Getting a Little Claustrophobic

After the unusually wet early summer we had and the improved growing conditions that came with it

things were getting downright claustrophobic around here a few months later! (I could have picked a better vantage point for this photo. That corner of the concrete pad on the right is actually on the edge of a drop-off that's more significant than the photo reads. If that bench was down on the ground in the middle of the photo the vegetation would show as a foot taller than the back of the bench.  Oh well, too late for a do-over now.)

A point (claustrophobia) that was driven home the other morning when I saw a couple of deer come up out of the pond and attempt to cross the meadow there in front of me.

Even after the usual late-summer dry spell and growth-stunting brutal temperatures, except where we keep a fire-break mowed down around the barn, much of the meadow was chest high to me, which meant chin high to the deer (we don't grow them as big here in the south because they don't need the body-mass to survive brutal winters and smaller means less energy expended, which translates to less food and other resources required, which translates into better survival rates.)

Out of deference to the polinators feasting on the bio-diverse variety of plants afforded by a meadow pretty much left to nature (sort of unusual here in cattle-country where grazing and haying call for more mono-cultured pastures) I usually don't do the annual shredding of the meadow (otherwise the surounding forest will creap in and take over) untill things have gone dorment in late November. Timing the shredding for then opens things up in time to give the spring wildflowers a chance to thrive without removing viable polinator habitat.

The other side of that pollinator coin though is that the tall plants also surpress the ground-hugging browse used by other animals, deer included.

So when I saw those poor deer hopping like rabbits, one hop at at time with a break in between to get reoriented (As prey animals they don't like not being able to see their surroundings), as they tried to cross the meadow to get to the treeline, I had to admit it was time to shred, regardless of what the calendar said, or the number of flowers still out there. (There's another flower-rich meadow on the far side of the pond that we never touch which means it's not like the pollinators would be shit-outa-luck. At least not for a other 10 - 20 years. Because we don't shred over there the meadow is slowly shrinking as the woods move back in.)

---- OK, fair warning. If you want to jump past the unneccessary details and one 'wandering off on a tangent' and get right to the point of this post, skip on down to the last two photos ----

Not being rich hobby-farmers coming out here on the weekend for a break from their big-city jobs we don't have a shiny orange Kabota ($25,000) or a hydrostatic-drive Mahindra ($26,000), or a bragging-rights green John Deer ($33,000) with their push-button controls and fancy electronic dash-boards.

I can use this photo untouched because that's Mom over 20 years ago and she's gone now.

We have a Jinma ($9000). A 1950's design built in a 1970's era factory with 4 switches (for lights we never use), 5 gauges (only 4 of which actually work), 4 foot-pedals (one a two-stage clutch with a spring strong enough to flip you right out of the un-shock-mounted seat if you're not braced just right), and 9 levers (including a shifter that takes two hands to operate).

We used to use the tractor quite a bit when we were developing the property but not so much anymore. Now it gets fired up maybe a couple times a year.

And no, the old beast doesn't actually have over 12,000 hours on it! At 3 to 4 MPH that would be 36 to 48 thousand miles all on our little 14 acres. That's insane! It's just that ever since she was about a shiny new 4 weeks old the hour meter spins like the false promises of a slot machine.

By the way, the tach hasn't worked for years either, except for about halfway through me using her this time. Then suddenly the needle jumped up right where it should be and tried to convince me it’s been working this whole time - Nope. I'm not buying it -

She spends the majority of her time chilling out in the tractor barn. Which is a pretty fancy thing to be calling that ragged out mess down there in a far corner of the meadow.

We put the tractor barn up about 22 years ago. The first structure we built on the property.

At that time this Water Oak a few feet from the back wall was a 6 foot tall, 1.5" diameter sappling and we just left it there. Now it's pushing 50' tall, is  22" in diameter,

and has been seriously abusing the barn's roof for quite some time.

