At the mission base high school my brother and I attended, seniors got Colombian minimum wage (25 cents an hour back then) and Vocational Training credit for working from 1:30 to 5:00 every school day. I split my time between the phone lab and the electric shop.

At the phone lab we maintained the three-digit system that connected the houses and offices of the base. The phones were from the 1940s, donated by a US phone company, very similar to this one:

My boss, Wes, a genial Viking from Minnesota, taught me how to

• install a new line and phone
• read a schematic and fix miswired phones
• clean the contacts on the handset’s carbon speaker and mike by buffing them on my jeans
• lubricate the phone system switch with lithium grease (the switch was a gizmo that did what operators used to do when they pulled cables from one place and plugged them into another to complete calls; the switch click-click-clicked across a set of contacts, then up, then across again to make the three-digit pairing, directed by the clicks of the phone’s rotary dial)
• check the specific gravity in the batteries that provided the power for the system (dial tone/conversation current was about 12V DC; the ring tone was 80V AC and would give you a jolt)
• put a beeper on a line and trace the beep across the base from box to box to find where the break was or to connect a new number
• use the lineman’s phone to clip onto a cable pair and make test calls from the field (usually to my girlfriend at her school library job)
• make sure the right color wire was connected to the right terminal (green left, red right, black left, yellow right)

In retrospect, I learned an awful lot about obsolete phone technology from Wes. It has come in handy since then; I ran all the phone cable for the house I remodeled in 1996, and have added extensions in various other places I’ve lived. (Of course, I haven’t had a land line for the past ten years, although the wiring in my last Dallas house was used for DSL internet.)

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Two days a week I worked for Joe at the electric shop. Joe was a Pennsylvania Mennonite, and not a big talker. My first day on the job, he handed me a packet of tools. “These are Maytag tools,” he said. “There’s a wringer washer in the back room. Take it apart so I can replace the agitator shaft.”

The agitator shaft was at the very middle of the machine, so I had to take it completely apart. It took a full afternoon, as I recall, and there were parts all over the place when I was done.

Two weeks later, Joe said, “I installed the new shaft. Put the washer back together.”

Gulp.

There was a schematic, but mostly I had to rely on  my memory. I managed to put the washer back together, and had four small pieces left over (bolts, as I recall). It ran anyway. Success!

Most of my work at the electric shop was on small appliances. I learned to splice broken toaster elements with little aluminum cylinders that I crimped down on the overlapped element ends. (This came in handy at my college dorm; the waffle iron had broken, and all the electrical engineering students were gathered around it trying to figure out how to resurrect it when I walked in. “Hey, Tim, you’ve worked with appliances. How do we fix this?” asked Carl, who is now a renowned satellite engineer and my brother-in-law. “Someone give me an old ballpoint pen refill,” I said. One was found, and I snipped half an inch off the hollow end and used it to crimp the broken element together. “Huh,” said Carl. “That wasn’t so hard.”)

Joe had me cut through a burned-out fan motor and count the wires, then rewind the motor with the same number of wraps. It was tricky getting the motor to fit back in its case, since I couldn’t wrap as tightly as the machines at the factory, but it worked afterwards.

Some of the projects would be laughed at nowadays: using epoxy to create the right shape of knob on a broken plastic shaft to make the variable speeds on a cake mixer work again; rebuilding the base on a burned-out coffeepot (I tried to use a mica insulator, which shorted out and burned a hole in my Formica work surface). But we lived a full day’s car trip or a one-hour flight from Bogota, no one was rich, and my time was only worth 25 cents an hour. (I don’t even know if the clients were billed.)

One job took me to the Wheeler house, where I noted a funny smell. It turned out that the freezer had quit. (That wasn’t what I was there to work on.) The parents were out “in the tribe” (they worked with the Sionas on the border with Ecuador), and the kids were staying at the Children’s Home, as our dorm was called. Frank Wheeler, who was a year or two behind me in school, was left with the nasty job of pulling out twenty pounds of rotten meat and scrubbing the freezer. (Fixing a freezer was beyond my skills. I suspect Joe took care of it.)

Joe and his family returned to Pennsylvania shortly after I came to the US for college. He died a short time later of cancer.

After spending the 1970-1971 academic year in the US, we returned to Medellín, and I enrolled in 7th grade at the George Washington School (where I had done grade school).

