2024 Snowstorm

     It has been 65 years since Eastern Colorado saw the kind of snowstorm that hit in early November of 2024.  Two things qualify the November storm:  absence of wind, and quantity of heavy, wet snow on the level over a windy plain.

     I know of three such storms including the one in 1946-47.  The second one was in 1959-60.

     It was a little hard to believe that the November 2024 storm was happening.  Where we are  in Northern Colorado, we got rain, nearly an inch, but hardly any snow.

     The beneficial moisture delivered by the snowstorm came with some “collateral damage”.   I wouldn’t find out about that damage for nearly a month.  Not that it mattered.  I could not have done anything about it.  I still haven’t done much.

      I got the news on the Friday evening of December 5.  It came in a phone  call from my Grandson who had gone to the farm with his Dad hunting deer.  “Granddad, you know that shed where you keep your old tractors?”  “Yes.”

     “The roof collapsed.”

     Ouch.  He went on to explain that they hadn’t noticed until Friday afternoon because it was dark when they arrived on Thursday night.  They went out hunting early Friday morning, and when they came back, they saw it and looked into the matter. 

     And then called me.

 

     I made arrangements with Leslie, our caregiver to be on duty Sunday.  We went down Saturday.  Thankfully, the boys had the house warmed up so the Goodwife didn’t have to suffer the usual winter chill when we arrive and face a house in the 40’s.

      Sunday morning was bright and sunny, so I ventured out and pried open a couple of doors to look inside.

 

      The deer hunters had gone out at daybreak and came back while I was puttering around taking pictures, and looking.  The north end stayed pretty much intact, probably because I had it reinforced so I could use a chain hoist to life 500-pound flywheels and the like when I worked on the old 2-cylinder tractors.

 

      They set about shoveling the hard-packed snow that had slid off the roof and formed a rampart in front of the east doorway.  We managed to get a six-foot opening to enter the east side.

     They then devoted themselves to clearing the roof that lay mostly on the shed floor.

 

     They were much more successful at getting rid of that snow than they were in bagging a deer.

 

     They weren’t willing to risk life and limb to clean off the part of the roof residing on top of the tractors.  Good decision!

 

      Some irony:  I had a table made of an exterior door sitting on two saw horses.  On it were some gaskets that hadn’t made it onto one of the old tractors, the “R”, yet.  There were several small parts waiting to be found and put back on as I try to get the old gal back to running.  A service manual and a notebook with things to remember as I put it back together written in it were on the table.

    None of that was disturbed.  The paper work hadn’t even got wet.  I was able to remove all that and put it in the shop where I hope I can find it when I need it.

     Also undisturbed in the far southwest corner are a table saw and a miter saw covered with a plastic tarp.

     I did jack up some trusses that had broken on the north side and reinforced them with 2 X 4’s I had cut out of some of the downed trusses.

 

    Note the galvanized pipe between the wheels and beside the ceramic light fixture.  I hope they will do the job for awhile. 

    I used my remaining daylight and “Leslie time” to start pulling nails out of the roof metal that I could reach.  I will have to work my way south until I can prop up the south roof resting on the two tractors.  I’m off to a slow start.  I didn’t quite finish with one sheet.

     The insurance company assessed the damage less the deductible at $27K.  That’s only for the structure.  The contents must have their own insurance, which they are quick to tell you.

     What damage the “contents” suffered is a bit hard to tell right now.  The reel on the combine header has some bent bats.  The two tractors don’t seem to be too badly damaged.  Somewhere under there is a wood splitter. 

     As usual in Eastern Colorado, I am at the mercy of the weather.  I won’t be able to do much until it warms up. 

     I shudder to think that the rest of the winter of 2024-25 will follow the example of the other two heavy snow winters.  Will there be another three feet to come?

    

Snow Storms of Eastern Colorado

      The first one I know of was the winter of ’46—’47.

     Since I was born the summer of 1947, I wasn’t around for this one.  I’ve heard the stories.  Donna and Ellis were expecting their first child that winter.  They lived twenty miles north of Genoa.

     The roads were impassible for up to six weeks that winter.  Ellis decided Donna should be closer to the hospital, so he decided to take her down to his parents’ home just a couple of miles north of Genoa and on Highway 109 to Hugo and the hospital.