But I have to give credit to Clearspan, the makers of the barn. Thought the door zippers, actually the stitching of the door zippers, failed fairly quickly, the barn fabric made it to and beyond the 15 year warranty before the translucent center panels of the roof gave in to the abuse of the Water Oak. (The solid parts of the cover, with the exception of the lower half of the door flap which the summer storms finally shredded this year, are still in great shape.)

We could have an arborist come and remove the tree, buy a new cover (the metal structure of the barn is still in remarkable condition), and pay a crew to come remove the old one and put the new one on,

but instead we just throw an old tarp we already had laying around over the vulerable bits of the tractor.

For a long time I didn't even do this, but a couple of years ago when I dragged the beast out of hibernation the transmition was stuck in 2nd gear (it's a shuttle-shift so I still had my choice of forward or reverse). Apparently water coming through the tattered barn roof had infiltrated it's way into the gearbox and rusted everything tight.

There used to be a fiberglass sun-shade on the tractor, see previous photo of Mom, that deflected the water away but a while back I ran it into one too many low branches and finally broke it to where it was trying to use the top of my head as a support. And, like everything else about this tractor, that thing is heavy!

It's a testament to the enduring utility of the generously sized square-cut teeth, loose tolerances, beafy shifter forks, no fancy sycro's or clutch plates, in other words of the 'crude' engineering of the old days, that after draining the milky oil/water crud out of the transmision, topping it up with fresh gear oil and driving it around for a couple of hours, everything broke loose, giving me back all three gears.

Reminds me of those early 20th century, crude, noisy, dirty, but supremely reliable - and repairable - engines used to power irrigation pumps, oil wells, small factories, generators, ships, ferries, pretty much anything you could think of, in all corners of the world. Some of which are still running today a century later.

In fact in the 80's I used to drive past one of these still powering an oil well, probably running directly off the sweet crude it was lifting out of the ground, near US 77 somewhere between Norman and Pauls Valley in Oklahoma. Once running with that distinctive thump of the single cylinder firing every second and a half, it was left on its own to do its thing around the clock, getting checked on every few days or so.

EMP will take out our vehicles, the washing machine, our phones, WIFI, banking, traffic lights, smart watches, but our tractor will still be running!

Damn! OK, I'm back. Went so far off on a tangent there I had to ask for directions back. Something that took a few more points off my man-card.

So anyway, back to claustrophobia.

To fix the issue I loaded the tractor battery, which lives on a battery-keeper in the main barn, onto the lawnmower, - what? You didn't think I was going to carry a heavy-ass group 27 battery down to the tractor barn by hand did you? -, heaved the damn thing into place (not easy at 58 pounds with the front-end loader bucket in the way), hooked it up, and with breath held, pulled the throttle open about halfway, leaned on the glowplugs for about 15 seconds, and hit the starter.

Two of the cinders were a little reluctant at first, but under the can-do insistence of the third cylinder, the frame shaking thump-hiss-hiss thump-hiss-hiss was soon converted to a sycronized, we're-ready-to-go-forever fast idle.

Shit! Now that it's started I guess I really have to do this.

"This" initially involves wrestling the mower-deck onto the tractor's 3-point

then struggling to get the PTO shaft stabbed onto the tractor's splined PTO take-off and locked in place.

This usually - always - involves a generous amount of WD40 to get the shaft-lock unstuck (the black ring turns maybe an eighth of a turn to release the lock), then, with eveything nice and slippery from that along with all the other oil and grease that oozes from old tractors, trying to get the shaft splines, flopping around on a universal joint like a newborn's head, lined up with the takeoff splines then shoving the whole thing home, all the while holding the shaft-lock ring open against a pretty damn strong spring.

To make it even more interesting, the PTO take-off shaft can 'drift' while you're screwing around down there,  especially when the gear oil is still cold, and with enough torque on it, the PTO shaft you're trying to line up with the take-off can spin the mower blades, which spins the shaft, which miss-aligns the splines, which results in a lot of grunting and cussing.