I discovered that the junior high boys had a class called Shop, taught by Uncle Harold. (All missionaries were Uncle and Aunt to us in Medellín.) He was an older gentleman; his youngest son John Mark had graduated from 9th grade in 1970 and was finishing high school at the Alliance Academy in Quito. (Harold is the father and John Mark is the little boy in this family picture, taken many years before.)

Uncle Harold taught us to use power tools and do simple soldering. But his biggest contribution was when he taught us the very basics of electrical wiring. He had us each make an extension cord out of a length of wire, a male plug, and a female.

It was so simple! Two wires, two screw terminals, one more screw to hold the plug together, and I had made something that channeled electricity from point A to point B. Outlets, lamps, appliances, stereos all worked essentially the same way: hot wire, ground wire. (I learned about earthing grounds much later.)

I went home and attached a simple ceiling light to a board and screwed it to the upper bunk so I could read in bed. Later I bought a cheap soldering iron and a roll of solder and began fooling around with stereo plugs and jacks and speakers. If the headphones broke, I stripped the wires and soldered on a new plug. I installed wall and ceiling lamps in our house. When I went off to high school at a remote mission base, I set up stereo speakers all around my dorm room. My senior year I worked afternoons at the mission base electric shop and the phone lab.

The smell of melting solder still brings back some of the best memories of my youth.

We only had Shop class for one semester. Uncle Harold and his family returned to the US at the end of that year, and he died of a heart attack a few months later. But what he taught me about electricity still affects my life today.

Much of this is repeated from a post I wrote years ago, but many of my current readers wouldn't have seen that one.

In Pasto and Puerto Asís, Colombia, in the early 1960s, our whole family of eight drove around in a red Willys Jeep. Dad used to have to fix flats himself. Many times I watched him jack up the car, lever the tire off the rim, patch the inner tube, reassemble the tire and rim, and pump the tire by hand. I still remember the smell of those old hot-patches he would clamp on the inner tube; they had a cork back that he would light to provide the heat to melt the seal.

Dad had our Puerto Asís house built out of cinderblocks. The first ones were made with a machine; he dumped wet concrete into the hopper, two men pulled down on the long levers, and a block was squeezed into shape, which was set aside to dry. After the machine was stolen, Dad had to buy blocks at the depósito de materiales like everyone else. (Our jungle house is now occupied by a community of nuns.)

I was fascinated watching the masons and carpenters. There was no electricity in our part of town, so all the tools were manual. Dad had an eggbeater drill. When I tried it out, I broke the bit and was devastated. After I told Dad and he forgave me, I felt better.

There was a rainwater tank at one corner of the house, and a well and outhouse out back. We took turns pumping showers for each other (the pump had a metronome-like handle to jerk back and forth). Each of us had a chamberpot, to avoid going to the outhouse at night, but that meant that in the morning you had to carry the full chamberpot down the stairs and across the back yard to the outhouse, and then around to the rainwater tank to scrub it with Cresopinol.

Mom and Dad gave me a set of carpenter's tools for my seventh birthday. I had access to the scrap lumber bin and a can of bent nails. I became very adept at straightening the nails by tapping them with a hammer while rolling them on a concrete surface. I can't recall what I made besides wooden swords for battling with my brother.

We moved to Medellín early the next year, and were blessed with running water and electricity. When the water heater was replaced, Dad kindly let me tear the old one apart. I patiently took off the outside metal and the fiberglass insulation, and was disappointed to find that there was nothing inside but a steel tank that I couldn't find a use for.

When we went back to the States for our second furlough in 1970-1971, Dad bought various power tools including a radial arm saw, a miracle machine that could do precise, clean cuts and had attachments for routing and dado cuts. He was very happy with his new toys and spent hours making picture frames and shelving.

Upon our return to Medellín, he bought us an old country house about three miles from the edge of the city, and remodeled it completely. Several of the old adobe walls were replaced with brick; my brother and I wheeled dozens of wheelbarrow loads of dirt and rubble out to the yard, leaving it considerably more level than when we started. A mason built a rock retaining wall at the bottom, and I helped Dad pour a concrete top to the wall so it wouldn't come apart. (My initials are still there.)

Dad used the radial arm saw to build cabinets and shelving. He loved to create diamond-point drawer fronts and doors. This cabinet Dad built in the 1970s is still in use. (The house is now an old folks' home run by a charity.)

