Rolling On One

Last Friday evening in Maine Arlene heard a loud noise that we couldn’t identify. Half an hour later I looked around the house to investigate. Oops! Should have checked right away. There was two inches of water in the middle of the garage. The pipe leading to the outside faucet had frozen and burst from the below-zero cold outdoors.

I turned the pump off. There would be no more running water in the house until we got the pipe fixed, because there was no way to turn off just the broken line. We unhooked the garage door from the automatic opener (that was something I hadn’t done before, but it’s super easy to unhook and reattach) and pushed the water out of the garage with a big broom and a snow shovel. That’s easier said than done, and remember that the garage door was at least partly open in the cold. Arlene had made lots of phone calls. Porky, who had done the new roof a year and a half ago, said he’d come over at 11:30 the next morning and fix it. I tore out enough of the sheetrock to get access to the pipe, and pulled out the fiberglass insulation behind it in the meantime.
Here’s the whole story, in pictures, except that we neglected to take a picture of the flooded floor and the water removal process.

That’s where the pipe burst. Although the hole is just an inch long, Porky said it’s important to cut out several inches on either side because the pipe is weakened near the break, and if you don’t cut out enough pipe it will just break again two inches from the original break.

That’s the broken pipe. That’s where all the water on the floor came from.

Even though the pipe was exposed to the (somewhat) warmer air inside the garage overnight, there was still ice inside the broken part.

Here’s one of the pipe couplings being soldered on. Porky’s girl friend is holding the pipe. Arlene was watching her daughter, who had come along.

I was wondering how you use a torch on a pipe inside a wall without burning down the house. The answer: bring a cookie sheet along as a heat shield.

Porky left several more feet of pipe, a coil of solder, a container of flux, the pipe cutting tool (which he showed me how to use as he was cutting out the bad section) and the cylinder of propane for us to hang on to. Of course, they were materials, as in “labor and materials”, which he charged us for. “If you’re going to live in Maine, you have to have some spare pipe in your house,” he said. “If you had had the stuff, I would have come right over last night and fixed it. As it was, I had to go to the hardware store, and it wasn’t open then.”

Two of the less common birds we’ve seen this week are uncommon precisely because they shouldn’t really be where we’ve seen them. Thirty or forty years ago they were out and out rare in Massachusetts. By now they’ve extended their range northward (presumably as the climate is getting more to their liking farther north) so they’re not a big surprise to see.

This one is a red-bellied woodpecker. When Arlene and I were new birders, we made a trip out to South Natick just to look for a red-bellied woodpecker that was listed on Massachusetts Audubon’s “voice of Audubon” phone answering machine, which at the time was the usual way to find out about rare birds in Eastern Massachusetts. Granted, South Natick is just two towns away from Newton, but still, it was a rarity at the time. We saw one in Chatham on Cape Cod several years later, when they weren’t so rare in Massachusetts but when the sighting was still memorable. Four or five years ago I was still pretty excited to see one most every day that I walked in Prospect Hill Park. This one is at a suet feeder in our heritage apple tree in Maine. Notice that on the range map on that page I linked Maine is not colored purple? This bird has less business being in Casco than anywhere in Massachusetts! A red-bellied woodpecker was reported on the Maine Audubon rare bird notice a month ago in Otisfield, the next town north of us. Arlene thought she had seen one across our driveway the weekend before last, but we didn’t get a positive ID that time. This may be the same bird, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the one that was seen in Otisfield. But there’s no way to know. By the way, take another look. Besides the woodpecker on the suet there’s a chickadee in that picture.

This one is a Carolina wren, at our kitchen window in Newton. They’re more common than red-bellied woodpeckers, but still uncommon. One of the best-known birders in the Boston area is trying to see a Carolina wren in every town in Massachusetts, and he’s most of the way there. There are enough of these birds around to make it likely that he can do it, but still few enough that it’s a challenge.

Hey, I found out that I could output an mp3 from Finale. Here’s the second song the Prozdor klezmer band played in the concert back on December 23, Der Zeyde mit die Bubbe, orchestrated in Finale by me.

