Skip to main content

Cranky Subterranean Operations





Sometimes life must be lived an inch at a time.  You take your turn, and inch forward.





At the side of our house there is an electrical outlet, probably put there for vaguely useful purposes, but which has served, in recent years, to power the drip irrigation controller.







As I have been building the rondavel in the expanded back yard, and as bringing electricity to it seemed useful, I decided to extend its reach to the rondavel by burying a conduit along the new back fence to the new building.  That was the easy part.  The harder part was pulling an electrical line through the conduit.

First, I hooked up a shop vac to one end of the conduit, then fed a light line with a small wad of plastic bag attached into the other end.  There!  Like magic, the atmosphere shoved the plastic bubble down the line, pulling the light line behind it!


Then I used that line to pull a parachute cord through the conduit.





The somewhat heavy electical cable--"somewhat heavy" to account for voltage dropoff--had to be dragged up the hill through the conduit:  I made a reel to facilitate feeding it into the conduit, where I could lubricate it as it protested its way past every joint and curve.






At the other end, up in the rondavel--knowing that I was not strong enough to do the job unaided-- I rigged up a small hand winch, hoping that the parachute cord would not break.  It wanted to, but it didn't.

 The plan was for Mari to crank the winch while I, and at the other end, lubricated the cable and prayed earnest prayers to the gods of silicone, underground spirits, mechanics, physics, good luck, and parachute cords, while assessing hang-ups.  I calculated it would take more than a thousand cranks of the winch to drag the line to the rondavel, an inch per crank.


We began with Mari at the winch.  Leverage makes Mari cranky, so we traded places, but finally, really reluctantly, the cable came up out of the subway into the rondavel!

Just out of curiosity, I tried to pull it a few inches farther, manually.  I could wrinkle the sheath on the cable, but I couldn't haul it farther.  No matter:  it was far enough.












Now I have to call the doctor and ask why I have not been summoned in for pre-op tests for my hip replacement.  Do they not understand that I have work to do, and miles to go before I slip?




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more