A bad week that turned out well

Last weekend I was crawling around under the frenchy-bus with a grease gun and a 9/16 wrench. I got the rear brakes set but while I was back there I noticed the green drop in the picture. NOT GOOD thought I. Really not good. I had visions of $5000 and up repair bills to open up that side of the engine and repair whatever was causing the coolant leak which appeared to me to be coming from along the line between the head and deck. That's the side of the engine that got the new head last winter but I couldn't see how it could be related to that. It didn't much matter what it was related to - there was obviously coolant coming out of that head. There wasn't a whole bunch coming out because the level in the expansion tank hadn't changed noticeably but I could see the drops forming and the cross member above the hitch was wet where the coolant was dripping on it. In fact what I first noticed was three green drops on the bottom of that cross member.




I got busy and sent some emails to 3 trusted mechanic friends and then I spent a night worrying - that always helps - wake up at 3:00 in the AM and think about all the bad things that it could be. The next morning I got a reply to one of the emails and didn't like the suggestions that the reply contained so I spent another night worrying about it. On Monday morning I got a call from Luke who owns the shop that rebuilt the engine. He pointed out that the stud immediately above the green drop actually goes into the water jacket. He and "Oscar" were of the opinion that likely what was happening was that the coolant was leaking out around the stud. I liked that idea - mainly because it wasn't going to cost me much to fix it but also because it made good sense. So I pulled the stud, got a bath in coolant, wrapped the end of the stud with teflon tape while the coolant pissed out and then ran the stud back in tight. So far it appears to be working. Sometimes you get lucky and Luke said it was my turn.



We spent a leisurely week there while Marilyn visited her sister from Tokyo who was in town for a few days. Alison and I looked at boat porn in the evenings and during the days I mounted two surplus solar panels that Camiel gave me. I haven't got them hooked up yet but I do have a plan. They won't be enough to liberate us from Sask Power or any other power utility but they are a start. We've now got the ability to generate roughly 200 watts of our own power. If we had that much again I'd feel like we were semi-independent from the power companies. We don't entertain any notion of never paying for power but we would like to be able to live our life for a week or so off the grid without having to run the (noisy) generator every single day and I think 400 watts of solar power would get us pretty close to that point. We have done a good job of cutting back our consumption thanks to the great LED light project. Our Trimetric monitor lets me keep close track of our consumption and the state of our battery bank. By this time next week I will have the initial two solar panels hooked up and I will test our ability to live off the grid while Marilyn is up at the mine.

Today we hooked up and got a late departure from Al & Camiel's. We headed generally west out of Airdrie eventually hitting the Saskatchewan border at Alsask. There's a scary amount of crop left out through central Alberta. Typically by this time of year the crop would be 90% cleaned up but I saw lots of swathing and I saw green canola that won't be ready to swath for at least 10 days.

Tonight we are parked in the campground at Alsask. "Campground" is a generous term in this case. It is more accurate to say we are parked in the area known locally as the campground. It consists of tufts of crested wheat grass, broken down picnic tables and the occasional barbeque stand. But its free. We're far enough away from the highway that we aren't completely bothered by the truck noise but we certainly do hear it. After supper we drove into the village for a visit with one of father's oldest and dearest friends, Tony Steiert. He is either 91 or 92 now - at that age he can easily be forgiven for losing track of a year or two. His mind is as sharp as ever and his body is treating him pretty well too.

We first started visiting Tony here when the boys were young. Alsask was a good stopping point on our endless journeys from Nipawin to Medicine Hat. Tony was involved with a community project to try to make us of the old Canadian Forces base buildings on the edge of town. One of the projects was a fish rearing enterprise. They hatched fish and grew them out to fingerlings which they then sold to farmers or to the provincial government. The community involvement quickly deteriorated to where Tony was doing all the work - he was in his late 70's and early 80's at that time. One memorable time I remember we stopped and he showed the boys how he picked the dead eggs out of masses of eggs that he was hatching. He had the eggs in trays in some kind of a box with water running through it. He could tell which eggs had died by their colour and he would painstakingly pick them out with a pair of tweezers so that they didn't rot and infect the rest of the tray. He would always keep back some of the fish and feed them out to market size so we could count on buying some fresh rainbow trout pretty well every time we came through.

Tony was always inventing something. Some of his inventions had to do with the fish like his fish toilet which flushed the collected fish poop out of the big tanks that he reared them in. Other inventions had nothing to do with fish like his apartment deck garden in what looked like a big plastic horsetrough or his various exercise machines. He was also always full of stories about Liberal prime ministers. The only Conservative that I ever recall him mentioning was Diefenbaker but he talked non-stop about the Liberals, starting with his hero, Louis St. Laurent.

Tonight was no different - Tony was in fine form with stories about St. Laurent, "Mike" (Pearson) and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His latest projects are wooden boxes with wheels under them which apparently he is able to sell to old ladies to put wool in. They looked more like a file box to me so I pointed that out. That may lead to a whole new area of potential sales.