      Roads were impassable for ordinary vehicles, so they decided they must use the tractor.   But it wasn’t just any tractor.  It was a Minneapolis-Moline Comfortractor.

     The Comfortractor had a cab and fenders, like an automobile, but was designed to work in the field like a tractor.  It could go up to 40 mph on the road.  (https://wdm.ca/collections/comfortractor/ to get a picture and full details.)

    I don’t think Donna and Ellis approached anywhere near that speed, as I think it was a long day getting from the north farm to the south one.  There’s a lot more to that story that I don’t know.  Things turned out well for them, anyway.

    That winter,  Dad made a pair of skis out of tongue-and-groove siding with leather loops for toe holds.  Somehow, he soaked the tips and got a sufficient bend on the front end of them so they didn’t dig into the snow.  He could negotiate the snow, which was three or more feet deep on the level.  ”On the level” is a pretty rare phrase for a snow storm in Eastern Colorado.

     The other stories I recall from hearing them as a kid had to do with the bombers that delivered food for humans and livestock to the rural families who were stranded for up to six weeks before they could get out and get to town or get to some of the cattle herds.

     Most of the stories were about the inaccuracy of the bombing crews.  The folks got one delivery in a wooden case.  Dad had to go nearly a quarter of a mile south of the yard to retrieve the box containing mostly canned goods, I think.  He was able to do that on his homemade skis.

     Another neighbor, I don‘t remember which one, had the opposite problem.  The box that fell from the sky wiped out the end of his hay rack.

     Though such a winter presents difficulties, it also provides abundant crops for the following spring and summer.

     It would be another thirteen years before any snowstorm like that occurred again. We had plenty of snowstorms in the 50’s, but they were windy blizzards that stacked the snow in huge drifts on the south side of something.

      It was the winter of ’59—’60.  It snowed heavily on Labor Day weekend.

     A “town farmer” living in Genoa had to travel over twenty miles north into Washington County in the storm to drain the water out of his new tractor, sitting in a field where he was drilling wheat.  That snow melted off pretty quickly, but it was a harbinger of what was to come.

     That year, the football coach arranged for Genoa to play their home games on Flagler’s field.  The Flagler field had lights and grass!  Our field had hard, old dirt which would have been quite muddy most game days.

     The games were probably not played on Friday night, as Flagler would have been using their own field on half of the Fridays.  Whatever night it was, it seemed it was always rainy-drizzly or snowy.  The early birds could park their cars along the sidelines of the field and watch in relative comfort. 

     Our parents never went to any of those games.  If I wanted to go, I had to finagle a ride, which I managed to do.  We never got there in time to park on the sidelines, so we watched the game outside in the mist, rain or snow, at least so it seemed.  We were young and didn’t mind the discomfort as long as we could be with our friends.

    Another drawback was I had to wait for the team to shower, dress and return from the game to get a ride home.  That could be up to an hour, and I was tired.  Late to bed, and then up at regular time to go to school.  Not fun, but the sacrifice was worth it to see the game with my friends. 

     In January of 1960, Dad had to go to Denver to a hospital for surgery, a procedure that now would probably be performed in the doctor’s office.  He had to be there the night before.  It must have been a Saturday or Sunday, as we were all standing in the yard bidding our parents goodbye.  Mom would take him to the hospital and then return home.

      We were in shirt sleeves on a warm January day.  Dad said through his open car window, “Well, it looks like you’ll have some good weather while I’m gone.”  We had to do the chores in his absence, and even after he came home, because he couldn’t lift anything for something like six weeks following the procedure.

     Mom drove home in a snowstorm, fortunately not a blizzard, but so much for good weather.  It was quite dark with fairly deep snow when she arrived.

    On school days, Mom rolled us out of bed at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m.  Brother John was in charge of feeding and milking the two milk cows.  The rest of us had to haul hay to the beef cattle and chop the ice and fill the stock tank with water.

     We could feed cattle with the ’50 Ford pickup or the tractor, which had a Farmhand with hay fork mounted on it.  There constantly arose two problems:  snow too deep around the hay stack and the corral, and the tractor often would not start on the cold mornings.  The battles to get that John Deere G started were epic, and usually unsuccessful.

