Carburetor Chronicles Part II: A Linkage in Time

March 24, 2026March 24, 2026 ~ sanebishop ~ 6 Comments

Last week, I fixed my chainsaw by fixing a carburetor that didn’t need fixing, so this week I decided to level up by fixing a truly broken carburetor on an old push lawnmower. Sounds simple, but add in a five year old orbiting, playing with your tools, while you’re trying to fiddle with tiny screws and delicate linkages, and it is the equivalent of a psychological experiment.

“Dad, I’m going to hammer some nails.”

“Great.”

“Dad, can I play with this spark plug?”

“No.”

“Dad, we need to put some gas in the tank?

“No we don’t.”

“Dad, I’m going to pull this rope” [pulls starter rope]

“Stop!”

The good news is I got the new carburetor on and the lawnmower running again. The bad news is I apparently mixed up the two linkages on the throttle, so the lawn mower was surging. I am not sure why I was even trying to fix this old lawn mower–maybe for nostalgia’s sake?–as it had been sitting in the barn unused for ten years or more, in the same place it’s been since it quit running. When Natalie and I first started renting the old farmhouse from her grandparents, I actually pushed our yard because we couldn’t afford a riding lawn mower. Back then, Fitbits and fitness trackers weren’t really a thing yet, but I’d love to know how many steps I took on a weekly basis cutting grass. All I know is I look a lot slimmer in pictures from that time.

“Dad, why does it sound funny?”

“I don’t know. I think I did something wrong.”

“Why did you do something wrong?

“That is a good question.”

“Well, how do you fix it?”

“That’s another good question.”

Of course, I had to take the new carburetor all the way back off, but Thomas came in handy this go round as he was able to find a tiny screw I dropped in the grass. Once we got the carburetor back on with linkages connected correctly, the lawnmower revved and ran like old times.

“Dad, can I push it?

“Maybe one day,” I said, “maybe one day.”

My General Life Philosophy: Just Blame the Carburetor

March 16, 2026March 16, 2026 ~ sanebishop ~ 8 Comments

When I was in college, my parents bought me a chainsaw for my birthday. I was going through my Thoreau phase when I wanted to be an enlightened lumberjack. That didn’t pan out exactly, but the chainsaw–an Echo CS-400–has served me well throughout the years. It has started and run reliably and hasn’t cut off any appendages, which is really all you can ask for in a good chainsaw.

Last year, after Hurricane Helene, I had to run the chainsaw hard. We had several massive oaks blown down, snapped like twigs by the wind, and the chainsaw, limb by limb, dismembered the oaks, slowly and steadily chewing through them. The chainsaw revved and roared until it developed a bad habit on the very last tree. It would run for about twenty minutes at a time, then reliably bog down and stall, after which you couldn’t get it to start again until you let it sit for an hour or so. And it has been that way ever since.

Thankfully, I haven’t had much need to cut up anything major since Helene, so twenty minute run-time has always been adequate for the minor jobs that have needed doing around the farm. But it has been on my to-do list to fix the chainsaw, and this past weekend I finally got around to doing it. I’m proud to say it only took me all day.

I’m no expert on small engine repair, but I know enough to know that old men who know a thing or two about engines always blame the carburetor. If you ever need a scapegoat, just blame the “carburetor.” At the very least, it makes you sound smart and mechanically inclined and is a generally plausible excuse for all sorts of predicaments.

SCENARIO 1:

COP: You were going 65 in a 55 zone.

DRIVER: Sorry, sir, I think the carburetor was running a little lean.

SCENARIO 2:

WIFE: Did you hear what I said?

HUSBAND: Sorry, I was listening to the idle. I think the carb needs adjusting.

SCENARIO 3:

ANNOYING COWORKER: You want to hang out this weekend?

EMPLOYEE: Sorry, I’ve got an appointment to get my carburetor cleaned.

