Friday, December 21, 2007

A long day spent tinkering with “time saving” devices

Jim Banholzer

Remember the good old days when you used to drive down your (much less expensive to maintain) gravel driveway and drop off an annual firewood load onto your porch? Now with an electronic starter for your gas fireplace, you’ll never have to worry about keeping your axe sharp, or ask where you winter wheelbarrow is again. Or will you?

If the fragile lifeline of gas or electricity the feeds this valley were to suddenly cease due to fire, severe windstorm, earthquake, massive computer crash or some other disaster, you’ll be wishing that you’d stuck with that old fireplace, because this is the time you will most need it.

Unless that long suppressed “free energy” whirls around soon, you may find yourself winding around on your belly in the crawl space like a bull snake, to duct tape some hand warmers onto your frozen water pipes.

Well, brush off those coveralls, because these days you can simply e-mail your local utility companies, to find out when power, and gas is expected to arrive back in the valley. Whoops, their servers are down too! Well, perhaps you have a satellite connection and possibly a small generator. Now you are okay -right?

In the meantime, your brother has been laboring in the flickering candlelight. He’s shoved aside your faux logs with the blazing Sun Valley logos. Now he’s breaking a sweat in this crazy freezing indoor weather, trying to reverse engineer the fireplace to simple caveman days. He’s already pulled the gas piping in two. Now you have agreed to go out and cut up some deadwood to get a real blaze a-going. Just need a little gas for the chainsaw from the gas station. Oops, that’s not going to work either, because all the fuel pumps are inoperable. Where’s that unswerving hacksaw then?

Finally you get going. Siphoning what little gas you have in your car ought to be enough to slice up a couple nights wood. You go chugging up Phantom Hill and then suddenly spy some abundant yellow-pine deadfall. You turn off to the side; but are sucked in fast by a tall snowbank. No darn, shovel either, because you’ve been relying on that gas snow thrower at home. No other vehicles seem to be coming by and you’re not quite sure how long a hike it is back to town, because those GPS receiver batteries drank all the battery juice quicker in this cold weather.

Therefore, you decide not to hoof it back. You won’t be returning to a warm house anyhow. Still no cars come by. It’s been hours. Eventually you tunnel out, using an old clipboard; but by now, your car battery is dead. Can’t push-start the rig either, because you invested in the extra convenience of automatic transmission!

Your car clock is kaput and you never wind up that old family heirloom in the glove box, grand-pop used to rely on for years. After waiting for an eternity, a nameless lumberjack, donning preacher clothes, gives you a jump-start and then helps hoist a couple of the best yellow pine logs into your tail end. After sensing that you’re fit to drive back, he disappears off into the mountain mist. You try to wave your hand out the window as thanks, but the electronic windows are frozen shut. (Lucky thing you didn’t slide off into the Big Wood River)

In the immense quiet, you descend again down Phantom Hill. There’s been absolutely no traffic since your encounter with the nameless preacher. You’re almost home, when the traffic light turns red to let through some phantom traffic. You don’t mind though, because you suddenly realize the red light indicates that our accustomed electricity has returned!

You’re glad to be back on your super-addiction to the grid and worked up a nice appetite to boot. If no one calls your recharged cell phone, you’ll have time to purchase some farm-raised salmon for supper. In a pre-meal meditation, you give thanks for the fact that those struggling fish were spared the arduous nine-hundred mile journey from the Pacific. Tamer schoolchildren speak of how nice it was that our truckers drove the salmon clear around those dangerous dams in their newly approved 300 foot hot-dog rigs.

In the meantime, you download some holiday music, hyper-recording it into gifts in under a minute. You tell yourself that someday, perhaps after the yuletide turns, you’ll make more time to absorb a festive Christmas song or two. Then you pause for a nanosecond and tinker with the idea, just what are some other cool labor saving gadgets that can be quickly grabbed to help speed up the holidays this year?

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