We live in a forest which during high winds sheds branches onto the electrical lifeline which threads through it to our houses from a box on a pole up by the highway ... It also drops limbs on calm days and snowy days and on freezing-rain days. I have a large, bright red generator waiting patiently in the garage for just such moments.
The power went out not too long ago and I, having already having gone down to switch over the 'specially "ganged" breakers in the specially installed standby electrical panel, hustled key-in-hand to the garage to start the generator. Done by the book. A practiced response, superbly executed.
Ten minutes later the lights went out !
With a scurry back to the silent garage I discovered that I hadn't the foggiest understanding of what was wrong. The gas gauge showed the tank to be half full, yet no amount of effort would resuscitate my recalcitrant machine.
Plan 'B' ..... candles and lanterns and the wood-burning masonry heater carried us through the twenty-one hour outage.
I pondered this failure over the next while, but didn't do anything until last week when the power went off again for an hour or so.
Out to the garage ..... back to the house for a flashlight. I had been thinking and my gut kept telling me that the engine wasn't getting gas. The gas gauge, even under the flashlight, supported the original story ... lots of gas. This time I chose to disbelieve the material evidence and filled the tank ..... and filled the tank .... until a new brighter red bar appeared in the gas gauge window and crept up to tell me the tank was full again.
Operational normalcy has been fully restored.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Legacy By The Book
For Christmas 2008 my son's family presented me with 'Hugh's Book of Matt and Eva" ... a slim coffee-table volume offering 20 pages of beautiful photos of Mike, Lisa, and Eva and the boys. They called it "Photo-journal of Mike and his family - especially the kids". It was the start of something modestly big.
What I had been given was a photo book created on Mike's Mac and subsequently published and delivered to him by Apple. The notion of self-publishing caught my fancy, which should not surprise anyone to whom I am even slightly well known.
I tried my own hand, publishing a 20-page book of wonderful images of Beverley's family at an aerial park deep in a Gatineau forest, with grandchildren appearing here and there among the tree branches ... and following up with a particularly fine gift for the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, congratulating him on his remarkable summer with the Liberal Express, and letting him know just what I thought he might do next to make Canada a better place for Canadians ... while saving the world.
Success! Beautiful volumes that brought me both both critical family acclaim and a letter of appreciation from Michael Ignatieff (which resides beneath the cover of my personal copy of his book, awaiting the unwary).
My objective now is to create a series of 'legacy' books for the family from several boxes of old photographs that I have inherited from my mother and acquired from my sister (who in turn etc. etc.) and which date as far back as the Boer War in South Africa ... Let the scanning begin!
What I had been given was a photo book created on Mike's Mac and subsequently published and delivered to him by Apple. The notion of self-publishing caught my fancy, which should not surprise anyone to whom I am even slightly well known.
I tried my own hand, publishing a 20-page book of wonderful images of Beverley's family at an aerial park deep in a Gatineau forest, with grandchildren appearing here and there among the tree branches ... and following up with a particularly fine gift for the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, congratulating him on his remarkable summer with the Liberal Express, and letting him know just what I thought he might do next to make Canada a better place for Canadians ... while saving the world.
Success! Beautiful volumes that brought me both both critical family acclaim and a letter of appreciation from Michael Ignatieff (which resides beneath the cover of my personal copy of his book, awaiting the unwary).
My objective now is to create a series of 'legacy' books for the family from several boxes of old photographs that I have inherited from my mother and acquired from my sister (who in turn etc. etc.) and which date as far back as the Boer War in South Africa ... Let the scanning begin!
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