Plowed!

Monday, February 7, 2011 by Dick.

I figure I can drive anything with wheels. The fleet right now includes a pickup and an 18′ flatbed trailer, the (topless) (white) car, a more traditional sedan, and a John Deere 2210 diesel tractor with a front end loader, mid-mount mower deck, and a 3-point snowblower. The bucket, mower, and blower are all 54″ which is a convenient width. I also have a five-foot brush hog and a five-foot swivel blade, but that’s another story. We’ve sold the race cars but in years past, I have manhandled a twin-stick Mack, lugged barrels and boats with a twin-boom fork, and shepherded race cars with and without fenders. Rufus is annoyed that I can tuck a trailer into a blind alley with 6 inches of clearance.

I’m still getting the hang of filling the tractor bucket, though. Dumping it is easy peasy but filling it while leaving nothing on the ground is still a trick.

I’ve had a chance to practice this past week.

Schools across the county had all cancelled Wednesday’s sessions before the 6 p.m. newscasts Tuesday evening as the biggest snowstorm of the season rollicked across Southern Vermont on its way to North Puffin. I had cleaned up all the open spaces just before dark so the drive was as ready as it could be. In fact, I even opened a new path to the woodshed as well.

I don’t have brine so I have to plow the old fashioned way: out in the elements, sitting high on my tractor, pushing and sometimes lifting the snow with the front end loader bucket.

Did I mention that I haz a tractor?

“Plowing” with a bucket means pushing the snow ahead of the tractor with the bucket until you either (a) fill the bucket or (b) get to the end of the driveway. In either case, the technique at the end of the run is to lift the overflowing bucket of snow high onto a mountain of snow somewhere out of the way and deposit same. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Did you remember my tractor has a snowblower?

Unfortunately, that snowblower is buried at the very back of the garage, behind all the materials for the new porch construction that were supposed to be out of the way (meaning back where they belong) by Fall.

I figured then it would be OK. After all, we don’t get many big snow falls and I didn’t blow any snow at all last year. Right? Right.

Ten inches of snow by the time I plowed the third time around 5 p.m on Wednesday. I measured another three inches at bedtime and it was still snowing lightly, small, sparkly flakes. The land is really quite pretty. Weather radar shows the majority of the storm had passed us by then.

SIXTEEN INCHES.

Lordy Lordy™

And it could have been worse.

My running total, with the Wednesday night-Thursday morning’s four inches, was just 14 inches total but the undisturbed, undrifted roof of the Mercedes told the real story on the yardstick. 16 inches. Shoveled the walk. Dragged a shovel’s width out from the south door of the porch portico so that door can open if need be. I have plowed and plowed and plowed and plowed. I moved all the new snow out of the driveway and then cleaned up the edges. I also opened up the walkway we use to get to the woodshed but still needed to plow up to the barn.

On Friday, I plowed the new snow, neatened up everywhere, opened up the woodshed again and the dooryard and made a path to the barn. Even ran the Camaro for a while to circulate the juices and charge the battery. On Saturday, I made another little path so we could get to the pile of locust since that particular wood was running low in the woodshed. I like it for overnight burns.

And then it started snowing again. Overnight.

Recall that plowing really means pushing and lifting. That’s easy when the snow is two or three inches deep because it takes most of the driveway to fill the bucket. Plow down, lift, dump. Plow back, lift, dump. Much more than that couple-three inches, though, and the lifting/dumping cycle happens with greater frequency.

I plowed Sunday in sunshine. And plowed. And plowed. Eleven inches of fairly heavy, wet snow. I had to move a lot of it by the bucket full. The lift/dump cycle for eleven inches of fairly heavy, wet snow turns out to be every ten feet or so of driveway.

27 inches of snow is more than enough. And it looks like it’s about to start. Again.

I have absolutely used up every convenient place to put snow but one and that one, at the head of the driveway, is convenient only for the circle at the head of the driveway. It’s tough to bring snow all the way there from anywhere else.

And that was kind of the point.

I can drive anything with wheels but Anne has never had much reason to. Oh, she drives pickup trucks and station wagons and garden tractors but she isn’t very good at backing up a trailer and had no “heavy equipment” experience at all.

