MY LAWN MOWER WORKS

      Some people wanted to know how my lawn mower  repair job ended. I immediately saw that as a topic for another post!

      So my repair job was to simply replace a rewind spring on my lawn mower.

     Okay I'll back up. In pioneer days , to start a small engine, you would wind a rope around a pulley and pull. If the engine started great! If the engine didn't start you wound the rope around the pulley and pulled again. Sometimes you had to pull 10 times for the engine to start.

     So some wise guy thought, "Why don't we have something to rewind the cord automatically and make things easier?" Well the gizmo was invented and was part of small engines. 

     Now I know some people's eyes are starting to glaze over and look for the end of this post. My eyes are glazing over too. 

     Okay back to my repair. The "unit" consists of a housing to hold the spring, a pulley with a rope, a worm gear and small plastic gear. The housing and pulley are on a shaft. The housing doesn't turn but the pulley does turn.

     Much of this you can't see because it's enclosed. Much of it you can't see because it's underneath whatever. Your hands have to feel things to put them back together. 

    The spring is a challenge to wind. First discover which way to wind it. It is wound opposite to the pulley with the rope. The rope is to turn the pulley counter clockwise. Too complicated for me. It took me four tries to get this right, but I did get it. I'm not going to tell about my dumb mistakes. 

     I'm not going to give details because who cares? Today most lawn mowers start by turning a switch!

CLOUDS

    We had a few thunder showers go through around 6 Pm and they left some towering clouds...my favorite.

       On some of the blogger chatter someone complained about putting pictures on the new blog so I decided to try putting photos on the blog tonight. It was a bit of a run around. I will probably not remember next time so I'll do the whole thing over again.

    Finding labels was also a bit of experimentation.

JUNKYARD DOG

      I have a lawn mower that is 50 years old. Every once in a while it needs to be repaired. I've written about this before and even showed photos.

     Now it's very hard to find parts for something that is that old. I needed  rewind spring. That's the spring that pulls the cord back in and winds it so that you can pull again if the motor doesn't start.

     So to find parts one has to do some searching. I found the part but they wanted 50 bucks. Well what do you do? You can't just run out and buy a 50 year old mower! Well, he said he would order the spring in a week or two so that gave me time to shop around some more. We did find one guy who said he could make us an air filter filament.

    We went to see about the air filter. What a junkyard! The guy had about 100 old mowers. There were many roto tillers, snow blowers and  other small engine machines. These were spread over the whole yard.The guy had a shirt that hadn't been washed for a week and pants to match. He thought he was God's gift to comedy. He had a dozen vehicles stored there and I knew who owned them. .He took me back to see if a mower like mine was there. I had been expecting a place with new things.

    I asked if he had the spring I was looking for. He went to look for one and told me not to go in his shop. Five minutes later he came out with a new spring in the original package! How much did he want for it? 10 bucks! I took it in a heartbeat. So the Micro Manager only had a twenty. So he says I'll take the ten for a tip!  What a card!

     Every once in a while you stumble into a very odd place. This was a very different business practise.

     So this was the typical junk yard without the mean dog.

MISTAKE-APOLOGY

   I made a mistake this morning by clicking delete for your comments instead of publish. My apologies to you. I feel badly because I value every comment.

A LONG TIME TO MAKE A DEDUCTION

     Something popped into my head yesterday and it should have been in my head about 75 years ago. Swift I am not. 

     I wrote about the pattern of naming for my brother and I. A German , as well as others had a tradition  for naming children. So me being the first born son was given my paternal grandfather's name for my middle name. My brother was the second son and he was given the maternal grandfather's name for  his middle name.

    What popped into my head yesterday was that this naming pattern was the same for girls. I had not realized that my sister's middle name was taken from our maternal grandmother! I make no excuse for not knowing this but if I ever heard my maternal grandmother called by any name, it was Lizzie.  It just hit me yesterday. I remember lots of chat in the family about my name and my brother's name. I don't remember any chat about my sister's name.

    So it took me a long time to clue in that the naming pattern also applied to my sister. Now my third and fourth brothers were named without consideration of ancestors. I wonder if I had a second sister , would she have been named after her paternal grandmother?

  
     Doreen Elizabeth between her two older brothers. I'm the cute one on the right! The dog was old Rex.  

NEW NEIGHBOR IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

     Yes, there's an unrecognizable person in our neighborhood today. Or should I say there's a neighbor who became unrecognizable?

      Well, the neighbor is me!

     In March when things were closed down , I needed a haircut very badly. So things closed down and I was left without a haircut. Barber shops opened May 17 but I didn't want to go. Finally, things got so bad I just had to get a haircut. Hair had grown to below the ears and was curled up on my neck. It was sticking out ll over the place from under my cap. My hair is not straight but it is badly behaved. In other words there are a few " cow licks" and they change daily. So you can understand that I needed a haircut.

    Now the micro Manager offered to cut my hair but I said , "No thanks!"  The Micro Manager had cut my hair for two years in the Arctic...never again!

    So yesterday I got a haircut and I'm sure the neighbors would have a hard time recognizing me.

     So here is my new haircut 

 Mid May and hair was sticking out.

MELT DOWN

      The micro manager loses things once in a while and she gets very upset. She has a humungous black purse which probably has more than 123 items in it. So what usually happens is that she puts something in the purse  when we are out shopping or doing business and then she can't find it. She gets very excited and thinks back to where she had the said item last. There's a lot of frantic digging in the black monster . Usually sooner or later she comes across the item she's looking for. I don't think she has actually lost anything but she spends a lot of time looking for things. 

    Now Friday , I had my opportunity for a melt down. I had to call at five different places to do business. 

    First, I had to call at a bank. Since I rarely enter this bank, as the micro manager does all banking, they asked me for identification. They wanted my driver's license. I'm very careful with that piece of identification. They took it and gave it back and I put it back in my wallet. 

    When I got to business number 4 , another bank, I was asked for identification and I couldn't find my license. I frantically went through my wallet again as it should have been obvious. No luck. By this time I was tearing everything apart. 

    Even though I knew I had put my license back in the first bank , I went back to the first bank. They had not found it.

    Well go to the next business. By this time I had cooled down a bit and decided to become sane and look in my wallet again. I checked in the pocket where I keep my license. I could feel something different between two other pieces of paper. There was my plastic driver's license. 

    Now this was a very upsetting incident which doesn't usually happen to me. If it's a small item I don't worry..

   So how about you. What do you fear losing most? What happens to you when you lose something?