Category Archives: General

Randomness

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It’s been a while since I last posted, but, fortunately, not much has been going on. Leah is still having pain issues. I am still here. The dogs are still here. And one cat is still here.

Fall has fallen here. We have had lows in the lower 30’s. Thursday morning it was 39F, a little warmer than the previous night. One of the people I see on my dog walks stopped Thursday morning and told me they had 29F and lots of frost in the valley. Leah still hasn’t quite internalized the temperature workings of a mountain top. It seems counterintuitive, but on the coldest, stillest, clearest nights, it’s not unusual for us to have lows 10F higher than at the base of the mountain.

I have been semi-busy trying to get firewood for colder weather. I was afraid we were going to fall short, but it looks like maybe we won’t. A large hardwood that smells like an oak fell last year down the hill from the house, and has been seasoning in place ever since. I took my old Mule — the Kawasaki type rather than the four-legged type — down to cut some wood. It’s a rough ride down, and a somewhat concerning turnaround because of the slope. Here the Mule is, waiting patiently for me to cut and split some wood.

The photo is a little misleading, because the slope of the hill is not really obvious, but I was pointing the phone camera pretty much level, so, aimed below the Mule. The slope is steep enough that it’s kind of hard to walk on.

There is a stump just below the left rear wheel of the Mule. That was a standing dead tree I cut on Wednesday. The top of the tree got caught in a fork of a nice-size green tree and wouldn’t let the dead tree fall any further. I had to cut the green tree, which I don’t like to do, to get the dead one down. They both resisted, but I managed to get both on the ground. Unfortunately the standing tree had been dead for a while, and was pretty rotten in the middle. The tree I was originally working on has also been dead for a while, but most of its soft, punky wood in in about the outer inch, leaving some nice, hard wood on the inside.

That kind of wood makes me think of my brother, who would have loved to get some of it for his shop.

Here is our current hardwood supply in one of our firewood racks.

It’s nearly half full. There is an empty rack the same size behind it, and a third rack almost filled with pine as well. I don’t like to burn pine, but I was afraid that’s all we would have, so I got some.

I’ll get more Friday, when this should post. Eventually I think I will have to make a new rack for the hardwood, but that’s a problem for another day, one when I actually have a truck to haul material.

I couldn’t get firewood without the Mule. It’s 13 years old, and has done a lot of hard work. It wouldn’t run last summer. I replaced the carburetor twice before I discovered a leaky fuel line coming out of the gas tank. Now it looks pretty rough, but it runs well. I wouldn’t buy a 13-year-old UTV like the Mule, and I wouldn’t sell it either.

But about that Fall. We have several patches of morning glories around the yard, slowly fading away. They’re a messy plant, but I leave them because I like them. Unfortunately, ours don’t have much in the way of blooms. Here is one by the driveway.

That’s my finger pointing at the flower. It probably looks impressive to an ant. And here is one down across the corner from our lot.

Why don’t these grow in our yard?

Speaking of yards, our front yard has been mowed only once this summer. I chose to plant zoysia specifically because it looks good unmowed. It’s deep, probably eight inches at least. Sam is up to his knees in it. Zoe finds it comfortable for a quick nap.

The grass is actually greener than it looks here, but it’s on its way to brown. Once it’s fully browned, I’ll mow it short so next year’s grass won’t have to fight its way up.

And, finally, it’s stinkbug season here. They light on sunny surfaces and window screens, and sometimes they come inside. They are not particularly troublesome, but they are a pest. I was glad to see this on Thursday night.

It’s a granddaddy longlegs eating a stink bug in our garage. Granddad’s body is the short oval on top, and the defunct stinkbug is the longer, horizontal oval on the bottom. I didn’t know granddaddy longlegs preyed on stinkbugs, but now that I do, I’ll be especially careful of them.

And that’s the news from Lavender Mountain.

