To all of you who are, as the saying goes, “gettin’ up in years” — remember when you had the energy and the stamina to close the bar? Not anymore, huh? Well, I have a tip for you, a way to bring back the days when you could do that.
Ready?
Move to this part of Ozarkansas. Pretty much everything closes by 8pm.
You’re welcome.
Crooked Creek Pub is our favorite bar in town. (It’s the only bar in town, but whatever.) We had dinner and beers there last night, wonderful as always. One of the owners had just returned from Montana, where she took our suggestions for places to go and things to do — Polebridge, Glacier Distilling, etc. She sat down at our table, told us about her trip, and confessed that as grand as Glacier is, she’s glad that she and her husband have made Ozarkansas their Home.
That’s exactly how Deb and I feel.
We stayed at the Pub until almost closing time (8pm, naturally) and drove back to The Mountain. We spotted wildlife along the way — a survival skill as well as entertainment — and pulled up to the cabin under a crescent moon rising in the western sky.
“I do so love it here,” Deb said softly.
There’s no place we’d rather be, no Life we’d rather live.
A drunk driver crashed into a pole holding up the traffic light at Main and Sixth in Mountain Home last New Year’s Eve. The busy intersection, right in front of the Baxter County courthouse, was turned into a four-way stop until a replacement pole could be delivered and the signal restored.
Reportedly it’s not an off-the-shelf item. And although Mountain Home is “the big city” ’round here, it’s neither big enough nor well-heeled enough to have a ready supply of every single replacement part it possibly could need.
That traffic light was out of operation for almost six months.
Then a few weeks ago, a half-mile east and exactly two months after the city got the Main-and-Sixth signal working again, yet another drunk driver — a 72-year-old guy from Summit, fleeing the cops — plowed into the control box for the traffic light at US 62 and Arkansas 5, the thoroughfare leading to the area’s only major hospital. Once again, a major intersection was turned into a four-way stop.
The city, waiting for parts, estimates that the signal will be out of service for a couple of months.
My intent here isn’t to cast Mountain Home in a dim light, nor am I trying to impress you with how many drunks are running around on our streets and highways. The reason I’m telling you this is because I want you to imagine that it’s your town.
But suppose we’re not talking about traffic lights. It could be the public water supply. Maybe it’s the 911 system, or the comms network that lets emergency-services agencies talk to each other.
Now imagine that it’s not a municipality but, say, the electric utility — whether due to an EMP, terrorism or another calamity, the power grid is down and isn’t getting back up any time soon. Or that a cluster of oil refineries is offline and all of the local gas stations are out of fuel.
None of these problems is permanent. All of the equipment can be repaired or replaced.
“We’re just waiting for parts.”
Two months? Six months? Apparently, that’s how long it takes to get parts for traffic lights.
What if it’s longer than that?
Comfortable, complacent and largely ignorant Americans have wildly unrealistic expectations, bordering on delusion, about what it takes to fix stuff. We see it every time there’s a power outage. Hell, hang out behind the service counter at your local car dealership and you’ll be amazed at how unmoored from reality customers are.
Clearly, if something really serious happens, as a society we’re colossally screwed. Don’t be among the unprepared.
The entire state of Arkansas now is at “moderate” or “high” risk for wildfire. Marion County isn’t under a burn ban — yet.
While talking on the phone with Deb during her commute this morning, I fiddled with the DeWalt sheet-metal “nibbler” attachment. Mounting it to my drill was easy. It feels solid, like it’s part of the tool.
I backed my truck up to a level(ish) part of the driveway, flopped the tailgate down and deployed a folding sawhorse — that’d be my “bench” for cutting 12-foot sheets of reclaimed barn tin. Transferring measurements from the ceiling over the woodstove onto the metal, I made my marks.
Before making my first cut on the tin, I took the nibbler for a brief test drive on a piece of scrap steel. The metal yielded easily to the bypass-style blade, and the tool was surprisingly controllable.
Moving on to the corrugated galvanized steel, then, the nibbler performed as-advertised. I found it easy to keep the cutters on the pencil line I’d scribed.
That said, cutting corrugated shit sucks. Porpoising along, surfing the waves, is challenging. The nibbler tended to bind about 12 inches into the work, though that wasn’t the tool’s fault.
Since the sheets are about 24 inches wide, I simply pulled out of the cut and attacked it from the opposite direction.
When I was done, the pieces I needed for the heat shield had been cut to length. I drilled and screwed together the two shorter sheets, all ready now to fix to the ceiling. (I’ll require Deb’s help to do that.)
The two panels that’ll form the shield behind the stove need work to accommodate the flue and the fresh-air duct. More measuring. More careful nibbling.
I stepped back from today’s task with the same sense I had the Saturday we laid brick for the hearth. It felt like a long stride.
That’s a good feeling, by the way.
A year ago today, our cabin arrived on The Mountain. It was one helluva day — read all about it here.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB