The Swedish Invasion

Who first thinks of Sweden when dwelling on machinery and appliances? Certainly not me. And yet, when I did a household survey, the list of Swedish Stuff was impressive:
Seven Volvos. Okay, so that’s a bit out of the ordinary, but let’s count two at least, okay?
But the list only starts there.
A dishwasher.
A clothes washer.
A clothes drier.
Maybe that’s not surprising either. But wait, there’s more.
A record player.
A chainsaw.
A fireplace.
That strikes me as a lot of Swedish Stuff.
The rest of the house includes
A kitchen stove (US)
Three computers (US brands but probably made in China or Taiwan)
A refrigerator (US)
Two stereo pieces (Japan)
Two dvd players (Korea and Japan)
A television (US brand, made who knows where)
That’s about it. Sweden dominates. I don’t know what, if anything, this means. I just think it’s a little odd.

A Man, A Fan, A Plan

It was about 25 years ago that Rachel and I, soon to be wed, bought one of the worst automobiles ever to emerge from the hearts and minds of Detroit. It was a car so terrible that going through a list of its deficiencies would try the patience of even the most saintly and sympathetic. But this long gone piece of Detroit rubbish had something in common with my whiz-bang Dell laptop computer: both were built around a fan.
In the case of our car, we had a distinct advantage: Dave, The Mechanic, who worked a block from Rachel’s office back then, was on retainer, or so it seemed. The car was in his shop every month, so that he could cure one ailment or another. Replacing the heater fan was particularly trying, not just because the car, as I said, seemed to have been built around the fan, but when he was lying on his back, grappling with some particularly recalcitrant segment of the dashboard substructure, a mouse leaped down on him and ran across his body, causing his body to react with the marvelous reflexes which every good mechanic should possess, hurling his head with great force into a steel crosspiece. Dave, The Mechanic, then took some time away from the car. I’m not sure whether we paid for that time off or not. But at the end of the day, the dead blower fan had been replaced with a freshly transplanted working model, and the car had to go back to the drawing board and think of some new problem to confound him the following month.
In the case of my computer, it became clear over time that the cooling fan was wearing out. All computers have fans in them to dissipate the heat which is generated by operation, mostly from the central processing unit. And it stands to reason that something that runs every minute that the computer is on, something that *moves*, might be prone to wearing out and necessitating replacement. Thus, a good engineer might choose to design the machine so that all that would be required to replace the fan would be the removal of a couple of screws, followed by unsnapping the old unit and snapping in a new one. Total time spent, maybe two minutes.
But no.
In order to replace the fan on my machine, complete disassembly is required, and I do mean complete. The keyboard, the wrist rest, the screen, the battery, the cd drive, the hard drive, the ram, the CPU, all that and more have to be removed. The procedure is twenty pages long. And after you get to the end of it, and have replaced the blessed thing, it all has to be reassembled. If We were the King, We would not be Amused.
So this is a combination complaint and warning. The complaint you have heard and the warning is this: If Time Goes By without Freshness on this page, it will Most Likely be because The Machine is scattered in Pieces On The Dining Table, waiting for me to make another attempt at getting it through the forty pages of disassembly and reconstruction. I have the new fan, sitting in a little box, waiting for its day in the spotlight. That day is not yet here, but as the current fan increases its propensity to squeal and grate, that day draws nearer and when it comes, you’ll hear about it. I’m just not sure when....

Letter From Camp

Hey Everyone,
Last night someone got sick on the bunk above me and it splashed all over the place. We had to sleep in the Habitat House. Say hi to everyone if everyone isn’t reading this. Hope everyone’s ok.
Love,
Patrick

Salad Days

When the mud dries (no dust to settle here) and the NOAA tabulates the amount of rain we've had the last several months, I have to believe it will set some sort of record. July, typically a very dry month in Maine, has had rain and thunderstorms for more than half the time since the month began.
This may be bad for sales at concession stands near beaches, for ticket sales to whale watching cruises, and for canoe rentals, but it's been just great for the lettuce.
We have about eight varieties of lettuce in the garden, which this time of year might be expected to be wilting under the glare of relentless summer sun and heat. Instead, the lettuces are running rampant, turning into Salad Jungle, even in some cases choking out the weeds. Red Oak, Green Oak, leafy, speckled, broad leafed, curly-- all the varieties are doing well, and it's a matter of moments to step out and pick a salad bowl full every night right before dinner.
The lettuce has to be washed pretty well, lest grit form too great a percentage of the meal, but that's a small price to pay for such beautiful, fresh salad.
This is our first foray into serious salad raising, and it's gone so well, that we're planning to expand the salad section of the garden by 100% next year.

Will It Go Round In Circles... Sophia, keeping track of the laundry, making sure none escapes... 

