Thursday,  June 23 2022

If the children are our future, why do we market to them? If the world depends on their care and attention, why addict and weaken them before they can even develop? 

***

It’s 9:00 a.m. and I’ve just had some breakfast. Truthfully, I’m not sure if I ate because I was hungry or simply because I am facing a daunting amount of work and I am doubtful of my own abilities.

In case you want to know the truth, I found some quinoa for an amazing price. Normally this stuff is too expensive for me to bother with. I have the money but I prefer to invest in less expensive things. It’s a matter of investment and reward. Certainly, it’s a very healthy food and makes you feel good. Being made to pay for it is what returns the pain. I don’t like being manipulated.

However, for whatever reason, it showed up on the shelf at about half price and it led me to a bit of a buying spree. I loaded up. Not loading up as if I’m clearing the supermarket shelves out of fear that the war is going to swallow me. I just bought a lot, enough to last quite a while.

I understand that in the United States at the beginning of the covid debacle, people were hoarding toilet paper and hand cleaner. I do not fear social reprisals for being a hoarder. In fact, I’m probably stupid for not loading up. Maybe next time.

So we had a mishap. My build on the barn failed. The wind or something got a hold of the lead bucket and toppled it over. The main connection ripped out and because I didn’t have any safety valves and because I chose to load these buckets at the very bottom, I lost about 900 L of water.

The bucket was seriously dented. It’s hard for me to imagine what forces could have caused this. It could have just been that the foundation I had it on was not really strong enough to carry the weight and when it filled up to the top, it just went over. It could have been a human being but I’m not particularly feeling that.

Sometime today or tomorrow, we’re not planning on getting any rain for these next two days, I will rebuild the system and leave it as a three bucket system. I have room for more and potentially I could do a lot more to help save water there. But looking at what I have, it might be easier simply to move the downspout and just fill the three buckets that are sitting on a pallet. I can replace the fitting in the fallen bucket and move it over to another place on my field that has the ability to catch rain.

It’s just a matter of space. There are options and I’ve already thought of a way to better make use of the space I have under the barn. I might go ahead and add more buckets on the other side of the door and run the hose underneath the piece of metal to protect it from being walked on or broken going in and out of the barn.

I always go back to this lesson I learned from a fellow bike courier in Manhattan. I had just had my incident with some African cab driver and had rebuilt my smashed Schwinn into its fixed gear form that it is now and I was talking to this guy about fixie philosophy.

He said that it really wasn’t about style but minimalism and simplicity. Because there were no gears and no brakes, there were less things that could possibly break. The only issues we have is in the chain and agreeing to do regular cleaning and oiling and keeping everything properly set up was all you ever needed to do. Fixies were bomb proof and this was the main reason that people rode them.

It’s also a different style of bike riding. It’s harder, it uses more muscles and of course it doesn’t let you rest anywhere. But technically, if you have a taste for such things, it’s a lot more fun than a standard bike. They feel better and your sense of connectedness to the ride is heightened to an extreme. Literally, you are not just the motor and the brakes of the bike, you are a part of it. 

I should have seen that my design and setup of the barn water system was bad. I mentioned it to my ex partner. I told her that the height difference would make a difference and I could see with my own eyes that it was leaning.

I know why I didn’t fix it perfectly. The answer is not that I was lazy. The answer is not my personal laziness. The answer is pain. The answer is that sometimes you just don’t have the mental toughness to do everything you need to do because the investment is not worth the pain. Pain and self-sacrifice.

Before I sent off my ex partner last night, I was talking to her about my health and my legs and making the decision to pick up those last fruit trees from town and even do that ridiculous crawl to get him in the ground. This was my last great effort and the thing that put me in the hospital.

At that moment, I simply felt it was worth it. Either those trees went in the ground or they don’t live. If I didn’t make the effort to get him in there, nobody would. A year of bullshit. A year of pressure. A year of illness. The year being abused. A year of trying to do the right thing and not getting paid anything for it. And yet, the only thing I could think of was to put those trees in the ground.

I wrote a children’s story one time about a boy who goes out to play football in the rain despite his mother’s demand that he stay at home. At the end, at the end of the debacle, his father asks him if it was worth it.

Was it worth it? That’s the question.

I wish I could say that I have the exact same state of mind every day. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m so changeable or distracted. It’s just that there are limits to my physical capacities. I just wanted that job to be done and when the gutters were being built, the builder was not really tuned in to the questions I was asking and not really willing to go anywhere out of his way from his original plan. I am not blaming him. I’m pleased for his help and I’m pleased with his job. It’s just that that job led me to make him a compromise in the setup. It specifically made me put the fourth barrel in the daisy chain outside of the fence. The foundation there wasn’t straight and trying to save the plants growing there, I didn’t dig out and level the space.

