Rolling On One

I didn’t get to do much today except work and index stamp mounts. Oh, wait, I noticed (from an ad on Crazy Aunt Purl) that the new Prime Suspect was on yesterday. We looked around the  TV listings for our local PBS stations and found that it was being repeated tonight, so I watched the first hour and ten minutes before starting the indexing. We recorded it, so the other 20 minutes aren’t lost. And now it’s past bedtime. See ya —

Since Arlene was still in Maine, I figured I wasn’t going to make coffee and eat breakfast at home before driving back there. Since Millie and Joel were also up there, I figured that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to bring a half-dozen bagels back with me. A stop at Rosenfeld’s would get me breakfast as well as the bagels.

The guy who waited on me was the guy who bakes the bagels. I’ve seen him for years there, putting wooden boards covered with unbaked bagels in the huge rotating oven, pulling the finished bagels out on big wooden paddles, and dumping them in wire baskets behind the counter.

“You’ve been coming here for years, haven’t you,” he said. “Yes,” I said, “we’ve lived in Newton since ’76 and I’ve bought bagels here all that time,” “I started here in ’88.” he said. “I bought the place about five years ago. None of the kids of the people who founded it were interested in taking over. The only change I made was to make it kosher. Rosenfeld couldn’t make the place kosher, because since he was Jewish the rabinnical authority would have made him close it on Saturdays. Since I’m not Jewish, all I had to do was keep the food kosher.”

Joel is up in Casco this weekend with Millie and their grandson Mason (who’s dragging around with a cold, but that’s another story). Joel encouraged me to get out my chainsaw and start using it, while he’s here to coach. Yes! I’ve been meaning to cut up some wood, but haven’t really worked up my courage after smashing my finger back in September. But that’s two months ago by now, the finger is all healed and working fine, and there’s wood to be cut.

Really, you can’t own eleven acres of Maine woods and not have a chainsaw (and be able to use it). Trees fall in the forest, whether or not they make a sound, and block trails you made, or block the driveway, or are a hazard to walking because they only fall halfway and are just waiting to fall the rest of the way onto someone. Besides that, there are logs lying around that would be better cut up into firewood than left to rot.

So, now I’m checked out on my chainsaw. I cut six or eight or ten logs into convenient stove-sized chunks. Four of those logs were in the way of a path I want to use to get to the raspberries and blackberries. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go farther around the lot and cut up some more logs that are in the way or could be firewood before they rot. This time of year, deer hunting season, you don’t want to be walking around the woods on a Saturday, but there’s no hunting on Sundays.

As a bonus, working with a chainsaw is macho enough that I felt fine finishing knitting that herringbone stitch scarf. That was just over a month from yarn purchase (at the Fryeburg Fair on October 7) to finished object. OK, so I still have to weave in the ends, but the knitting is done.

I took Friday off and we went up to Casco on Thursday evening. Partly it was because I had vacation days I had to use up in this year, and partly so we could be there to have our oil burner serviced. When the water failed last weekend, we figured that it was good that we were going to be there so we could have the well people over today, too.

The oil burner guy was about my age and size. He didn’t mind my watching him work, changing the filter on the oil tank, cleaning off the nozzle and igniter of the furnace and water heater oil burners, and showing me how to reset both of them. I’ve seen signs in garages that say things like “labor rate, $15 an hour, if you watch $20 an hour, if you help, $25” so I wasn’t sure he’d want me around, but he said he had taught in vocational schools and was used to people watching him work and he liked to explain what he was doing. Besides telling me lots about oil burner maintenance, he talked about hockey, northern Maine (“the county” being Aroostook county, way north, where you expect the temperature to be 30 below zero when you get up at 5 in the morning to get your friend’s sled team ready for a competition), and his travels around the Canadian maritime provinces.

The first and most senior of the guys from Burton Page Artesian Wells came over around 9 in the morning, swapped in a new capacitor and motor controller box, and determined that that wasn’t the problem after all. That meant they were going to have to pull up the pump. His crew was a couple of towns away on a job that didn’t have to be done right away and wouldn’t be finished today anyway, so he had them bring that to a good stopping point and come over to fix our well.

They showed up mid-afternoon with two trucks. They backed one of them over our front yard, raised the tower, and pulled the pump up.

The well pump is 600 feet under ground, with a long plastic pipe and electric cord leading to it. It gets pulled up on a big hose reel suspended from the derrick on the back of the truck. The pump motor itself weighs ten or fifteen pounds, the pump three times that, and then there’s six hundred feet of plastic pipe full of water; so you don’t want to pull that up by hand.

Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera along. All I could do to show you the proceedings was to take a picture with my camera phone.

It took a while to pull up those 600 feet of pipe! Finally the pump and motor came out of the ground. The repairmen took the motor off the pump, tried to turn the gear at the top and found it wouldn’t move, and said, “Yup, that’s the problem.” They swapped in a new motor, tightened all the connections, and unreeled the pipe and wire to let the pump back down the well.

