The long days of spring

Laugh. Go ahead. Get it out of your system. I like making people laugh.

I could not stand back up after planting my onion transplants.

There I was. Kneeling in the middle of the garden with a trowel in my hand. I have been doing a lot of kneeling lately, it being Holy Week and all.

And darned if I could make my left leg do what it needed to do. It was stiff!

The good news is that I only had 70 transplants and not the 200 I had planned on. Mrs ERJ would probably be wandering out there in the dark looking for me if I had put 200 of them in the ground.

Those of you with more miles on the odometer are laughing because you know exactly what I went through. You vividly remember when you first experienced those anomalies in the gravitational field that be-devil us as we age.

Those of you who are not there yet are laughing because of the visual image.

I didn't want to drop into a three-point stance and attempt to launch that way. I had just tilled the garden and I didn't want to compact the fluffy soil with a face plant. Besides, then there would be physical evidence. No evidence and I can pretend it never happened. Right?

Nothing in my physical therapy had prepared me for this dilemma.

I crawled on my hands-and-knees over to a fence post and levered myself up. Then I went into the house and popped a couple of Ibuprofen. 

Sprite

Sprite lost her mother this past year and she is sorting through the junk that collected over 80 years of living. Sprite's mom worked up until about a week before she died.

Sprite needed to talk about her mom, so I went over and picked through the things she was giving away, more to give her somebody to talk to than to acquire more "stuff". She had this hood ornament. It is a swan or a goose and is made from chrome-plated brass. Does anybody know what model of vehicle it is from?

Landscaping

This was a good day to work on the landscaping around out house.

The soil around the foundation settled over the five decades since the house was built. Last year I had moved wheel-barrows of dirt from the burn pit (now filled with water) and dumped them beside the foundation.

Today I tilled the dirt and raked it out. Then I spread black poly-film and started putting 16", square, concrete flags over them. I need another 36 flags at 9 flags for every 4'-by-4' of sloped approach. The flags weigh about 40 pounds each.

The slope away from the house is now very aggressive and that should help with keeping the basement dry.

Tilling

I tilled the nightshade patch this morning.

The plan for the layout gelled. The rows run east-west. The 16' on the east end of each row will have either tomatoes or pepper plants. Feedlot panels are 16' long and are excellent for supporting tomato vines...which is where the 16' came from.

The rows will be more compressed than in previous years. I had been planting rows 42" apart to make it easier to run the tiller between the rows and to give me some allowance for imprecise planting.

I measured the width of the south-annex and it was 34 feet wide. I can squeeze in one-more-row by making the rows 37" apart. The tiller is nominally 24" wide although I can remove one of the four gangs of blades to make it narrower. As long as I am precise in my planting, 37" SHOULD be far enough apart. 

I will ask Mrs ERJ to help me. She is a very precise person. She can color with crayons and keep everything within the lines whereas I prefer cans of spray-paint with predictable results: quicker results with a slight loss of precision.

I found a straight stick and very carefully measured 37". I cut to length and scraped off the bark. I will probably also give it a few wraps of bright duct tape. It is the Official Planting Stick V.2023

Mrs ERJ agreed to play life-guard if I want to go swimming next week.

 

Tin-knocking

One of the dumbest things in the world is to have a furnace with a humidifier in a house with a water-softener.

The humidifier pulls water when the water softener is cycling. The brine runs through the humidifier and if the drain gets clogged by so much as a single, dead fly then highly corrosive brine wets the guts of the furnace.

Fast-forward several decades.

I looked at the box that used to house the humidifier and it fell off the inside of the fan-plenum. As a stop-gap, I stuffed the ducting with fiberglass batting to prevent the air from recirculating.

Today I cut some "tin" and I am going to release my inner tin-man. The hole that the humidifier covered is 12" tall by 15" wide. I cut a piece 14" X 17". It will not be pretty but it should get the job done.

The plan is to cut three flaps on the bottom (25%-50%-25%) with the two on the outside being on the fan side of the divider and the center flap being on the other side of the divider. Then I have some automotive "J-nuts" that are from an automotive fender installation and I will use them to stitch the top into place. I might even add a J-nut in the middle of each vertical. A bit of foam weatherstrip in the middle of the sandwich and I should be good-to-go for another fifty years.

And just to keep me hopping

I had to find an intermittent short in the electric fence. It was across an insulator where a short tag of wire had worked its way around and it was arcing point-to-point. I found a length of baling twine and hooked the tag with a loop and bent it away from the wire it was arcing to.

Riley Gaines

I appreciate that young woman's courage.

If various jurisdictions fail to protect her, then I hope she seeks redress in civil court.