 Many days we ended up hauling hay with pitch forks through the snow drifts and into the feed rack.  Dad didn’t like baled hay, said bales dried the hay out.  So we stacked loose millet in a stack in September, then pulled it out and fed it to the cattle all winter long.  Pulling the hay out of the stack and making a pile of suitable size for hauling it to the corral and throwing it over the fence with a pitchfork was time-consuming hard work, complicated by the frequent snowstorms.

     We were supposed to have semester tests on the second week of school in January.  It wouldn’t do to be tardy or absent.  When the cattle had been cared for, we went in to breakfast and listened to the radio.  Sure enough, no school.  Bad weather and impassable roads. 

     I remember the radio announcer saying, after about the third cancellation, that we Genoa kids would have to wait until next week to take our semester tests.  The announcement was greeted with mixed emotions.  Normally, a no-school day was quite welcome.  But after struggling for a couple of hours with chores, it would have been nice to know we had all day to do them instead of trying to get them done and on the road by 7:30 or 8:00.

       We did have some warm weather, enough to thaw some of the snow.  Then, it got cold again, and we discovered that the melted snow had turned to ice in the  hay stack.  After that, it was impossible to pull hay out of parts of the stack with a pitch fork.  We had to resort to a dull hay knife, a tool that had teeth like sickle sections and a handle like a lumberjack’s saw in the days before chainsaws. We had to saw the frozen hay out in chunks, until we got deep enough into the stack where the moisture had not penetrated or hadn’t frozen.

     After it thawed some, we could load the Ford pickup with hay and drive into the corral to unload, provided it wasn’t too muddy. Or we could get there early in the morning before the mud thawed.

     Well, we survived, and so did the cattle. It was the muddiest year I can ever remember.   In the Spring, when it didn’t freeze overnight, we had to put chains on the pickup to negotiate the muddy yard and corral.

     The county roads were soft and muddy, too.  Many a day we were late to school because of slugging slowly through the mud, even having to rely on neighboring farmers to pull our school bus out of muddy spots.  The wet winter was followed by a wet spring.  Mud, mud everywhere.

      All the dams in pastures filled and overflowed.  Then the weather dried up and so did the watering holes.  We were back to normal in Eastern Colorado.

     All of this was a prelude to the story of winter of 2024—2025.  Of course, the story isn’t finished, but I can tell the 2024 part of the story.  Next time.   

’53 Chev

       The Green Bomb.

     It probably should be the Green Bomb II since there was another ’53 Chev that preceded this one.  The old one had the wheels run off of it.  It had maybe 150K miles on it, which is remarkable for cars of that era.  Those old “6-bangers” often had to have a complete engine overhaul after 60 or 70K miles.  I can’t remember that first ’53 being overhauled.

     The folks liked that first ’53, which was the first automatic transmission ever allowed to join the farm fleet, so well that they snapped up the Green Bomb when it came up for sale from a neighbor whose parents had died.  It was similar to the first ’53 and they knew its history.  Those neighbors bought it new in 1953.

     The Green Bomb was replaced by a much newer Buick.  The Green Bomb may have sat outside for a while, but not a long while.  As soon as the red barn was completed, it was moved to its retirement spot in the very deepest part of the barn, the north end where there was supposed to be walk--in door leading to the “finishing corral” for future beeves.  That door never got done. 

      Eventually, a stove blocked the way to the exit for the Green Bomb.  Then various tractors and trucks, some being overhauled, were in its way to the door.

   Note the stove pipe descending on the Green Bomb’s hood like a tornado funnel.  That’s where the stove stood.

     There was never any reason to get the Green Bomb out of its place.  It probably sat there close to forty years.  The tires went flat, the roof provided a storage place for things that needed to be kept mouse-free. 

      While the mice couldn’t get to the roof of the old car, the interior of the car was not so lucky.

    The ’53 is the last antique car left on the farm.  Plans are to get it sold, too.  Then will come the antique tractors and machinery as my farm career approaches its end.  It’s a sad, sweet time as digging out the old stuff brings back a lot of memories.

     The first step in getting the Green Bomb out of the barn was clearing a way.  The stove was the big obstacle.  With the help of the 4010 and it’s frontend loader, and Lelsie, Patti’s companion when we are at the farm, the stove came out of the barn and went down into the basement—another story, maybe, except I forgot to take any pictures of that memorable event.

