This Old House (But Not Mine): Kansas Edition

 One day left.  That's today.  I roll out tomorrow.  I really want to be home but that's still nine days away since I have another place I have to be from Wednesday to Sunday.  Getting tired but having fun.

List of accomplishments since I got here:

Wiring:

New outlets and switches, including 240V for new dryer, installed in renovated back porch.

New outlets in LR, upstairs office, guest room, to switch everything to three prong (not grounded since house doesn't have 3-wire electrical pulled to most of it but at least you can plug stuff in without stacking adapters)

HOT WATER! Capped the open valve in the kitchen so that there would actually be propane pressure in the line, instead of filling the house.  Not sure how the valve on that stub got opened but at least it has a cap now.  Pro tip: Crack the line down by the hot water heater if it's been sitting open for a while to force the air out, heater fired right up.

Doors: Shaved three doors so far so that they will open and close properly.  One more to try to get done today.  It's easy but makes a mess since the borrowed electric planer is missing the sock.  I need one of these now.  Going to do some shopping once I get home.  I'll be getting battery powered and Bosch since I have lots of batteries and chargers.  Could theoretically get Milwaukee as well as I picked up an electric ratchet for car work last spring.

Mice: Haven't seen a mouse in three days.  😁

Cleaning and sorting: The upstairs is now nice and useable.  Cleaned and sorted three closets, threw away a fair amount of stuff, swept (again), mopped (again).  Takes a while for everything to shake out.  Hung some pictures.  Cousin isn't sure precisely where everything will go but there were two nice blue paintings with no home so  I asked permission to hand them at the top of the stairs.  They look nice and spruce up the hallway quite a bit.

Incomplete: Couldn't get cold water to the upstairs bathroom sink.  Very frustrating.  The individual who nicely volunteered to do a bunch of plumbing for my cousins a couple years ago should stick to his day job.  It is a mess.  He only connected the hot water side since they didn't have hot water anyway, so just the one tap worked.  Which was fine until the second I got the hot water working and now there's nothing but hot water at that sink.  So here's the situation: 

1) Pex coming out of the floor

2) Pex shutoff valve above that with copper tubing coming out of the shutoff valve

3) Compression fitting with regular shutoff valve attached to copper tubing

4) Stainless flex line attached to shutoff valve, then attached to adapter on the faucet.

What The <insert your favorite and appropriate word here>?

On the cold side, 1) and 2).  No adapter on faucet but I don't know what threading it is.  The flex line won't attach so it isn't that.  I could have sworn I saw a faucet wrench somewhere during the past week, but now that I need it...

So in order to finish I need to go into town (20 minutes away) and buy a faucet wrench, come back and undo the faucet, and go back to town (still 20 minutes away) to buy the correct adapter, to make it just like the other side.  Which at this point is better than nothing.  It's the two hour-long trips that is bugging me.  I have today left.  Well, maybe the wrench will show up this morning.

Blind spot.  Just realized that I could pull the adapter off the hot water side and get the same adapter while in town.  Don't need the faucet and since I can get the adapter off with a crescent wrench, don't need the faucet wrench.  😁

What won't get finished is the equally horrible shower assembly on the clawfoot tub in the same bathroom.  The good news is that she doesn't have too many guests so it'll have to wait for another time.

So all in all a good trip.  We're going to do a bit of tourist stuff in town and I may be able to finish the upstairs sink, if I get lucky.

The Great Mouse Hunt, Kansas Edition (Mum, if you are following my blog, don't read this)

We have mice.  To be expected since it's a 150 year old farmhouse out in the middle of a lot of grain fields in Kansas.  My cousin spends half the year in the Philippines as a missionary, and then the other half here.  This is a fairly new thing as they just bought the house a couple years ago with the intent of eventually retiring here.

The house sits vacant during the winter and when she returned it was, to put it delicately, gross.  Full of mouse droppings, chewed everything, etc.  A fair amount of items that were just put in closets rather than bins were chewed on.

OK, we get it.  This happens.  She hired a friend to do a deep clean before she moved back in, I arrived the same day she was moving back in after the cleaning.  The house was relatively clean although the friend apparently didn't do a lot of moving things around.  So I've spent parts of the last week cleaning more upstairs, since that is my territory.  Cousin doesn't come up much as stairs aren't super easy for her and she doesn't really have a need to be up here.

