Specialization is for insects

So a week or so ago, I went in for my regular oil change. When I got back, the service guy was giving me the stinkeye.

"You didn't come in for your regular maintenance." he says.

"Um... no.." (It was over six hundred dollars, and I'd been a flighty idgit and not budgeted for it)

"Your differential gearbox is seriously overdue for service. There's a leak in one of the seals, cack on the bottom, and your gears are swimming in sludge. You drive any more on it and you'll be buying new axles."

...crap.

And I still didn't have six hundred dollars.

However. I did have an internet connection, a wrench, and lots of smart friends.
One of 'em even owned a garage.

Well ... hangar. But close enough.

A bit of googling found several how-tos from the guys who do this for fun, so with a parts list in hand I hopped down to the parts store, got (almost) everything I needed, and scheduled a morning off from work to play mechanic.

First, open the fill bolt, then remove the bolts around the differential. This was the hardest part actually - those top bolts from "noon" to "two" were hiding behind the front steering (rods?) assembly - and since I was on drive-up jacks I couldn't turn the wheels to see if I could get a better angle.

Airplane mechanics have lots of tricksy tools for the funny angles though, and eventually everything worked out.



Crack the seal, and out pours the sludge. No metal flakes - yay!



 You don't have to see the long goopy step of sopping out all the old oil and wiping down the parts. IA Guy checks the gears with me - all good! (Incidentally, I wasn't impressed with the last person in there - they left toolmarks on the mating surface even I knew to avoid - the "someone else's car" thing I guess)




Back goes the cover. (Turns out I didn't need a gasket and RTV, but one of the guys in the shop suggested stick with the gasket. So I did.) In goes the gearbox oil.

Put the plug back in, and all done! I can drive to work! One more "I didn't know *that* this morning" to add to the list, and I can still pay my rent tomorrow.

The really cool thing though?

Once again, Alaskans prove just how awesome they are. Everyone from my computer geek boss to the spiffy blonde lady who dropped by in a business suit said "oh, changing the oil in a differential.  No problem, just be sure to do such and such."

Best neighbors ever. Alaskans are so cool.


And that's that!


Also - thanks y'all for your patience with the delay while I was in Boston visiting Dearest Friend.
It went very well, thank you. :)

Paul Revere's Ride, Pt II

So - I promised the "moral" of Paul Revere's Ride was timely.

Boy howdy.

First- the underlying theme of the book - Revere was no lone rider. He wasn't just some guy who spontaneously got on his horse when things started going sour.

Rather, the man had been hooked in for years. In one of his appendices, Fischer gives a table of lists - patriot groups, the Tea Party participants, the Boston Committee of Correspondence - even an enemies list put together by the crown. Of all those people, just two names were on every list -

Paul Revere and Doctor Warren.

In other words - if something was going down - Paul Revere knew about it. He also knew who needed to know. He knew whose doors to knock on. Most of all  -  they knew and trusted him.

If anything then, that is the lesson for the coming hard times I think.

Know people.

Not just the movers and the shakers, but everyone you can.
The stocker at the grocery. The police officer who rides your neighborhood. The guy at the gas station. The pastor who knows who needs help. The shadetree mechanic who could use some work.

And perhaps more importantly - be worth knowing. :)

Finally of course - be honorable. You never know which of your letters will end up in the hands of a Benjamin Church.


Gosh did those guys and gals back then set a tough act to follow.
Whoof.

To it, I guess.

Book Report, Paul Revere's Ride

clever readers will have noticed long since this blog thing is more than half commonplace book. Please pardon one more installment before I get back to the real world doings. :)

So - Paul Revere's Ride - this one came heartily recommended by the Appleseed folks - the copy they had at their shindig a couple weeks ago was filled with placeholder tabs and handwritten margin notes.

Now I see why. :)

When my own copy gets here (this was a library copy - couldn't wait!) - I'll be transferring those notes over and doing some marginalia of my own.



As for the book -

First off, let me confess to my total crush on David Hackett Fischer. He's the same guy who wrote Albion's Seed that I'm constantly harping about*. Paul Revere's Ride is just as incredibly well done.

Now -  the narrative. It sets the stage c. 1770 in Boston, and walks fairly quickly through the rising tensions of that half decade. The story starts picking up in greater detail with the 1774 Powder Alarms (i.e, the first two times the military governor sent soldiers on arms confiscations in the surrounding area). Then it gets into almost hour-by-hour detail from the moment the Lexington/Concord mission starts, through to when the Regulars straggle back into Charleston. Finally a brief nod to the impending siege of Boston by the Yankee militia, and a farewell "what happened to who" for most of the major players.

Now, here's is where Fischer gets awesome. Aside from the narrative itself, we get an extraordinarily good set of appendices - family trees, timelines, patriot group membership lists, British Army and Royal Navy lists, on and on. All those nit-pickety details.

Then we get historiography - he traces how different generations have framed the Revere tale, from early Patriot rabble-rousing through 19th c. legend-making, VietNam era slandering, and right back around again. Finally, a 28 page categorized annotated bibliography (for finding original sources in Google Books!)  and over forty pages of end notes (the only gripe I have is I'd have preferred 'em as footnotes).

So - that's the book. Obviously - loved it.

Big things I learned - 

*Yet more reasons to love Doctor Joseph Warren. The more I read, the more amazed I am how little space he gets in our popular images of the Revolution. Guy was amazing - I definitely have to make time for a biography of him soon.