Surprisingly, I was able to get the old carburetor off and the new carburetor on without too much trouble (or too many leftover pieces). Much to my surprise, the chainsaw fired right up. This time, however, it ran for about twenty seconds before stalling, which I took to mean the new carburetor needed adjusting. The idle was running lean at first and the throttle was running rich (or maybe it was vice versa–who the heck really knows what rich and lean mean anyway?). In any event, the engine kept flooding, and I’d have to remove the sparkplug to unflood it, and sometimes I’d just have to let it sit for an hour before I could start it, but finally I got it running good and purring like a kitten, until it bogged down again at twenty minutes—ARRRGGGG!!!!

So after scouring YouTube, I finally figured out what was wrong with the chainsaw in the first place–the gas tank vent was completely clogged. The clog would cause some sort of vacuum in the tank to form at around the twenty-minute mark that prevented gas from flowing to the engine. The good news is it was a three-dollar plastic piece that took me all of ten minutes to switch out, and now the saw runs like a charm. The bad news is it took me all day to fix a carburetor that didn’t need fixing in the first place.

Of Satyrs and Sutures

March 9, 2026March 9, 2026 ~ sanebishop ~ 1 Comment

We have three goats. As goats go, they are pretty good, meaning they are not dangers to society, but they are still dangers to our sanity. Howie is the goat leader. He is a tall tannish brown goat. I was walking through the dining room the other day and just glanced at the kitchen window when I saw the brownish back of a beast breach above the windowsill like a shark fin breaching the water.

“What is a deer doing so close to the house in the middle of the day?” I thought. Then a devilish head popped up, and I realized it was just Howie, escaping again. We stared at each other momentarily, and then he took off when he heard me coming out the door to detain him. I won’t bore you with the details of his recapture, but I will say one man trying to wrangle three goats on his lunch break is not a fair fight.

In the wrangling process, I noticed that Howie’s back hooves had gotten long, so I mentioned to Natalie that we needed to trim them. Yesterday, being a beautiful day, Natalie and I initiated the process of ruining a beautiful day by hoof trimming. The good news is that we got Howie’s hooves trimmed. The bad news is we spent most of the rest of the afternoon at the urgent care. I was trying to hold Ross, the black goat, still against the stall wall while Natalie was trimming. However, Ross kicked and Natalie cut herself on the hand. Blood began dripping profusely, and soon we were journeying to the urgent care.

As cuts go, the doctor said it was a beautifully straight clean cut, or a two inch laceration as she officially called it. One of Natalie’s former students, who is in nursing school, got to stitch her up. Pleasant small talk was had by all. While she was stitching, the nurse trainee said the cut wasn’t nearly as bad as the cut they saw last night on the bottom a seven-year-old boy’s foot. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get the boy to lie still enough (she said his parents and two nurses were trying to hold him down) to stitch him up so they had to send him to the emergency room to sedate him.

“I can only imagine,” Natalie said.

“Yeah,” I said, “I bet holding a boy still while stitching his foot is even worse than holding a goat still while trimming its hoove.”

Natalie smiled. Another beautiful day at the urgent care.

Beware the Company of a Cat

February 3, 2026February 3, 2026 ~ sanebishop ~ 2 Comments

If you ever see a black and white cat on the run, do not approach or engage the animal. It could be Barney, our barn cat, and he should be presumed dangerous. He goes by many aliases: Barn, Barn-Man, Barn-Barn, Barn Master, Little Barney Boy, and Sweet Little Barn Muffin.

Barney first came to us at about the same time our previous barn cat, Bunty, was dying. Bunty was thirteen years old, and Barney just showed up out of nowhere, a spry and spirited juvenile. My wife believes Barney was a godsend, which is exactly what a blossoming con artist cat would want you to think. My best guess is that Barney asked around to find the barn with the oldest cat and decided to take up there in an attempt to become heir apparent.

It worked.

Now Barney has even swindled his way from the barn to our porch, and I would consider him more of a porch cat than a barn cat–though I wouldn’t consider him entirely ours. I’m pretty sure Barney scams other families during the day. I believe this because my wife bought a fancy tracker collar to put on him so she can monitor his movements and protect him from peril. Every day he makes a circuit to three other houses in our vicinity. Then, at night, he comes and sleeps on our back porch in a little cat house with a heated pad–Bunty is probably rolling over in his grave (he used to sleep on a pillow in the hayloft).