    Next, the tires had to be aired up.  One refused to accept any air.  One aired up and went back down in about 15 minutes.  A third lasted for a few hours, and one held air for nearly a week.

    I was able to get the spare out of the trunk and replace the totally no-good tire.  The spare held air for a couple of days.  I was able to get both wheels off the front, using the spare on one side and blocks under the other side.

    Brother Dave came down to help.  He rolled around under the back end of the car for nearly an hour getting the rear end jacked up, blocked and both rear wheels off. 

     Dave had brought four “cheapy” tires (in fact, they were free, but it cost $96 to get the old tires removed and the new ones mounted) with him.  A trip to town had the new tires mounted in less than an hour.   That was quite enough work for two old guys for one day.

     It got cold overnight.  Halloween dawned cloudy and cool.  Attempts to start the 4010 in the cold didn’t go too well.  It took three attempts with battery chargers hooked up between attempts.  Once it started, the clutch and transmission didn’t want to go to work in the cold, but eventually, everything worked. 

     Moving the 4010 left only one obstacle between the Green Bomb and its first glimpse of sunlight in 40+ years.  We pulled another tractor out of the barn and the way was clear.  Hooking a chain to the Green Bomb called for another roll in the dirt beneath the car, but it got done.

      One last problem:  the car didn’t want to shift out of Park.  WD-40 here and there and constant working the shifter succeeded. 

     Pulling the car was no problem for the 4010, and the Green Bomb seemed actually anxious to get out, rolling faster than the 4010, catching up to the tractor and managing to unhook the chain.

     Inertia was overcome and the car soon sat in front of the shop waiting for a good cleaning.  It didn’t get a good cleaning, but it got most of the mouse poop and debris removed from interior and trunk.

  We donned respirators whenever we got near the interior or the trunk of the car.  Hantavirus, you know. 

      There were a few interesting mouse-chewed documents, like this booklet listing license plate numbers, what car and to whom the license was issued.  Invasion of privacy?

     

    We left the car sitting in front of the shop.  It was destined to sit under two feet of snow on this second week of November, 2024.  I’m not there to take a picture of that.                                                   

                      

  Long live the Green Bomb!

 

    

The Missing Spark Plug

     ”No good deed goes unpunished.”   (Somebody important said that.  It wasn’t Mark Twain.)

     It wasn’t a very magnanimous deed, anyway.  I changed the oil on the lawn mower.  It’s one of those chores too easy to put off. 

    Check the oil before starting the mower.  My but it is dirty.  I’ll change it when I get done mowing.  Except after I get done mowing, I’m too tired, so I’ll put it off one more time.

     This time, I really did change the oil after I got done mowing.  Getting the drain plug out of the underneath side of the mower, then getting the mower over the drain pan so as not to pollute anything with dirty oil, is like trying to use a bed pan in the hospital. 

      The draining process finished and the drain plug restored, I searched the place for a quart of the right weight oil.  Nothing.  So I used a jug of 15-40W to fill a quart measuring can with a spout that pivots, up when you want to contain the oil, down when you want to send the oil into the crankcase.  I filled it full and got it all into the mower.

     Then I checked the oil.  Way over full, and the words “Do Not Overfill” clearly amplified on the dipstick through the film of clean oil.

     Oh well.  I’ll be sure to get some of the oil out of the mower crankcase before I start the engine again.  I stowed the mower.

     A couple of weeks later, I needed to mow again.  I recalled the too-full engine.  I put an old suction device to work with a piece of  gas line that fit over the suction pump’s inlet fitting, and small enough to fit into the dipstick and oil fill access on the mower.

    It took a few tries to get the oil level down to  near the full mark on the dipstick.  I replaced the dipstick, filled the gas tank, gave the primer button two or three shots. 

     I gave the starter rope a jerk.  The mower, reared up and threatened to hit me.  I changed positions so I could use a foot to hold the front of the mower down while I pulled the starter rope again.  Nothing moved.  The starter rope wouldn’t budge.  A few more attempts confirmed that.

     I then performed a dangerous maneuver.  I tied the brake lever to the handle so the brake wouldn’t interfere with my attempts to get the engine to turn.  I rolled the mower over on its side, the side with the gas tank and the oil filler up so as not to leak liquids all over while I grabbed the mower blade and attempted to rock it back and forth.

