Rolling On One

The weather forecast for southeast Maine last Friday evening was terrible — wintry mix, rain and freezing rain — so we decided not to go until morning. There was a show at the Portland art museum that Arlene wanted to see, so we figured what we’d do was to go to Portland, go to the museum, and get to our house whenever.

The exhibit we wanted to see was sculptures by John Bisbee, (note! link only valid while that show is on — it looks like the address the museum uses for whatever show is on at the time) who welds nails together. Many of the pieces in the show, “Bright Common Spikes,” are made of foot-long spikes, suitable for railroad ties. You don’t want to stumble into the works, or be too close to them and have someone bump into you.

We ate lunch at the museum cafe before going on our way, and noticed a long line of people standing in the same room — not on line for the cafe, but waiting for something. Oh — the artist was going to be speaking on his work in 20 minutes! I hadn’t quite finished my sandwich and chips when Arlene came back from investigating and said, “come on, they’re going to close the door!”

Bisbee turned out to be a most engaging speaker. He said his current job title has four words, of which he has no trouble with the first three but is not sure about the fourth: part time visiting lecturer, at Bowdoin College in Brunswick ME. He likes making things, and works for four hours a day for several months to do each of many of the sculptures (and four or six other hours on other projects). People may not like his sculptures, but everyone respects the amount of work that went into them. People will ask him what his work means, but he said to the audience (I should say, the packed auditorium — it was standing room only by the time I got in) “I sort of feel that’s your job. I make the stuff, and the people who look at it can say, ‘Oh, were you trying to say such-and-such,’ and I say, ‘…. well ….. maybe.'” He hasn’t read a book since he was in eighth grade. That was _The Yearling_, and he didn’t finish it. His parents tried to get him to read, to the extent of not letting him go outdoors to play until he had read ten pages of some book a day, so he would read ten pages of some random book, but not read through any one.

So we had a great time at the museum, even though we didn’t get to spend much time at our house.

Just because I like the way the finished one looks, here’s the state of a pair of mittens as of Thursday morning, with one finished:

By now the other one has the ribbing and two rounds of those white diamonds on black. Arlene tried the finished one on and says that both the thumb and main part are long on here, but the circumference is good. There’s a hole at the thumb joint that I’ll have to fill in, phooey.

These are Peace Fleece (worsted weight), main mitten body 23 stitches on each side on US #5s, done in magic loop with the cast-on from the Knitty article I cited a few posts ago (so knit top down). I got an extra stitch or two after joining the thumbs, so there are 48 stitches around at the start of the ribbing. After the ribbing the cuff increases to 64 stitches around, and then to 72 midway through that leaf motif.

I didn’t take as many pictures of the Mushers Bowl myself yesterday as I did last year. I think that two years ago there were no dog sled races because of lack of snow. Last year the races were postponed from the original date until sometime in February because of lack of snow. This year there was plenty of snow by this time, as you might have noticed from some previous posts, and the dog sled races went off right on time.

Probably because things were on schedule, there were more cars parked in the lot than last year — in fact, it was full. We had to drive a couple hundred yards down the road, make a k-turn, and park along the road coming back towards the event. Walking toward the races, we passed the horse-drawn wagon ride:

Since this event last year was our only previous exposure to dog sled racing, it was still interesting to see the dog teams and how they had traveled (mostly in kennel cages built to fit in the back of pickup trucks, eight to ten cages to a truck) — this isn’t one of them, just lots of dogs

Besides snowmobiles, ATVs with snow treads were much in evidence. Five Fields Farm, which is the host venue for the races, is also a cross-country skiing place and it must use these to groom ski trails (which for all I know are the same trails as the race is held on). The port-a-potties look COLD!

Here’s a close up of a dog sled. They’re very light and graceful looking.

They were selling T-shirts and caps as souveniers of the event. See those pallets to the left of the picture? You’ll see more of them in a minute —

… as fuel. A nice big fire was going so you could warm up every so often. It’s really not unpleasant being outdoors for an hour or so when the temperature is in the 20s if you dress warmly, stay out of the wind, and thaw out your fingers now and then.

