Friday, September 30, 2011

It stretches ahead of me like a long, black road...

I didn't get a lot of woodcutting done yesterday. Spent an hour and a half cutting logs and piling trash, went back to the customer's, emptied the trailer, and then fate took a hand.

She'd gone to town early, I left my dull chains with her the evening before and she dropped them off at the saw shop. She came back with a new fuel filter for her tractor, which was acting up. When I got to her place she'd just finished installing the filter, and the tractor still didn't want to run well. Uncle Joel, as everybody knows 8^{ used to be a mechanic. So I spent most of the rest of the day trying to find what was wrong with her fuel system.

No fuel blockages anywhere. Nothing apparently wrong with the injector pump. It came to light that the troubles began right after she'd added fuel from a new vendor in town. So we drained all the fuel out of the tank and fuel system, blew everything out with compressed air, put it all back together, filled it with older fuel from her barn, bled the system, and the tractor ran fine. Bad diesel, though there was nothing obviously wrong with the sample I drew into a Mason jar.

Went to town with her around three. I've gotta start getting my chains sharpened by somebody who knows less about his business - the first thing he said was, "Stop letting your chain come off the bar!" He not only knew it had happened, he knew how many times. I sharpened a lot of chains when I worked at that shop, but never got that sort of expertise.

Today I've got shit-shoveling, then have to go to D&L's to help D move a 300-pound iron bathtub. Then it's back to cutting juniper. This three-day woodcutting job bids well to stretch into the weekend. AND I learned that Monday at least I've gotta work on geiger counters. The money's good, I'm not gonna say no. But it's not getting my kitchen finished.

This "hermit" business is turning out to be too social. And busy.

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