Sep 13, 2008 | Captain OCD
Lots of groundwater, a condition one might reasonably expect when pushing toward cattails, which are nature’s way of saying, “Come any closer and you’re going down, son.” Not conducive to using the bucket to lift up the machine to walk it out backwards. In fact, what you are looking at is the result of repeated attempts at that technique.
Almost out.
Unstuck.
This is old news for Captain OCD and it got unstuck with the help of a brother-in-law/next-door-neighbor (in the hat), a 1-1/2 ton ratchet chain puller (when I asked if it was strong enough to pull the machine out, I was laughed at, but such ignorance is to be expected from someone who doesn’t know how to walk a belt onto a pulley), a tree, a truck, and a hand shovel. The tree (about 18 inches in diameter) nearly gave what’s left of its life (I noticed just last week that it’s dead except for one low branch), but when Captain OCD noticed it moving more than the Bobcat, he decided that there were better ways to begin a day than to have a large tree fall on top of his truck and the Bobcat stuck in the mud. Because I knew that it wouldn’t stay stuck for long, my main concern was that this detour had used up all the blackberry-clearing time. I got home after dark today but was assured that the job is almost done, and will be completely done tomorrow.
Sep 12, 2008 | Captain OCD
So, Captain OCD comes in the house, the fresh-from-the-garden cucumber, tomato, and basil salad that he’s prepared in the fridge, the steak strips that he’ll barbeque later marinating while he finishes a little work outside, and says, “When’s the last time you drove the Bobcat?” The comment suggests that whatever he’s got going on out there now requires two people to move the Bobcat. Not often a good sign:
Periodically, for years, I’ve suggested that it would be nice to get all the blackberries and other undesirable brush cleared out from the other side of what used to be the pond before it began silting in to a sad shadow of its former self. I could, of course, whack the weeds by hand, but it would take me weeks to do what can be done with the Bobcat and a skilled operator in half an hour, which means it’s simply not possible to do it by hand. At least not by my hands. The skilled operator lives here, but the Bobcat is rarely home and instead spends its time moving from job to job, so when it is home I like to put it to use. Or, rather, put someone else to use using it. Someone who knows it so well and has been driving it so long that he could use it in a Tiddlywinks tournament and take home the gold.
Because it hasn’t been cleared out for a few years, and because the shoreline of the pond is always changing (and no longer visible under all the brush), it’s not easy to determine where the edge turns too soft. This is one way to find that edge. Or, rather, just beyond the edge. But, hey, if you always operate on the edge, you’re bound to go over it every once in a while. Or down into it.
He has lots of experience getting things unstuck. One is to use the bucket to push the machine up out of the muck and slowly walk it backwards. See too-soft edge, above. I’m guessing that more than several minutes were spent trying that before he came in the house to inquire about my Bobcat-driving skills, which are not good enough for this sort of situation. If you ever need a Bobcat driven up and down a hard, straight, flat driveway, though, you call me. Another way is to chain it up to the truck and pull it out while someone else drives it in reverse. See the truck’s front driveline – the one that puts the terminal “4” in “4×4” – in multiple pieces in the carport. If you’re good at math, you know that that leaves a 4×2, which is not much help in pulling machinery out of deep and slippery mud. For now, the Bobcat is chained to a tree so it doesn’t sink any deeper and we’ll revisit the situation when it’s daylight again.
Sep 8, 2008 | Captain OCD
On my Google toolbar are icons with recent search words, the buttons you can click to find the next occurrence of that word in the current window. I sit down to the computer to see:
q-jet divorced choke
C1 used the computer last. Good thing I know that:
- a q-jet is a carburetor
- he’s not married
- his girlfriend is not married
- a choke is associated with a carburetor
And that he is here to de-Captain-OCD-ify a couple of vehicles, one of which is having mysterious carburetor troubles.
Aug 10, 2008 | Captain OCD
How often, especially in the summer, do you curse road closures and construction crews for inconveniencing your day? Me, often, even though I’m married to one of the delayers.
There is lots of stream enhancement going on around here so fish can get where they’re supposed to be going the same way they used to go before we put roads through their streams that lead to their homes in the saltwater. We put in small culverts to allow most of the stream to flow under the road, but not enough for the fish or to prevent floods upstream from the culvert during big rainstorms, or “events” as they are sometimes called in stormwater-management circles. Because we did so a long time ago, and the salmon have been complaining, and we find salmon delicious, we are now ripping up those roads to restore the streams inside big pipes, and then covering that with road again. I think it would be cheaper to develop a public-transit system where fish could queue on one side of the stream and then be bussed to the other side of the stream at regular intervals, but no one asked me, so gigantic culverts under existing roads it is.
These photos hurt my eyes, too. They are from my cell phone and it was getting dark, so the camera struggled with the focus. And it’s a cell phone camera, so distances and scale are not very apparent. Look at us, all complaining about the quality of the cameras in the relatively tiny devices that allow us to carry on phone calls from just about anywhere to just about anywhere and take pictures between phone calls. What a bunch of whiners we are, instead of appreciating that we can send this photo from said device out here in the woods of the Pacific Northwest to another device in Santiago or Paris or Manhattan for about a quarter. If I’d had my real camera, hadn’t been wearing brand new shoes, and hadn’t just vacuumed out my car, I might have crawled around in the mud more to get more representative photos (we hadn’t planned to come here when we left to go eat dinner).