     The engine was primed with gas and the spark was enabled with the brake lever tied to the mower handle.  Had I succeeded in getting the motor turn, it could have started.  No worries.  After several attempts, I got the engine to move an inch or two.

    At this point I figured out what had happened and why the words on the dipstick, “Do Not Overfill,” was an inviolable commandment.  The oil in the overfilled crankcase had seeped into the cylinder and locked things up.  Eventually, I figured out that I had to remove the spark plug to get the engine to turn. 

    By the time I figured that out, I had worked oil into the exhaust valve.  When I did get the engine freed up enough to turn, not only did oil spew out of the spark plug hole.  It sprayed out of the muffler.

      With the engine freed up, the spark plug cleaned and replaced, I tried several times to get the mower to start.  No luck.  I pulled the spark plug again and checked it on the ohmmeter. Nothing.  No amount of cleaning, blasting with air, anointing in alcohol could get anything out of the spark plug.

     Lesson:  don’t soak a spark plug in oil.  It probably will ruin it.

     It was Sunday.  The only place that would be open was Big R.  I threw the spark plug into the cup holder in the car and went in to start my domestic chores. 

    A couple of hours later, we got into the car to  head to town to find a new spark plug.  I forgot something and had to go back to the house.  I left the Goodwife in the car while I ran in and back out.  Hurried, maybe, rather than ran.

     I grabbed the garage door opener and threw it into the car’s cupholder on top of the spark plug.  Or at least, I thought I put it on top of the spark plug. 

     When we got to Big R, I picked up the garage door opener to grab the spark plug.  Which wasn’t there.

      Where was it?  I looked in every nook and cranny in the car, the glove box, the console, the door pouches, under the seats.  Nothing.

     I patted down the Goodwife.  Nothing.  Not in a pocket.

     I didn’t jump to the conclusion that she had relocated the thing, because I have been known to do something without thinking about it, or even to forget that I have done something.  I might have put the spark plug somewhere where I couldn’t miss it, but can’t remember where.

    It didn’t matter.  Nothing to do but go into Big R and see what spark plugs were available.  There were only three in stock, and it wasn’t hard to select the right one.

      Come Monday morning, I installed the new plug, primed the engine, and on the second pull, the engine fired up.  It smoked horribly for the first minute while burning the excess oil it had imbibed. Over the next five minutes, the smoke coming out of the muffler gradually lessened to zero.

      The recompense for my good deed was fully paid.  Almost. 

     The spark plug remains MIA, or MII, missing in INaction, since it wasn’t working.  Not that it matters at all.

     The experience is all too usual nowadays, where I find dirty underwear in the bathroom vanity, a flashlight in the refrigerator, or a picture removed from the wall and wrapped up in a bathrobe for just a few examples of life in our house.

    Oh well.  One missing, worthless spark plug is nothing to fret about.

The May Gap

       It’s 3 p.m. 

      “Let’s go!”

     “Go where?’  Woops!  That’s a question.  Can’t ask direct questions.

     “Someone needs to tell me where to go.”

     No answer, maybe a shrug and grimace, maybe a “I don’t know.”

     But go we must.  I looked for back streets and residential areas where I could putt along at 20-miles per hour.  I could be a Uber driver or go to work for UPS or a pizza place that delivers.  I’ve seen places around town that I didn’t know existed.  I have toured a section of Fort Collins with names from the Eastern Planes,  Akron, Limon, and Arriba. No Genoa, yet.

     After 45 minutes or so, I would try returning home.  Ten minutes in the house and  I would hear, “Let’s go!” or maybe “We’d better be going.”  Many times, her arms would be full of something rolled up in a blanket or maybe pictures taken from the wall, stuff we mustn’t leave behind, we must take with us.

     Attempts to prepare something to eat would be interrupted with demands to do something, usually leave, go somewhere.  Shut off the stove and go.

      Going out to eat became risky.  Once, as we sat waiting for our meals, she became increasingly agitated.  Trying to find causes for behaviors was , and is, a major consumer of my time.  In this case, some girls sitting in a nearby booth were having a good time, laughing and joking.

      The Goodwife was sure they were laughing at her.  She became increasingly agitated. She rose and started to go for those girls.  I blocked her exit from the booth we were sitting in.  She became loud and abusive, turning her wrath on me. 

