Friday, September 23, 2011

Whew. I always feel like I dodged such a bullet...

Uncle Joel's papers are not in order. Haven't been for over ten years, but since I got nailed back in '08 it's been an issue. Consequently I've gotten into the habit of not going into town very much and almost never by myself. Mostly I bum rides. But I got into a situation - I've had a wood cutting gig hanging over my head for over a month but kept putting it off. Guy wants it done, I promised to do it next week, but wrecked two of my three chains doing something stupid.

NOTE: If you're gonna cut up a tree that's already down on a rocky slope, chain it behind your Jeep and haul it someplace that's not a rocky slope. Your chainsaw will thank you.

Anyway, I had to go into town. Nobody was going, or at least nobody willing to wait half an hour at the saw shop. So I had to do it by myself, and it had to be during the day on a weekday. This breaks three of my three rules for going to town. I always get a case of nerves. Plus I don't even OWN the Jeep, and sort of have this silly rule about endangering equipment that doesn't belong to me. Fortunately the side of town that's closest to my part of the desert would be the wrong side of the tracks if this town had tracks. Cops don't go there much, and getting into it and parking the Jeep is relatively risk-free. Unfortunately the saw shop is outside town, all the way on the other side. So Uncle Joel went for a nice long legal walk. My stump is not thanking me for this. But that's nothing - what bugs me, after 3+ years of living like a hermit, is the perceived risk and the sensory overload. I'm not used to all those cars, all those people. And the driving part does things to my blood pressure. Still, I'm home, it's quiet, the boys are out of Gitmo, have had their run, and will give me a couple hours to decompress and maybe even get some work done. All's well.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

OK, being fully aware of the method you used to liberate yourself of the pesky other leg, I dangle out on a limb now in wonder as to whether one of those swanky cheap motorized bicycles might now be a solution to long stump bummering walks?
I don't know about Arizona but we are not yet being molested into getting a license to operate those here.
One of the few things not under such taxation here so far....for now.


Buck.

Joel said...

Nyet. Tried it. In fact that was my very first attempt at motorized transport, after the local authorities expressed disapproval at my presuming to ... use motorized transport.

The problem is not the law, which does allow motorized bicycles, but the terrain. The hills tore up the centrifugal clutch, and the dirt roads beat hell out of the bicycle. Have you ever driven through a wash-out on an unsprung frame at 20 MPH? To say nothing of washboards that go on for miles? Not fun. The bike agreed. Important pieces kept falling off, and the whole experiment lasted about six weeks before everything but the engine itself more-or-less simultaneously agreed to catastrophically fail. A day when I went to town and back without something breaking down or falling off at least once was actually quite rare.

Those things are meant for pavement. Once I hit pavement it worked great.