And all this has to be done while you're contorted into the space between the lower link arms and the upper link turnbuckle while trying to work around the obstruction of the take-off shield.

Yep, it would be easier if that shield were removed,  much easier. But have you ever seen something get sucked into a PTO shaft spinning at 540 RPM by a very torqy engine?! That's why there's so many one-armed farmers gathered in the morning around 'their' table at the waffle house. No thanks, I'll leave the shield on.

As usual, I eventually manage to get everything hooked up and ready.

Then it's three hours of circling, dodging trees and the two septic system cleanouts, trying not to tip the tractor over on the banks around the pond, dragging tools out (this time one of the lines on the hydraulic pump started weaping more than normal so had to be tightened, and the tailwheel of the mower deck quit castoring and had to be broken loose and regreased), keeping a close eye on the gauges, and just generally trying not to bust anything, to turn claustrophobic into this.

I barely had time to put everything away again before the deer were out there nibbling on the freshly exposed browse. 

Halloween Display is Up!

 Yep, that whole drug lab/police raid scene has been dismantled for something a little less violent and more ghoulish.

It all started

with this magic shop/haunted house

I built back when The Surgery of 2023 had temporarily reduced my lifting ability down to a handfull of popcorn. A small handfull of popcorn.

After a few years of being tucked away in storage it got drug out a couple weeks ago as the perfect starting point for a Halloween display.

But of course I couldn't just stop there!

So I Amazoned some asorted ghouls, ghosts, and other bits (I already used up a bunch of them before thinking to take this photo),

and with some paint, glue, and glitter spruced a few of them up.

Then I dug around in my Bins-of-Crap and came up with this wire-n-paper tree.

You know how there's two schools of thought about tinsel (yeah, don't ask me how tinsel made it here to Halloween because I have no idea. It just did.), the one-strand-at-a-time (and do it neatly damnit!) sticklers and the just-throw-a-handfull-at-the-damn-tree-and-call-it-done anarchist hippies?

If it would have worked I'd be with the hippies and tossed a couple of handfulls at the damn thing. But it wouldn't, so I ended up painstakingly gluing one strand at a time onto carefully selected branches untill it seemed like enough - or untill I'd had enough - I'm not really sure which it was.

Of course you can't have a Holloween tree (is that even a thing?) without buzzards (that I had to paint myself since they only came in bright-metal)

and a murder of crows.

These came in black, I just had to add some highlights and, even though you can't really see them, red eyes.

Add a base made out of some stacked foam covered with brown wrapping paper, some buzzards and crows hanging around, a few ghosts for ghoulish measure, and you have a Holloween tree! (I don't care if that's not really a thing yet, I'm starting a new tradition damnit!)

Not one to learn from experiance, I then, one persnickety strand at a time, tinseled the hell out of the haunted house and finally pumpkined, ghosted, vultured, crowed, and black-catted the crap out of it.

Things are starting to get outa control here! But that’s never stopped me before - -

OK, I'm not sure how this Christmas truck got in here but it has been commandeered by the resident witch who is taking out civilians with it.

Speaking of buzzard food - I mean eviscerated civilians - - -

And every respectable haunted house has to have a graveyard. After all, there's got to be someplace to put all those unfortunate civilians.

OK, getting closer now. (The penciled rectangle on the bench represents the inside dimensions of the display case.) 

But wait!

Poking around online I came across this Haunted Forest canvas-on-frame print, at Walmart of all places.

It's actually a quite effective backdrop in its own right,

but when did that ever stop me from meddling?

I mounted some LEDs face down on an appropriately sized circle of white, open celled foam. This acts as a diffuser, spreading the light out.

Then mounted the foam circle in just the right spot on a backer (actually just a trimmed down file folder), and mounted the backer to the back side of the haunted forest frame.

Lights off

Lights on

And the effect is quite dramatic, even if I do say so myself.

