The Nut

While sweeping around the woodstove, Desiree found what looked like a 3/8” nut on the floor. She immediately showed it to me.

“That’s not good,” I said. Noting the nut’s dark color, I added, “It looks like it might be from the woodstove.”

My first thought was the nut might have come from the door handle, but a quick glance at that proved the handle was intact. My next thought turned to the air intake damper, which is located at the bottom of the stove. Having a compromised damper is what my buddy Rodney would term “ungood.”

An operating damper is required to control how hot the fire burns. If the damper failed closed, the fire would struggle to climb. If the damper failed in the fully open position, the fire might quickly drive the temperature to over 1000°F.

The damper seemed fully functional, but I still felt fairly concerned. I waded online and found an exploded view of the damper parts. No nuts there.

Yesterday morning I stopped at the shop where I purchased the stove and consulted with the experts. “I don’t think it’s from the stove,” one of them concluded, “but I would hang onto it just the same.”

One other possibility existed: the iron fireplace toolset holding the poker and other tools. When I got home after visiting the shop, I inspected the toolset and stand.

Bingo.

The nut came from under the base of the stand.

Naturally, this provided me with an opportunity to grab a Cold Smoke beer to pose with the nut for a sense of size. The perfect way to end a mystery.

The Nut

The Toolset Stand

—Mitchell Hegman

Wimpy Fingernails

This “getting older” stuff I’ve been undergoing is getting annoying. I can tolerate the migrating aches and pains and the occasional brain cramps that prompt me to go blank when I reach a point where I’m supposed to fetch someone’s name, but now a couple of my fingernails are going wimpy on me. They are just not as tough as they used to be.

—Mitchell Hegman

My Mental Junk Drawer

Most of us have at least one “junk drawer” or “catch-all drawer” somewhere in the house, typically in the kitchen. A few useful items are typically found there: screwdrivers, a flashlight, a lighter or matches, and a few random screws. But then you get stuff ranging from marginally useful to not useful. Mine has keys for things I no longer have, a small tape measure that no longer retracts properly, rubber bands, etc.

I also have the equivalent of a junk drawer in my brain. It’s a place that stores memories and information that are not entirely helpful. And the drawer is always falling open and dropping stuff into my normal thinking.

Spoonerisms are stored there. For example, I may say it’s a “lack of pies” instead of a “pack of lies” when the drawer is open. A rainy day becomes a “dainy ray.”

My old landline phone number is kept there.

And then there are those useless memories. One of the more recurrent ones is of the time a class of apprentices let me go the entire day with my shirt inside-out. And there is that momentous day when I literally hit myself in the head with my hammer.

I really don’t need that stuff, but it remains rattling around in the junk drawer.

—Mitchell Hegman

Friendly Solar PV Arrays

I am a proponent of solar energy. It has a role to play in our energy production and has, in fact, become relatively inexpensive and quick to deploy and commission. At the same time, energy storage, mostly in the form of batteries, is becoming more feasible. My biggest beef has been the footprint required for large-scale solar PV arrays. In my way of thinking, we had to essentially subtract the land used for the array from all other uses.

Fortunately, this may not always be the case. I read, for example, that in some places, communities use the shaded area under PV arrays as garden plots for plants that don’t appreciate full sun. I also just read about an array constructed in Nevada’s Mojave Desert that provided surprising benefits to the ecosystem there.

The Gemini Solar Project adopted a different approach during the construction cycle. Rather than scraping the land clean in a “blade and grade” fashion, developers preserved much of the native soil and its dormant seed bank. Years later, researchers discovered that life had responded. Beneath the modules, a rare desert plant known as the three-corner milk vetch began appearing in numbers far greater than before construction. Instead of sterilizing the landscape, the array altered it in ways that allowed certain species to flourish. This suggests that design choices matter and that, under the right conditions, a solar installation may influence its surroundings in ways that extend beyond electricity production.

My PV Array

—Mitchell Hegman

By Way of Introduction

I was born on a planet where rainbows appear following rainstorms, and we construct houses from wood and stone. We’ve developed technology to melt rocks but still hide when the wind blows. Our waters flow downhill, our sky never stops roving, and we have a single moon waxing and waning as it circles about us. We regularly celebrate something called a “weekend,” which defines a two-day period in which beer tastes better.

—Mitchell Hegman

Alice Street (The Hard Edge of Town)

Yesterday, I taught a class at a facility on Alice Street in Helena. Alice Street is unusual because it is literally the edge of town. A hard edge.

On one side, you find a standard cityscape: paved streets, parked vehicles, apartment buildings, commercial properties.

On the other side runs a seemingly endless strand-wire fence. It stands as an absolute demarcation, like glass holding back water. Beyond it lies undeveloped prairie stretching for miles.

It’s strange to drive along Alice Street with the city shouldering against you on one side and open land rolling away on the other. The two worlds meet, but they do not blend.

I’m sharing two photographs today. The first was taken through a window in the facility where I was teaching and shows the fence and prairie on the undeveloped side of Alice Street. The second is a map-view capture from above.

The Edge of Town

Map View of Alice Street

—Mitchell Hegman

Something Albert Einstein Said

 — “If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.”

— “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”

— “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.”