Well, that was interesting

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Early last week when I was walking the dogs, I decided to walk back up the mountain at a little faster pace than normal. Since I had recently had a shot in my knee, I was feeling good. I could tell that it had been a long time since I had done anything more than a slow walk. I was breathing hard by the time I got to our driveway, which is steep. I was breathing even harder at the top of the drive, but so what, I thought, it will be good for me.

I tried it again the next day, and I had to stop once or twice. Well, I thought, it will be a process.

The next day I stopped a lot. Not right, I thought. The day after, I could barely get back up the mountain to home. Definitely not right. I called my doctor, and he recommended that I go to the emergency room. That was Friday. I didn’t feel like going, so I didn’t. But Saturday I did feel like going, so I did. And it was a good thing.

I had multiple blood clots in my lungs. They admitted me, and I spent from Saturday night to Monday on a heparin drip. Any time I tried to breathe deeply, my breath caught in my lungs and made me cough, so I was constantly struggling to breathe. I was winded from getting up and going to the bathroom. I spent ten minutes breathing hard to recover. I could barely talk on the phone for gasping for air.

A chest x-ray and a CT scan had shown a lot of little blood clots. Although each was small, they added up to a major load on my heart and lungs. They also found a nodule in one lung. They assured me they would refer me to someone who could follow up on it. They didn’t seem worried.

But I was worried.

I had no pain initially, even when my attempts at a deep breath ended in coughing. Sunday night my back started hurting enough that I asked for acetaminophen, which helped some. But now it was back pain that kept me from drawing a deep breath. The back pain seems to be muscular, rather than associated with the clots. No one in the hospital seemed concerned with the back pain. Maybe every patient has back pain after a few hours in a hospital bed.

By Monday they figured all my vitals looked good enough, so they sent me home with a prescription for Xeralto for the clots and hydrocodone for the back pain. I was pretty much exhausted when I got home. I had not slept well the whole weekend and had missed most of my meals. Plus, getting enough oxygen into my system was hard work. So I took a pain pill and piled up in bed for a nap. Zoe jumped up, gave my face a good washing and laid down next to me. The next hour was a deep, painless, rewarding sleep. I wouldn’t do the hospital stay again for a lot of money, but I would take that nap again just about any time, for free.

I saw my regular doctor on Tuesday. He assured me that I was right to have been worried, because I could have died. He said that since I was active and had none of the normal risk factors, other than perhaps a genetic risk, he didn’t really have any idea why I got the clots. He did say that cancer can cause clots like I experienced. Nice to know that.

He said that the nodule didn’t look like cancer because it was smooth rather than spiculated, that is, looking like it has little spikes on the surface.

Apparently nodules are common in adults. One source said about half of all lung X-rays of adults show a nodule. Also, apparently only a small percentage of nodules turn out to be malignant. Also, nodules smaller than around 9 or 10 mm are less likely to be malignant than nodules that are larger. My nodule is about 10 mm. Not small. Not large. So the nodule is probably not malignant, but there is a smallish chance that it is.

My doctor said that I had weathered the first storm and had come out on the other side. He said taking an anticoagulant reduces my risk of another clot significantly. I am supposed to have an appointment with another doctor soon. They will look at my nodule and decide what to do. A PET scan might show whether it is malignant, and whether there might be other cancers lurking about. They might take a biopsy. They might wait a couple of months and take another x-ray.

I think almost anyone would be at least a little worried at this point. I know I am. I can’t help thinking of my brother, whose doctor discovered his pancreatic cancer when he did an ultrasound on his liver. He found metastases there and in his lungs. I had ultrasounds of my heart, liver and some other abdominal organs. So far no one has said anything about suspicious lumps anywhere but in my lungs, so maybe that’s one worry I should put aside. A PET scan would probably clear that up one way or the other.

I felt pretty good Tuesday, even after visiting the doctor. I can breathe much more easily, I can walk around like a normal person without panting, although I know better than to try to climb the mountain, and I can have a conversation without stopping for air after every word. I can still tell that I’m not getting as much oxygen as my body would like.

