reading

I finished Stephen Fry's Making History a few days ago. This book didn't wow me. It wasn't awful, but it was weak. The first part goes into a lot of detail then the second part feels like "whoops, don't have enough pages left to get to the end, let's throw things together quick!" It's an alternate history based plot, Alternate history has been around a long time and covered by many very talented writers. This book centers around an era that has probably had more alternate history/parallel worlds stories written about it than any other. If you're going to play in a field like that, you better bring your absolute best game. This one sort of felt like, we'll not bad, but you have plot holes and a lot of people have done similar in more interesting variations.

27. Stephen Fry Making History

if a tree falls in the yard, it should be planned

Not sure what icon to use for this post, it's truly a mixed bag.

Yesterday most of the day was spent working on the front suspension of the van. Now what I did shouldn't have taken most of the day. I finished putting the boot on the driver's side of the tie rod/steering rack, a task which should be simple but isn't (slipper rubber which does not want to stay stretched over half of the circle while you stretch it over the other half, which you can't reach). Then I changed the driver's side radius arm bushings, the coil spring, and the lower control arm bushings. Those things shouldn't take a lot of time if you do them in the right order and the right way. But if you don't do everything in the right order, you end up redoing things. Basically, getting the lower control arm back in place is really only possible if you disconnect everything else, or if you have a ring of infinite strength.

After that I felt like doing something easier, so I felled a tree. This particular tree was only marginally alive, it lost its leaves early last year and only had a few leaves this year. I rigged up cable and rope to it to give good odds it would drop in the right place. I wanted it to miss the barn and the wood shed on one side and the willow tree we planted last year on the other. So I had maybe 30 degrees of arc to play with. The fall was perfect and was a nice end to the day.

This morning we went for a walk at the local state park with a friend. Then we processed the tree and cleaned up the area. It wasn't a lot of wood, but it is the first tree of the fall wood gathering. It will dry during the crisp days of the winter then become next winter's firewood. This afternoon we worked in the garden, harvesting a lot of peppers, a few tomoatoes, and a few late pole beans. We also pulled up our yellow pole bean bushes and untangled them from their net. They will go into compost and the net will get used next year. After that I cut down the sumac tree which was threatening to fall on the garden fence. Then since I was climbing up in trees and cutting things down I put the ladder up into the big ash tree by the driveway and cut a couple of limbs. One was very much dead. The other was a possible threat to our small elm which we are hoping might grow up to be a big elm (this is a long shot, but it's worth a try). The big ash is the last of the large ash trees near the house. Unfortunately its days are numbered. A good portion of it is dead and two years ago I noticed a mushroom growing out of the base. Not a good sign at all. I was considering cutting it down this spring, but a nuthatch made a house in one of the knotholes, so we chose to leave it up at least until this fall.

My observation for this weekend is a follows: doing any work consists of 30% fetching things to be able to do the work and setting up, 20% actually doing the work, and 50% cleaning up everything from doing the work. It really feels like I spend most of my time cleaning up and putting stuff away.