But wait, you ask, how does the water get from that pipe to the house? The connection is about five feet under grade level, below the frost line, that is, deep enough underground that it won’t freeze. There’s a fitting at the top of the pipe from the well that drops into a fitting connected to the pipe to the house. The well guys connected a ten-foot iron pipe to the fitting on the well pipe, held a flashlight to shine down the well, and guided the well pipe down to where the two fittings matched. When it was done I said, “That looked to me like the step where everything could go wrong.” It was just the guy holding that iron pipe that was holding all the pipe from the well. If he had dropped the iron pipe, I don’t know what would have kept it from going all 600 feet down. But he’s done it before, and it was OK.

I tell you, it was pretty strange see that brand-new pump motor I had just bought go down the well. The wellhead is only fifty feet from the house, but that motor is going six hundred feet away. With a little luck, I’ll never see it again.

The phone listing we have for the well company is “Burton Page Artesian Wells, Dale Page”. It was Dale who had come over earlier in the morning. I asked the guy who seemed to be in charge of this crew if he was Burton. He said, “No, that’s my grandfather.” Dale was his father. That’s three generations of well guys, and the  teenage or 20-something kid who was the third person on this crew is a fourth generation.
I drove back to Newton this evening to go to a potluck party from where I used to work.

I don’t know where I found Tales of the Cupcake Mafia, but it is fun to read. I think it was two degrees of separation from a knitblog.

It’s about midnight:30 and I missed getting in a post on the 9th. Darn. I’m counting this, but strictly speaking it’s a different day.

The Gray rest areas are closed for the winter this year. The signs are down, there are lots of cones across the exit ramps, and the lights are off. If you didn’t know they were there, you might not see them in the dark.

Tonight was the reception for Arlene’s friend Lynda’s show at the Newton library. Arlene had gone over there a week or ten days ago to help hang the show. I heard a lot about the show, how the space is for hanging art, and so on.

Lynda is the person who told Arlene about the Nature Printing Society. We went to their conference in the summer of 2005. Lynda does most of her art with leaves, crushed eggshells, and other natural objects. She has a really nice sense of color as well as a feel for composition, which makes her work easy to take. Still, there’s a good variety in it — it doesn’t really all look the same.

Well, I have to break off now and check a Guiness Gingerbread that’s almost ready to come out of the oven downstairs. Recipe from Epicurious, link thanks to this blog, post from Nov. 3.

It’s too early to be sure, but it looks that way. We’ll count that as posting something today, and go back to paying attention to the election returns.

It’s looking as though the referendum to allow wine sales in supermarket chains has been defeated here in Massachusetts. It looks as though my college classmate has not been elected governor of Vermont.

Oh, by the way, this is one year since I started my current job.

I didn’t know about limoncello until just under a year ago. If you don’t, either, it’s an Italian lemon liqueur. Anne and Matt acquired (the contents of) their friend Marcy’s liquor cabinet when Marcy moved, just about the time we got the house in Casco, and moved most of it up there. The best thing in it (at least, to my taste, of the things in it I’ve tasted) was a tall, graceful bottle of strong lemon flavor, limoncello. I’ve gone easy on it because it’s obviously too good to guzzle.

When Nicole looked at the crabapple liqueur I’m trying to make, she said, “Oh, it’s like making limoncello.” After a little internet research, I think it’s very similar indeed — let lots of lemon rind sit in vodka until the flavor soaks out, then add sugar syrup. So I may be acquiring fifteen or so lemons in the near future to try to make a batch myself. Or just eight lemons. I think half a recipe might hold me for quite a while.

Sometime in the late morning today Nicole called “There’s no water!” That would be a problem in any case, but it was worse at that point because Emma was halfway through a bath, ready to be rinsed. So we had a soapy little girl, and no water.

I checked some circuit breakers, and reset the one by the pump control, but it was no use. By now we’ve had an electician look at the breaker and controller and arranged for the people who put in the well and pump to come by when we’re back next weekend.

There’s a sort of spring that flows a lot of the year where the wellhead is, and I can get water from it to flush toilets; and we have a stash of drinking water in the cellar; but of course it’s a nuisance.

We finally put together a project we’ve been meaning to do in Casco — a shade for the skylight in the upstairs bedroom. Charley likes rooms very dark. He’s been tacking a piece of cloth over the skylight over the bed when he sleeps there. Since he and Nicole and Emma are here this weekend, covering the skylight is high on the agenda. We had bought a room-darkening windowshade, but there’s really no way to support it on the skylight. We finally used the sewing machine that I fixed a couple of months ago to sew a piece of fabric (remnant Marimekko from the Crate & Barrel outlet in Kittery) to the room-darkening shade material to make a skylight cover that’s the right size, is reasonably opaque, and looks good from the inside. And the sewing machine cruised through the job!

In birding news, there was a ruffed grouse standing between the living room window and the lilac bush thirty feet away. It stayed there until Charley went out the front door to try to photograph it.

We tried making crabapple jelly, but I didn’t have directions for the powdered pectin that I had, and I didn’t have as much sugar as the Ball canning book called for. So I have no idea whether or not it will ever jell. Of course, there’s no telling how it will taste, either.

I finished Order of the Phoenix and started right away on The Half-Blood Prince.

And, really most significant if least interesting, I have my new laptop set up so that I can connect to work and work from home in the event of bad weather.