Besides dog sleds, this was a good place to see snowshoes of all different vintages and of course lots of knit hats, mittens, and sweaters.

Arlene and I have our picture in today’s Maine Sunday Telegram. Not that you’d know. Here’s the picture:

See that yellow circle? That’s where we were standing, so Arlene figured that was us. I looked with a magnifying glass and convinced myself that it was.

Ready for our close-up:

Yup, unmistakable!

I have been knitting mittens lately. Here’s a finished pair, made from leftover Cascade 220 from the adinkra bag project and leftover Andes from the socks I started in Pocatello, and a motif from Knitting in the Old Way:

There’s most of a pair of small child size mittens from the Andes that still needs thumbs. Then there’s the beginnings of a pair in three colors of Peace Fleece that I got at Down Home Trading Company in Bridgton in late December. I’m loosely following a pattern in Anna Zillborg’s book that’s in the picture, and following her idea that a pair doesn’t have to be two things that are mirror images of each other — if you use the same three or four colors in each, but in different places, and you say it’s a pair, then it’s a pair. I used the cast-on that Judy Becker wrote up in Knitty for toe-up socks. It was far easier than the method Zilboorg gives for starting mittens. I started the second mitten before finishing the first, just because I wanted to work with that gray yarn with the color flecks.

Recently the shower in the bathroom off our bedroom has been dripping from the pipe above the shower head. I was a little concerned that it might be getting water inside the wall or someplace it’s a real problem, so for a couple of weeks I’ve been showering in the other bathroom. Finally last night I had enough free time to look at the place that’s leaking. It’s a piece that connects the supply pipe with a pipe down to the shower head, and it turned out to be cracked. The leak didn’t have anything to do with the pipe in the wall, but the cracked piece needed to be replaced.

My basic philosophy is that the more things you know how to do, the better. Sometimes you need to know how to use a knitting needle, sometimes you need to know how to use a pipe wrench.

I was able to buy a replacement part today; it’s called a head bracket (as in shower head). Here’s the story in pictures.

Here’s the rough pipe coming into the shower, with the broken part and the shower head removed. The replacement part has to be threaded onto it. Yes! I suspect your shower has something about that ugly behind the chrome parts.

Here are the old (left) and brand new (right) shower head brackets. You may have to take my word about the cracks, or use a little imagination to see them.

On the left below is a roll of teflon tape, or TFE thread seal tape. If you have any plumbing work to do (other than soldering copper pipe together, which I don’t know how to do, or glueing PVC pipe together, which I don’t know how to do either) you should know about teflon tape. It’s very thin, no more than half as thick as scotch tape and probably a quarter as thick. You wrap it about three times around the threads you’re putting together and tear it off. When you put the parts together it fills in any tiny gaps between the threads so the joint won’t leak. Better yet, the two parts have teflon between them so they won’t corrode together if you need to take the joint apart twenty years later, as I had to here.

Here’s the shower put back together. You can see the tape around the joints (but one joint is up inside the head bracket so you don’t see it.

I haven’t turned the water on yet. Ask me if it has stopped leaking tomorrow morning.

Matt and Anne bought me a set of new modern snowshoe bindings to go on the old 1970’s snowshoes we have. They arrived in Newton on Friday. We took them up to Maine that evening. Matt and Anne had got there a little while before us. I installed the new bindings right away and, eager to try them, asked Matt if he wanted to come along for a walk.

It was a bright moonlit night, with a waxing gibbous moon about three days before full, no wind, and pretty warm — at least in the upper 20s. The snow had a hard crunchy crust from rain earlier in the day. I’ve been wanting to get out on snowshoes on a moonlit night, and the warm temperature, clear sky, and new equipment made it irresistible.

I was out of breath a third of the way up the logging road to Sleeping Rhino, and let Matt take the lead and break trail. It was a lot easier going following him than crunching through the crust myself.