He also built these shelves. As you can see, he liked scalloped edges.

I spent many weekend hours helping him push plywood through the saw, and sanding and staining the wood after it was cut. I hated sanding, but discovered its importance when I forgot to sand my parents' closet doors. They were made of finish plywood, and the stain highlighted a multitude of tiny scratches and scars that didn't get sanded out. Every time I saw them, I would squirm with guilt.

Over the years, I helped Dad replace a master brake cylinder and make other repairs to the truck, maintain the pump he installed to supply potable water to the house (the water plant was across the street, so there was no pressure at our house), replace large concrete drain tiles to connect our house to the sewer, install electric lights, and build kitchen cabinets. When Amerian or Canadian volunteer craftsmen worked on the plumbing and wiring and fireplace, I followed them around and learned about PVC pipe and pulling wires through conduit and the difference between fire brick and ordinary brick.

Growing up with a dad who was used to fixing and building things himself and who loved carpentry left an imprint on me. Once you've learned to do a few things, you realize that you can do almost anything if you're willing to try. I dabbled in electricity and electronics in junior high and high school, and in grad school spent a summer working construction. Later as a homeowner I remodeled one house completely and made changes to several others. After my divorce, I had a handyman business for ten years.

In the 2000s I took my kids yearly to visit my dad and his second wife, and he and I installed tile in their kitchen and built shelves for his shop and the garage. While we were building his shop shelves, he chuckled. "When you were a kid, I always had to tell you what to do when we were building something. Now it's the other way around."

I've been fighting a cold, which makes me feel grumpy and unmotivated. The other night after work I made some hot lemonade and decided to tackle something fun: sanding the cedar beams from the fireplace.

For some strange reason, Alicia didn't want me to sand them in the house, so the first order of business was to lug them out to the shop. I moved all but the huge top beam. I'll need help with that one. I leaned them against a shop cabinet that I still haven't set up (after ten months of living here).

I bought this cheap belt sander on clearance at Target ten years ago. It's their store brand, and has never been very good, but it got me through several important projects back in Dallas.

The main problem is all my belts are also ten years old. They snap as soon as you try to use them.

I tried the handyman's secret weapon, but it didn't help. It lasted about two times around the pulleys and then came apart. I went through four belts without getting any sanding done.

So I went searching through my boxes and bins, and found my plane. I bought it in Costa Rica in 1992. Tramontina is a good Brazilian brand.

The only problem is, I hadn't used it in years. The blade had developed a little rust. I decided to try it anyway.

It worked all right, at least to begin with. Did you know that cedar's natural color is white?

You can really see the sawmill blade's tracks as you knock off the top of the roughness.

The plane eventually ran into some wood it couldn't handle and got dull. While I was looking for a whetstone, I found my dad's belt sander, which I inherited when he died. This is the real deal! Better brand name, wider belt. Most importantly, newer belt! (Although it's probably at least five years old.)

It turned out to be very effective on that rough wood the plane couldn't handle. Here you can see the huge difference between rough stained cedar and freshly sanded cedar.

I sharpened the plane blade with a discarded sander belt. Between the plane and Dad's sander, I got through one upright and the mantelpiece before Alicia got home. I had a wonderful time and didn't think about my cold symptoms at all. (Maybe sawdust is good for the sinuses.)

Signs of a happy carpenter:  sawdust-covered clothes and a cold beer.

And the next time I went out to the shop...

The problem with tools is they get old. I went out to do more work on the cedar beams, and Dad's belt sander broke down.

My first thought was that the brushes (carbon contacts in the motor) had worn out. I opened up a port (the little round hole in the case) and saw that the brushes are fine.

So I opened the case (sorry, forgot to take pictures of that process, but it's a simple matter of removing screws and prying the case apart), and found this. Take a look at those ball bearings.

I took a picture of the plate with the model number on it to look for parts on line.

So I chatted on line with a Sears parts specialist. He's going to send me the bearings, front and back. But he doesn't have information on how to get them off. I'll have to keep searching.

If only I'd worked this hard the whole time my wife has been gone...

I would be nearly done with the downstairs by now.

My brother-in-law Diego showed up around 2:00 Sunday. While I was waiting, I finished disassembling the cedar beams around the fireplace. There were still two uprights, one on each end.

