Blackie

This is a little backward, but it’s been a damned long day with very little accomplished. I suppose I learned quite a bit about the electrical system in this house, in addition to a nice refresher course on the general nature of electricity.

It stormed last night. I wanted to get some work done around the place, and I was vacuuming. At the same time I was vacuuming, I was operating the washing machine, the 13 inch television was on, the computer is always running on some level, but was at rest, and the lights were on in the living room and bathroom. That was, on some level, enough to shut down the circuit. Or so I thought.

When the vacuum was stopped, I couldn’t help but notice the number of things that didn’t work around the place. It was extensive enough that I made a hell of a list of things that weren’t working. Basically, the entire house was shut down, except for the kitchen and sun room, both additions to the home. The outbuilding also worked.

So I snooped around a bit in the basement. I got the flashlight, and headed down to see if I could fix the problem. Everything appeared to be in order, and none of the breakers physically appeared to have failed. I tripped each breaker individually, and there was no change upstairs. I inspected a sub-box that had a pull-plug and a set of fuses, in addition to the antiquated boxes…Federal Pacific, maybe? Anyway, it’s too damned old, and last night was a perfect example why.

I strongly suspect that the wiring here predates the walls, which have unbleached paper rock and textured plaster coating. It’s a rock home that predates the civil war. There are perhaps a handful of buildings in the state of Kansas of this age, and I suspect almost all of them are in Leavenworth. More on that later…

I see no evidence that the wires that go to that box aren’t relatively new, (by new, I’m talking 40 years old here) but I’d be surprised if upon further inspection there aren’t a series of unboxed connections that would fail a naked eye test. I’ll have to start pulling some individual plugs very soon, although I’m pretty sure I know what I’m likely to find…that’s a fight for another day.

We got an inch of rain last night in Baldwin City. I accomplished my new year’s resolution for this year when I was looking for light bulbs. Don’t ask me why I’ve sorted the light bulbs with the rain gauges, but I found this rain gauge in that empty bulb box I’d be returning to very soon for a different specialty bulb…The new year’s resolution for 2010 was to install a rain gauge, and the feat was stunned a quarter of a year ahead of schedule.

The door to the basement was open longer than I’d originally planned. I was messing around down there for close to twenty minutes inspecting the situation with flashlights and by flipping breakers. I declared myself somewhat defeated, and notified my dad of the situation. My grandfolks lived here half a century, and the place is now in dad’s name, while granddad is in extended care. So I’m kind of trying to keep the place from burning down here…

Dad answered from his card game. We discussed the situation briefly, and he declared that I was looking for a short.

“A short?” I asked. “Can’t those cause fires?”

“Well, they could. But you’ll probably be all right.”

“Right. Has this happened out here recently?”

“Not that I can recall, but it happened to my box. It shut down half the box,” he explained.
I told him I’d keep him posted, and that was that.

Most of the night, I watched television wide awake. Questions floated in my mind such as: “What are the burning points for limestone and mortar?” “What exactly was the wiring situation which burned down my maternal grandparents’ home?” The television show numbing my mind, and piquing questions about my current residence, was about compulsive hoarding. For some reason, it does wonders for my self-esteem. I don’t know exactly what I want out of life, but there is some comfort in knowing I don’t want that type of lifestyle. Even though there are a couple of rooms in this place that could fit right in on that show…

I awoke early after only a couple hours sleep today. Nala the cat had gotten herself stuck in the cellar for the first time. As far as I can remember, she’s never been stuck down there for a night. That basement door has been the DMZ for Nala and whatever creatures might be in the basement. I’ve previously seen opossum dart into the exterior wells, but these are in such disrepair there is really nothing to stop the invaders.

I immediately began my search for an electrician, and I threw myself at the situation in the meantime. My main concern was the sump pump. It didn’t appear to be running, and I had to make sure the basement had not yet become truly flooded. One of my first projects was to set up a light. There was a dual head 2000 watt halogen light, and I ran a cord and situated it in the middle of the room. I directed the majority of the lighting on the box, after a cursory inspection of the pit found it to be functional.

My light wasn’t working too well. I’d burned out one bulb, and another had completely fizzled itself down to a low death right in front of me. The night before, the main outdoor light that illuminates the yard nearest the kitchen had expired. I thought that was a bad thing, as the light won’t be the easiest thing in the world to replace. It’s about twenty feet in the air. Wires and tree limbs all around.

And now…this. I’m looking at the electrical box after getting a secondary light refocused, and a pretty decent sized blacksnake crawled into the basement from a crack to the sun room’s crawl space. It just slithered a little down the wall, and went straight for the box. It should be noted that the electrical box has not had a cover since I’ve been here. That snake had now wrapped itself nearly completely around the box and it’s accompanying feeder wires. I was doing the things I would normally do out in a field, or in the barn if I encounter a blacksnake. Yelling and shit—that doesn’t work out in the open, and I’m expecting it to work in his home. Needless to say, we had something of a standoff:

“What the fuck?!? Hey! I’m right here, you fucker!” This didn’t impact Blackie at all.

“I’m going to get a hoe—I mean it. I hope for your sake I don’t find you down here when I get back.” I’m not a sworn enemy of blacksnakes. We typically leave each other alone, and when we do see each other, if the snake has its way out, the snake is allowed to come and go as they please. This situation wasn’t going to work, however, unless that snake got the hell out of the basement. I already knew this would be somewhat unlikely, but possible. The cool and damp cellar was probably preferable to saturated earth.

Adjacent to the power boxes is the previous exterior entry to the cellar. It would dump out underneath the current sunroom, if it were still open. As it is, it’s a boxed in mess of rubble. I’m now seriously considering digging through that mess….because Blackie was headed for his favorite pile of cellar rubble. I’m confident that until today, any rodents that would happen into a stand down with Blackie were likely losers.

There used to be two hoes here. One was ideal for an operation like this. It had a thin blade, and had a hell of a good snake-killing angle to it. I’d like to be able to explain it better, but it had always been a great snake-killing-hoe for me. I couldn’t find it, and I had to make due with a new fiberglass garden hoe. I’d never been on a snake-killer with that hoe, but this would be the test.

Blackie was still working his way down the wall and into the rubble pile when I found him. I had to get some work done for the power concerns, and I’m a hell of a bad jittery electrician. When I was drinking, I first noticed the shaking from the aftereffects when messing with electrical issues. When I needed to be at my best, it always seemed I was at my worst. Oh well, it didn’t appear to kill me…

“Why didn’t you get out of here?” I asked Blackie. “I’m sorry about this.” Blackie took a rotten gash to the back, right about the middle of the body. His head had gone into the rubble by the time the first blow occurred.

That hoe wasn’t worth a damn for killing a four foot blacksnake. I had no way of knowing it going in, but the offing was brutal. I ended up clubbing the poor bastard on the head with the hook of the hoe to finish the job. “Damn. I’m sorry,” I’d repeated to the beast as I realized the true inadequacies of my tool. As I knew the suffering was unacceptable, I resorted to the direct clubbing. It took a while to get the head out and pinned down, which was unfortunate.

I didn’t want it to go down like that, but I have a much greater appreciation for Nala’s eagerness to leave the basement this morning.