What Light Through Yonder Window Breaks....

Kerosene sounds to many people like the fuel of a bygone era, evoking an image of lamps flickering in dark, low-ceilinged rustic homes, howling winds without, smokey gloom within, only slightly abated by the dim illumination from the guttering flame within the sooty glass chimney.
Not quite. Kerosene, aka K-1, is alive and well, and providing light, heat and power in many Third World countries, such as Maine and Wisconsin.
Anywhere that you find population density drooping and tree density increasing, and with it the likelihood of downed power lines in a storm, there you’re likely to find blue plastic jugs full of pioneer era fuel, old tin lamps from Czechoslovakia or new glass lamps from China, both old and new as simple as dirt– a glass chimney over a reservoir, a wick, and a knob to raise and lower the wick, and in some homes heaters and generators too.
I suppose there were good reasons to switch from kerosene to gas and thence to electricity for producing light. Certainly piped gas required less bother than kerosene, and electric lights were not only brighter, but more convenient and safer to boot.
But safety and ease come with a cost, and that’s in the quality of light. From no other source of light are the words “warm glow” more appropriate than when speaking of light from a kerosene lamp. Of electric lights, incandescent beats halogen, and they in turn leave fluorescent in the dust. LED are efficient but highly directional and so expensive still that they aren’t worth fooling with unless there’s an application where it’s really hard to change the light source.
But kerosene light, warm and yellow, dancing ever so slightly as the flame moves on self generated thermal currents seems to produce serenity as well as light. If the glare from the awful fluorescent lights at the Post Office in our town can be fairly called “harsh”, then calling the happy glow from our kerosene lights “soothing” is hardly a stretch.

July. You might think that leaving the butter out over night so it would get soft, rather than leaving it in the refigerator until morning, would work. Maybe where you live, but not in Maine. 

Holy Coincidence, Batman!

One of the nice things about writing a piece of blog (think of some large, complicated dessert that you can take a discreet bit of– maybe some of the bottom, a bit of crust, a glob of nuts, a smidge of the middle layer, something that protrudes from the top..) is that not only does it not have to relate to the other bits of blog (alright, so it’s the opposite of the dessert analogy, because you’re creating, not consuming it..) but it doesn’t have to be about anything much at all, sort of like those short stories in the New Yorker magazine that seem to start in the middle and come to a close well before any rational end, point or conclusion. Reading one of those pieces is somewhat like opening a door in a hotel, stepping unseen into a room, listening to the occupants for a while, then remembering that you’ve a dinner date that you have to rush off to, and popping off while the denizens are still in mid-discussion. They’ve baffled us for years, these aimless pieces, but someone must be reading them.
Nonetheless, there are interesting Things out there in the world– such as July 3rd. Falling squarely between the actual signing of the Declaration of Independence and the day that most people think it was signed, the third day of the seventh month is host to a curious trio: that of the birthdays of Dave Barry, Tom Stoppard, and Franz Kafka, three writers who have little in common save that they are authors with the same d.o.b.
Kafka was born in Prague 121 years ago, which I didn’t know until recently, and which surprised me– I had thought he was more contemporary than that. The next surprise I got was that Stoppard was also born in Czechoslovakia 67 years ago. Stoppard, one of the greatest artists in our time working in English was born Tomas Straussler in a place called Zlin? How do things like that happen?
It’s not to hard to think of Stoppard and Kafka at the same time, to hold them up and look at them at the same time, to compare them and enunciate some sort of preference or order.
But Dave Barry, only ten years younger than Stoppard, doesn’t compute– it’s impossible to hold him in the same hand with the others. It’s like comparing a Lexus to an Audi and then having someone say “What about a Toyota RAV4?” The only reasonable response is, “Huh?” It’s not that the Toyota isn’t a good vehicle, but other than having pneumatic tires and a gasoline engine, it has nothing in common with the others.
I have to confess that if I found myself stranded in an airplane with a choice of books by Kafka or Barry that I would reach for the chuckles and laughs instead of Stygnian gloom. After all, who needs it? Things are hard enough without adding to the problems we already have. Maybe Kafka contributed something to Literature, but like so much of Big L, the fun quotient in Kafka’s output is sorely lacking, the laughs are too few and far between, and the soaring bits that raise the spirit and gives hope are conspicuous by their absence.
If I haven’t dwelt much here on T.S. it’s only because he requires no dwelling upon– a genius with the black incaustum put to parchment or vellum, everything he writes seems to have it all– laughs, albeit sometimes darkish in nature, insight, cleverness, and Big L qualities that lead to his works being Studied while their author is still in the quick. We could begrudge him his intellect- Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead was a hit before Stoppard hit 30– but instead we’ll be nice, and wish him and Dave Barry a pair of happy birthdays.