I searched around and found the Feasto 3-Shelf Pizza Oven Table on Amazon. It seemed decent for the money, a little over $100, and it had three shelves, hooks for tools, and wheels to make it easy to move around. I ended up buying it, assembled it, and have been using it for about a year and a half.

This winter took a bit of a toll on it. The bottom, black shelves were both showing a bit of rust, and even the stainless steel top shelf was starting to look a bit weathered. I decided that instead of replacing it or just letting it continue to deteriorate, I would paint it, figuring it would get me a couple more years out of it.

Last week, I disassembled it and painted the two bottom shelves and legs with black Rust-Oleum that I picked up at Lowe’s for $17. It went well; it shows some brush strokes, looks much better than it did, and, more importantly, should hold up against the harsh outdoor weather. I’m still not sure what to do about the top shelf, though. I don’t want to sand it and ruin the finish, so maybe I’ll just put a layer of clearcoat on it and leave it at that.

Today I went to reassemble it. Helpful hint: Take a photograph before you take something apart, since a reference image is really helpful when putting it back together. I struggled a bit, but eventually got everything back together. While I was sitting on the ground, inserting and tightening screws, I looked down and noticed that I was covered in ants. I looked around to see where they were coming from and traced them to one of the cart’s plastic wheels. The wheels are cheaply made hollow plastic things, painted to look like wheels, and both have some sort of tiny weep hole, which is probably there to equalize the pressure. Anyway, the ants were pouring out of one of the holes on one of the wheels. They apparently had nested in there, and my actions were disturbing them. I brushed the ants off and continued working until I had assembled everything, and when I finished, I took a shower to rid myself of the ants.

Dealing with the ants reminded me of my childhood. When I was a little kid, I loved ants. It drove my mother nuts because she’d often find me playing in the driveway covered with ants. I thought they were cool, and since we didn’t have a dog, they were the closest thing I had to a pet. I’d sit in the driveway next to an anthill and let them crawl over me. I liked watching how they moved, interacted with each other, and dealt with other bugs. I also had visions of being the ant king with the ants worshiping me and doing my bidding. (Little boys can be very weird.)

As I grew older and learned more about ants, I found them to be pretty fascinating creatures, and that the colony is a well-organized unit, with each ant serving a function toward the ultimate goal of protecting and nurturing the queen. Pretty cool.

When you’re a kid, discovering the world around you is fascinating, and even something as mundane as an ant hill can provide hours of entertainment. I miss those days.

It reminded me of something I’d thought about in the past. I wonder how much impact the advent of photography and, eventually, video has had on our brains and emotional well-being?

Before these things were invented, time was much more abstract. We knew that it was passing, since we saw the things around us changing and witnessed our friends and family growing older, but it was on a continuum, with subtle changes occurring, often with little notice, over a long period of time. With the advent of new technologies, we can now see those changes in stark, jarring detail. There was now a record of our lives as time marched forward. We could see ourselves age and be reminded of the people we once were, and of how our parents and grandparents, whom we always thought of as old, were once just like us. I’ve got to believe that this ability has profoundly changed us.

Going back even further, there was a time when we had no knowledge of what we looked like. Before the mirror was invented, unless you happened upon a still stream and got a glimpse of your distorted reflection, your appearance was a mystery to you. You could have been the most beautiful person to ever grace the planet or a hideous monster, but the only clue you had was given by the way others reacted to you. Just imagine going through life and never knowing what you looked like. Would that be good or bad?

Going forward, things are going to get even stranger. With the advent of AI and its ability to generate realistic images and videos, the reality of our past can now be fully distorted. People who didn’t exist will now exist. Events that didn’t happen will have taken place. Will future generations have any clue what the world was really like, or will their history be a fantasy generated by a computer?

There’s little doubt that all the technologies I’ve mentioned above have changed us and the societies in which we live. Has it been for the better or for the worse? Since we have no way of measuring it, we’ll probably never know.

