Labor Day Labor - No runs, no hits, no errors

[Bob Womack]

I am not a man whose wife nags. I'm not sure I can remember it ever happening to me. Yes, it is a blessing. So, when there are "honey-dos" in my house I assign them to myself. Nothing huge today, just two jobs. But first I should mention that as a guitarist, I rate jobs by knuckles busted, callouses punched, and nails broken. It is reality. As a mature guy with AFIB who lives on blood thinner, I also rate them by amount of blood spilled. Mature skin becomes paper thin and any tiny little blood leak turns into a holiday with extremity elevated and pressure applied. Graze a knuckle and congrats! You've won an hour trip to the kitchen to sit with a paper towel and pressure on the wound while whatever you were fixing laughs at you. Boldly.

With that background, today's little chores were rebuilding the kitchen sink faucet (a very nice Peerless Faucet from thirty years ago, second rebuild) and rebuilding the ruptured wire rope diagonal brace on the garden gate.

The faucet, a single handle job, hasn't been worked on in over ten years but had gotten to where you had to fiddle with the handle to get it to close all the way. Drip, drip. You know what that means: you've got to remove the ball cover and the works and replace the valve seats and springs. The actual core work isn't bad, it is the collateral work that gets you. I dived under the sink to shutoff the cutoff valves and discovered, after heaving and ho-ing, that they are seized. I'm not replacing them today. Instead I pulled the breaker on the water heater and went outside. The cutoff for the house is two-feet down a chunk of PVC in the garden where skinks love to hang out. They bite and draw blood, so I went down the tube with a glove on. No problem. With the water off, there was the hex key screw on the handle that wouldn't yield to the enclosed all-in-one tool so I dug out my set of hex keys. After seeing stars and not loosening the screw a whit, I applied WD-40 to the screw with the screw hole surrounded by paper towel to catch overflow. A liberal application or two, a short wait, and it broke free. The rest was routine. Success!

Now, the diagonal wire rope brace on the garden gate, complete with turnbuckle, consisted of a scrape, abrasion, or poke, just waiting to happen. I chose to reuse the clamps which meant that I had to unscrew the rusted rope clamps from the frayed, rusted wire rope. They didn't want to budge. Seeing stars again. WD-40 to the rescue again. With the help of my wife I reassembled the rig and got it up to tension. Voile'!

Not a big deal for a man who doesn't leak, but I am celebrating two jobs done with no leaks, no calluses punctured, and no knuckles or nails busted. Nice. Fixing things round the house engenders a certain satisfaction as well.

Bob

[hubcapsc]

I returned home from five days of motorcycle riding yesterday (Labor Day).

In the South, what's leaking is the sky. I rode on many wet roads, but
somehow, never in the rain. Stayed dry the whole way ...





-Mike

[Murphy Slaw]

Yep, I made a quick trip to Louisiana Sat. and Sunday, and it was raining.

[rllink]

At my age I grab a pair of work gloves first thing, before I even start looking a project over.

Labor day at our house has always been a family get together with three days of mowing, trimming, and fixing leading up to it. Big BBQ, homemade ice cream, lots of treats from my daughter's bakery. This year though I am recovering from surgery so no mowing, trimming, or fixing.

But it was all still going to magically happen until my daughter picked up the big C and my son in law is wrangling two stir crazy kids. As I sit here this morning, my back yard looks like I'm working on the wild prairie look and anything that wasn't fixed before isn't fixed now. We're just calling this year's labor day a wash..

[Photojeep]

I also grab a pair of work gloves, or gardening gloves, or rubber gloves (you get the picture) these days when beginning any work. Of course, this is a new phenomenon for me.

Just the other day I was sitting in my new Dermatologist's office and noticed several scars on my hands for which I had no corresponding memory. I don't take any blood thinners luckily because, based on the sheer number of scars on my hands, I would have bled to death many years ago.

Yeah, I now don gloves whenever I'm about to begin any sort of project. It only took 65 years to get me to take this seriously, but I guess "better late than never."

Best,
PJ

[KenL]

Man, I hear you about "paper-thin skin." For me, it's more like "wet crepe paper skin."

I barked the top of my right hand about a month ago and tore the top layer of skin, and that bled for a long time. Scabbed over, and looked like hell for a couple weeks.

Then, just as that one was getting close to disappearing, I tore the skin on the top of my left hand even worse while pulling something off a shelf. I was able to salvage the damaged skin, but it too looked real bad for a couple weeks. Still does.

I have a pile of gloves on my workbench about 8" high, with a different pair of gloves for every chore. Lately it's been firewood, with a pair of gloves like RR workers used to wear.

[Bob Womack]

Thinking of "barking"... My father was named for a family friend who was Stonewall Jackson's Chief of Staff. He recorded minutes for each of the Army of Northern Virginia's staff meetings during the Civil War. In his minutes you would see a note, "Captain So-and-So was unable to attend this staff meeting due to barking his shins on a log while running this morning." A few days later it would be, "Lieutenant So-and-So died from sepsis that set into the aforementioned wounds." They had very little resistance to infection back then - simply barking your shins could cost your life.

Bob