In the meantime I have tried to start talking to Leah about what she might do if I end up dead.

I am not a happy person right now. It’s surprising to me how emotional this has made me. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Everyone dies, but not today, right? But this is like feeling a tap on my shoulder, looking around, and seeing a skeletal hand resting there.

Elon and us

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We have not had decent internet access for the entire 17 years we have lived on the mountain here. We couldn’t get service over cable because the cable company has gone as far as they care to go, and begging (ours or others) hasn’t convinced them to go further. We couldn’t even get DSL because we are so far from the equipment the phone company needs, plus our telephone cables were laid in the ditch beside the road up the mountain, probably sometime just after the Civil War. We have used our cell service for access, which was sufficient for email and light browsing, but this strange new streaming thing has been beyond us.

That was our sad situation until a couple of days ago, when we got a nice package from Elon Musk. It included the rectangular dish you can see attached to our soffit in this photo.

Aren’t the flowers nice? They just bloomed.

A cable runs along the soffit to the corner at the garage, then up into the attic, down the length of the house, and into a wall, from which it sprouts into a closet in the little bedroom we call our office. There it is attached to a router, which provides us with wifi throughout the house. We can sign into the wifi with our phones, our iPads, our computers, and, most exciting of all, with our television. There the wide world of streaming opens up and allows us to pour thousands of hours of entertainment directly into our television. So far we have watched several episodes of Grace and Frankie. But I’m sure there will be lots of other things we can watch.

Oh, and we can finally update our phone operating system without waiting to connect to the wifi at a restaurant. I’m almost afraid to use it for fear that Elon Musk will change his mind.

The connection process was not a particular problem. It involved climbing into the attic, but the weather was mild when I did it. It involved drilling some holes through top plates and soffits, but it went reasonably well. It involved building a satellite antenna mount, which was pretty straightforward, although I don’t think my approach is a long-term solution.

The satellite system part was painless. I downloaded an app, which allowed me to find a good antenna location by aiming my phone’s camera up at the sky and panning around. The app evaluated any obstructions and decided that my intended location was good. Once I connected the antenna-router cable and plugged the system in, the antenna itself looked around and decided which direction to point. This is pretty typical of the approach that Elon Musk’s companies take: let the system do the hard work. And it worked, just like Tesla electric cars and SpaceX boosters work.

I am not a big fan of Elon Musk. I don’t like some of the things he says or some of the things he has done with his employees, but I have to give him credit, not only for kicking the established automotive and aerospace industries out of their ruts, but also for providing good, high-speed internet to people who otherwise can’t get it. Our speeds went from around 2 Mbps to 33 Mbps measured about ten seconds ago. I have seen more than 40 Mbps, but 33 is literally an order of magnitude better than what we had before. It’s not cheap. We paid $500 for the equipment and the monthly charge is $110, up 10 percent since we put our name on the waiting list last year. I hope this will allow us to get rid of our satellite TV service, which gives us hundreds of stations we don’t watch at a high price just so we can watch the dozen or so stations we do want to watch.

So, thank you Elon.

Bits and pieces

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I find interesting things when I walk down our driveway. This is a shot of a deceased snake.

Isn’t it beautiful? It’s a scarlet snake, a fairly common snake found from New Jersey to Texas, mainly in coastal plains and piedmont regions. This snake was probably less than 10 inches long. Its range is shown as not extending into the Appalachians, including out area of northwest Georgia. So, it’s out of its normal range.

I don’t know how it died, but I suspect a cat might have been involved.

I have also been finding the dehydrated remains of adventurous traveling snails who underestimated the rigors of crossing the Great Driveway Desert. They are there every morning when I walk out. I found more than a dozen on the day I took this photo.