It did snow in December and January while I was out of state. I came back here to neat piles of snow where there should be piles and no snow where there shouldn’t. The sight lines at the road were clear. And there was plenty of room for the next storm and the next. She had mastered the plow/lift/dump cycle beautifully and she did it on her own.

I wonder …

Posted in Global Warming, Seasonal, Random Access | 6 Comments »

Getting It Up Early

Monday, November 8, 2010 by Dick.

I have a houseful of visitors here in the Keys. I don’t understand that. In our more than 30 years in Vermont, we can count our out-of-state visitors on our fingers. Here in Paradise, visitors are numbered like grains of sand. Anyway, our friend Missy noticed that I was “up bloody early” today (Biff was still snoring then).

“No,” I told Missy. “It is the clock that has changed. I’m up at the exact same [solar] time I get up every morning.”

Thanks to the visitors, I was actually late-ish getting to bed last night and therefore late-ish getting to sleep. Late-ish is defined as early-ish by Daylight Savings standards but later in terms of the hour at which I planned to arise. The alarm makes sure I rise correctly no matter how long the temptations of the night before seduce me.

Farmers have lived according to the sun for as long as there has been fixed base agriculture. Although my great-grandfather was a dairy farmer — I grew up on the last few acres of his farm, then made a home on the last few acres of a former Vermont dairy farm — I do not farm. I prefer sleeping in and generally like to roll out of bed about 30 seconds before I have to go to work. It also means I can see the sunset, the moonrise, and the clocks strike midnight.

Clock setting is arbitrary, all because somebody in “the dawn of time” jammed a stick in the ground and decided that getting his farm workers up at 4 ayem was a good idea. Some of us don’t agree. Russia’s 11 time zones are all an hour ahead of the corresponding standard time zones and double that during DST.

Ben Franklin wrote satirically that Parisians should go green and save candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. He didn’t seriously propose Savings Time, though, no matter what you read on the Internoodle. That honor falls to George Hudson, an amateur New Zealand entomologist who wanted to collect insects in after-work daylight.

I don’t understand why we don’t just choose a time we like permanently.

Arizona, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, most Indiana on Eastern Time, don’t switch their clocks. Arizona remains on Mountain Standard Time year round. They, along with India, China, and Japan are the major industrialized states that are constant UTC+something 12 months out of 12, while the rest of us spend seven months of the year with “extra” daylight and nearly five months without.

Not even all of Arizona is exempt. The Navajo Nation does observe. The Navaho have the largest land area of any Native American jurisdiction within the United States with 26,000 square miles that covers all of northeastern Arizona, the southeastern portion of Utah, and northwestern New Mexico.

Changing the clocks irritates me but I’m not rabid about sticking on solar time except I have a regular morning phone call with one of the non-mainstream states.

A friend who lives there “finds it irritating that we have to rearrange our meetings every time all y’all flip to another time, and irritating that I have to think “Is it two or three hours different when I call my dad? Is it one hour or the same when I call my daughter or mother?”

Exactly.

My choice is to synch my own schedule rather than force the others on that call to rearrange theirs.

It just seems bloody early to start the morning to Sally. And to me.

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For the record, my European web host thought this post went up at 13:00.

Posted in Seasonal, Society, Holidays, Random Access | 7 Comments »

Last Day of Summer

Monday, September 21, 2009 by Dick.

Today is the last day of summer here in North Puffin.

[sigh]

Since the rotation axis of the Earth is almost perpendicular to its orbital plane, today is the last day in which we have more light than dark. An equinox occurs twice a year when the constant tilt of the Earth’s axis aligns the Sun vertically above the Equator. In the coming winter months the Earth’s axis will incline farther and farther away from the Sun and we will gladly entertain thoughts of Global Warming as we stoke the wood stove in a vain attempt at Local Warming.

Schizophrenic weather.

Pretty cool here this morning at 48̊ outside and 60̊ in the bathroom when I arose. On the other hand, it is sunny and mild with the thermometer headed perhaps for the upper 70s. That means an afternoon for shorts and sandals bracketed by flannels morning and night. Not cold enough to start the wood stove. Too cold not to. My fingers and my bald head got colder just typing that.