I brought my car into the dealership on Wednesday for an oil change and tire rotation (I had a coupon), and while I was waiting for the work to be completed, the technician came out and informed me that a mouse had built a large nest in the blower and cabin filter assembly. This was a surprise to me, since I hadn’t heard any of the rattling you usually hear when debris gets into the system, and my rather sensitive nose hadn’t detected any bad smells. The technician told me they could clean it out, but it would take about 2 hours and cost $265. Since I didn’t feel like sitting around for an additional two hours, I had already been there an hour, and $265 dollars seemed like an excessive price for cleaning out a mouse nest, I declined his generous offer.

When I got home, I did a bit of research online and found that this was a pretty common issue in Honda CR-Vs. Part of the problem is that Honda chose to install a five-inch-by-nine-inch inlet in the firewall that allows air to enter the system,, and there is no screening over it to prevent a mouse or chipmunk from entering and setting up residence.

One guy posted a solution that involved putting wire-mesh screening over the inlet, fastened with self-tapping screws, but it required first removing the wiper blades and a plastic cowling that apparently had proprietary retaining hardware that would break during the process and require replacement. To actually remove the nest, he removed a plastic cover from the bottom of the dashboard, disconnected a couple of electrical cables, unscrewed and dropped the blower assembly to get access to the area for cleaning. While all of this seemed like the perfect solution, it was pretty complex, and I really didn’t want to deal with it. I especially didn’t want to pierce the firewall with self-tapping screws, since there was a risk of damaging something and creating an area that could rust out over time.

I was able to dig up some photos and diagrams of the whole assembly and found that it was actually pretty simple. The intake on the firewall leads to a chamber, and at the bottom of the chamber is the cabin filter. Below the cabin filter is the blower assembly. When the mice get into the vent, they can build a nice, comfortable nest on top of the cabin filter. When you slide out the cabin filter to replace it, acorns and debris from the nest fall into the blower assembly and act like a ball spinning on a roulette wheel when you power on the blower. Yet another bad design. If they really wanted to fix the problem, they could put a screen over the inlet as the guy on the Internet did, and as a fallback, put a second panel above the cabin filter, which you could pull off, allowing you to vacuum out the area before taking out the cabin filter, preventing any debris from entering the blower. Unfortunately, I guess the allure of making $265 every time someone had a mouse infestation was just too much for them.

Since I was too cheap to pay to have the mouse nest removed and not ambitious enough to do the process the other guy described, I came up with another method that I figured would be a good compromise.

First, I ignored the open inlet. It sucks and will probably be a problem in the future, but for now, my goal was just to clean out the mouse nest. I got out my wet/dry vac and put on the attachment with the narrow, flat inlet, which was small enough to fit into the cabin filter slot. I then opened the glove box, slid out the filter just a bit to keep debris from falling into the blower, and inserted the wet/dry vac attachment between the filter and the top of the opening. Since the filter is made from corrugated paper, this wasn’t too difficult. I then slowly backed out the filter while leaving the vacuum in place, allowing it to suck out part of the mouse nest. After completely removing the filter, I looked into the chamber with my endoscope and found there was still a decent amount of mouse garbage, so I put the vacuum nozzle in the slot and worked it around until all the stuff was removed. Using the endoscope again, I noticed that a few acorns had fallen into the blower as well as some crunched-up leaves. Since I couldn’t get the vacuum attachment into the blower area, I reinserted it into the cabin filter slot and used my fingers, also in the slot, to rotate the blower while lifting out debris and feeding it into the vacuum. This was probably the slowest part of the operation, but when I checked it with the endoscope, it appeared successful.

As a final test, I started the car and ran the blower at full speed to make sure that it sounded OK. It did. I then put my new cabin filter in ($9.85 on Amazon) and reattached the glove box assembly. Problem solved with a total savings of $255.15.

I know this wasn’t the perfect solution, but it was good enough, and sometimes good enough is good enough. Hopefully, this post will help someone else save some money if they ever run into the problem.

I’ve recently started periodically spraying both my wife’s and my engine compartments with peppermint spray because I’ve heard it keeps rodents away. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s worth trying. Hopefully, I will not have to go through this again.

The gauge is powered by a CR2032 lithium coin cell battery, a common battery typically used to power TV remote controls. Unfortunately, Deere chose to seal it inside a closed unit and manufacture it in a way that makes it impossible to replace, forcing you to replace the whole unit. It’s hard to believe this isn’t just a money grab on Deere’s part.