That’s why I fixies are bomb proof. There are a lot less moving parts to break. They are too simple.

I didn’t say hi to Zhenya and Vika. I always say hi when I am at the market. The thing is, there’s almost never anything to do on the bike. It never breaks. It just keeps rolling.

It has required maintenance. I’ve rebuilt it several times. My favorite was its racing variant with the carbon fork and custom wheels. That was the most fun bike to ride. Unfortunately, I just can’t use that here. I have nothing but the Sandy service roads. That bike was perfect for when I lived in town. The carbon monoxide poisoning is not worth good City rides. I am much happier with the current setup even with the really heavy Wheels and the steel fork.

I also found some potato beetles in the potato box. I found five of them. Two of them were having sex. They experienced coitus interruptus. I don’t think that couple has a future.

There are quite a few insects but not all of them are bad. I recognized one form of beetle that tends to like living on sunflowers. I never see any damage to the sunflowers themselves so it leads me to believe that these are carnivore insects that eat the insects that like the leaves of plants. This then is a very positive thing having them around. A couple of them were also having sex. My modesty had me simply brush them into privacy.

All this means that we are going to need to do something to protect the plants. My ex partner has picked up some Valerian extract. I need to do a little more research on this.

I am a beginner and I do not claim to understand everything. But the one thing I do know is I’m not trying to end life in my boxes. Good soil health depends on things like worms and insects doing their things within the soil. If you really want to have good soil health and for things to continue to grow, you can’t simply poison everything and expect a sustainable result.

As of the moment, I don’t see anything like severe infestation anywhere. I may be kidding myself but a little daily vigilance, even 15 or 20 minutes a day of simply walking the box and individually getting rid of particular bugs that you don’t want is probably enough. We have a sprayer but I just want to use things that are a natural deterrent rather than a killer. I’m sure a lot of people are going to scream at me about this but I’m quite sure there is a logical answer that is available locally.

By the way, this doesn’t ruin my plans to water this evening but it does put a dent in it. I didn’t lose my entire water supply but I did lose 40% of it.

My best answer is diversification. I need to exploit one or two more places that I have not yet done. I’ll take a little bit less in the current moment and simply rebuild the barn system into a three bucket catcher. I have enough water today and even for three or four more days and theoretically, it’s going to rain on Saturday. Hopefully that should fill us up again.

Anyway, that’s about it for now. I wish I had something more interesting and philosophical to talk about. Food is absolutely not my problem right now. There isn’t a damn thing to think about there. Today and tomorrow are work days. It’s going to be warm and clear but I’ve got a lot to do. And I’m going to be on my own for about the next two weeks, or at least the next two weekends.

I guess I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So, lots to do. I guess I should quit bullshiting and get to work.

***

I do want to add one more quick thought. I spend a lot of time in this blog complaining about people. I’ve been told that people get tired of listening to me complain. I can see where that would be true.

What I want to say though is that the town of Pinsk was extremely polite to me yesterday. I don’t remember a single moment of harshness or anything even remotely insulting from anyone anywhere all day long. I had a nice and very enjoyable conversation with my friend at the Jewish community. The folks at the market who I dealt with were all happy to do business with me and we’re very polite and helpful. When I needed to cross a very busy Street on my bike, all the cars had no problem stopping and giving me the right away. This is my legal right but sometimes you sense aggravation and in this case there was none. Even a cop who wrote up next to me while I was riding on the street, the single most ridiculous no no in the history of car bicycle relations, did not do anything but show me his doors. No yelling or abuse or necessity for any bullying as is usually the case. I just nodded and hopped up on the sidewalk and he rode off without a single sound being uttered.

Even the cab ride started literally 2 minutes after the phone call. He got me home in a hurry, a little worrisome on an unlit two lane country road. And when he didn’t have change for the cab fare, we figured out a way to take payment off of my credit card by putting money on his phone. 

Not a single person wished to take anything off of me. Not a single person required any extra attention. Not a single person pandered or berated. It was as if it was the old days when the reason I stayed was because it was too respectful to even think about leaving.

All of this and a little bit of excitement and the purposeful rides made this a pretty excellent day. They of course could put their mind a little bit towards ecology and we could do a lot of work towards slowing down the pace of life. But yesterday was a fine day. My compliments and thanks. I truly appreciate your courtesy during my stay.

***

1:00 and this has been a super morning. I don’t know whether it was the quinoa that I had for breakfast, some refreshing energy from an evening with my ex partner, my ex partner leaving for 10 days or what. Maybe it was the bicycling yesterday. Maybe it’s the season.

