Kevin, home alone
February 8, 2012 By Tamar 7 Comments
I’ve always been easy to understand. Your first impression of me is guaranteed to be absolutely accurate simply because I have no way of camouflaging my blunderbuss of a personality. I mean what I say and I say what I mean not because I see any particular virtue in it, but because I am temperamentally incapable of doing anything else.
Believe me, I’ve tried, but I can’t hide an agenda to save my life. In fact, the only thing I do worse than hiding my own agenda is uncovering someone else’s. I take absolutely everything at face value, something my mother has been known to twit me about. “Concrete-bound,” she calls me.
Until about ten years ago, I used to say that I was the most straightforward person ever to walk the earth. And then I met Kevin, who makes me look like Henry James.
One of the reasons my husband and I live in peace and harmony is that we leave nothing interpersonal to chance. If he wants me to know something, he knows he has to tell me. In English. Body language and pointed hints will not get the job done. And this suits him just fine, as it is his first impulse, when he wants me to know something, to tell me. In English.
Kevin is a relentless and compulsive truth-teller, and tackles every situation head-on. Although he has a much more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the workings of other people’s minds than I do, he calls ‘em as he sees ‘em. There isn’t much of a filter between what he thinks and what he says, which means you almost always know what he’s thinking – a wonderful thing for a woman who can’t uncover an agenda to save her life.
And you always know where he’s been. He’s fundamentally incapable of not telling me what he did while I was away.
And, while I’m away, he’s always up to something.
Last week I left him alone for an afternoon and evening, and came home to find him sprawled on the bed, with what looked like closing credits scrolling up the TV screen. “Hi honey,” he said. “I had a steak and watched a war movie.”
So you did.
“And you know what else?” he asked, a glint in his eye.
Alarm bells went off. Leaving Kevin home alone with power tools, not to mention a big hairy truck with 650 foot-pounds of torque, is not always wise.
He led me into the living room and picked up something that looked like a cross between a fishing pole and an electrical conduit. He could barely suppress his pride. “It’s a sabiki rod!”
A sabiki rod!
A sabiki hook
A sabiki rod, for those of you have never jigged for mackerel, is a rod specifically designed for a sabiki rig, which is one of the most diabolical of all fishing lures. It’s a length of line, five feet or so, with five or six teeny hooks spaced along it, each attached to the main line with a length of line about four inches long and decorated with a little feather.
To use the rig, you attach a weight to the end of it and drop it down to the sea floor. Then you reel it up to the depth you think the school of mackerel is. Then you jig it, jerking it up and letting it sink again, until you get a fish.
If your sabiki rig is in a school of mackerel, you will get a fish, or several fish, immediately. A mackerel cannot resist a sabiki rig, and it’s not unusual to pull the rig up with a fish on every hook.
But that is not why the sabiki rig is diabolical. The sabiki rig’s diabolical nature is evident only when it comes time to put it away. It is impossible to store a sabiki rig without tangling it hopelessly, and every fisherman has spent the better part of a full-length movie untangling sabiki rigs in preparation for the next day’s fishing expedition.
If there’s one job Kevin hates, it’s untangling a sabiki rig, so he set his mind to building a rod that would obviate the need for it. The internet has all kinds of suggestions, and he amalgamated a number of them into his own design. As is his wont.
The Zebco set-up
It started with a Zebco 404 reel, which is the kind of reel kids use – you press a button to release the line and cast. It costs about $13., and comes spooled with 15-pound test. The Zebco then got attached with a hose clamp to a five-foot length of PVC, and Kevin drilled a hole through the PVC a few inches above the reel. The line gets threaded through the PVC pipe and attached to the sabiki rig. At the end of the rig is a weight with a hook that’s big enough to not fit through the PVC.
So, when you reel in the line, the sabiki rig gets housed in the length of the PVC, and the weight on the end keeps it taut by hooking over the end of the pipe. Then a little pipe insulation on the reel end for grip, and a cap on the end of the PVC so the edge doesn’t abrade the line, and Bob’s your uncle.
Total cost? “Seventeen dollars!” said Kevin, “So I made two!”
Kevin's sabiki rod
Yes, while I was out my enterprising husband made two sabiki rods. I should go out more often, I figured. So, yesterday, I went up to Boston to interview a source for an article and have dinner with my friend Dianne. I came home quite late, but Kevin was still up. I put down my bag and was about to take my coat off when he stopped me.