[Visualize picture of dirty house here]

Five mice, that we know of.  We didn't name them but the first night we got two in the traps we put out.  The plastic "jaw" style traps, btw, don't actually kill bigger mice because the spring isn't strong enough.  So I lay awake that morning for a while listening to the trapped mouse thrash itself around the room with a trap stuck to its head/shoulders.

Next day we got another.  Watched the fourth run back and forth between the three traps in the living room three nights ago, but never stop to check them out, most likely cause we were there.  Woke up to chewing noises from the closet outside my bedroom, noises which kept going on.  So I got up with my flashlight and looked in the closet.  Well, hello. After some silent communication (by the mouse, I talked to it cause I'm weird that way) it ran off down the hall.  

Next night, two traps in the closet gained me another mouse.  Thinking we're done at this point (if you're keeping score that's four) but reset all the traps just in case.

[Visualize picture of mouse in trap here]

Next night, mouse in closet by bedroom ignoring all the traps and all the yummy peanut butter and chewing on the inside of the door.  I wake up, open the door, and eventually she runs off down the hall (I say she because she won't be quiet and let me sleep so that makes sense to me).  

New theory.  When that door is shut they can't get out of that closet, so she's chewing her way out.  Leave door propped open.  Boom.  Got a mouse.  Except that it doesn't kill her so I wake up to the sound of her thrashing around with the trap stuck to her head.  Get up, grab flashlight, pick up trap (and attached mouse) and deposit into garbage can in other room that is full of paper and stuff.  Back to bed and slept the sleep of the righteous.

[Visualize picture of the last (hopefully) mouse in a trap]

Today's plan is to clean and rebait all the traps with more yummy peanut butter, but I think we may, for now, have them all.  The only unfortunate part of this is that she will be going back to the Philippines at the end of October and the mice will have five months to reestablish themselves.  Sadly.  I'll be recommending poison bait traps in every room, several of them.

The Motorcycle Diaries, Kansas Edition: Abilene, Kansas 4th of July

 Spent the last few days doing wiring and helping out around the house.  Updated some of those activities in the last edition but yesterday got the 120V wiring all closed up and powered.  Everything in the back porch has power and works so all the extension cords got cleaned up and put away.  I still have to hook up the 240V but am planning on shutting off power to the house before I do that.  I'm not a total idiot.  😁

So Abilene Kansas 4th.  A patriotic but small town.  Abilene is located in Dickinson county.  The total population of the county is under 20,000.  I live in a town smaller than Abilene, with only about 5,000 resident, compared to Abilene's 9,000, but the difference is that my town is one of the smallest in my county, whereas Abilene is the largest town in this county.  It is amazingly sparsely populated.  The 4th of July celebrations were commensurately smaller when compared with home.  So what were the positives and negatives?

My town has a parade, a car show, vendors, and fireworks.  People come from all over the county and Canada to attend.  Hard to estimate how many show up but there are usually five to six blocks of classic cars and three to four blocks of vendors.

Abilene, on the other hand, had none of that except the fireworks.  There were other activities going on down in Eisenhower Park yesterday though.  Mud volleyball, turtle races, cornhole tournament, etc.  I drove by during the day just to check it out but the festivities were dampened by the monstrous rainstorm that hammered through right around 11 am.  I don't know what attendance would have looked like had the forecast not been so bad but there were very few people in the park.

In the evening, however, with the weather cleared and the air cool, there was a concert at the bandstand.  The Abilene Municipal Band, which has been around for 144 years, played an hour's worth of marches and patriotic music.  One number was the Lexington March, although I'm not sure if it was the Edmundson or the King version.  They invited all the kids in the audience to come up and march through the audience waving flags while they played.  I've included a short video here:

Afterwards we moved a block or so to the fields behind the community center for a spectacular fireworks show.  We were there a half hour or so and fireworks were going off all around during the whole wait time.  Some people had set up in the same field and entertained us for that whole half an hour before the actual show.  The show itself was outstanding.  I won't bore you with pictures of fireworks.  They looked like everyone else's firework pictures.  All in all it was very enjoyable.  It was great to see so many people thankful for America.  There were no politics whatsoever, just Americans celebrating the greatest country in the history of the world.

The Motorcycle Diaries, Kansas Edition, Days 5 through 7 / This Old House (but not mine)

 Well, it was Interstate Highway System from Bennett to Abilene.  Cruise set at 80 mph, no wind to speak of, an acceptable ride.  Made it here in about seven hours (it's Tuesday June 30, in case you're keeping track.