Arlene has been seeing Massbird reports of white-winged crossbills at Salisbury recently. On our way north yesterday we stopped at the Salisbury state park and looked around the pines. Nothing there, but a guy who was walking down the road told us he had seen them twenty minutes earlier (that’s the way it always is with birding as well as fishing, “you should have seen it yesterday!”) Then a flock of twenty small birds flew over and he said, “There they go!” They didn’t settle in the trees near us, though, but went on towards the other side of the camping area. When we were at Lake Sebago State Park a couple of months ago Arlene said she thought she had never seen so many picnic tables in one place. The camping area at Salisbury had even more! There are hundreds of camping spots, each with a picnic table. This time of year, with nobody camping, you can see them all. With four wheel drive, we drove down the icy unplowed road between campsites in the general direction the birds had gone, not really expecting to find them. But Arlene spotted some movement in a tree as we passed, and it was a flock of crossbills. They flew a little farther away, we doubled back between a different bunch of campsites, and got a reasonably good look.

We continued along the New Hampshire coast, just because once we’re at Salisbury it’s not too much slower along the coast, and much more interesting than the interstate. We stopped for lunch at Robert’s in Kittery, then at the Crate and Barrel outlet, then got back on the Maine Turnpike as far as Scarborough. There’s a big outdoor outfitter store that opened just off the exit there within the past year that we hadn’t ever been to, and I wanted to see how it compared with L.L. Bean and Kittery Trading Post. This one is Cabela’s, and it feels immense. It doesn’t seem to have as much clothing as L.L Bean, but is very strong on hunting and fishing, especially hunting (which is not really going to be an attraction for us.) I think both Bean’s and KTP are better for general outdoor activities like canoeing, snowshoeing, and hiking. Although Cabela’s had a lot of marine stuff, too, a big display of electronic fish finders and a display of small electric motors for small boats and canoes. We might be back there in the spring to get a motor for our canoe or rowboat. The fly tying supplies are amazing; I’m going to want to go back in the late winter, when I start thinking about fishing. In particular, they have a selection of top-quality dry fly hackle in small quantities. The least expensive way to get that stuff is to buy a whole rooster neck, but that’s well over $100. I’d rather buy 1/100 as much material for $10. Even though it’s much more per feather, I’m not going to need more than that at a time. The Cabela’s store is one immense room, not at all interesting as an architectural space (Bean’s and KTP both are subdivided and on multiple floors, so more interesting in that sense) but filled with displays — mounted animals, dioramas, electronic shooting galleries, and an aquarium with big trout, bass, and pickerel swimming around (and black crappies, a panfish species I’ve seen pictures of but never seen for real before.) If you’re driving through Maine with kids, it would be a good place to stop just to look at the fish and animal displays.

I just ran into “an introduction to the fracture mechanics of spaghetti” on the BBC news web site and liked it so much I need to share it here.

There was a postcard advertising a sale at Wild & Woolly, a yarn shop in Lexington (actually, on the street I used to live on. I walked past that spot on my way to junior high school and high school all the time, if I wasn’t bicycling or taking a short cut through the parking lot in back of it), in our mailbox this morning. If I had found a web site from W&W with a picture I’d link it, but I didn’t, so I scanned the card because I’m sure Judy will enjoy seeing it, and also Gina and anyone else from Black Purls who happens along:

I neglected to post a picture of a pileated woodpecker which, very cooperatively, worked on a tree across the driveway in Casco for long enough to let me get my camera, step out onto the front porch, and take a few pictures. Most often these guys are pretty shy, but occasionally they don’t seem to mind humans watching them. That tan spot to the left of the bird’s head? That’s the hole it has dug into the tree trunk. You could stick the end of a 2×6 into it. These are big birds, and when they start pounding on a rotten tree trunk the chips fly!

Starting Christmas weekend and finishing last weekend, I made a bird feeder that I copied from a photo on a web site from the Michigan Upper Peninsula. I just liked the way it looked, and it seemed like a good quick woodworking project. I’ll have to get a post to put it on, and a big sheet metal cone to keep the squirrels off it; but here’s the feeder, ready to mount and fill:

We had several pine siskins at the feeders in Casco this past weekend, both at a monster thistle feeder across the driveway (it was an anniversary present from Arlene’s brother) and at a little thistle feeder on the kitchen window. Siskins are small birds that you might possibly mistake for sparrows, in other words, not spectacular birds at all, but with some bright yellow stripes on the wings and an overall much more delicate look than sparrows — more the size and shape of goldfinch, which they were flocking with, but less colorful and finely streaked with dark brown all over. They’re uncommon in New England, sometimes showing up in the winter. We don’t see them at all often, so they were very welcome additions to our list of birds we’ve seen in Casco and this year.

On Friday we went to Portland first to the art museum at the University of New England to see the show of Alice Spencer’s paintings (that link is to whatever is the current show at that museum, so it won’t be for that show if you’re reading a few weeks after this got posted) inspired by her collection of textiles from around the world. Many of the textiles themselves were included in the exhibit, ranging from a heavy floor covering from Kazakhstan to a delicate batik from Indonesia. I liked some that seemed to show the inside and outside of some clothes at the same time. Ms. Spencer has a printmaking background, and the paintings had a lot of the layered look that Arlene’s prints have.