I need a sale on toques.

Last night I sat on the deck looking out over the Lake. A couple of errant ducks paddled around thinking duck-like thoughts and a lone fisherman cast his line occasionally from a boat drifting in the shallows. The late afternoon sun continued to warm me after a couple of hours of yard work. The deck offered an oasis for an adult beverage, a bowl of peanuts, and the final chapters of Wicked Prey, John Sandford’s latest beach book set against the Republican convention last year in Minnesnowta. The sunset painted the sky as character Letty West returned to school with her new name.

The lush, kaleidoscopic foliage display will start soon. Some of the brain dead locust leaves here in North Puffin began dropping in July but our canopy will stay mostly green for another week or maybe tow. As a photographer, I will celebrate and luxuriate in the colors of our hills and valleys but I will miss the long days of summer.

People ask, this time of year, “What’s your favorite season?” Fall is grand for its colors. Winter brings quiet solitude and peace. Spring signals rebirth. Me, I like Daylight Savings Time.

Some pan Daylight Savings as an artificial construct but I find it more comfortable to have that extra hour of daylight during my waking hours. In fact, I believe … I believe … I believe we should insist that Congress prescribe an extra hour of daylight in every day, winter and summer, spring and fall. Congress believes it can legislate human behavior; why not change some natural law, too.

Today is the last day in which we have more light than dark. I hope that is not a metaphor for the political dark ages now approaching.

Posted in Seasonal, Random Access | 1 Comment »

A Grand and Glorious Morning

Sunday, April 5, 2009 by Dick.

Sort of…

It was 80 degrees and 80 percent at 8 o’clock ante meridiem with both the thermometer and the hygrometer headed for the high 80s here in Paradise. I’ve managed to avoid firing up the air conditioning although that is getting more difficult; the house temp is reasonable even during the heat of the afternoon but the humidity keeps on climbing.

It is only sort of grand and glorious because at 2 o’clock this ayem all the older clocks with Daylight Savings Time settings and all un-updated computer systems thought the Eastern Time Zone, the Central Time Zone, the Mountain Time Zone, and the Western Time Zone should lose an hour of sleep. That is exactly what my clock radio did. I could not imagine why the radio was blaring at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

I like Daylight Savings Time.

I do not like getting blasted out of bed at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson first proposed changing the clocks forward and back to take better advantage of late afternoon sunlight in 1895. The U.S. House of Representatives considered “saving” daylight in 1909, but that initial effort died in committee. Germany wanted to conserve coal during WWI and imposed the first nationwide Daylight Savings Time in 1916. The U.S. established it in 1918 as a direct result of the Great War; Congress repealed DST just a year later but put it back in place for WWII. Peacetime DST began here in 1966.

I have now reset the clock radio.

Thanks to the U.S. Congress, I’ll have to do that four times this year instead of two and I won’t be sure which devices will set themselves correctly, which still think it is 1967 when the federal Uniform Time Act became effective. I do know the ones that don’t screw up; they’re the ones with counterweights or springs and a winding key.

I like Daylight Savings Time. It would be better if we simply stayed on it.

Posted in Seasonal, Society, Random Access | 2 Comments »

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

Thursday, December 25, 2008 by Dick.

In Charlotte, Vermont, a school got hammered to take down its candy cane decorations because a grinch there says they have an overt Christmas message. CANDY CANES! The Menorah probably stayed up, though.

Every radio station has defaulted to Christmas music. I’m surprised we haven’t lost that, too. I don’t particularly like Christmas music but my radio has an off switch. I don’t have to listen to it if I don’t want to.

I was raised in a family that was Quaker on one side, Presbyterian on the other. I may not be as organized now as I was when I reached the age of accountability and joined the Presbyterian church but I am still a Christian. And, of course, a WASP.

You don’t have to be either.

Today is the day Christians celebrate the birth of the Christ child and the meaning of Christianity. It was a pretty big day before the stock exchange took it over.

It doesn’t mean Do unto all the other religions, then cut out.