For a sense of scale, that’s Captain OCD, just shy of six feet tall (and getting shyer of six feet every year), next to the excavator. The black sections are gravel, and the road used to go from where we’re standing straight across to the black section on the other side. It’s about 275 feet to the other side, about 47 feet deep (picture a 5-story building sitting down in the hole), and more than 200,000 cubic yards of material was removed from this site.
That’s the new passageway for the salmon. The pipe is about 140 feet long, 10 feet high, and 20 feet across. It’s a half pipe sitting on concrete footings, with a gravel floor, upon which a sort of naturalized surface was created using rocks, logs, and other things salmon like to see in their streams. It will take several events before enough silt fills the system (possibly several years) so that the stream flows as it should and the salmon can get back in the reproductive business.
There are 7,500 large bolts holding those pipe sections together, each one fastened by hand with impact wrenches held at odd angles, often overhead. Some of the guys doing most of the bolting together could barely feel their arms and hands at the end of the 10 to 14 hour workdays, making driving home a challenge. Captain OCD spent the better part of a very long day fastening bolts while sitting on a ladder at odd angles and his hands look like swollen hamburger (which were not helped by replacing belts in the cramped quarters of the front of an engine bay). He generates impressive bruises easily (both because he bruises easily and because he uses his body like a tool), so I told him if he has to take a trip to the emergency room he’d better be prepared to explain the crop of bruises on his backside or he’ll go up on the wall of weirdo admits.
Soon this will all disappear under a standard paved road. The entire process, from finished road back to finished road, has to be completed in 35 working days. Now, would you like to know what’s under your housing development, the nearest strip mall, or a hospital? A whole other complex world.
Jun 30, 2008 | Captain OCD
It was 186 degrees today and Captain OCD was full of energy even though he hates the heat, but he manages to not whine about it while at the same time getting stuff done. I can do neither of those things. He asked me to go to the store to get the ingredients to make a blue-cheese-stuffed-bacon-wrapped-chicken-breast recipe he saw on one of the five shows he watched on the Food Network this morning. He gets lots of ideas there but says that he gets some of the ingredients and techniques mixed up from show to show because he watches a lot of them when he wakes up early. I’ve mentioned once or seventy times that it’s possible to find nearly every recipe ever prepared on the Food Network from their Web site, but where’s the fun in that?
I complained that it was too hot to drive to the store to get the ingredients he needed to make dinner, but he had work to do. He was terribly excited to make dinner, but first wanted to finish re-doing the entry, which involved moving large plants, dismantling an old waterfall and pond, reusing that rock to make new rock walls and outcroppings, planting new plants, tearing up a stepping-stone path and putting it down again (because I did the first one many years ago and my talents are not to be found in the laying down of stepping-stone paths) and generally tidying up the large area. When I got home from the arduous task of driving to the store and buying food for someone else to cook (although I made a lovely fruit salad) and asked what the broken sections of pipe in the driveway were for, I learned that he also had to fix the sewer line that goes to the septic tank that he’d mistaken for a particularly intransigent rhododendron root. I said that it was a good thing the washer wasn’t going. He didn’t understand why that would be a problem, so I explained that that would have made for a muddy mess. “Yeah, and it’s a good thing we don’t have nine toilets that were all being flushed at the same time.” My idea of the difficulty in fixing a pipe apparently differs from his.
By the time he was done with the yard a few hours later and had taken a shower, it was too late for him to make the dinner he’d been planning and he’d worked a little too hard in the heat and was exhausted. He said a fish sandwich sounded good and that he’d run down to Fred’s to get some fish fillets. I rarely go in the store (Captain OCD is in there at least once a day), but I’m fairly certain that Fred does not carry fillets of any kind:
“You mean fish sticks?”
“Yeah, fish sticks.”
“Yuck, not from Fred’s!”
“They’re fish sticks. What difference does it make?”
“Because they’re probably old and freezer burnt and gross.”
“No, I’ve gotten them there before and they’re good. He goes through a lot of that kind of stuff.”
Oh, he does not. Even though fish sticks are my favorite meat, I’m not sure “good” is ever an apt modifier for them. I told him he didn’t need to buy any for me and that I would find something in the refrigerator to eat.
I didn’t see what he brought home, but saw a plastic bag full of something on the counter. They were sort of squarish things of differing sizes, and they were kind of pale with an uneven coating of something not recognizable.
“What are these?”
“Fish sticks.”
“Those are not fish sticks.”
“Yes they are.”
“Then what kind of off-brand are they?”
“Van de Kamp’s.”
“No way.”
So he showed me the box he’d already thrown away.
“See, ‘Sealed in Freshness Pouch’!”
He was right on both counts, but even after closely examining the things in the plastic bag I had a hard time coming up with the fish sticks I know and love. So I searched for an expiration date because, while I know I’m always right, it never hurts to have documentary proof.
See that date up there under the title? It’s very nearly July 2008. See that date on the box of fish sticks? It’s very nearly a year old. My guess is that fish sticks have a long official shelf life, so I shudder to think of how old that box really is. I doubt that fish sticks go bad as long as they stay frozen, but they get dry and misshapen (which hints at the lack of a consistent frozen state) and stuck together and the coating comes off.
“Yuck! You have to take those back.”
“Why? They’re fine.”
“Look at the them! And you can’t let Fred get away with this! It’s disgusting!”
“I’ll take one box back, but I’m eating these.”
“You bought TWO BOXES?!”
Last time I looked, he was enjoying his fish sandwiches. No way will he bother to take the other box back.
Jun 7, 2008 | Captain OCD
He must have been the tragic victim of an unfortunately balanced egg carton when he was a child.