     The manager came over and I asked her to change our order to “to go”.  The manager and waiter got things ready to go as fast as they could.  Using one hand and holding her back with the other, I fished out a credit card, signed the slip, and the manager helped us to the door.

      The end came on a Tuesday night while I was at the weekly meeting of the barbershop singers.  I got a phone call and I rushed out of the meeting and headed for the bingo site where a lady had volunteered to take her.

     The lady has lived with cerebral palsy all her life.  She is small in stature and not sure on her feet.  When I arrived on site, a friend of the caregiver had helped soothe the savage beast.  I soon learned that the Goodwife had knocked the caregiver over in the parking lot when she tried to keep her from running away.  

      I thanked the friend, I apologized to the caregiver lady, and I got the goodwife into the car.  I knew I had to do something.  I couldn’t go on this way.

      Three different people suggested I have her tested for a UTI, a urinary tract infection.  After three days of trying to reach our neurologist with no response, I turned to our personal physician.  Not much fun, as under the new company he now is contracted to, you cannot reach his office.  Instead, you have to do everything through Arizona headquarters.

      Finally, we got an appointment at an urgent care facility where the “pilot fish” lady that does all the preliminary work for the doctor, got the Goodwife into a restroom and managed to collect a urine sample.

     As we sat waiting for the doctor, I read all about diabetes on a poster on the wall.  When the doctor came, he said there was indeed an infection, a “mild” one he said.  He prescribed an antibiotic to be taken for four days.  He also said she was dehydrated.

    “Getting her to drink water is a chore,” I said.

     “What will she drink?”

     “ A little coffee, maybe some tea, Coke.”

     “Give her Coke or Gatorade or anything she will drink.”

     “I just read all the evils of sweets,” I said and gestured to the poster on the wall.

     “Doesn’t matter.  She needs liquid.  Give her all the Coke she will drink.”

     We picked up pills at the pharmacy and took one immediately.  It didn’t help much.  That evening, I was tired from going.  I resisted the call to go somewhere until about 9, when I realized it might be a long night if I didn’t get  her settled down, so we went out at 9 and drove around.  It didn’t help much.

        When I pulled back into the garage 45 minutes later, she refused to get out of the car.  I left her sitting in the car.

      As she had been a flight risk, I had previously rigged up an extension cord and plugged the garage doors into it.  When I pull the extension plug out of the outlet, the garage doors won’t open unless you pull the emergency cord and open them manually.

     She was sitting in the dark in the car in the garage.  I went to shower.  When I came back, she was out of the car wandering around in the garage and had settled down a lot.  I managed to get her into bed and that was the end of that day, a Thursday.

             Meanwhile, another suggestion came from friends at Dementia Together.  Try CBD gummies.  The cerebral palsy lady agreed.  She said she had used them for years and they helped her.

      On Friday, we called on the local CBD store.  I had just about made up my mind to walk on by, because I really couldn’t see the store itself, only the signs.  As we passed by, a young guy came along and asked if we were looking for the CBD store. 

     I was a little worried about taking her into a place where there might be a crowd or noise, but the young guy wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, so we followed him up the stairs and into the store.  We were the only people in there. 

      There followed a brief explanation of the types of CBD and the benefits.  Always the skeptical one, I though, “Yeah, right,” to myself, but then what did I have to lose.  We bought a small bottle of Peach-flavored gummies that had both CBD and CBC in them. 

     When we got out to the car, I took the bottle out of the box, broke the seal under the cap and gave the Goodwife one.  They were so good she wanted another, but I managed to delay that. 

    We took a little run up to Carter Lake, visited with a man with a dog, always an attraction for “us.”   We went home for about 30 minutes before going to the bar where the 96-year-old guy plays.  We were at the lounge until after 9 p.m., ate, visited, had a good time.  No sign of agitation or anger.

     It was our miracle day.  There hadn’t been a peaceful day for a long time.  Was it too good to be true?  Would I have to reconsider my opinion that such stuff was another form of snake oil?

     Saturday came and went with only minor disturbances.  We ran through the antibiotics and continued to use the gummies.  There have been days when we used two gummies a day.  It hasn’t been perfect, but when I look back on it, it still seems a miracle that I don’t have to deal constantly with “Let’s go!”