Whatever it is, thank God for the drive that I had this morning. I have not been this purposeful in a while. I’m not going to say it was painless because it was not. But I definitely made a dent in the work that needed to be done and frankly, I’m pretty proud of myself. Maybe pride cometh before the fall or maybe pride doesn’t come often enough.

To start with, the first thing that needed to be done was to put back together the barn roof. The original design was not going to work because the end of the gutter was too far away from where the barrels were properly seated on top of a pallet and this led to the collapse in the windy storm and the loss of 1,000 L of water.

So the first thing I did was to build a ladder. Actually, I didn’t build a ladder, I just modified one of the ladders that I have. The one that Dima used is way too rickety. Maybe I could have spent my effort fixing that but instead what I did was make the latter built by Ghenna last year for exactly this job. Ghenna, if you were reading me last year, is a local alcoholic who attempted to attach himself to me ostensibly for this very job. He never even came close to finishing it and one of the things he did was to build a ladder so he could do the job.

The ladder has two small problems. First of all, the runs are spaced too far apart for me to comfortably work on them. I don’t know what natural spacing is on a ladder but I think he was trying to conserve wood. Anyway, I used some of these new extra-long screws I just got and added in two runs to make it easier to walk on and then it carried it over to the roof.

Would you like to know what a shock is? This ladder that Ghenna the alcoholic built specifically to work on my roof was not long enough to balance against the roof. Can you believe that?

I chopped a few pieces more of wood and fastened them as well as I could to the end of the ladder, giving it another 20 cm. Now it was good enough to do the job.

So the first thing I needed to do was find out if the current system, if moved a meter and a half to the right, would still drop water into the barrels. It did but the tube itself had to be modified. The angle was more extreme and I needed to cut a bigger smile on it so it would work.

After that, I made a stupid mistake in trying to make it a two-sided downspout. The eventual correct fix for this probably entails buying a downspout, the correct angle that I need and an end cap and refitting the entire roof much more properly than the system we have now. I tried simply to cut a second side on the tube that I had. Maybe it would have worked but the moment I looked at it again up next to the roof, the more I realized I had just wasted my time. It was never going to work

I figured out a reasonable patch for the hole I had made and then refitted the whole thing back on the roof and funneled it down into one of the now three buckets. Everything looked a little bit off so I went back up and added a piece of wire to hold the gutter a little higher in place and I think now we are okay. It doesn’t look too stupid and like I said, at another time somewhere in the future, I’ll put together a slightly better system and we’ll go from there.

I lost about a meter of roof water in this operation. Yes, that will have some connection to volume but not enough to make a difference.

I also want to say that in the future I think I’m only going to cut my barrels as overflows. This means cutting the holes at the top rather than at the bottom. Cutting the holes at the bottom means that all of the barrels are completely tied together. This gives you much more volume at your disposal. On the other hand, if you have a mistake like the one I had where one of the barrels keels over, you don’t lose all your water. That was something I should have thought of. Or maybe, this was something I had to learn. Now I know. No more holes at the bottom unless you are gravity feeding a hose. If you’re just stringing tanks together, stay at the top.

After that I made a quick fix on the tanks themselves and refitted the remaining three tanks. There were no problems. I thought I had a chance to recycle the broken coupling. I still might but for some reason, one of the pieces that I had has now disappeared and I can’t remember where I put it. Stupid stuff.

My next move was to take the now empty lead tank and move it over to the back side of the house underneath a downspout I have been wanting to harness since this project began.

This was not a huge job but it did have to do with taking apart the existing downspout and removing a tube and then replacing the actual exit spout about a meter and a half higher up. This was not a huge deal, my ladder managed working without making a sound and everything got put together smart and neat.

After that, I drilled a slightly larger hole in the tank, fitted a new coupling there and simply capped It off. It holds water now just fine and in the future, if and when I buy a couple more tanks, I will splice it together if necessary with a partner.

I understand but this work was not really that great. I definitely made some mistakes and wasted some time and materials. I didn’t cause a massive break anywhere and the system now is much smarter and cleaner than it was before. It might not be exactly as efficient as it was, but I’m thinking it will be efficient enough. Just a little rain is all we need and we will know everything.

Right now I am in my office making these words and I am a bit tired. I didn’t feel quite good about that burst of energy. I like being purposeful and I certainly like when I get to change the landscape and improve the mechanics. I like mechanical work.

So I’ll check in later if there is anything else interesting. It’s a bit overcast right now and though the weather report denies it, there might be a slight chance of rain. I’d be happy if that was true. I’d love to go back out and see that everything is set up and working. 

I’ve had enough catastrophes for a while. I’ll be a much happier man if things just go according to plan.

***

Oh my goodness. It’s 9:00 p.m. and I finally got finished with this day. I’m not even sure where I quit writing or what I was talking about. I think it had something to do with repairing the water system. That seems to be okay and we’ve even gone forward a small step and harnessed yet another patch of roof.