Chores to do for my cousin:

1) Wire new back porch.  Not bad, boxes and wiring were already in so my job was to add switches and outlets, then hook up power to the whole thing.

From here.  Bottom left slot, just waiting to be used:

Yes, those are fuse boxes and old, old, old.  Right now upgrading is not in the plan but having an electrician come in and install a breaker box from the main feed is probably a good thing to add to the list.

110V for all the switches and outlets, 220 for the dryer.  That took a bit of thinking but I'll be using this fuse box, currently connected to a 220V plug but only with one leg actually connected.  I'll probably disconnect and remove the one on the porch as it won't be needed.

One of the joys of living in a little farm house 25 minutes from town is that you live 25 minutes from town.  So when you are planning your electrical work you make a list of everything you might need, you buy extras, and then you discover halfway through that you are short something.

Short a white outlet.  There's an argument that I could just install one of the cream outlets, but then I'd have to take it back apart at some point and that's a hassle.  So the project sits until I can get back into town.  Today is July 4th, however, and I'm pretty sure that all the shops in town are closed, so that means either Sunday (they may be closed then too as it's a small town) or Monday.

Here's an interesting workaround that the drywall/wiring guys did so that the porch would have light in the meantime.  Took me a bit to figure out precisely what they were doing, then I realized that the extension cord was just feeding the two wires that went to the light switch and then up to the light circuit in the ceiling.  OK.  That works.

2) The mice.  The house sat vacant all winter since my cousin lives in the Philippines most of the year.  The mice had free reign and now have to be reined in.  I'm not particularly freaked out by mice, but I'm not a big fan of the poop everywhere you go.  The house itself was cleaned by a friend of the cousin before she or I arrived, but that still leaves closets, behind furniture, etc.  Plus a lot of small construction garbage that we are cleaning out, along with its poop collection.  Traps, poison, etc.  My cousin will be in the house til October, then back to the PI, which presumably means that she'll go through some of this again next year, but that's up to her.

Yesterday morning AND this morning, however, I woke to chewing noises.  Today grabbed my flashlight and found a mouse in the closet just outside my bedroom door.  He cruised off down the hall after we stared at each other for a while.  Was he stuck in the closet or was it just a part of his route?  No idea.  Meanwhile there are banging noises coming from downstairs.  Down I go, only to discover that a mouse has gotten stuck in one of the mouse traps but guess what isn't powerful enough to kill that mouse, just to trap it.  I have no idea what cousin wants to do with the mouse so I just left it alone.  It's been a couple hours and it's still banging away down there so clearly in no danger of dying from the trap.  Cheap garbage but it did catch a mouse.  I'm a "bait" guy rather than a trap guy but there it is.  We'll see.

Update: Another mouse dead in another trap, this mouse was just big enough that it couldn't totally get him.  Threw dead mouse and live mouse out in the field.  Live mouse still in trap and he'll eventually die and we'll retrieve the trap to reload and reset.  Peanut butter gets you two mice in one night.  Comment if you want pictures of dead mice. 😁

The Motorcycle Diaries, Kansas Edition, Day 4 (June 29)

(Posted late due to internet issues, and then forgetting about it once I got to Kansas.  This was Monday, June 29)

Well thank goodness I'm out of the bad weather.  That was just horrible. Finally I can now relax and enjoy the rest of my ride.

Is there any way that anyone knows to take a picture of wind?

This morning, leaving Montpelier, ID, I decided to avoid the interstate highways.  I have to be in Abilene by July 1 (have to is strong, but that's when I said I'd be there).  I have two solid days plus could theoretically arrive on July 1, so more than two days.

East on Highway 89.  Otherwise you follow US-30 to the Interstate.  What a beautiful ride.  Sweeping curves, canyons, a KOA campground in which I could have also stayed.  Then you turn right on some little back highway which takes you to ...

... US-30?  Are you freaking kidding me?  But then it gets you off 30 eventually and takes you north and east through Wyoming.

OK, keep in mind that the plan was to poke around, visit little town museums, etc.  Except that the highways going through Wyoming don't have ANY towns!!!!  So I rode an extra 200 miles  to get on the Interstate highway at Rawling, WY.  

Wouldn't have been so bad, it was a nice ride, except, did I mention wind?

The Wind River range, panorama view:

Insert picture here when I have proper internet:  🤔  (Struggling to get things to upload from hotels.)