If you look carefully you can see the trails of the snails and their little shells at the end. There are three or four in this photo. They are mostly very small, only about half the size of my little finger nail. I don’t know whether they are dead, but I toss them into the dewy grass. Maybe they can get enough moisture to revive there.

This is the last hurrah of our flower garden. This iris (I think) stands about six feet tall. There is another bloom getting ready to open, but it has been getting cooler at night lately, so I don’t know whether it will succeed.

A few nights ago I went out to let the dogs relieve themselves, and the nearly-full moon seemed about to be drawn into a vortex of clouds.

It’s a good thing so much interesting stuff happens on out driveway, since I so rarely get far from it. I did manage to get one sunset shot on one of our grocery shopping excursions.

Things fall apart

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We have had more problems with appliances and fixtures at this house in the four or five years we have been here than we did in the 10 years we lived in our old house.

First the control board in the dishwasher failed, and I had to replace that. That wasn’t too bad.

Then the microwave oven failed, and I had to replace that. I did some searching for potential fixes, but it seemed unlikely they would solve the problem, so we had to buy a new over-range microwave.

Then the clothes dryer started making terrible screeching noises, and I had to repair that. Actually, I had to pull and dryer and washer out of their little nook and remove the back of the dryer to oil a tensioner pulley. Then it started making more noises. I diagnosed that as failing rollers that support the dryer drum. I knew what I needed to do, but I had to recover from my shoulder surgery before I could start.

I ordered what I hoped was the right set of rollers, and I found what seemed to be good instructions online for doing the repair. Our dryer was not quite the same as the one in the instruction video, but it was close enough. This repair required removing the top panel and the entire front. In the process, I broke the switch that turns the dryer off when you open the door. So I had to order that. I completed the repair and the dryer now makes only the noises it’s supposed to.

And then the vent fan in one of our bathrooms failed. I couldn’t believe it. Bathroom vent fans were installed in my parents’ house in around 1967, and they were still working in 2013, the last time I was in the house. Electric motors are one of the most reliable pieces of technology we have today. It shouldn’t have failed. But it did, so I took the guts of the fan and light fixture out, hoping to repair it without replacing the entire unit, which would have required going into the attic. I did not relish that idea, with temperatures in the upper 80’s or low 90’s.

I dug into it and found the motor. This is the offender.

I couldn’t find the fan’s brand name anywhere. The most I could find was the name of the Chinese company that made the actual motor. So I took the fan motor to an electric motor specialist. He scoffed at it. He said it was a piece of cheap crap, although not in those words. He said I was unlikely to find a replacement, which I already knew from searching online. You can certainly get replacement vent fan motors, but nothing that looked anywhere close to this one.

So I started looking for a new unit. I didn’t want the institutional square, white, vented fan. Ours had a nice glass shade, so I looked for nice glass shades. I found one that looked similar. When I looked at the details, even the mounting screws and brackets looked the same. So I ordered it.

The replacement unit was a Hunter, a reasonably well-known name. It was the same model that we had installed in our bathroom ceiling. All the pieces looked the same, except that the motor was a little different. Maybe the old motors were having problems.

But that didn’t matter. I could install this fan and fan housing in the same fixture, and never climb into the attic.

So, it was almost identical. Almost. Two screw holes were about an eighth of an inch away from where they needed to be. I plugged the fan unit into the housing and went back and forth to the garage, looking for a way to make the holes line up. I left the fan hanging by the electrical plug, which should have locked it in place, so, of course it didn’t. The metal fan housing fell ten feet to the tile floor and chipped off a nice piece of tile, right in the middle of the room.

I was not happy.

In the end, I managed to find two screws (I knew I might need those screws!) into the fixture and closed it up, so we now have a working vent fan and a light fixture in the bathroom. I can hardly wait to take a shower tonight.

So, what’s next? Well, one of the heating elements on our electric range has to be replaced. I found a good instruction video online, and I’m sure I can find a replacement heating element that’s almost identical to the one that went bad. Almost identical, anyway.