Where would we be without friends?

"My snowblower has trouble starting, too,"
Mark said. "I just unscrew the plug and shoot in
some starting fluid."

Mark doesn't know that starting fluid is the stuff
religious people use to set themselves on fire
and blow up their underwear in public, but he says
it works, so I bought some starter fluid.

It worked. My underwear caught on fire.

"That," I thought, "is not a good way to move snow",
although if your underwear is on fire, you do move snow.
I decided to replace the spark plug.

I couldn't even find it. With the snow blower
hitched up to the lawn tractor, the hood will not open
far enough to see where a spark plug might be.
As it turns out, it is up there where you have to have
the hood open wide to see it. I know, from having spent
a couple of days on the floor of the garage, trying
to get the mower off and the snow blower on,
that taking the blower off was not an option.

I removed an offending discharge snow chute instead.
I saved almost half-an-hour by doing it that way,
cutting the time down to eighteen hours.

Pieces kept falling onto the floor.

As it happens, the spark plug is in an old coal mine shaft
up at the right front of the engine, but that was no problem
after I bought a spark plug and thirty-five dollars worth
of ratchet extensions to reach into the coal mine shaft.

It still doesn't start right, of course. It must not have been
the spark plug. My guess it is the alfergated corroptive
distribution motherboard system that has corroded.
Either that, or something beyond my education and vocabulary.

It does start. I will say that. Reluctantly.

Mark may be right. Maybe I should must remove the
discharge chute and use my new tools to take the plug out,
and spray some of that Jihad spray into the cylinder,
and then put the pieces back together again.

The snow will melt while I am doing that,
and I won't freeze my face and other things.

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

SmokeSound

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