Notes from Maine - 2025/02/09
My neighbor just stopped by with his leaf blower. It wouldn’t start.
Last night we got a decent amount of snow. Maybe five inches (thirteen centimeters) were on the ground when I got up. That’s enough snow where Albert (dog) can play with the frisbee without much help. When I throw it the first time, if he sees me shoveling the deck he’ll toss the frisbee around trying to lose it in a drift. When the deck is clear, he brings it up for another throw.
If we get a ton of snow out back, I’ll consider getting a snowblower out from the cellar and making a path from the barn to the manure pit. It has to be a lot of snow (over a foot, or thirty centimeters) to bother with that. I don’t mind shoveling. I do it every day of the year, so it’s a good thing that I don’t mind it.
This morning was not a snowblower morning. It’s a shovel-when-necessary morning. The horses will stomp down enough of the snow in the pasture to make it passable and I can shovel the rest.
My neighbor is a couple decades younger than I am and he has no time for all that shoveling nonsense. That’s why he brought his backpack leaf blower over here. When running, the leaf blower is strong enough to make quick work of paths and decks. He wanders around with the thing buzzing like a billion wasps and moves snow in big clouds until it’s out of his way.
The problem was that it wouldn’t start.
I’ve become known as the small engine person. From his first pull, it was pretty obvious that the engine had everything except enough gas in the carb. The filter wasn’t clogged. The primer bulb had good vacuum. But when I unscrewed the cap from the gas tank, the machine gasped for air. It was suffocating. There’s a vent that’s supposed to let air into the tank so gas can go out, and that vent was clogged. With the cap off, the machine started easily. One it was running, it created enough suction to keep going, but my neighbor is going to have to replace that vent to fix the issue. For now, he put a hole in the cap, which is not ideal (debris and snow might get in, gas might leak out), but at least today’s crisis has been averted.
“You want me to clean off your deck?” he asked.
“Just did,” I said, “but thanks.” Cleaning off the deck gives me something to do while Albert is messing around with his frisbee. I didn’t bother to mention that. Later, that neighbor or his stepfather will plow my driveway I hope. They’ve been doing it for twenty years, so I’ve come to expect that they will, but it’s still an act of kindness that I find touching. When I first moved in, Steve showed up right after the first snow. The people I bought the house from mentioned to Steve that I was moving in, so he took it upon himself to plow. He does our other neighbor as well. Good fences make good neighbors, but so do overlapping skill sets.
Mom flew home successfully yesterday. The flight was delayed and she just beat some weather. To complicate matters more, she was flying into DCA (Reagan National Airpot), which I’ve heard is accepting less traffic now in the wake of the accident at the end of January. It’s always a relief when she’s safely settled after travel. These past few years she has gone back and forth a lot. The distance between Virginia and Maine seems small now, although I haven’t made the trip in forever.
In the kitchen, I have one more narrow cabinet to install. It will fit between the Range Hood and the oven cabinet. I’m not sure what I’ll put in the cabinet, so I haven’t worked out the shelf heights. Once that’s done, I’ll switch back to making doors. I still have a bunch of doors to make. At least the kitchen is getting more usable. With every cabinet that’s finished, I’m closer to putting things away in their proper homes. I don’t have any outlets in my island currently. I was up to date on the NEC code a few years ago, when I started this project, but the code has changed. Outlets are now optional, but there are changes to where they can be installed. They used to be okay on the side, below the counter, but now that’s considered unsafe because a child might pull on a cord. I have to check which version of the NEC my town is currently following. It’s not uncommon for local code to adhere to standards that are several versions back.
Maybe they should make an allowance for households that forbid the entry of children under the age of 12. I would consider putting up a sign if that was the case. Perhaps I’ll post a sign that says, “Children under the age of 12 forbidden on these premises,” and then I won’t have to worry about anyone pulling on a cord. Maybe I’ll just put the minimum age at 16. My nephew is 16 and might pull on an electrical cord but he should know better by now.
It’s not difficult to imagine a scenario where a builder doesn’t bother to put an outlet on an island because they’re too much work given the current code. You have to put a hole in your countertop and then have a popup outlet. Safe and convenient, those popups still downgrades to a nice, clean, unbroken counter. So a builder leaves them out and then the homeowner drapes a cord across a walkway to the wall outlet in order to run a mixer from a power strip. That scenario is several times worse than having an outlet on the side of the island, just below the counter. But code is code. Wait a couple years and I’m sure it will change again. The code for island outlets has changed significantly three times in the past decade already. It’s a safe assumption that we’re still honing in on the right solution. Maybe in the next revision they will require hanging outlets down from the ceiling. It’s not a terrible idea.