The AUC15402 sells for around $60, but I suspect it costs less than $5 to manufacture. So if you do it yourself, you’re out sixty bucks, and Deere is $55 richer. If you pay to have it installed, I’m guessing it costs significantly more. So, if you own a John Deere lawn tractor, expect to be on the hook for at least $60 every 2 to 3 years.

Since I just replaced the unit in my tractor, I thought I would describe the process here in case someone else wants to give it a try. It’s a pretty simple process, and the only hard part is removing the old gauge.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Disconnect the negative battery connection. To do this, use a 10mm wrench or socket wrench. You can place the disconnected cable next to the tractor’s plastic shroud to keep it out of the way. Everyone always tells you to disconnect the negative battery cable first, but they never tell you why. You do this because the negative cable is connected to the tractor or car’s frame. If you were to disconnect the positive cable first and accidentally touch it to the frame, it would short out the battery. Disconnecting the negative cable prevents this from happening.

• Reach up behind the fuel gauge and disconnect the signal cable by pressing on the connector on the top and pulling back on it.

• Now comes the hard part: removing the old fuel gauge. There are four plastic retaining clips holding the fuel gauge in place on the dashboard. Ideally, you could just reach up, press the clips simultaneously, and push up to remove the fuel gauge. Unfortunately, being a mere mortal, I don’t have the finger strength to do that, but maybe you do. If so, go for it. What I ended up doing was pressing in the bottom two clips simultaneously and forcing the bottom of the fuel gauge out. Once I did that, I put a screwdriver on the bottom of the gauge to keep it from slipping back in, and then pressed the top clips and pushed up to force the fuel gauge out.

• Insert the new fuel gauge into the dashboard, making sure that you have the top of the fuel gauge facing upward, or you’ll have to go through the whole removal process again.

• Attach the signal cable, followed by the battery cable, reversing the steps you used when you disconnected them.

• Put the key in the ignition and turn it one stop to the right to the ‘headlight’ position. If all goes well, the fuel level and number of hours should be displayed. Sadly, the hours reset to 0 and can’t be changed,, so the number of hours reflects how many hours have passed since you last changed the fuel gauge, not how many hours you’ve operated the tractor. This isn’t really a problem for me since I keep track of each time I’ve mowed and what maintenance I’ve done in a spreadsheet, but it’s just another indication of Deere’s disregard for its customers.

Recently, John Deere paid $99 million dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission and the Attorneys General of Illinois and Minnesota. Deere was accused of restricting farmers’ ability to repair their equipment by preventing them from accessing diagnostic software and tools needed for repairs. Because of this, farmers had to rely on John Deere dealers for repairs. Not only was this more expensive, since the dealers essentially had a monopoly on the service, but it also delayed repairs because there were often waiting lists for access to their services. Imagine being a farmer with a crop to harvest, your very expensive Deere tractor is on the fritz, and you find you’ll have to wait a month before you can get a technician out to fix it. Not good.

While it worked out for the farmers in the end, it’s not so good for homeowners and small businesses that use John Deere products. The company has apparently made decisions to maximize profits at the expense of consumers. While they’re allowed to do this, some of the things they’re doing are pretty sleezy and they may pay for their short-term profits with fewer customers in the future. It’s really sad that they’ve chosen this direction.

I’ll give three examples of this, one of which I’m dealing with now.

First is their Easy Change Oil System. The idea is that instead of having to do an oil change, you can just replace the oil filter with one of their special filters, and not only will you have changed the filter, but you’ll also have performed an oil change. Sounds good, but there are multiple problems with this. First is the price. The proprietary oil filter costs more than a standard filter and the oil it uses. The price difference can be small or significant, depending on whether you used OEM parts or third-party parts. Over the life of the tractor, the difference in price can cost you a lot of money.

The even bigger sin, in my opinion, is that the Easy Change Oil System changes less than half the oil. A typical JD tractor takes about 2 quarts of oil, but the Easy Change Oil System only holds 0.8 quarts, so you’re only doing half an oil change. This is bad because you’re always operating with dirty oil, and even if the filter prevents this from becoming an issue, it doesn’t address that the oil is chemically breaking down over time.

