Category: Banalities & Journaling

Arthur and I are traveling to visit my mother (his sister) in Australia.
I might not have much interesting to say in this here blog over the next few days. But anyway, I’ll post more when we get there.
Meanwhile, you’ll notice I’ve queued some poems and trees to keep each day monotonously the same for you, my kind reader(s).
See you later alligator.

As some of you might know, I have this project going on: I want to build a treehouse. Not a full-scale house by any means, but not a tiny, kid-treehouse either. Just a kind of Arcata pumphouse-style outbuilding, I suppose.
I had originally meant for it to be down by the water. But I lost my confidence in the reliability of the trees near the water – although they are big and fat old-growth trees, they are old and their root-systems are precarious. I felt that putting a treehouse among those trees was likely to be fraught with the risk of one of those trees going down in a storm.
So I chose a spot among the third-growth trees up on the hillside, near the southern property line. Most of these third-growth western hemlocks and sitka spruce are about 8 inches in diameter – that’s enough to support a well-engineered treehouse, in my estimation.
When my brother Andrew was here, I consulted with him, because I know he has actual experience engineering and building treehouses. And he asked me for an update on progress, recently. I decided to post it here because other people might be curious too.
Progress is slow. I’ve cleared the spot where I intend for it go. It’s a rough quadrilateral with three 8-inch trees and one 6-inch tree. The 6-inch tree seems a bit small to support the treehouse, but it’s one corner out of four, and it’s attached to a hefty old stump, so if I rely somewhat on that, structurally, I think it will be OK.
I accepted Andrew’s recommendation to supplement my fat brackets that I bought specially for this project with cables to suspend the corners. So I bought the hardware for that.
I haven’t made much progress mostly because of the weather. Firstly, it’s been sunny and just below freezing, mostly, since Andrew left. That’s actually not good weather for working on this – the hillside has become very slippery, with old snow, repeatedly melted and frozen, turning into sheets of ice. Good old Prince-of-Wales rain would be better – that would make things muddy but manageable. This is a problem on the road, too, and so I’ve also decided to wait on going into town with the trailer to buy the additional lumber I need for this.
So meanwhile, all I do is go up periodically and judge the quality of my path up there, and clear spots of nearby brush.
I’ll hopefully make more effort once Art and I are back from our Australian venture, to start next week. We’ll see.

I have bitten the bullet.

I installed Ubuntu Linux on my lemon HP laptop, in hopes that at least some portion of its lemonosity is derived from the Windows 10 operating system.

So far… well, it works, at least the basics. I’m updating my blog from the new operating system.

It will take a while to get it all working smoothly. I’m a bit rusty on the linux desktop, since I haven’t used it since I left my desktop behind in Korea, last July.

This morning, the water in the house wasn’t flowing.
Some pipe had frozen, somewhere. Not completely beyond reason – the low last night was 13°F (-10°C). At first Arthur thought maybe it was at the point where the water pipe entered the house – so he had this giant portable kerosene heater running outside, there. But then we concluded it was in the water-tank and pump house, up by the driveway. So we heated the great outdoors up there for a few hours.

Sure enough, around noon we got the water flowing again.

Living here along a dirt road in Alaska, when your washing machine breaks, you don’t just call an appliance repair person.

Arthur is used to being mechanically adept, and solving these problems for himself. He takes things apart and figures out the problem and deals with it. He has always had very high skills in this area, and I would say to the extent I have skills such as this at all, I largely “inherited” them from him.
Well, the door latch on the washing machine malfunctioned this morning.

Arthur seemed flumoxed and overwhelmed by it, however. This is his new cognitive state, to some degree. Thus I had to “play Arthur.” I’m pretty happy with the result.

I had to look up how to disassemble the door latch online. There are lots of resources for that kind of thing, these days. I took out the door latch, and called the washing machine’s manufacture about replacement parts. The washing machine is 20 years old. That model is obsolete. It was looking problematic to replace.

I took pictures of the assembly – which I could use to shop for an appropriate replacement, searching online. Here it is. Washing machine door latch mechanism:

I decided, meanwhile, to try tinkering with it a bit. The problem seemed to be the actuator (“detector” of whether the door is closed or not), not the solenoid that locks the door. I wiggled the plastic switch connector, a mechanical relay between where the door latches into the slot and the electronic detector switch (lower left in the second picture, above). I thought maybe the mechanical lever was just misaligned. So I decided what the heck, and put it all back together.
It worked.

I am officially a washing machine repair person. For a few hours, anyway.