After I removed the last two props, the big cedar beam  remained wedged between the two walls. When I looked close I discovered that on the right it was sitting on a book by George McDonald! I had two ladders ready to prop it, so once I got rid of a toenailed nail on the left and lifted it off the book, it dropped onto the ladders. Diego helped me lift it off when he arrived.

The nails that held it together at the top were hidden behind these huge plugs. When I tapped the nails back out, the plugs popped loose. I will cut them flush when I reassemble it. The finished cedar will look gorgeous.

I put Diego to work priming the family room after we finished removing the cedar beams from the fireplace. I didn't mind the paneling, but the place looks bigger and cheerier with white walls.

After he got a coat on the family room, he moved on to the dining room. Goodbye, striped wallpaper! I took the baseboards, outlet covers, and a/c grills off before he started.

By the time he left last night, we had a coat of finish paint on the ceiling and walls of the family room, and the dining room and most of the living room had been primed. The wallpaper bubbled up in a few places, so I'll need to deal with that before I can paint it again. I'll try slitting the bubbles and gluing the paper down. If that doesn't work, I'll cut out the bubbles and mud them smooth.

This is what my kitchen wall tile looked like when I started putting it up.

And this is what it looks like now that it has been grouted. I should have chosen a grayer grout but I was too lazy to try another store.

To give you an idea of the transformation of the kitchen, here are some dishes in the unpainted cabinets.

And these are the same dishes in the painted cabinet on the other side of the kitchen.

The sink side of the kitchen is nearly done. I like the brightness of the room now. The outlets and floor need changing, and the recess where the fluorescent lights are needs to have the seams mudded and some new lights put in.

This recess looks a lot better without the aluminum frame and plastic sheets that used to hide it. We'll put some nice modern lights in and get rid of the fluorescents.

Saturday morning my brother-in-law helped me tear out all the downstairs carpeting. I'm getting the family room ready for painting. Bye-bye, dark paneling. The tricky part will be the rough cedar pieces that "decorate" the chimney wall. I'd like to take them down and smooth, sand, and varnish them. Cedar can be a gorgeous wood.

I don't know why anyone would think rough cedar was attractive.

The carpet we tore out was cream colored. However, I found these threads that show the original carpet color back in 1975. Ghastly!

Sunday we start painting the walls. The place is going to look so different...

<p>A friend in Colombia heard this song on the radio some years ago and was entranced. He recorded it on cassette and gave me a copy, which I recorded onto my computer and have uploaded.

We would really like to know who this singer is, and the name of the song. I have searched using phrases from the lyrics to no avail. My guess is that it is from the 1950s or 1960s and that the singer is someone like Doris Day. The composer might be someone who wrote musicals. Those are uneducated guesses; I'm not a musicologist.

If you find out, please let me know.

The lyrics are more or less as follows:

[Unintelligible line]
The dreams I shape, they call to me
There’s no escape, I’m never free
I run and run and when I’m through I run to you.
[Unintelligible] rains that never ends
The summer rains they never end
The sound of larks it never ends
[Unintelligible] parks that never end
Time can’t erase, cannot dispel, that smiling face I knew so well
It was always there as you can guess to bring despair and loneliness
All those I tried to kiss all knew that I’d kissed you
When love was mine the earth was new
and there were things to see and do
When love was mine the skies were too
You’d run to me and I to you
Now it’s small comfort to recall that it is better dear by far
to once have loved than never to have loved at all
When love was mine the earth was new
and there were things to see and do
When love was mine the sky was too
You’d run to me and I to you
Now it’s small comfort to recall that it is better dear by far
to once have loved than never to have loved at all
</p>

I painted the cabinets this week, and decided today to install the tile backsplash before moving all the stuff back in. I went to Floor & Decor and found rough-cut Carrara marble squares for $2 a one-foot sheet! They have occasional green hints that I think will work with the green counter tops.

I started with the back wall by the fridge because it's awkward to get to. Fortunately it didn't require any cutting except around the outlet. The trim strip on the left edge is cut from a marble tile. (Sorry, photo is fuzzy.)

Next I started from the window by the sink. This required some cutting around the windowsill and smoothing the corner tile pieces. The edge pieces at the top are strips from a marble tile. You can see how rough-cut the marble is. I normally wouldn't have chosen it but the price was too good to pass up and I'm selling the house anyway.

