Mason

Last Wednesday morning Mona left in the car for a hair appointment while I was still in our bathroom, which is above part of the garage. I heard her drive out of the garage and the garage door opener begin to close, when I heard a loud “Bang,” and then a clatter seemingly from the garage. I hurried downstairs to investigate; the car was disappearing down the driveway, and when I opened the kitchen door to the garage, nothing was obviously wrong, and the garage door was normally closed. I went back upstairs and finished brushing my teeth.

Later, I went back into the garage to take the Kubota out to do some logging. I opened the door in front of the tractor, and when I went to mount the tractor, I found a chunk of splintered 2X4 lying on the 3 point hitch. “Where in the world did that come from? I must have backed into something with the tractor!” Looking around the garage, I didn’t see any broken 2X4s. Then I picked up the piece from the tractor and examined it. Aha! There was half a bolt hole remaining where the 2X4 had split. Finally, I looked up and saw that one of the vertical 2X4’s supporting the rear end of the garage door track and the eye bolt holding one of the door springs was missing a large chunk of wood that looked strikingly like the piece on my tractor. Further examination revealed one of the garage door springs (about 2 feet long) lying on the floor behind the charcoal grill at the back of the garage. When I picked up the spring, the loop on one end was missing, and one end of the spring was covered by white sheetrock dust! Then I discovered the hole in the sheetrock where the spring had impacted the wall after shattering the support 2X4 on its way past when the spring flew by after the end broke off!

It took the rest of the morning to get replacement springs from Western Maine Supply and install them. They advise replacing both door springs whenever one of them must be replaced. I have decided to get some pieces of angle iron in order to better anchor the ends of the springs. I found that the new springs come with a length of steel cable with a loop on one end. The cable runs through the middle of the spring and is anchored at both ends to prevent the spring from flying away if it breaks in the future.

In other news, I recently noticed that Shiloh has an odd fascination with toothpicks! One evening I was using a toothpick to pick popcorn hulls out of my teeth after eating a bowl of popcorn. Shiloh came over and sat beside me at the table to watch. He edged closer to my side and began staring intently at every move of the toothpick with intense concentration, his yellow eyes narrowed and sparkling, his muzzle moving ever so slightly closer to my hand. He tried to grab the toothpick in his own teeth, which I resisted. I held the toothpick out for him to sniff it, thinking he would see that it wasn’t food. No dice. For some reason he continued concentrating on the toothpick as long as I was using it! I wish I knew what he was thinking!