Brian's Morning Newsletter

Wednesday March 3rd 2010

Good Morning

Yeah, boy howdy! Jackson created these tiles from scratch at New Mexico Highlands University back in the seventies, I suppose. He says they didn't come out right; the color faded, and the tiles warped, well some of them, but most were fine I said.  Not entirely sure how the concrete base didn't come-out directly in front of the fireplace, although it was my design that caused it. Whatever, but the reason the main pattern is off-set is to make up for the discrepancy. The dark colored tile are slate left-over from Jona's and Sara's bathroom project. There are still a few things left to do around the fireplace, namely the adobe which the water from the fire-hoses eroded, still needs to be redone. You can see evidence as a jagged edge at the upper left and right in the photo. Also we still haven't installed the door Louie created.

Even though we have these minor projects looming, we really can't do anything about them right now. This extreme weather has demolished our driveway. We've added rock and gravel continuously over the last four decades, yet somehow nature always wins, and quick too. Yeah that damn entropy rears its head after a melting and soaking snow. I don't know exactly where the tons of rocks we put on the driveway go, one thing is certain the rocks aren't coming to the surface. I mean most of you have been up our road, it was done to perfection, large rock base, covered by smaller rocks, graveled,
don't come to visit today though unless you run one of these mud-bog trucks

Yeah the driveway is crying out for aid in the only way it can. We need to do something, and do it today. My idea is to go to town in the Dodge and buy four inch rock by the cubic yard, and unfortunately because I haven't built the dump-bed yet, unloading the rock by hand into the worst mud will be a tough job. Knock on wood, the sand and gravel we dug from the river and placed on parts of the road, is holding up well. Perhaps we can get our neighbor with the Bobcat loader to put us a couple bucket-fulls on the Dodge. I don't mean to doubt, but that's a little iffy since we never got together when the weather was nice to try out his Bobcat in our gravel quarry, now it is a a frozen mess down there by the river as well.

I really need to get the front-end loader installed on our tractor, but then again for how long have I been saying that? We need rocks today. It will be hard enough unloading the truck without the dump bed, so I guess it is time to meditate and manifest a couple of little positive ideas into reality, well for next year anyway.

Yesterday,  was a beautiful day working in the shop, even with the garage door off, the wood stove and south facing windows made enough heat to create a comfortable work environment. Yeah, I wasn't going to let that icing on the cake of irony I wrote about yesterday get me down.  In order to remove the starter from a 1984 Chevy S-10 Blazer, your trusty mechanic must first remove the large hunk of steel called a cross-member. I chuckled, "where the hell do they come up with these terms?" I mean is there a non-cross-member, affectionately called a "member?" The two members cross in the middle, obviously??

Anyway while I was considering the hours of my life I was about to dedicate to the ill-placed cross-member, I cheered myself up with the idea that if the utter-ass-hole-engineers of 1984 could dream up a retarded system like I was about to undo just to swap out a starter, then what have those sneaky little engineers been up-to during the decades since? These days it may be standard practice to pull the engine to swap a starter. What the hell do I know about modern vehicle mechanical design? Nothing, that is for sure. Nope I have never bought a new car, never, oh yeah I worked on plenty of new cars being a factory trained VW dealership mechanic for ten years, but since I'm now reaching human antique classification, the cars that were new back then are older than hell now too.

Even though I'm going to be digging black grime from under my fingernails for a few days everything worked out swell. The starter went in, after what might have been a graceful 180 degree twister had it been done off a high dive

instead of knocking chunks of grease in my face, I keep telling myself. It's all about the spiritual plateau one may obtain whilst performing the maintenance needed to create a sustainable lifestyle. See what I mean? I could have been working on a car we were still making payments on designed by the devil himself, instead we were making what we had work, and loving every minute of it.  
I hope you enjoyed reading about my joyous day
Right now all I gotta do is find a way to attain a personal spiritual plateau about the mud filled driveway.
I'll work on that,
Until next time,
Peace
Brian Rodgers     

--
Visit the forum at: http://outfitnm.com/forum/
 Read the BMN online at: http://outfitnm.com/category/brians-morning-newsletter
 Oh yeah, I turned the comments back on at http://outfitnm.com