter of the way up, for the scales. Then follow it left, and eventually find the head a quarter of the way in from the left side and a quarter of the way down from the top. As we looked carefully, we convinced ourselves that there were three snakes together in this little area. Maybe all in this picture, even; I kind of think that black stick in the top right section of the picture is one, and that there are two along the right edge where I told you to start looking.

Here’s a closeup, a few days later. The scales showed up particularly clearly! I tried to get closer to get the head in the picture, but the subject slithered away. I hate when that happens.

I spent a lot of the Fourth of July weekend with my baby chestnut and hazel trees.

The first order of business was to go out to the planting site with the string trimmer and clean out the area. There were lots of ferns growing there, as well as plenty of wild brambles and sweetfern and beech seedlings and sprouts. Then we raked the area to remove at least some of the chopped up weeds. By early afternoon we were ready to plant the seedlings.

I had labeled wooden plant markers that we got from Paris Farmers Union, about the width of tongue depressors but thicker, twice as long, pointed on one end, and bright orange, with the kind of plant and the date. We set them out where we wanted the plants to go and then got busy digging with a mattock and trowel. We dumped a timed-release fertilizer pill and then a trowelful of humus/manure (I had trundled the 40 pound bag of that as close as I could in a wheelbarrow, and carried it the last hundred feet) in each hole, set in the tubeling, filled in the hole, and watered. By suppertime we had planted all ten chestnut seedlings and all 22 hazels.

I was tired, sweaty, and dirty by the time we were finished. And this is after brushing the bits of weeds from the string trimming off my shirt:

It was rainy a lot of Saturday so I didn’t do much more with the trees then, but on Sunday I went back and marked off the seedlings in little squares of surveyors’ flagging tape, because I don’t want to step on them by mistake and they’re not particularly conspicuous at this stage.

I added some cedar bark mulch. I’ve been told that one way to keep deer from eating your apples is to hang soap bars from the apple trees, so I thought maybe some chips of soap on top of the bark mulch will keep deer from eating the seedlings; so I added that.

By now the whole area looks sort of like this:

Now all I have to do is water the plants once a week for a month or two, sprinkle some fertilizer in a circle around each, keep the weeds down, and wait five or ten years.

I was thinking of titling it “shirt and pants — I mean plants.”

About a week ago I did buttonholes and sewed buttons on a shirt I had been working on for some of this spring, made from remnant Marimekko from the Crate and Barrel outlet in Kittery. I had selected several colors of the same basic design — well all right, at the per-pound price we had taken all we could find of the designs we liked — and combined three different colorways in one shirt. I’m waiting for someone to ask, “where did you get that shirt?” so I can answer, “You can’t GET a shirt like this, you have to make it or commission it.”

Now, as to the plants, they’re the hazel and chestnut trees I had ordered back in March. I was hoping to get them a month ago so I could plant them Memorial Day weekend, but they finally arrived on Monday. And there’s another three day weekend coming up during which to plant them. The package looked like this (except that I blurred my address on general principles). Note the “Live plants, do not leave in sun!” Well, maybe I made the picture too small for that to be legible.

Inside are plants grown as “tubelings”, that is, seedlings in plastic tubes. I think the idea is that you can remove the tube and plant what’s left and disturb the roots less than if the plants were shipped bare-rooted. At any rate, there are 22 hazels which should have various sized nuts — the larger nuts are more convenient to eat, but probably produce less food per bush than the smaller ones, and some of the smaller ones may grow faster and start producing sooner. Then there are ten chestnuts, of which 5 are selected for nut production and 5 for being bigger trees. So, please wish the trees all good health and wish me strength to get them all in the ground appropriately.