Sleaking of lights, I ended up using a lot of them in this display, my whole supply of 12V LEDs as a matter of fact, to get everything to where we were happy with it, but we think it turned out pretty well. (In my opinion the video at the end gives the best view.)

Now I need to dust off that Victorian house and start thinking about a Christmas display.

Maybe tomorrow - - -

The Hidden Costs of Autism

There are some costs to being autistic, especially when both of you in the houshold are on the spectrum, that you just don't think about - untill they happen.

The other day the drum-bearing, probably the inside bearing since it's right behind the seal which had probably been letting water slip by, on our front-load washing machine failed. No warning. No slightly unusual noise getting louder over time. Just suddenly a full-blown classic failure - the machine sounds like a jet engine during spin cycles.

A loud jet engine!

Loud enough that I couldn't deal with standing at my workbench during wash-loads, having to wander off and find something else to do untill the commotion was blissfully over.

The replacement bearing kit (two bearings and a seal) is only about $30 but the repair itself requires a full teardown/rebuild and takes an experianced person with the proper tools a good 4 - 5 hours.

Me? Longer obviously. Probably twice as long.

And I just didn't feel like tackling that job.

Because of the labor involved getting it repaired on site by a 'professional' is around $450. Not great, but still about half the (today's) cost of the machine. 

But then again neither one of us is emotionally prepared to have a stranger in our house for that long (The Wife usually goes for a drive when this is unavoidable but this would require a full-blown road-trip!)

 So instead we scraped our 12 year old ($700), otherwise perfectly functional washer and bought a brand new one ($1000). Not the most financially responsible course of action, but one that we were willing to pay for because was a lot easier on us emotionally since the delivery people are only here for 5 minutes. 

Yes, The Wife still makes herself scarce when we hear the truck at the top of the driveway. But I can deal with it reasonably well because it's a technical interaction rather than a social one and those hardworking independent contractors have many other deliveries to make before earning enough for their families to make it through another day, so they don't hang around any longer than neccessary.

That was 24 hours ago.

By my count the new washer has done 4 loads already. The US average for a family is 6 loads per week. Around here we easily hit a weekly average closer to 10-12.

Sidebar: I know the failed washer was 12 years old because, looking back through our water consumption data (we have a meter, a private meter for our own use, on the well.), 12 years ago we suddenly went from an average of 110-120 gallons per day to 60-70 when we replaced our rusted out top-load machine with a much more eco-freindly front-load.

Waiting for Breakfast

 

And aparently I'm not invited. She wasnt too happy about me trying to horn in.

This Spectrum Thing Can Be A Drag

Once in a while this autism thing decides I'm too comfortable and reaches out and bites me in the ass!

Yesterday, as part of an otherwise typical 70 mile round trip shopping thing to restock on tomatoes and cleaning chemicals (I don't know what's in the CLR we use for removing lime, calcium, and rust left behind by our hard well-water, but the person that brings it out to the curb-side has to verify you're old enough before handing it over.) we made a stop at Hobby Lobby for beads (The Wife)

and a few bits-n-bobs to finish up the Halloween vignette for the display case (me).

True, Hobby Lobby pretty much ignores Halloween because it doesn't align with their version of God, but they have loads of other things that, with some imagination, can be repurposed.

i.e. This little red Christmas tree truck which I can re-use later in the year. But for now I can bend the tree forward and use it as a support for a flying witch silhouette cut from black foam-board. (Yeah, I know, I need to scale that drawing down a bit to make it work.)

Hobby Lobby has a decent web-front store but that doesn't always work when you're trying to be creative. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet, go inside, and browse the shelves and aisles to find things that you didn't know you need but are perfect for the project. (Turns out Poly-Fill teases out into spooky puffs of creaping mist much more effectively, and way more cost friendly, than cotton batting. Something I would never have figured out at a keyboard.)