I should have turned around when I saw the signs saying "Closed to high profile vehicles weighing less than 26,000 lbs due to winds 55+".  What can I say.  I'm stubborn and I process slowly.  By the time it occurred to me that I should go back, it was a long way back and might as well push on. 

Nope.  It was about 200 miles back to the interstate that way, with a howling gale bashing me the whole way.  The interstate was no better, once I reached it, but it was three hours shorter according to Google Maps.  Sigh.  I mean at least it didn't rain.

Well, by the time I reached Colorado it had started to warm up.  I stopped and stripped off all the gear (sweatshirt, jacket, gaiter, beanie, First Gear gloves), just in time to hit Fort Collins rush hour traffic.  I took the toll lanes, no idea if motorcycles are free but the last thing I needed was two hours of rush hour back up.

The Motorcycle Diaries, Kansas Edition, Day 3

Decisions, decisions. Ride over Homestake Pass towards Bozeman, by all accounts the worst pass in Montana for weather; take I-15 down towards Idaho Falls and go through Monida Pass, or just go back to Blaine and get my car, thus losing two full days of travel. Well going back to Blaine would have been pointless no matter what, cause my truck is in the shop and my car threw a cylinder misfire code the day before I left. Homestake eliminated because everyone from my cousins to the gal at the gas station said so. Monida it is. Turns out it's hard to tell that it's a pass, perhaps because you're already so high up. I kept wondering when I was going to get there, and then there was a sign saying 60 miles to Idaho Falls. So that was easy. Uncomfortable as it rained all the way through the pass, but easy.

Behind me:

Before me:

Halfway decent through Idaho Falls and on to US30. Almost stopped at a very nice KOA just down 30, Lava Something Springs Something, looks like a resort, but it was only 3:00 and too early.

Stayed at the Clover Creek Inn in Montpelier because it popped up first on my Google Maps and showed a pretty reasonable price.  I usually stay at Best Western because of the consistency, quality, and points.  However, it's gotten expensive.  CCI was $109 with my military discount.  A bit run down from the outside, it's a three sided compound with parking in the middle.  However the entryway as you drive in had green grass, nice picnic tables, and flowers blooming.  The office and the room were nicely appointed.  Staff super friendly, room clean and smelled nice.  I'm giving it a 5/5 just because of the price, otherwise it would be a solid 4/5.  The only down side at all was the wifi signal was weak in the room as I was across the parking lot, so I couldn't post this update last night.

Gentleman bought my dinner at the Ranch House cause I'm a veteran.  For the record, that embarrasses me, but I also accept that it makes him feel good, so I'm gracious and thank him.

The Motorcycle Diaries, Kansas Edition, Day 2

Friday was a glorious romp in the woods compared to Saturday.

Left my campsite in Newport, WA about 0830.  Only six or seven hours to Missoula, because I'm going up through Kalispell, just to check it out.  It's still nice-ish.  The lake for which my campground, the North Shore KOA was named for.

Does the phrase Winter Storm Warning ring any bells to anyone?  Yeah, I didn't see that at all.  Didn't look at my weather map because, well why would I.  I already knew it was going to be a chance of rain.

Instead, just as I was approaching Kalispell it opened up.  I couldn't see anything.  Including the sign saying "Slow to 15mph for roundabout".  Thankfully I saw just enough out of the corner of my eye to think I should slow down more than I had when the downpour started.

For the record, it's not a good idea to slow down too much in a downpour like that.  Even though you can't see the road, and you can't see enough to get off the road, the people in cars behind you can't see either.  So you run the risk of being rear ended.

So to allay your fears, I slowed down a lot, made it through the inch or so of water that was sluicing through the roundabout, made it down the hill on the other side, and into the first gas station I saw.

Which is when the hail started.  😒

I have no pictures of the storm.  It was the last thing on my mind.   Which is why I don't have a viral youtube channel where I film all the horrible things that happen to me.  

So made it into Missoula, on and off rainstorms but nothing like the Kalispell episode.  Drowned rat is the expression that comes to mind.  Wish I had my full face helmet but I never take it with me on trips as it most likely won't get used and just takes up space hanging from the luggage.  And of course it's Sunday so nowhere that might sell a helmet is open today.

Next steps?  Either push on, chancing the fact that there's a pass with a Winter Storm Warning prominently displayed on every possible way to Kansas, or turn back where the passes are lower.  I could probably get home no problem today but then I'm home and not in Kansas.  So push on it probably is, wishing I had a full face helmet.

And try to remember to take pictures of the worst of it.