First thing in the morning it sometimes feels like I am tech support for the little people. During the holiday season we allow half an hour of screen time. It usually involves minecraft, but it all has to work first. The devices are temperamental. One of them is old and requires the occasional reboot, or its certificate refreshed with the router (by turning it off and on again of course). The other device behaves most of the time. Although sometimes it refuses to see the shared minecraft worlds. I don’t know why. All I do know is that when it doesn’t work the little lady throws a mini tantrum declaring, “Just give me the world! That’s all I want!”
Today I decided to try and fix two very annoying noises. One was a bad belt in my car. For weeks now a little high pitched whine has developed while idling the engine. A dodgy alternator? A dying pulley bearing? I hoped it was simply the belt. Tightening it helped a bit, which is a good sign. I could call it a fan belt, however in most engines it is not connected to the fan at all. Calling it a fan belt is engineering nostalgia, a bit like windmills that no longer mill anything but electrons. The other annoying noise was something I did not want to face fixing. So, I started by replacing the belt and the first noise went away. Unfortunately this did not take very long, which meant I had to move on to the other noise.
For a very long time now our shower has been problematic. It got stuck at a particular temperature; quite hot. Not scalding hot, just bearable hot as long as I kept the thermostat low on the boiler that heats the water. I even tried to fix it once, a long time ago. The direct cut off valves to the shower were nowhere to be found in the crawl spaces around the cottage. Instead, I let the water tank drain and then tried to remove the “thermostat cartridge” from the shower. It did not move. I threw everything I had into it but it did not budge. I gave up, retreated to give the problem time and thought. That was many months ago. Then it began to call to me. Drip. Drip. Drip.
The drips were slow at first, a small reminder that the problem would not go away. Fix me……………………………….Fix me……………………………….Fix me ……………………………… Then, Fix me……….Fix me……….Fix me………. And for the last few weeks; FIX ME FIX ME FIX ME FIX ME FIX ME FIX ME.
The system was drained and I faced the stubborn shower. It was a showdown of brass and steel meets determination. I gave it an ultimatum; today I will not give up. You will be fixed, and if that fails, I might call a plumber. In the end it was all about having the wrong tools for the wrong job. I might have drawn some blood, maybe crushed a finger tip, but it did get fixed. Instead of a spanner for the stuck cartridge I used a strange device I found at the bottom of my toolbox. It looks like a handle attached to a bicycle chain and is used for removing oil filters from cars. It is just the device I might use for a stuck filter out of futile politeness, right before I resort to stabbing a screwdriver into the filter and then unscrewing it with the screwdriver acting as a sort of chisel. So, the cartridge unscrewed with this bicycle chain device, and a hammer. I always find a hammer useful in plumbing jobs.
The cartridge was stripped down and all the relevant washers were replaced. Now there is silence. To be fair, there was silence a few hours ago and no hot shower, only stone cold freezing water. After draining the system, removing the cartridge again and a little tinkering, there is now a hot shower with controllable temperature, and silence. No dripping water torture, just the delightful quiet of a house full of children running and yelling and generally behaving like children do.
The air outside feels damp but not yet cold. I can see my breath in the air if I choose to look for it. Heading out to get some more fire wood the sound of Amazon’s Disney station blasts out the door before it is shut and the sound is muffled and contained. Only one of the little people can read, yet two of them can interact with the A. I. connected to the cottage. “Alexa, how can I stop the little lady repeatedly playing Frozen songs?” “Sorry, I can’t help with that.”
the moon tonight
I walk away trying to shake the song out of my head, but I can’t let it go….let it go…..ahhhhhh. Then the moon is in the corner of my eye and I take a step back for a better look. It snags me? No. That would imply it might unravel me. Catches me? No, I am not as ensnared as the tide. It is more like correcting a picture on the wall that you spot is not quite straight. I am the picture, corrected, realigned by the image of the beginning moon. I simply stop and see the movement of the sun, earth and months, yet I cannot see anything actually moving. Slow time. I take a deep breath. The wood stove has only just been lit. As the air is still and October cool, the smoke falls around the cottage and fills my lungs with the sweet smell of Hawthorn. Seasoned Hawthorn I cut in the spring over a year ago. Many moons ago.
I needed to be home before I lost the light. A chimney needed repaired after Ophelia ripped off the cowling. The actual repair did not take that long, the preparation did. A small scaffold platform had to be dragged out of the corner of the woodshed, behind the bikes, the toy trucks and the empty beehives. The beehives had been brought in from the garden a few days before. They had sat out in the weather looking forlorn for two winters. It was a disgraceful thing to leave them out. Bringing them in was a job I had kept putting off due to the sadness of not having the bees and the time it would take to strip all the frames from the old wax and mess. The thing that finally made me sort them out was the approaching hurricane. I suspected Ophelia had her eye on the beehives.
Ophelia
The chimney job was done in time for the little people arriving home. They were well into homework when I slipped my welly boots back on intending to head outside for more work. This was spotted by the littlest man who declared that he would help, then they all suddenly wanted to be helpful. I sighed, very little work would get achieved now and it would be achieved at a much slower pace. The little man, little lady, littlest man and I hammered in a wooden stake and tied up an apple tree that Ophelia had tried to take for a short walk. We picked up twigs and fallen branches. We played tip around the house. I pointed out that it was called tig when I was a boy. Nobody listened, nobody cared. We ran, we laughed. The littlest man and little lady tripped over a couple of times. I used this as an opportunity to encourage; “Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” There are not many Batman quotes that are useful in parenting, but this is my favourite. I spotted lots of jobs that needed done when I had the time, yet I didn’t really care at that moment. Playing in the low golden autumn light seemed more mindful. Maybe this is what the little people meant when they said they wanted to be helpful.
The final job was closing the gates before returning to the homework. We said hello to the donkey who seemed happy about the company and we promised him some apples from the fridge tomorrow. As we closed the gates the little man looked at them and told me that I needed to paint them, “maybe some waterproof paint.” Helpfully reminding me of the jobs that need to be done seems to be something he got from his mother. We said goodbye to the donkey who was not as happy at this and bayed as loud as he could. The little lady and the littlest man lost it at this; screaming and running with fear for their lives. The donkey needs to work on making friends and saying goodbyes.
this teacher's life 