But that doesn't change the fact that the place is inevitably full of people. Many of them, like me, old and blocking the aisles right where I want to go. Too many of them over-active, and loud, kids (Why do people keep having those annoying little rug-rats?!).

So that’s how I came to be standing in the too-long, too-slow checkout line while the really inefficient checker (I mean how many times do you have to look at the lable on each item? Once damnit! Pick it up, check the lable, key it in, put it in the bag. Stop fiddling around with the damn thing and get on with it! And by the way, this is a retail checkout line, not a craft seminar, so this long-winded exchange between customer and checker about the finer points of quilting technique is totally inappropriate!) plods agonizingly slowly through a simple task, while I'm getting more jittery by the second, when The Wife casually, innocently, wonders if a local restaurant we haven't been to since before the COVID lockdown started still has the pick-three appetizer we used to get.

A simple enough question, but it raised the possibility of an unexpected deviation from our normal routine, and that was enough to plunge my brain over the edge towards a full-blown meltdown. Between over-activated sensory systems and trying to mask - you know, so people wouldn't know I'm slightly wierd - I could barely function by the time it was my turn to be the served customer. And it wasn't untill we were back inside the safety of the truck that my brain backed far enough out of fight-or-flight (or curl up into a little ball and whimper untill the world goes away) mode to allow me to look up the restaurant's menu on line and confirm the pick-three appetizer was still there. (After all The Wife deserves her little pleasures too and my issues shouldn't interfere with that.)

Remember the robot from Lost in Space? The one that was constantly saying "danger Will Robinson"? Well I think my brain is a blood relative of that robot, like a direct decendant. All too often it's waving its arms around spasticly while seeing horrible things behind every rock, most of which were never there in the first place, and trying to convince me to fight dragons that were never there.

Autism isn't all bad. It's what keeps the two of us from attending events that are potential mass-shooting venues, but sometimes I can't help but wonder what it would be like to be 'normal'.

I Raided My Own Drug Lab!

 

Y'all may remember that recently I inadvertently built a mobile drug-lab.

Well, to atone for that transgression

I called in some reinforcements in the form of a Lego City Cop

and since I wasn't sure he was up to the job all on his own I called in a swat team as well,

complete with their own swat jeep.

The cop stuff was easy enough to assemble once I figured out, via Youtube since there were no instructions on how to assemble the many fierce-looking swat-team members included in the box, how to put the utility belt on these guys. (Being a Lego neophyte at first I thought it was some sort of shoulder pads or chest harness but just couldn't make it fit.)

Now the real work started!

I had to create a base for everything to sit on.

In this case, 1/2 inch foam board cut into two sections so the whole thing would fit into one of my 

hanging-file storage boxes when not actually on display in our display box.

I added a few extra scraps of foam on top of the table-flat bits and carved some contours and wheel-ruts into the whole thing to give the terrain some variety, then taped off where the drug-lab assembly would sit before starting the next phase.

Which begain by toning down the pink of the foam with a couple rattle-cans of earth-tones lightly applied so the solvent didn't melt the foam too much,

before moving on to dirt.

Now in the modeling world you can pay good money to buy various colors of pre-cleaned and sifted dirt from several different sources,

or you can grab a soft brush, a scrap of paper to brush onto, and any handy container, then go out in the yard and collect your own.

By moving around to different parts of the property I was able to come up with a variety of colors

I then sifted them into a brushed-on layer of thinned white-glue through a spare tea-ball, dropped additional, watery-thinned glue on the sifted dirt, and 'settled' it all with a misting of isopropyl alcohol, (breaks surface tension and lets the watery glue flow and seep into all the nooks and crannies.) working on a small area at a time and giving it plenty of time to cure before going back and messing with it.

I recorded quite a bit of the work on the base with my new thumb-camera clipped to a headband, but most of those recordings are unusable. I have to figure out how to get the camera to point down at what I'm working on and not out across the shop - - -

At this point I decided to add some additional texture in a few spots by collecting the shavings from rasping a bit of scrap foam and gluing them down using the same glue/alcohol processes.