The Easy Change Oil System seems like a scam by JD to increase profits by selling expensive filters and causing engines to wear out prematurely, requiring replacement.

John Deere claims to have tested the system and that it isn’t an issue, but common sense tells me otherwise.

The only legitimate reason this might be considered a good feature is that some owners neglect their tractors and never change the oil, and having a system like this might encourage them to do it from time to time. For the rest of us, though, I think it’s a bad idea.

There are ways to fix this problem. You can buy kits that let you switch the Easy Change Oil System for a standard oil filter. It requires you to change the base to which the oil filter attaches and also replace the drain plug. It’s not that big a deal for someone who’s comfortable doing that sort of thing.

Since I typically put less than 20 hours on my tractor per season and John Deere recommends changing the oil at 50 hours, I chose to replace the drain plug with a drain hose and leave the existing filter in place. Once a year, I completely drain the oil, replace the filter, and add additional oil to the system. While it costs me a bit more, I believe I get the best of both worlds: a complete oil change and a better quality oil filter.

The second place where JD cheaped out was using bushings on their front wheels instead of bearings. Even if you’re good about lubricating the bushings, they tend to wear quickly, leading to front-end problems. Again, this can be modified by the user with a bit of work, but it would have been even better if they had just gone with the slightly more expensive bearings in the first place.

I could have avoided both of the above problems by purchasing one of their more expensive tractors, and I would have done so if the dealer had informed me of these issues, but he didn’t, and since I was in a hurry (my existing tractor had died and the grass was out of control) and didn’t do my usual amount of research, I got burned.

The third problem, which I think is really crappy of Deere to have inflicted on their customers, has to do with the fuel level/hours meter. The meter on the dashboard shows how much fuel you have in your gas tank and how many operating hours the tractor has. Both are pretty important things to know. It turns out these fail after 2 to 3 years, not because of a defect but because they use a CR2032 battery. The CR2032 is one of those disk-shaped batteries used in cameras and remote controls, and it costs about seventy-five cents. Deere uses one of the to power the meter, but instead of making it replaceable, they have chosen to seal it in the meter, apparently pot it in with epoxy, and then glue the whole unit shut, making it impossible to replace. The only solution is to purchase a new meter from them, which will cost about $55. What a disgusting thing to do to your customers!

When I started my tractor up for the season yesterday, I noticed an error code on the fuel gauge indicating a dead battery. I have ordered a new meter, which I’ll pick up today. I’m not happy about this.

Overall, John Deere makes a pretty good lawn tractor, but it’s infuriating that they treat their customers the way they do. I really hate dealing with sleazy companies, which, sadly, John Deere appears to be.

Yesterday, while watching Amazon Prime, I came across the Lone Ranger TV series. I originally watched these as Saturday afternoon reruns since the original show aired before I was born, but I remembered really enjoying them when they were on.

So I grabbed a cup of coffee and a couple of Pepperidge Farm Double Chocolate Nantucket’s, plopped my backside on the couch, and watched season 1, episode 1 of The Lone Ranger. It was the origin story, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a multi-part story, so there’s more to come, but what I saw was even better than what I remember watching when I was a child. While it wasn’t an adult show, it wasn’t really a kids’ show either. I think that anyone of any age could be entertained by it. I’ll probably watch the second episode this afternoon and look forward to watching the whole series over the next few months.

Watching the first episode brought back memories of what happened to Clayton Moore back in the 70’s.

Moore was the actor who played the Lone Ranger on the TV series, which ran from 1949 to 1957. The show had been off for around twenty years, and Moore, who was in his sixties, apparently wasn’t doing well financially. Unlike today, early TV shows did not pay residuals, and actors and actresses were often paid little for their work. To supplement his income, Moore would put on a black mask, a fake six-shooter, and make appearances at rodeos, home shows, and anywhere else he could find work. He had done this for a number of years, and I remember seeing pictures of him at some of the appearances. The pictures were kind of sad. He was a little old man in a costume, looking like a feeble version of the character he once played, but people loved it and got to see the hero they grew up with.