      How did I live with it?  The truth is I was seriously considering memory care for her.  I couldn’t deal with that kind of stress day after day. 

     I have since found some good help for three to five days a week.  We are managing.  Life goes on. 

 

 

    

Snake in the Dryer Vent

      No, not a real live snake.  Settle down.  No need to shiver and get the chills.

     It is a  sewer-cleaning snake. 

     The story goes back a few years.  (Hard to believe, but we are coming up on ten years of living in this house.)

     The washer and dryer are in the basement.  The dryer vent runs up inside a wall, takes a turn, or maybe two, and between floor and ceiling, heads to the outdoors.  The horizontal section of the metal vent pipe is at least twenty feet.

     Every year, as farm activities slow down, I think, “I’ll clean that dryer vent pipe this fall or winter.”  This spring, I really did go after the lint in that vent pipe.  I think a lot of house fires start when lint, highly flammable, builds up in the pipe and some malfunction of the dryer allows it to keep running and heating even after the clothes are dry.

      Under ordinary circumstances, the lint is so wet you couldn’t ignite it with a torch.  But when it is dry, it makes a good fire-starter.  Try using some to start the blaze in your fireplace or wood stove.

      Anyway, I moved the cabinet nestled between the washer and dryer.  I moved the dryer away from the wall so I could get to the flexible connection from dryer to vent pipe.  No easy task, since the dryer is "two-story." There was plenty of lint in the flexible pipe.  It was easy to use a rag to remove the lint from it.

     Now for the metal pipe disappearing into the basement wall.  A drain-cleaning sewer snake would be perfect, at least so I thought.  I tied a rag to the little coil spring on the tip of the snake and ran it into the pipe. 

      It was sort of successful.  I got a lot of lint out.  My idea was to run the snake all the way through the pipe, tie a rope to the end of the snake and pull it with the rope in tow back through the pipe.

     Problem:  the snake is only fifteen feet long.  It was then I calculated the length of the vent pipe.  It must be between twenty and thirty feet long.  Revise the plan.  I had to go from both directions, from the outside termination of the pipe as well as the from the dryer side. 

     If it was indeed thirty feet of pipe, the fifteen-foot snake should cover the entire length.  To gain access to the vent pipe from outside, I had to remove the metal, hooded flapper mechanism. Worthless flapper, I should add, because the flapper valve never closes after a little lint gets into the hinge side.   The idea is for the flapper to close when the dryer is not running.  Once the lint gets into its hinge, the flapper never closes.

     It took a little effort to get rid of the flapper assembly.  Screwed to the exterior wall and a rather tight fit, it came out reluctantly.  I ran the snake and rag as far into the pipe as I could from the outside.  I got some lint out, but it wasn’t satisfactory.  I needed a longer snake.

     I didn’t want to buy one, so I went to Home Depot where the only light snakes were electric powered ones that look like an electric drill attached to a sewer snake.  It was $30 for 4 hours to rent it.

     I had another snake at the farm.  No need to rent one.  I bought a plastic dryer vent termination assembly which is much more efficient than the metal one.  The plastic one has three little flappers that aren’t too badly affected  by the lint, and they are easy to clean if they do get stuck open.

      It was a bit of a problem to get the plastic one through the wall and connected to the metal pipe because the metal pipe had no support and sagged when I removed the old flapper assembly.  I got it in temporarily and resolved to finish the job after the next trip to the farm.

     All was well for a few cycles of the dryer.  But one day, the dryer ran and ran and ran.  I opened the door.  The clothes were still quite wet.  Hmmmm.  Did we need a new dryer?

    I went outside and discovered that there was virtually no air coming through the vent pipe when the dryer was running.  Back down the stairs, I pulled the flexible pipe off the metal vent pipe, and the warm wet air gushed out.  I left the dryer run with the hot air venting into the laundry room.  In about fifteen minutes, the clothes were dry.

     Conclusion:  nothing wrong with the dryer.   My cleaning attempt had had the opposite effect; it plugged up the vent pipe so that no air could get through it.

     I didn’t have a shop vac, but that was my first idea.  Stick a hose in there and see if I could remove any of the lint that way. 

     We do have a central vac in the garage that has never been hooked up.  It seems to have been used to vacuum vehicles and the garage floor once in a while.  It has a twenty-foot hose.  It wouldn’t reach the dryer vent.  I took the hoses from the central vac and hooked it to the Kenmore vac and ran it as far into the pipe as I could.

