Author: doug

The säge saga

I helped one of my son’s friends build a bookshelf unit over the weekend. At the end, he had a piece of thin plywood for the back, that proved a little tricky to cut on the table saw. No problem, I said, I’ll use the circular saw.

Except it proved to be suddenly dead.

Well, I said, I can cut it with the blade on the angle grinder. But even with a very light load, it bogged, then started smoking. So the hell with tricky. We managed to cut it on the table saw, and finished the project.

Yesterday I dismantled the circular saw and tested the switch, then remembered that when I bought it from a German guy several years ago he had given me something else, replacement brushes for the motor. After a bit of searching, I came up with one, and dismantled the saw further. Voilà! Relatively painless to replace the brush, reassemble the saw, and it’s back in action!

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Walter the German handkreissäge is happy again.

Not so the angle grinder (amoladora). It addition to being more challenging to dismantle, in the end I couldn’t get to the switch, which I suspect partially melted.

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And I thought Hyundai made quality stuff.

It is the only thing I’ve bought here for which I cannot find a receipt, but I’m pretty sure it’s been over a year, if it even had a guarantee that long (the cheap Chinese power tools come with a two-month guarantee: inspires confidence!).

So, this becomes another addition to the next Montevideo trip: find their service center and see if it can be repaired. It may not be worth it, but anything with electronics, a motor, or an engine costs 60-100% more here than up north.

Brazil in flames?

I left the house about the time of the start of the World Cup semi-final match between Germany and host Brazil. On my walk, I saw something burning in the east, smoke plume extending far over the water.20140708-1

When I got back to the house, I could scarcely believe it: Germany ahead at the half 5-0. I looked more carefully at another photo.

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No, the smoke was between us and Piriápolis. And besides, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where the match was played, is northeast, not east, of us.

But I expect for the Brazilians, not only has their chance to win the World Cup gone up in smoke, so has their national pride. It wouldn’t surprise me that the burn from this will be worse even than their 1950 defeat by their little neighbor Uruguay. Billions of dollars spent, 260 million of which on a stadium that will never again see any significant use after just four games, embarrassing delays and infrastructure failures, and now total, and I do mean total, humiliation at the feet of the flawless German futbol machine.

7-1. A record number of goals scored in a World Cup semi-final match. Ouch, Brazil.

 

Mold season in Uruguay

If you hail from, and live in, a place where building construction techniques have changed in the last couple centuries, you may be thinking, “oh, interesting. I wonder when mold season is in Uruguay?”

But, no, it‘s an inside joke for locals. When is mold season in Uruguay?

All. Damn. Year.

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Meet my new BFF: cloro puro, not the overpriced, diluted crap sold in orange bottles (which have their own recycle container at the local waste processing/recycling operation). In this case no doubt sold in a recycled bottle.

Remembering Syd’s tales of protective eye wear and scrubbing ceilings black with mold, I realize I had it relatively easy the last couple days (wasn’t even this bad), but it has been a bit of work. 1.5 liters of bleach consumed yesterday and today, and much of yesterday ended up consumed in the entirely enjoyable project of helping one of my son’s friends (early twenties) build a 6′ high bookshelf (the event also involved the death of the circular saw I bought for $40 from one of Syd‘s strange tenants [our only tenants turned out stranger still] AND a Hyundai angle grinder that went up in smoke for no apparent reason).

Simple accounts lead to stories and more stories and more than you need to know. Perhaps another time.

Worms!

Our local comadreja (possum; translates as weasel) has wrought havoc in my little 1/3 barrel compost pile. Like most things garden I do these days (I had a wonderful garden pre-internet), it’s a half-assed affair, without enough mass to heat up and, on rainy days like today, getting entirely too wet.

So I decided to transfer its contents into a full-size plastic barrel with drainage holes at the bottom, in which I have tried unsuccessfully several times to grow potatoes (to be fair, once in the campo where the alambreros (fence guys) upended it, dumping the contents, so they could stand on it.

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However, once again I have grown a rich crop of something unplanned: a dense, wriggling mass of worms. I don’t know how they got in there, but obviously they find it a good environment. In case you’re not a gardener, worms = good. When we moved here, we could not find a single worm on the property. We looked. Now we have an abundance.

Garden update: I have several of these type things in the garden now. This plant (predictably) didn’t make it. I did harvest and dry some insanely hot little orange peppers from here a week ago. The first year here, we had volunteer tomato plants everywhere; the second year squash. And the first summer in the country we had an abundant supply from plants I didn’t plant.

Maybe this summer will be the one I actually get my gardening act together. Just need to take a quick look at my Google+ account first ….

Lo barato sale caro

It wasn’t so long ago (one week to the day, in fact), that I speculated that the road crew might have solved our chronic drainage problem. But I did harbor some concern that the plastic culvert, covered only by a thin layer of dirt, might not stand up to the weight of garbage and delivery trucks.

As I see today, I did not. It broke. Within a week.

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Proving once again what everyone here knows, but none seems to understand: doing things the cheap way ends up being expensive.

Expensive assuming they fix it. With general elections in the fall, the odds are better now than after, I’m told.

If you’re not a Spanish speaker, but want to show off, it’s lo bah-RAHT-o SAH-lay CAH-ro, with crisp Rs: English, not ‘Murkan.

What is cheap ends up expensive.

 

Another rare Glove Fish sighted!

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Oh, OK, can’t fool you. Obviously it’s the same Glove Fish, a hundred meters further west on the beach.

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However, I did see red and white carnations and candles washed up over several hundred meters. No point letting those go to waste.

When I light them, I will say a silent blessing for whatever their original intended use.

¿Solucionado?

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Thought the street is still a muddy mess, we got a surprise today when a backhoe appeared and installed plastic culverts, potentially (there remain a few unresolved upstream/upstreet issues) creating a workable drainage system. Whether the plastic culvert, with only a shallow covering, will sustain the weight of trucks full of bricks or tankers from the barimétricos (septic pumpers) remains to be seen.

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At the far (downhill) end, you can see the ripples indicating that real flow is going on. The swamp is draining. Given caveats, this represents a great improvement over the last “repairs,” during which the weight of the grader broke the concrete culvert, over which it then spread a fresh load of tosca (pulverized rock), which of course completely blocked the culvert, preventing any drainage. Yours truly opened that up and restored drainage, at the cost of presenting a slight danger to motorists.

It‘s really funny to look at these photos. This place looks so third-worldy. I had the same reaction when I took perhaps my favorite photo in Mexico, without the benefit of being able to see what I was taking a picture of (to not scare momma-or-pappa bird).

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Seven years ago. Wow.

 

Road “repair” — looking ugly

Here we go again…fresh tosca (rock dust, for lack of a better description) and the grader.

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Making a mess.

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As if to taunt their efforts, rain comes in torrents, turning the road once again into a river, because the “repair” has done nothing to address the crucial issue, that the drainage system is broken.

Can this end well? Stay tuned.