Along the way, the studio, Wrather Corporation, got wind of what was going on and, in 1979, obtained a court order prohibiting Moore from wearing the costume and appearing in public as the Lone Ranger. They claimed they were planning a Lone Ranger movie and feared that Moore in costume would tarnish the brand. To get around this, Moore substituted dark sunglasses for the black mask and, I imagine, the appearances were probably advertised as ‘Meet Clayton Moore, the man who played the Lone Ranger’ rather than just saying it was an appearance by the Lone Ranger. The lawsuit lasted 5 years, and Moore fought it all the way, refusing to give up. Simultaneously, the Wrather Corporation’s movie ‘The Legend of the Lone Ranger’ was released and was a box-office bomb, possibly in part because fans knew how Moore had been treated by them and refused to support it. Anyway, between the movie flopping and negative publicity surrounding Wrather Corporation, they finally decided to drop the lawsuit, and Moore went on to make appearances as the Lone Ranger until his death in 1999.

Good versus evil, and the good guy won, just like in the old TV shows. I like it that way.

I believe I’ve posted this before but since it shows the hypocrisy of the virtue signaling people of Massachusetts, I will post it once again….

Years ago, the organization Citizens for Limited Taxation pushed through an optional higher tax rate for Massachusetts citizens. The reasoning behind this was that they thought it would show how hypocritical the left is, and boy, were they right.

The optional higher tax rate appears as a checkbox on the Mass State Tax form and allows taxpayers to change their tax rate from the default of 5.0% to the higher rate of 5.85%. Since it’s Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the country, you would think that all of the leftists would be checking the box.

Not so.

There are roughly 4,000,000 taxpayers in Massachusetts. Of that four million, only 1,083 people have chosen to pay the 5.85% rate. (and knowing the people that live in this state, I’m guessing that most of them checked the box by accident)

So, in the great liberal Mecca called Massachusetts, only 0.0271% of these fine liberals are willing to pay at a higher rate.

What a bunch of hypocrites.

This isn’t the country that I grew up in. We used to have standards. My family was poor, but we had middle-class values. The house was kept clean, the children were fed and well dressed, and we knew that if we got into trouble, we would be shaming the family, which in my household was one of the worst crimes you could possibly commit. We weren’t the only family like that. Most of the neighbors were in a similar lot financially but had decent ‘American’ values. There were some exceptions, of course, but those people were looked down on and considered trash by the rest of us.

I won’t go into what I believe are the causes for what has happened in this post, but there’s little doubt that our country is in much worse shape than it was before. A lot of it is because our population has somehow been convinced that what is happening is normal. It isn’t. This is not the way decent people live, but for various reasons, our leadership has decided this is how we should live.

The graphic at the top of the post shows one example. The woman, whether sane or insane, was a threat to the community and those around her, yet some liberal judge let her back onto the street. Why? Again, I have my opinions on the reasons, but I’ll share those at a later date. For now, I just want to say, it doesn’t have to be this way. We need to demand more from our government and our neighbors and not let our way of life be destroyed. We own our country, not the politicians and freaks that have set out to destroy it. We need to let them know we will no longer stand for this, and they either need to shape up or find some other type of work. This needs to end.

One of the weird things that I’ve noticed is that whenever I dig a hole or a trench in the yard, when it comes time to fill it, there is always less dirt than when I started.  I don’t get it. I dig out the dirt, do whatever I need to do, then replace the dirt, and 100% of the time, the area I was working on is an inch or two lower than when I started.  Where did all the damn dirt go?  Anyway, after installing the coax last year, I filled in the trench, topped it off with three bags of topsoil, and let it go for the winter.  Now that it’s spring and the snow is gone, it’s clear I didn’t use enough dirt, which is why I put in more topsoil.  I’m guessing it still won’t be enough, and I’ll be heading back to Lowe’s yet again.