“You wanna come see what I did?” he asked, flashlight in hand.
The same alarm bells went off. No matter how many constructive things Kevin gets done while I’m out, the alarm bells will always go off.
He led me outside, around to the side of the house that faces the pond. He shone the light on a hole in the ground. And then a second hole. And a third. All the holes were where stumps used to be.
“You pulled the stumps!” I said.
“It was awesome!”
Now, stump-pulling, under ordinary circumstances is hard, frustrating, sweaty work. It is most definitely not awesome. Which led me to believe we were not dealing with ordinary circumstances here.
“I’m afraid to ask how you did it …” I said.
“Well,” he began, “I backed the truck up by the side of the house.”
That would be the big hairy truck with the 650 foot-pounds of torque. I knew that truck was trouble. But I didn’t think he’d try to use a truck on the side of the house to pull a stump in the back of the house. I groaned.
He told me how it went down. He tied a rope around the stump, and then ran it around a tree down by the water, and up to the truck. Just because it’s worth picturing, I have worked up a crude graphical representation.
The house is our house. The red rectangle represents the big hairy truck (the other two vehicles are actual, less hairy, vehicles). The red X is the stump, and the white line is the rope.
He put the truck in its lowest four-wheel drive gear, and started to creep forward. The rope stretched. He crept some more, it stretched some more. And then, as he crept, the rope released and made that boing-oing-oing noise you hear in cartoons.
At first he thought the rope had snapped, but then he realized it had pulled the stump out with such force that it flew all the way out into the pond. He had to go down and haul it in.
It was so much fun that he pulled two others. The only reason he stopped was that he ran out of stumps.
“It was awesome!”
I am glad to be married to the kind of man who uses his time alone creatively and constructively. And if, some day, that means he burns down the house or totals the truck or severs a limb, I take comfort in the fact that I’ll be the first to know.
Winter is cancelled
February 5, 2012 By Tamar 6 Comments
This is our fourth winter on Cape Cod, and I didn’t like any of the first three. It’s not just that my cold tolerance is decreasing as I age, the snow turns our driveway into a carnival ride, and my husband insists on winter activities centering around the possibility of falling through ice into water. It’s that winter on Cape Cod is isolating. Restaurants are closed. Tourists are gone. Everyone whose driveway is a carnival ride stays home, huddled around the woodstove. This winter, … [Read More...]
The January harvest
February 1, 2012 By Tamar 25 Comments
We’ve got a goal, here, this year. We’re trying to get 20% of our total caloric needs from first-hand food. So, at the end of each month, I’ll be tallying up the harvest. But, before I give you January’s list, I have a confession. At the end of last year, when I added up our total 2011 take and figured out it was about 11% of our calories, I thought it would make all of you hunters, gatherers, fishermen, and gardeners curious about your own year in food. I thought I’d get comments … [Read More...]
How to deep-fry an egg
January 29, 2012 By Tamar 8 Comments
First, get a Fry Baby. A Fry Baby is the world’s smallest deep fryer, and we got ours at a Yankee swap hosted by our friends Tommy and Ali, for which all the guests were instructed to bring something that’s been lying around the house for ages but never used. We brought a platter we’d bought at a yard sale a few years back, but somehow never warmed up to. But one couple brought this 1970’s-era miniature deep-fryer. Imagine! They had it for years, and it was still in the box! There’s … [Read More...]
Math-man-ship
January 24, 2012 By Tamar 15 Comments
Buying boats is like playing leapfrog. You buy a boat, and you have to buy a truck to pull it. You buy a truck and then, one day, it occurs to you that your truck could pull a bigger boat. You want a bigger boat – you always want a bigger boat – so you buy a bigger boat. You do a lot of towing of that bigger boat, and one low tide when you have trouble getting up a ramp you realize that a bigger truck could tow your bigger boat more safely and reliably. You buy a bigger truck. You’re happy … [Read More...]
Who goes there?
January 22, 2012 By Tamar 22 Comments
The first snowfall always shatters my illusion of privacy. I go out, the morning after, to discover that it’s Grand Varmint Central out there. There are rabbits criss-crossing the driveway. There are raccoons (still!) trying to get in the chicken coop. There is the occasional wild turkey. There is a coyote, or maybe the neighbor’s German shepherd. But what the hell is this? It’s a series of tracks, in one line, evenly spaced a little less than a foot apart. Each print is a … [Read More...]
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