     It sort of worked.  The vacuum hose would grab a slug of lint and plug up.  I would pull the hose out, unplug it and repeat the operation.  I eventually had a trash bag full of lint.  And the dryer worked a little better, but the air flow wasn’t as robust as it should have been.

      I still needed something to go through the entire length of the vent pipe.  I had remembered to bring the other sewer snake from the farm by this time. Attempts to connect the two snakes together by sticking one in from the basement and the other into the outside opening were unsuccessful.

     And now, the problem.  I decided I should hook the two snakes together and try driving them in that way.  I should be able to get all the way through the vent pipe with the two hooked together.  You have probably already figure out what happened.

     My connection was a dismal failure.  I got one snake about twenty feet in, it got stuck.  When I tried to pull it back, my feeble connection broke and about five feet of the second snake came tumbling down out of the vertical section of vent pipe. 

      The other snake has taken up lodgings in the dryer vent pipe.  It remains.  Attempts to remove it from either end of the vent pipe have been unsuccessful.

     I returned to the vacuum cleaner.  This time, I ran the dryer on air flow—no heat--while I ran the vacuum hose into the vent as far as I could from the outside.  Using that and the sewer cleaner, I managed to remove a bushel, no exaggeration, of lint.

      When the vacuum came up empty, I ran the snake in there and snagged big chunks of sopping wet lint.  Not much danger of fire, unless it fermented! 

     Alternating vacuum and snake, I succeeded.

     Unless you consider the resident snake in the vent pipe. 

     The first load of clothes that went into the dryer got dry in record time.  So it wasn’t only a safety issue.  It was a step for energy efficiency.  When I get my report from the power company, maybe my electric usage will be closer to my energy-efficient neighbors.  (Except I’ve had to run the air conditioner more this year than ever before, but that’s another story.)
     Brother John suggested attaching a leaf blower to the vent pipe.  That makes a lot more sense, but I don’t have a leaf blower.  I could rent one but . . . . .

     I will have to try to get the snake out of the dryer vent  someday, but for now, I’m content with “let sleeping snakes lie,” or something like that.      

Living With Dementia II – Lost & Found

 

            There it was, right on the dog’s bib. 

 

      Not too long after getting the ID bracelet, it went missing.  Not surprising.  Things go missing all the time.  Peanut butter jar found in the dishwasher.  Underwear in the trash can. 

     For a person who has always believed in, “a place for everything and everything in its place,” and for whom “Look for it!” is inflammatory,  it has been a tough time.  Nothing gets put in its place.

     But I am learning.  I must have multiple items.  Can’t find it?  Get another.  The lost one will eventually turn up.  About a year ago, I couldn’t find the dandruff-preventing shampoo.  I looked and looked. 

      On a visit several weeks later, Tisha came upstairs carrying the shampoo.  Where did she find it?  In a basement closet full of sewing and quilting material and other junk.

     Conventional wisdom is that the person living with dementia won’t change her ways, so I must change mine.  What I discover is that losing things bothers me.  A lot.  That characteristic is why I quit carrying a pocket knife decades ago.  I couldn’t keep track of it.  Them.

      When I lose things, I have to find them.  If I had all the time back that I wasted looking for things that weren’t in their place, I would only be fifty-something.  Though I try, old habits die hard.

     So it was that when the new ID bracelet disappeared after less than a week, I looked and looked, even though I knew I should not.  I need more than one.  So I returned to the website I had ordered it from, RoadID, and ordered three more.

     One day, I picked up the cute little mechanical dog to see if it would help to calm stormy waters that were arising.  There it was, the bracelet on its red band somehow nestled into the dog’s bib.

      While waiting for the new bracelet nameplates to arrive in the mail, I had jerry-rigged a label on one of the spare bands (I had ordered six total, but only one nameplate) because  I found it difficult to leave the house unless the Goodwife was wearing an ID bracelet.

    In less than a week, the new nameplates arrived.  Now I have multiples and wait for the lost to find themselves, like Little Bopeep’s sheep.

      This time, I saved the packaging.

              

    Note:  the original red bracelet has gone missing again.  It’s been AWOL for 4 or 5 days.