enjoys working with hands

Technical Narrative:
So I've been mowing the lawn again this summer (after a two-year hiatus). Since I last recall using it, our mower--which I remember going with my dad to buy, brand spanking new from Home Depot, a vast improvement over the one I learned how to mow with--has fallen on hard times. The engine now vibrates, painfully, whenever it is in operation. The first time I tried to use it (without work gloves), ten minutes of holding it while it was running left my hands swollen for days. After mowing our front lawn today, I decided that the shaking was unacceptable, and took it upon myself to partially disassemble the engine to try to figure out if the shaking could be easily stopped. After several trips back into the house to retrieve tools, I isolated the problem: the single bolt that is supposed to hold the actual chamber part of the engine onto its mount was loose. It had been designed to fit snugly through a hole in the engine housing, to prevent exactly the kind of vibrational problems we've been having, but was now sitting in the middle of a rather large hole, indeed, one that held the parts together, but allowed a good quarter-inch of play to the engine with every cycle. The other obvious problem was that several of the screws holding the crankshaft/pull-starter piece, the engine block, and the metal engine cover together had stripped out or flat fallen off the mower at some point.

Deduction: the screws stripped first, allowing engine instability and vibration (of very small magnitude), causing stress on main bolt, compressing metal around bolt hole, widening hole, causing noticeable shaking. This leads to irritating noise, swollen joints (unless leather work gloves are employed), and fraying nerves. I reconfigured the remaining screws as best I could to try to hold things together, but it still shakes. At least now I know that the mower is bad because of years of operation and irreversible problems, rather than something I can fix.

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I really enjoyed this (the disassembly, less so the writing about it). It's the sort of thing I rarely (if ever) had time/opportunity to do when I was at school, working with my hands, tools, mechanical things. It's when I'm home that I start to think about working on my car, building things, tactile, real things. Even cooking, as a transformation of food brought about by labor. Things that seem more real than thought-reflection-response essays, historiographical evaluations, definition-definition-lemma-theorem-corollary. Next project: strut tower bar.

There were times (most of high school) when I thought I would be an engineer, someone who built things, worked with materials, responsible for a tangible product. There were times (years of grade school) when I would come home and read "The Way Things Work" so that I would understand how things, mechanical things, mostly, worked. In a reality close to this one, I would be, already. Interning with aerospace or industrial chemistry or maybe just working with cars.

Vicki and I were in Taxco, Mexico, a mountain town built, not like Colorado mountain towns filling the bottom of a river valley, climbing the side of a mountain, roads so steep and sharp in the city itself that VW beetles had to make three-point turns. We took a combi-bus (a VW van stripped and refitted with extra benches to sit on) up the mountainside to see a statue of Jesus

that overlooked the town. These drivers seemed crazy to me--they took curves too fast, with one hand on the wheel and the other around the shoulders of the pretty girl they let sit shotgun to flirt with. Of course, I realized that they drove these roads all the time, memorized the slopes and intersections, had been in some sense destined to do their work from a childhood spent drawing maps, banking curves for toy cars, watching the dials on the dashboard when their fathers drove them anywhere. I thought, I could have been a pretty good combi driver, if I got the chance. I still don't know (for sure) what I want to be when I grow up, but I know that, if the chips had fallen differently, these are places I could have been. Instead, I guess I'm going to travel to Asia to teach, going to plan on medium-distant-future law school, and hopefully have a car I can tinker with on the weekends. I'll leave it here, cause tonight is cooking dinner and then trivia/open mic standup/bingo night at the bars on Colfax.