Here’s the thing. If you offer food to the monks on Vesak, Buddha’s Birthday, I will honor your commitment to the poor. If you celebrate Diwali, the Festival of Lights, I will honor with you the victory of Lord Ram over the demon-king Ravana. If you fast during Ramadan when the Qur’an was revealed to Mohammad, I will honor your patience and humility. If you celebrate the most solemn and important of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur, I will honor your atonement and repentance. If you light the candles of Kwanzaa, I will help you honor your heritage. And if you are a lib’rul atheist, I will not proselytize.

That maybe the most important message.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist, a Christian, a Hindu, Islamic, a Jew, a Kwanzaan celebrant, or an atheist; I have no expectation that you should. It is time, on this Christian holy day, to let Christians be Christians.

My right to impose my own beliefs stops at my property line (or the end of my nose when I’m out in public). The Charlotte, Vermont, grinch’s right to his own idiocy stops at pretty much the same place. It is time to stop accepting that “politically correct” credo and start honoring the true message of Christmas.

Scythian philosopher Anacharsis wrote in the 6th century BCE, “Wise men argue causes, and fools decide them.”

Peace.

Posted in Seasonal, Society, PC, Big Thoughts, Random Access | 3 Comments »

Pelletized - IV

Monday, October 20, 2008 by Dick.

Wood pellet sellers are worse than plumbers. And surgeons.

I wrote that “the highest [price] I’ve seen so far is $300″ for a ton of hardwood pellets. That was way back in August and early September, four or even five weeks ago when supplies were apparently plentiful.

So we bought a stove.

Then I tried to buy pellets for it.

Vermont has more than two dozen dealers. I found, listed, and called the 15 or so within 50 miles of North Puffin. The typical response has ranged from “Gee, Dick, we don’t have any in stock right now” to “We’re simply not accepting orders–try calling back in November.”

Urk.

My best local fuel dealer still says, “Soon.” One hardware chain told me they had “one pallet of softwood pellets. Do you want it?” Not for the $313 they planned to charge. Another store said they had none in stock but I could keep calling on Wednesdays when their delivery truck arrived. A farm a long hour away by truck offers a “softwood single species from the Midwest” but they were sold out and didn’t know when any more would arrive. An outdoor furnace rep is “searching for a Canadian supplier.” Unsuccessfully so far. A couple of lumber yards and a couple of stove dealers sold stoves but no pellets.

The Energy Coop sells stoves but no pellets and has no plans to sell pellets.

I finally found a stove dealer 50 miles away with “truckloads coming in every other day.” He sells a premium-hard/softwood mixed-low ash pellet from Canada for $235/ton. I asked for two pallets.

“Sure,” they said.

That seller may have the most disorganized store I have ever done business with. I borrowed a 7,000 pound flatbed trailer, hitched it to the truck and drove right down.

Me:	I called this morning for two skids. Where do you want me to park?
Them:	We don’t have any left. Where’d you call from?
Me:	North Puffin
Them:	You’re the woman who called from Petuniaville?

I just looked over my glasses at them.

Anyway, they had promised me three tons and the woman from Petuniaville four tons. They had two wrapped skids (1.5 tons each) and one already opened skid with about one more ton. I arrived first so I got one wrapped skid and the still wrapped bottom half of the second, leaving a wrapped skid and 25 loose bags for the woman from Petuniaville.

She’s a stove buyer so she is gonna be mad.

The boss was on the phone when I arrived. He yelled at his peeps and said that from now on, only one person takes phone orders. He didn’t identify the order taker and I ’spect nothing will change.

{shaking head}

I managed not to give them the benefit of my management expertise which is to say I carefully applied my management expertise not to give them the benefit of my thoughts.

I parked the pellet pallet porter and pickup by the porch where Anne and I pulled and pushed and packed 4,000 pounds in place.

I am pleased to report that the pellet stove just lit again. I am not pleased to report that I’ll have to do it all again in less than 100 days.

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Running a new appliance means we accumulate some cost and usage info. I’ll post that next.

Posted in Heating Issues, Seasonal, Random Access | 1 Comment »