This is clearly something I should have done before painting with earth-tones and not after, but it is a fantasy scene, I mean it's Legos for cryin' out loud!, so I'll live with the pink sparklies. But next time I'll get it right - maybe.

Because most deserts are not all dirt I added a few judicious patches of ground cover

and some bushes using the same glue/alcohol process.

To help blend the harsh black-plastic edge of the drug lab assembly into the rest of the scene I 'dirted' around the edge of it a little.

If I was using expensive commercial dirts I would have done this over a tray so the leftovers could be collected and returned to the bag, but since I can just step outside and sweep up some more I didn't bother.

Now I could set the major components

into the scene,

but before making that permanent, lights

had to be added,

and grime

dusted on.

I don't think I was entirely successful at capturing the wiper-marks on the windshield, but you get the idea.

The 'grime' is a variety of pan pastels painted on with foam brushes and fine-tuned by smudging with a fingertip.

Another marginal attempt at videoing what I was doing.

Finally the vehicles could be permanently fixed in place, wiring secured,

 and supporting characters dropped into the scene.

This included drilling a tiny hole in the bottom of the swat drone so I could insert a bit of wire

and 'fly' the drone over the scene.

The resulting raid was so fierce (notice the bullet holes in the RV's door) that even the headless torsos surrendered!

And in the mayhem of bullets, flash-bangs, and teargas, the swat robot got confused and ended up dropping its weapon and surrendering too.

There was one casualty, but the balistic vest took the hit and she just had the air knocked out of her. She's fine now.

Well, two casualties if you count the fire, friendly or hostile - that hasn't been determined yet - that took out the red roof-light on the swat jeep.

Clearly something went wrong with this particular light between testing and final assembly. The lights I used for that are very small and delicate so are easily damaged and not easily replaced so I'll just have to live with it

The only way I've been successful at stripping the insulation off the very fine wires of these lights is with a judicious application of direct flame. Just enough to melt the plastic but not enough to vaporize the very thin wire underneath.

And here's 

a couple videos

of the completed project.

Finally it was time to remove the Viking Fishing Village scene from the display case and tuck it away in a storage box,

so the drug-raid could be put on display.

Now I guess I better get to work turning the 

haunted house into a proper Halloween display.

And after that?

Well last night Fedex dropped a box off up at the gate.

The Wife needed a $3 bobble from Hobby Lobby ($1.50 with the perpetual 50% discount) and we ended up padding out the order to reach the free-shipping threashold. (To be honest we got caught up in the frenzy of catalog shopping exceeded that threshold by quite a bit!)

Now we have more than enough stuff to build a number of Christmas scenes!

Then this arrived today after months of waiting (many model railroad bits like this don't actually go into their limited-run production untill a pre-order threshold has been reached).

It's going to be an element in a Maritime Heritage Museum scene inspired be a screenshot from a  window-swap video.

And then there's  also - - -

Crap! Clearly the therapy isn't working!

Edit: After living with the new scene for a couple days I decided it needed more overall lighting. Something like a floodlight to give the scene a little more definition.

I've got a mess of these 12v lights. They're designed to be snapped apart and used individually but I left them as a string of five

and created a little mount for them out of a tongue-depressor, a few dabs of glue, a bit of paperclip, and some left over granite rattle-can paint.

With the strip of lights glued to the mount, plugged into a 12v power source already permanently mounted to the bottom of the display case, and the paperclip hanger hooked over the edge of the case, we have flood lights.

From the 'viewing side' of the case its not too obtrusive, but now I'm wondering if I should have just left the mount its natural wood color.

Before

and after.

I may have to use the current-limiter pot on the power supply to tone down the light a little. We'll see tonight.

I was sitting minding my own business while making that last edit to this post and a couple of Guinea Hens came wandering by, ignoring me like I don't count!

That was hurtful!