I worked back to the corner. Outlets and switches can be simple or tricky, depending on where they are. This one only needed cuts at the top and bottom. The tiles lined up perfectly with the sides of the box.

This outlet, on the other hand, required cuts on all four sides. Sometimes if you're lucky you happen to have the scraps you need.

When I got to the back corner, I had a gap of not quite half an inch to fill.

To cut strips, you flip the sheet over so the mesh holds it flat. It's tricky, though; sometimes the marble splits while you're cutting, and sometimes it sags and your cut ends up angled.

Here's another view of the sheet on the saw. I invested in a good tile saw some years ago because I did a lot of tiling in my handyman business.

This cut came out well.

Here is the sink corner with the gap filled in with little pieces.

And here is the section of kitchen I tiled today. There are two more sections to do, one this big and one about a third as much.

I'll need to grout it tomorrow or Monday. I think it will look great.

I confess, I grew up enjoying Neil Diamond's music. I even had some albums, and of course enjoyed I'm a Believer and other songs he wrote for the Monkees. In my adulthood he's not someone I seek out, say, on Pandora, but the other day on an impulse I pulled up an ancient concert performance on YouTube and was impressed by the song A Solitary Man.

I like it. It's lightly written, not sappy, not as pretentious as some of his other songs or performances. I have it on my YouTube channel among the songs I want to sing someday.

I'm not the only one who likes it. Johnny Cash thought enough of it to include it among his American series, and ended up winning a Best Vocal Performance award for it.

Here are the lyrics:
Melinda was mine 'til the time that I found her
Holdin' Jim
And lovin' him
Then Sue came along, loved me strong, that's what I thought
But me and Sue,
That died, too.
Don't know that I will but until I can find me
A girl who'll stay and won't play games behind me
I'll be what I am
A solitary man
A solitary man
I've had it to here being where love's a small word
A part time thing
A paper ring
I know it's been done havin' one girl who loves you
Right or wrong
Weak or strong
Don't know that I will but until I can find me
A girl who'll stay and won't play games behind me
I'll be what I am
A solitary man
A solitary man
Don't know that I will but until I can find me
A girl who'll stay and won't play games behind me
I'll be what I am
A solitary man
A solitary man
A solitary man
A solitary man
A solitary man
A solitary man

Last night while I did cardio at the gym, I alternated between tennis and Canadian football on the TV screen. The tennis was evenly matched between two dudes I don't know, one of whom used a lot more spin than I'm used to seeing in tennis.

The football was fascinating.

It appears that Canadian football involves twelve players on a side. Offensive players can be in forward motion, so most plays involved two or three guys running forward at full speed, with the snap occurring just as they reached the scrimmage line. It looked really cool.

From what I could see, they had only three downs to make ten yards, so punting happened frequently. There also were a lot of fumbles, which may have been a coincidence.

One of the teams was the Montreal Alouettes. What kind of team name is that?! I suspect it's the league's equivalent of A Boy Named Sue, chosen to keep the players sensitive and angry. Can you imagine an NFL team named after Head and Shoulders Knees and Toes, or maybe The Hokey Pokey? (Actually Virginia Tech's team is named the Hokies, which may explain some things.)

In other news, my kitchen cabinets are coming along slow but steady. Last night I primed the backs of the doors, but I didn't have time to paint them, so that will happen tonight. It looks like the door fronts will need another coat of paint before I can hang them. If all goes well, I'll be putting the doors back up on Friday night. Then I'll move everything into those cabinets and start on the other half of the kitchen.

We have decided to put laminated wood floors both downstairs and up. Lowe's has very nice 30-year laminates for only .99 a foot, far better value than anything at Home Depot or Floor & Decor. The nice thing about laminate (compared to tile) is that once you've installed it, you're done. I can do an average room in 4-6 hours. Tile takes a couple of days and makes much more of a mess.

I do plan on tiling the kitchen, breakfast room, and laundry. Most of that area is currently covered with a brick-pattern vinyl. If I can get the old vinyl up safely, I will. Otherwise I'll need to float out the edges with thin-set for the transitions to bare floor.

I also plan to install tile backsplashes in the kitchen, and to tile the risers on the stairs (although the pattern will be simpler than what I used in Dallas). There's nothing like nice tile work to make a house memorable to a potential buyer.

Better get back to work.