5 December 2015

Sometimes you catch the bear and sometimes the bear catches you.  After two Geek Squad people at Best Buy last week told me to buy the wrong cable to attach my laptop to my new Epson XP-630 printer, the helpful person at the Radio Shack outlet in Martin’s Lumber and Hardware sold me the correct cable during my morning errands foray into Middlebury.  One bear caught! While reconciling my checkbook, caught a $2,000 subtraction error, not in my favor.  With no checks bounced as a result, we’ll call that one a draw. After lunch, following the detailed instructions in their respective user’s manuals, quickly detached the new snow blower and sub-frame assembly from the Kubota.  Another couple of bears caught!  Then I tried to reattach the Kubota’s front-end loader, which requires plugging in four quick-connect hydraulic hoses.  One of those hoses (the one color coded red) was very difficult to undo when I took the loader off the tractor (for the first time since I’ve owned it) before having the snow blower put on.  Well, that red-coded connection absolutely refused to be remade this afternoon.  Looks like the fitting is out of round from a manufacturing defect. Any guesses whether that defect will be covered under warranty???? No problem, he says, ignoring the claw marks, I just need to move the loader into the garage and take it off again, for which I probably won’t need whatever function the red hose controls (oh, please, do bite me again!).  Well, without the red hose connected, the loader came off “funny” (a family-friendly term that is a lot more benign than what really happened), causing another hydraulic line to get pinched, causing the fitting for that line to start leaking hydraulic fluid all over the floor.  And at this point the loader is off on one side only, severely canted in a way that I’m sure it was not designed to be, seemingly impossible to get back on without the function that the red hose controls, and it’s looking like I am totally dead meat. Fortunately, sometimes I am trickier than the average bear, and I eventually horsed the loader back into enough alignment (my back may never be the same) that I could reattach it. At that point, somewhat ravaged, I hooked up the trailer and loaded the tractor, to be hauled to Champlain Valley Equipment at their first service opening. Being (temporarily, I assure you) out of scotch, I just cried myself to sleep instead of assuaging my wounds the old fashioned way… though, come to think of it, an Old Fashioned is made with bourbon, not scotch.