But that’s not what today’s post is about.  I just wanted to start out by showing that I did some heavy lifting and had little problem tossing forty-pound bags of mulch, manure, and topsoil into the car.  Which brings me to Saturday.  On Saturday, I decided there were several garden beds I wanted to edge.  My wife is the main gardener at the house, taking care of most of the ornamental plants, while I have a small vegetable garden and do all the lawn mowing.  Over the years, lawn mowing has been a problem because I don’t want to get too close to the garden beds, or my wife will complain that I’ve run over the flowers, so I actually stay a few inches away.  As a result, a small area never gets mowed, leading to tall grass encroaching into the garden.  This year, I figured I’d fix that by edging the beds.

The edging started easily enough.  I opened the garage, navigated through the piles of stuff that get tossed in for the winter, and located the edging tool.  I grabbed it, walked over to the first bed, decided where the edge would lie, stuck the tool into the ground, and lifted my foot about three inches off the ground.  When I placed my foot on the edging tool, a sharp pain shot through my left hip, and it felt like I had just been hit in the hip with a baseball bat.  All of that just by stepping on the edging tool.

I suspect it was just a pinched nerve, since I didn’t do anything that would have brought it on, but the pain persisted throughout the weekend and prevented me from working outside or doing my usual exercise routine.  Today, while I still have some pain, I thought things had improved enough to resume exercising.  I went into the cellar to do a weight workout, got through my bench press sets with no problem, and then attempted squats.  The first squat I attempted was also the last, since it once again caused sharp hip pain.  I think I’m now back where I was at the time of the original injury.

To make things even tougher.  Since I take blood thinners, the only pain medication I’m allowed to take is Tylenol.  This worked well for years, but in the last year, I seem to have developed an allergy to it.  When I take it, within minutes my skin gets really itchy, and after about four hours, I end up with red welts all over my body.  If that were the extent of the reaction, I would have no problem, but there are all sorts of warnings (and graphic pictures) on the Internet about how severe Tylenol reactions can be, and that if you have any symptoms, you should stop taking it immediately.  So I guess I’m out of luck.  I seldom take any type of medication unless I really need it, but now I have no real options for pain, so I guess I’ll just have to live through it.

Anyway, no exercise, no gardening, and I just ended up paying our outrageous tax bill, so I’m really grumpy.  

Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better day.

Hamnet is a historical fantasy that speculates on the origin of the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Since no one was there and there are no accounts of what really happened, it’s pretty much pure fantasy. While historic fantasy is not that uncommon, I find myself a little uncomfortable with some of it. While books and series like The Man in the High Castle are historic fantasy, everyone knows that they’re make-believe because everyone knows that Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire did not win World War II. With something like Hamnet, it’s so close to reality, I fear that people will take it as gospel, and instead of remaining historical fantasy, it will become history. But that’s just my concern, and no one really cares.

I try to avoid actually discussing movie plots when I do these reviews because I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, so all I’ll say is that a number of unpleasant things happen to Shakespeare, his wife, and family, and the movie speculates that the writing of Hamlet served as a means of catharsis for Shakespeare. That’s the premise, but like I said earlier, no one really knows.

The movie is well-executed, the environment is beautiful, and the acting is fine, but the majority of the story is pretty depressing and may not be for everyone. My wife went into this expecting something more along the lines of Shakespeare in Love, and while she liked the movie, it was not the pleasant outing that she was looking for.

For me, the problem is that I’m just not into Shakespeare. I know, I should be ashamed of myself. There’s little doubt that he’s probably one of the most important figures in literature, and his contributions have shaped all modern storytelling, and I won’t argue any of that. I just can’t read his work. I’ve tried, but every word is painful for me. I don’t know Old English, and I have little desire to learn it. Even if I take it word by word and understand what he’s saying, it has little emotional impact on me since the decoding process is so slow and painful. So I’ll trust the opinion of others on this one and spend my time on other things that work for me.

For what it’s worth, the movie was nominated for nine Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Casting, and Best Original Score.

Ultimately, only one award was won, with Jessie Buckley winning for Best Actress. She does an excellent job with the part, and while I’m not in a position to judge, since I haven’t seen all the nominated movies, I suspect she was a good choice.

Summing it up. It’s a well-executed, somewhat depressing but entertaining movie that might not be for everyone.