Arthur was really mad at my brother Andrew earlier today. But he couldn’t remember his name. It was funny, because the target of his anger floated from “person to person”: “damn Aaron” … “what was Jeffrey thinking!” …
The reason he was angry was because we were putting the boat railings back in the water after their winter hiatus.
Last year when he was here, my brother Andrew had ambitiously taken on the task of trying to improve the safety of how the boat trolley is mounted on its cables. Andrew had added these extra U-bolts and changed the configuration of how the cable attaches to the trolley. Arthur hadn’t been opposed in principle to this improved safety, but we were now finding that we’d increased safety at the expense of reducing the flexibility of the system, such that it had become essentially impossible to get enough slack in the cable to re-attach it to the rail-brace down at the bottom in the water
So I spent more than an hour removing one of the supplemental U-bolts at the base of the trolley so that we could increase the slack in the cable. Once there was some slack, we were able to re-attach the cable, and we could tighten things back up.
But now the U-bolt is gone. Andrew would not approve. Arthur thought it had been overkill anyway. We know what Arthur thinks of safety: “Better to be lucky than smart!” is his operating motto.
Meanwhile, a second radish appeared in my garden. The greenhouse was actually hot today, for the first time, I think: a combination of a sunny day and warming temperatures. Here is the second radish, on the right, with the first radish, on left and more in the foreground and out-of-focus.
And the patch of lettuce is doing well.