From there the intention was to go to the curtain store and get more energy-saving drapes. I was following directions on the car GPS. At a corner in Portland I was in the wrong lane to bear left on the street with the same name, but signalled to go that way anyway — traffic was light and it looked safe. Suddenly Arlene said, “No! Go straight anyway!” She had spotted the Artist and Craftsman Supply Company! It’s an art supply company that has a big wonderful store in Central Square, Cambridge, in a basement location across the street from Pearl Paint. We had known their main location was in Portland, but up to that moment we hadn’t known where. I parked in a 15-minute-only spot on the street and we went in, but when we found the main entrance that opened on their own parking lot I moved the car and we settled down to some serious looking. I got mostly a couple of big sheets of decorative paper for bookbinding, and a small sketchbook. Arlene got some pens she likes, handmade Indian paper, and some specialty adhesives. We ordered some brayers that I like for indexing stamps that weren’t in the store’s online catalog but are in the supplier’s catalog.

We did get to the curtain store and found what we wanted very quickly. We headed back up route 302 and had supper at a restaurant called Charley Beigg’s, which is in a former firehouse building in North Windham.

We stopped at Marden’s (“I should’ve bought it when I saw it at Marden’s”) (don’t click that link unless you want to hear their jingle!) in Gray on the way to Casco on New Year’s day. Someone was talking to his kid (or more likely grandkid) about routers, because there were three big boxes, each with a Black and Decker plunge router, there on the bottom shelf, at $59.99. That sounded like an awfully reasonable price — though I have a Craftsman router that I’ve owned since we lived in Watertown. On the other hand … of course I wouldn’t be posting about it if I hadn’t got it.

My first impression, though I haven’t done anything except one trial cut with it, is that it’s wonderful. First, the plunge feature makes it much better suited to use with the lettering template than the old one. “Plunge” means you can set a depth stop, rather than setting the bit to a fixed position below the baseplate, so you position the template bushing in the lettering template, then turn it on and push the bit down into the work, rather than getting the bushing into the template while it’s running. That makes it lots less likely that you’ll ruin the template before cutting with it. Second, it has a gradual startup. The old one goes from 0 to whatever, 3500 rpm, in a split second when you turn it on. The startup torque makes it try to jerk out of your hands — especially troublesome if you’re going to try to get that bushing into the lettering template, but I have marred lots of workpieces because of that. This one doesn’t have that starting jerk, so it stays where you’re trying to hold it. Maybe best of all, this one has a port that takes a vacuum cleaner hose to remove shavings. A router is about the most productive source of sawdust, shavings, and chips of any tool I’ve ever used. They build up around the bit very quickly, making it impossible to see what you’re doing. That’s especially a problem for lettering freehand. I haven’t tried this with the shop-vac, but it it halfway works it should be a big big advantage. One more thing, this has a turret for depth stops that allows you to set three depths of cut at once. In hard wood or for deep cuts, you need to make more than one cut at different depths to get the job done. If you have to move some sort of edge guide to make different cuts (say you need a guide for each joint on the side of a bookcase, and you need to cut at two depths) you are constantly readjusting depth of cut for first pass, finish pass, move the guide, first pass, finish pass, etc. With this one, you can set the turret depth stops for first pass depth, finish depth, and just click to the next depth for the next cut.

So, OK, the old router works perfectly well and has stood me in good stead for decades, but the modern features make me wish I had the new one long ago.

Oh, I found the same model on the internet for $74, and then there would be shipping. So it was a good price at that.

I’m under way on a new sweater, this one for Arlene. It’s inspired by one of the sweaters in Kaffe Fassett & Zoe Hunt’s book Family Album, the brushstrokes sweater. I guess that’s what I should call it, even though I’m not really following the pattern but rather just trying to use what colors of yarn I have, mostly Classic Elite Renaissance that we got at Fabric Place when they were going out of business.

I’m planning to make a V-neck pullover, using a pattern that the people at Creative Warehouse in Needham made for her using a program called Sweater Wizard.

Here’s the picture of Fassett’s design, with the center of what I’ve knitted so far:

… and everything I’ve done so far on it.

Yes, it’s a big tangle. There were 22 strands of yarn hanging down the back on that row. No, it’s not driving my completely crazy, not yet. However, it sure is a lot slower than Fair Isle or the cabled stuff I recently finished.