* An even greater appreciation for just how personal it got. The Concord fight started as a military engagement. By the time the regulars straggled back through Concord, they were getting picked apart by old men and housewives shooting practically (sometimes literally) out their front doors.

* most of all...well - We'll tackle that tomorrow. It's worth a topic of it's own - and frightfully timely.






=====
* For serious. That's still my "if you're only going to read ONE American history book ever" favorite
You might not get the long continuous narrative of a textbook - you'll even miss whole important swaths of  the story - but what you *will* get is a deeper appreciate for how all those little parts of American got their flavor and quirks in the first place.

Walls and Mirrors.

I was talking recently with Dear Friend about the constraints of life.

More specifically - the mercy of having the walls of other people's needs hemming in about us. Whenever a one of us is given totally free reign, surrounded with sycophants, shielded from the consequences of our actions -  the result is hardly ever good. Our most graphic modern example to come to my mind is Michael Jackson, but it's a universal story.

Recent events in London couldn't help but be (another) reminder of old Rome - the Imperial era, this time. 

See, for some time Rome had been developing something of a "thug culture" and as a young man ol' Nero (yes, that Nero) wanted in on the fun - 

 Although at first his acts of wantonness, lust, extravagance, avarice and cruelty were gradual and secret, and might be condoned as follies of youth, yet even then their nature was such that no one doubted that they were defects of his character and not due to his time of life. No sooner was twilight over than he would catch up a cap or a wig and go to the taverns or range about the streets playing pranks, which however were very far from harmless; for he used to beat men as they came home from dinner, stabbing any who resisted him and throwing them into the sewers. He would even break into shops and rob them, setting up a market in the Palace, where he divided the booty which he took, sold it at auction, and then squandered the proceeds. In the strife which resulted he often ran the risk of losing his eyes or even his life, for he was beaten almost to death by a man of the senatorial order, whose wife he had maltreated. Warned by this, he never afterwards ventured to appear in public at that hour without having tribunes follow him at a distance and unobserved. 

Now it's not in this account, but I've also seen references to the fallout of that beating up the Senator "youthful prank."  From that point on, Romans were terrified to resist when accosted in the street, afraid it might be the young emperor.

Three guesses what happened to the frequency of muggings in Rome after that.
Yeah... yeah, pretty much what you'd expect.

Davy, Davy Crockett!

This post from Loup rang a few bells for me. I'd never seen the movie in all it's 50's cheesy glory, but the song was still floating around a generation or two later when I was little. So it was neat to finally see where it came from!

Here's the fun thing - my Daddy grew up maybe a half hour's walk from where Davy Crockett hisownself was born! The last time I was down visiting him, he took me for a drive around his old haunts as a kid, and we got to see the site as it stands now. 

First, the monument - according to legend the foundation stone of the original Crockett cabin. It's seen some years, and is in pretty sorry shape, I'm sad to say. I think a large part of that is a century or more of tourists chipping off a piece to take home. Funny way to show your respects, that. 

The really cool thing these days is that on the site they've rebuilt a copy of his folks' cabin. Now I use the term "copy" fairly loosely here - it's not like anyone was registering floorplans along the Nolichucky in the 1780's.

But that said, this here is a pretty typical cabin for the Southern Appalachians in the late 18th/early 19th century. Excepting the nicely mowed grass, plastic trash can, and ADA-mandated ramp up to the front porch, that is. :)

First, note that there's two doors, each in the middle of the cabin, opposite each other. In the hot sticky Tennessee summers, that breezeway is a godsend, I'm telling you. However, you'll also note there's not a lot of windows. Two small ones on either side of the front door, and a very small one well above ground level on the wall opposite the chimney. That cabin can be holed up tight. 

Next - you see those square spots above the door in back? Those are the supports for the loft. In this cabin the loft goes clear across the lower floor. That's the more common type I've seen, but occasionally you also see a half-loft, where the other half is left open across both "stories" of the cabin. That's usually where the kids sleep.

The foundation is just river rock to keep the floor supports off the ground - it's at least as common to have a full stone foundation though. The walls are dovetailed together in a really clever self-locking way. I think the squared-log/dovetailed corners thing was originally a practice of the Germans, but it caught on with the Scots Irish and English immigrants right quick. The original chinking between the logs was mostly mud and (I think) straw... when I was growing up you still saw the remains of some horrid preservation attempts using brick mortar from the early-mid 20th c.. These days it looks like they've mastered a "best of both worlds" approach that still looks pretty traditional.

Now let's look inside. Here's the far wall, opposite the hearth. You're looking towards the back door, and see the narrow walkway up to the loft. A fairly nice rope bed for Ma and Pa there - the bedspread looks like a linen or linsey-woolsey coverlet.

Those are *not* warm.  I bet the black bear pelt would help a little on a chilly night though. 

On the other side of the room, we see the hearth. Now this is a really nice one - lots of nice cut stone, and they even have fire irons! This is not a "just walked over the mountains" cabin - there's some real luxuries here.
Oh, and see that string of something hanging down by the left side? Them's "leather britches" - dried beans!

So there you go - Appalachian Homes and Gardens. It's actually quite cozy - I'd miss my hot baths and indoor  plumbing, but minus that, I'd be fair comfortable setting up housekeeping in one to this day. :)