“Little Barn-Barn, do you have secret families you visit during the day?” asked my wife, interrogating him after seeing the tracker data. Barney remained silent. He does not like the tracker, and sometimes I wonder if he likes me.

“It’s under there,” my wife said, pointing to the location where Barney first lost his tracker.

The tracker is on a breakaway collar, and Barney enjoys finding new places to break free. There, in this instance, was the old corn crib, which, sitting on fieldstones piers, had about a foot and a half of ground clearance. He lost it right underneath the middle of the structure, meaning I had to dust off my claustrophobia to crawl under there and retrieve the collar. A few days later, he broke loose again.

“It’s in there,” my wife said this time.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. There was now a tremendous blackberry thicket that I had to tunnel through on all fours. Eventually, the tracker collar became too much of a nuisance for all involved and Barney now roams unmonitored, but I still have the sneaking suspicion that he has something else up his sleeve.

During the past few weeks, due to the winter storms, my wife has broken her own protocol–no animals inside–and taken the extraordinary step of letting Barney sleep inside our house on those bitter cold nights. She put an old pillow in a cardboard box, and the first night he slept soundly in this makeshift bed. On the second night, however, I awoke in the middle of night to a cat kicking me in the head. Apparently, Barney had gotten out of his bed, jumped into our bed, and snuggled down between man and wife. When I awoke, he was asleep on his back, pummelling me with his hind legs, as if he was trying to push me off the bed.

All this is to say, I think Barney wants me out of the picture.

Man Plans. Weatherman Laughs

January 26, 2026January 26, 2026 ~ sanebishop ~ 11 Comments

On the Tuesday before the storm, I called my wife to begin the necessary bureaucratic process. We make each other jump through hoops to justify big purchases, if for no other reason than one of us–usually her–can say “I told you so” once the purchase proves imprudent.

“I think we need to buy a generator,” I said, sneaking the comment nonchalantly into a conversation that started as inquiry into our dinner plans for the night.

“A generator!?–where did that come from?” she asked.

“They’re calling for a big snowstorm this weekend.”

“Weren’t they calling for snow last week too–and we didn’t get anything?”

“Yeah, but this one is different. They’re saying it’s going to be bad–even catastrophic.”

“Generators are dangerous–my dad burnt up a refrigerator with a generator when I was a kid.”

“Well, how else are we going to stay warm if the power goes out?” Although our old farmhouse has three fireplaces, the unstable fieldstone chimneys have been cut down. The fireplaces are now defunct, and we have no alternate heat source if our heat pump is without power. “Remember how bad it was when we lost power during Helene–and that was when it was warm,” I continued.

“Let me think about it,” she said. At that point, I knew she would acquiesce, but the problem with our bureaucratic process is that it takes time. By the next morning, when she verbally rubber stamped my acquisition request, saying “I guess you can get a generator,” there were no generators left to acquire. I had done my research overnight and had hoped to buy a small gas generator in the $500 to $600 dollar range but Lowes was completely wiped out, not a single generator remained in the store.

I was left to hurry home and scour Amazon in search of any generator that could be delivered before the storm hit on Saturday. The cheapest one I could find was $1000, but supposedly it could be delivered by Friday afternoon. I don’t think I’ve been so nervous about a delivery since the birth of my son.

“Why are you so wound up?” my wife asked.

“I’m worried the generator won’t get here in time.”

“We’ll survive if it doesn’t.”

Sure enough, on Friday, I got a notification from UPS that my delivery was delayed. Had the original forecast proved accurate, we would have been doomed to shiver, but the storm had slowed and the generator was delivered Saturday afternoon, right before the first sleet pellets began to fall.

Sleet was actually good news. Meteorologists had been waffling back and forth on sleet versus freezing rain, warning that freezing rain would be the worst case scenario in terms of power outages. But the freezing rain held off until the tail end of the storm on Sunday evening–and, of course, the power never went out.

“I told ya we didn’t need a generator,” my wife said, though she did sprinkle her “I told you so” with some pity, “but at least we have one now if we ever need it.”

Despite being secretly disappointed the power didn’t go out so I could justify my big purchase and prevent the marital “I told you so,” I am glad it wasn’t all freezing rain. Thomas got to go sledding for the first time!