But after taking a break for a little while, the urge to move came back to me. I don’t know why it did this today. I don’t normally have this much energy. I know I spent a good deal of time thinking about this this morning. I’m not sure any of the list items have changed any. I’m just saying that for some reason, I had the groove today. I felt like moving.

So the next big step was to do the watering. But before I could do that, I needed to hook up our new gadget. This is a switch that allows me to turn on and off the electricity from my phone. I understand this is not a giant deal but I think it probably is here. When I told the taxi driver about it last night, he about jumped out of his seat. That was the first thing I’ve ever said to the guy that made him excited. Modern. That’s what he said. It was very modern.

What it also was was a pain in the ass to get started. I tried to get fancy and solder my wires before I went into the device but that didn’t help any. So then I had to undo all my work and just simply twist everything down tight and stuff it in there. I must have put it together and taken it apart five times before the bloody LED finally showed up. Success.

So I hooked it up between the wall and the lamp. Once I finally got the whole thing connected, you could see where there was a connection and you could manually turn on and off the lamp against the switch. But it was not working on the internet. I simply could not pair the thing up. 

So into the manual I went and then on to the internet. I thought it might be the speed of my internet although that has to be ridiculous. I went all over the place until I finally got the idea to check what was going on against my modem. I opened up all of that information and finally found the culprit. I have a different password than the one I have written down. Unbelievably stupid. Unbelievably stupid.

Put the right password in there and the thing works like a charm. Late in the day, I’m exhausted and more than frazzled but you know what? I got to water today.

So I hooked up the new fittings to the pump and carried it outside. It’s heavy. I probably need to harness up something for a carrier to make it easier to move around. I plugged it in and started it up and nothing happened. Really? Really.

Back to the manual to see if I had the intake in the output correct. I did. I started looking for something that I was doing wrong and went back and forth about five times. Why was this damn thing not pumping?

The answer finally showed up when I gave a very close reading to the Russian language instructions on the pump. They had sold the thing as being self priming. What this means if you actually speak Russian is you have to prime it yourself. So I grabbed a bottle of water and put about 2 L of water into the thing and turned it back on and suddenly, well not really so suddenly but within about a half a minute, water was coming out of the hose.

At first the pressure was not so much so as usual I started checking out the system. Were there any kinks in the hose? Was everything plugged in okay? Was I ignoring some part of this scheme that I needed to get right?

I want to tell you that the ability to turn that pump off via the phone is a great thing. If you have a problem, you’re not running like an idiot to try to get back to the pump and turn it off manually. You can just shut the thing off and take your time on the cleanup.

Also that pump is very quiet. It is as quiet as the other pump is noisy. Just a quiet little hum. If the water is spraying and you’re on the other side of the root cellar, you can’t even really hear it. It’s just a low rumble and for sure, it shoots more water than the other one. This is actually kind of a big deal because you have to do your job a little bit faster.

On the downside, it leaks like a sieve. I had to go back and get a wrench to try and tighten it. That didn’t help. I had to look for my plumbers tape. It was supposed to be where it was supposed to be but suddenly it wasn’t. A few choice swear words uttered in anger until I finally found the damn stuff. Did it help? Not a whole hell of a lot.

I bought plastic fittings. I went to the guy who has been selling me all the fittings and I bought plastic. I asked him for metal. I wanted brass. He didn’t have it. The shop that had it was no longer open. I get to go back and do this again. How many times do I have to go back and do my water project? It seems like it never ends.

Finally though I decided I didn’t care if it was leaking or not. The field had to be watered. The later it gets in the day, the more the mosquitoes want to come out and eat something. There are certain times of the day you just don’t want to be out. I agree, dusk is the most romantic time. There is no more beautiful time of the day and when the sun is going down. But unless you enjoy that stinging itching constant annoyance of mosquitoes and or a few other different breeds of insects, you do your work earlier and that’s all.

Anyway I finished. Today was a hell of a day. In fact, I know I said earlier that I was a bit proud of myself but I’m going to say it again and I’m going to Pat myself on the back right now. I was workerish today. I had movement. I had the music in me. Today was a lively day, livelier than I have had in a while. How do I feel about this? Well, I agree you do feel alive when movement is possible. I’ve been fighting my legs for so long, I’ve gotten used to being a drag. I guess once you convince yourself that you can’t take it, that’s it.

You know, maybe it was that message I got from my daughter. I hadn’t spoken to her in a while. She’s a baker and she puts out cookies and cakes and croissants for restaurants in bulk. She’s a ninja basically in the kitchen. Maybe it was her. I think I owe her a thank you note. If that’s where this blast of energy came from, I’m glad. Really, I had no idea.