Category: A Daily Tree

This tree oversaw a boat that wasn’t afloat.

Chet the boat mechanic made short work of repairing Arthur’s boat. It was finished today. Because of high turnover at his shop, he wanted us to fetch it as soon as possible.

Arthur basically bullied me into letting him drive the boat home alone. I wasn’t happy, but I need to just let go. It’s his boat. If he wants to go out and have adventures in it and wander around the sea, I need to refuse to stand in his way. He thinks I’m overly controlling and excessively cautious. But of course, he doesn’t remember all the stuff that’s gone wrong in the past. He just has these quite stale, vague mental images of everything going smoothly. So Arthur drove the boat home, and I took the boat trailer home with the car. I’m pretty angry, but mostly because he is so dismissive of my efforts to communicate. He ignores or willfully misunderstands my concerns until finally I give up on trying to explain them, and let him have his way. Bear in mind that this is not specific to his cognitive issues related to the stroke and head injury – he has always been like this. I think in some weird, subconscious way, he exploits his new memory and comprehension issues to ensure he can be this way “more and better than ever.”

The problem with the boat was an “Idle control valve.” Chet wrote on his summary of work done:

Alarms going off, hook motor to CDS fault idle control valve, replace bad IAC valve, service both motors, oil change, lower lubes, test run both motors on hose no faults on main, replace trim bracket anode on main

Which is to say, it was easy to fix – for him. There is no way I could have done it. These modern engines with their electronics and such, you need the “CDS” (computer diagnostic system) to be able to figure anything out.

Below is the offending removed and replaced valve.

[daily log: walking, 3.5km; dogwalking, 4km; c149080063084s]

This tree was in the background as a raven cavorted along at dock-edge.

We got the boat to town successfully. It took about 95 minutes on the kicker (small) engine only, at about 5 knots speed but with a good tailwind outside of Port Saint Nick that got us up to around 7 knots. It’s parked at the boat-doctor’s place. Here is a view of Craig harbor as we entered. It was a rainy morning.

Then Art got a ride home with Penny and I worked all day. I made some frames and messed with spreadsheets. I realized I had done something quite new in life: I commuted to work by boat this morning.

[daily log: walking, 6km; retailing, 8.5hr; boating, 2hr; c103061055084s]

This tree is awaiting more rain.

It never rains but it pours. On top of the boat problem, this morning it turned out the UV water filter system had managed to stop working during a brief power outage yesterday. it turned out the florescent UV bulb inside it was burned out. Art did have a replacement on hand, but unfortunately there’s a glass protective sleeve that goes around, that somehow broke on trying to reinstall things – I suspect I was doing something wrong. But in all the cardboard tubes which I thought had spare, additional glass protective sleeves, there was nothing but air – Arthur was saving them for some reason, but the result was that I thought we had more backup inventory than in fact we had. So now we have to await a re-order of protective sleeves from Amazon. Meanwhile, it turns out that when Arthur built this filter system, he didn’t take into account the possibility that it might need to be bypassed temporarily. There’s no bypass route or valves. So… I had to construct a bypass using a garden hose from an upstream spigot to a downstream spigot – the latter being the water source for the washing machine. Here is the hose, coming up the stairs…

… and connecting behind the washing machine.

This more-or-less works for water supply, though our laundry facility is disabled. But now we wait 10 days while Amazon delivers the part we need. I will work on re-engineering the filter installation area so that it has an actual, workable bypass system for events like this in the future.

[daily log: walking, 5.5km; c100060076084s]

This tree stood in the background while I exploited a moment of non-rain to begin trying to diagnose our boat’s engine’s problem. Something is causing it not to idle. I took out and inspected the spark plugs. Turns out Art doesn’t have a spare set – so I’ll shop for them tomorrow.

[daily log: walking, 5km; dogwalking, 4km; c103059072084s]