There were no tracks in the snow when we started. New snow that had fallen this week (Bridgton got 16 inches on Monday, and Casco couldn’t have had very much less) covered up the tracks we had made last week, but you could still see where the old tracks had been. I never before realized how well I know our trails, but we knew where we were in the moonlight. We went up to Sleeping Rhino, right on the Blueberry trail, spotted the little sign I had made at the intersection of the Rock to Rock trail, and came back to the house on it. The woods were as beautiful in the moonlight as I had hoped. It was perfectly quiet when we stopped, but only when we stopped. The crusty snow was very noisy to walk on when we were moving.
Saturday night was overcast, so the moonlight was less bright, but all four of us went out after dark and walked all the way around the property. We had been around the trails in the afternoon, so there was no problem breaking trail. Arlene and Anne went inside after one lap around, and Matt and I did a second lap because it was so nice out there.

December 2007 was exceptionally snowy both in the Boston area and in southern Maine. I think Boston was within an inch of being the snowiest December on record, and Portland had about the third snowiest December on record.

It’s very hard to tell how deep snow is without being in it. Once grass is covered you can’t really tell what’s under the uniform blanket of white nor how far down it is. Two weekends ago the snowbank by our driveway in Casco was shoulder high on me. That’s not how deep the snow was on the flat, just how high it was piled by the plow. But I had to shovel through it so the oil delivery driver would be able to get up to the oil filler pipe. On the flat the snow was more like hip deep on me.

After I got that path dug through the snowbank, I started a path to the left of the lilac bush. There’s a retaining wall at the edge of the driveway there, but there’s not much of a snowbank; so it will be easier to shovel that path out after the next storm. Even though it doesn’t come out at driveway level, the oil person will be able to get up to the filler pipe without wading through deep snow.

Here’s what the driveway and garage door look like:

Maybe you can judge the depth of snow by where it comes compared to the lowest branch on the Baldwin apple tree:

Finally, a quiz: can you find the Weber grill on the back deck?

When Arlene’s cousin Mira was visiting last weekend, I asked if houses in upstate New York have mud rooms. She said no, but that they should.

A mud room is something like a vestibule, preferably a space that you can close off. It’s where you can take off your muddy boots and snowy hat and mittens so you don’t track mud and drip melting snow all over the rest of the house. It’s pretty handy in northern New England. In Casco we have a mud room between the front door and the living room. Here’s what it looked like two weekends ago:

On the bench are Maplewood mittens from Robin Hansen’s Favorite Mittens book, in opal yarn and a hat from Bartlett Mills 3-ply fisherman’s yarn with a couple of inches of silk blend inside the folded-over part for an extra-soft ear part.

The snowshoes are not for decoration. When there’s two feet of snow on the ground, you need them even to fill the bird feeders, to say nothing of getting around the property if you want to go for a walk on our trails.

Well, the leftmost pair of snowshoes may be for decoration. It’s the oldest of the lot, with real babiche (rawhide) webbing. We’ve never put bindings (the gizmos that hold your boots to the snowshoes) on that pair, which means we’ve never been able to use it. The middle pair dates from the ’70s, with neoprene webbing. The one you see on the right is a modern one. It’s lots easier to put on and take off than the middle pair, but somewhat less effective at keeping you on top of the snow.

At some point when I looked up the kitchen window feeders were covered with redpolls — two on this one, three on that one, two more flying around looking for a space. There were more in the apple tree right outside the window, more on the ground, and more on the other feeder – Arlene estimated four dozen total, and that sounds about right to me. Then they flew away, and we haven’t seen any the rest of the day.

Midafternoon, I saw some movement in the driveway out of the corner of my eye. Sure! The ruffed grouse was picking its way across. There are no crabapples on the bottom branches of the tree; guess the grouse has gone for the low-hanging fruit first. I watched it in binoculars. With them, you could count the feathers in the ruff if you wanted. Unlike the pine grosbeaks (not here today!) which take a while to eat each crabapple, the grouse picked off crabapples and chewed them whole.

Just before sunset (which this time of year is not much different from midafternoon) I walked around the place on snowshoes. Opposite the little clearing at the far side of the property which we call “the patio” I heard a tap, tap, tap tap tap. Woodpecker? I looked up that direction and saw a big bird with black and white wings flying a few trees farther than it had been. A Pileated! We haven’t seen one of those since the spring.

So, pretty good bird day!