North Lake Property For Sale

2009-08-13T11:01:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures of the property on North Lake, Van Buren County, Michigan. The cabin lies about 50 yards from the lake, and the hexagonal writing studio (The "Hex") is right on the water. The cabin has two rooms, one 16' by 14', the other 14' by 12', plus a full bath and a porch. The Hex is 8' on a side, and 8' off the ground, for a terrific view of the lake. It is finished in knotty pine (next two photos) and has a thermostatted fireplace fueled by propane gas to take the chill off when the temperature dips.

The Hex has a small porch (last photo) on which we frequently have our breakfast, enjoying the view of the lake. The opposite view from the porch is pure woods. Our neighbors to the right show up only briefly each year, and in fact this year we haven't seen them once. Our neighbors to the left also come out infrequently; usually a few weekends, and one time for about a week. So we enjoy solitude much of the time.

Its Post Office is Grand Junction, the Blueberry Capital of the World, less than 150 miles from Chicago. You can walk from the property to "You Pick" Blueberries. Fresh fruit is available from local farms practically all summer, and sweet corn in season.

North Lake is about 64 acres in area; this year my prize catches were a 21" largemouth bass and a 26" catfish. Jet skis and powerboats are allowed between the hours of 11AM and 7PM.

Grand Junction, 2 miles distant, has only a post office and a gas station. But the town boasts one of the best auto mechanics in the area. The nearest town for groceries, etc., is Bangor, about 7 miles distant. It has a wonderful Coffee Shop/WiFi place in its Amtrak RR Station. South Haven, about 10 miles distant, has much more to offer than Bangor, including spectacular sunsets over Lake Michigan.

The Horn

2009-08-07T08:51:00.000-07:00

THE HORN

The horn on my ‘82 Tercel started weakening noticeably one day, and before long it had ceased to function altogether. Probably one of the contacts has rusted out as a result of too much salt water splashing on it, I thought; a similar thing had happened on an old VW Microbus I had once owned. I opened the hood to check this hypothesis, but couldn’t see the horn anywhere.

There was snow on the street, and I didn’t want to lie on the ground to look underneath the car, so I dug out my rumpled Chilton’s Manual for the ‘82 Toyota Tercel from the trunk. It didn’t even have an entry for “horn” in its index! Oh, well, I was going to take it in for an oil change soon; I’d have the guy who works in the bay find it for me, and then I’d fix it.

When I brought the car in for its oil change & lube, I made a point of telling the guy who opened the hood that my horn stopped working, and that I was embarrassed to tell him that I hadn’t been able to locate it; would he have the guy in the bay find it for me? “We’ll find your horn for you, sir, will you please take a seat in the waiting area?”

Some time later I heard him call to an associate, “Hey, Tony, you know where the horn is on a Toyota?” And after a long enough time of silence that I was afraid they had forgotten about finding it, I walked over to the car to ask, “You guys find my horn yet?”, to let them know my interest in its whereabouts was more than casual. “Don’t worry, sir, please take a seat in the waiting area.” was the non-commital reply, through not-quite-clenched teeth.

I decided to let the matter drop until they offered the information. But when the work on the car was done, the guy I first talked to started lifting the door for me to drive out of the garage saying only, “All set, sir!” I walked over to him from the waiting area, and asked, “Where’s the horn, then?” Without breaking his hand-over-hand motion in lifting the door, or looking toward me, he said in an almost inaudible voice that also told me not to pursue the horn thing any further, “Couldn’t find it.”

On the way home I stopped at The Car Store, where the guys behind the parts counter always help me out whenever I get myself into a car-repair hole. I explained my current predicament to George, who immediately yelled out, “ANYBODY HERE KNOW TOYOTA’S?” There were only a couple of other guys in there at the time, and there was general head-shaking all around. “Is the car outside?” he asked. “Let’s go out and take a look.”

I lifted the hood, and George peered around inside for a few minutes. “Wow! Look at that gas filter...original equipment...how many hundred thousand miles you got on this thing?...ever notice the engine stalling slightly when you accelerate?...”

”See the horn anywhere, George?”, I reminded him of his primary mission. “Damned if I can find it”, he reluctantly admitted.

Driving home I thought about the absurdity of the situation. How can so many people who work on cars NOT know where the horn is on a Toyota?!?! I was almost at the point of doing the unthinkable: taking the car in to a Toyota dealer!

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Too cheap, I guess; afraid to get raked over the coals for something I really should be able to do myself. The snow had melted and the streets were pretty dry, so I put on my head-to-toe overalls, got a flashlight, and slid on my back under the front end of the car. I would find that danged horn if it took me all day and all night!

It took only a minute, it turned out; I think the guy in the oil-change bay was simply not interested in doing anything extra for the customers he never sees. Not that it was sticking out where the casual observer could see it, by any means; it was buried in a little well immediately under the left headlight, visible only with artificial light, and inaccessible to the human hand. In order to check whether the contacts were still OK, I’d have to be able to get at the thing somehow. It looked like the only possibility that allowed laying a hand on it was removing the headlight.

Well, it turned out that I had to disconnect the left side of the grill, remove all of the trim around the left headlight, including the yellow parking light next to it, AND remove the headlight before I could get a hand in to disconnect the contacts to the horn.

They were in perfect condition! I put everything back together while contemplating how I could check the horn contacts underneath the horn buttons on the steering wheel. What else could it possibly be?

I found three screws on the back side of each of the two radial arms of the steering wheel. There was a plate on each side that came off pretty easily to show what looked like perfectly clean, electrically sound contacts. But somehow, while fooling around trying to figure out what to do next, I discovered that if I held the horn buttons in while turning the steering wheel, the horn beeped when the wheel was rotated through 90 degrees! And it was reproducible; i.e., as long as the wheel was in its straight-ahead position, the horn would not beep, but if I rotated the wheel by 90 degrees in either direction, it would beep, loud and clear, and with the “don’t tread on me” tone of assertiveness essential to rush hour traffic in Chicago.

So the horn wasn’t technically broken; it’s just that if I were driving behind someone and wanted to beep at him, I’d have to swerve suddenly and simultaneously to either side. There are times when this could be useful, I suppose, but generally speaking, a horn should be more versatile. I decided to call the Toyota dealer’s parts department, and prepared myself for paying out an uncomfortable amount of money to get my horn functioning properly again.

I called the Toyota dealer in Evanston, and asked for the parts department. I had only begun explaining the symptoms of my horn when the service guy interrupted me to say that he knew exactly what was going on, and that I needed a part that would cost less than $5, and I should have no trouble doing the job myself. Wow! I couldn’t believe my ears! I was going to save myself a ton of money, and have the satisfaction of fixing the thing myself! Who says new car dealerships are only interested in the bottom line? I headed right over to the Toyota dealership on Chicago Avenue, with a feeling of childlike anticipation.

The man behind the counter produced a little plastic bag containing a tiny spring and something that looked like a brass swizzle stick. “Of course, you’ll have to take the steering wheel off, and disconnect all the wiring to the turn signals, headlights, high beams, windshield wipers, and all that. You’ve done that before, haven’t you?”

My childlike anticipation took a nosedive. Hmmmm...I decided not to bluff. “Well, no, actually, but if I had the right tools I’d like to give it a try,” I said. “Do you think you could let me borrow a steering wheel puller?” I had seen a picture of one in my Chilton’s manual while looking for the location of the horn, and somewhere I got the idea that this special tool was necessary to take any steering wheel off any steering column.

“Nah, all you need is a 19mm socket to loosen the nut holding it on. Just be sure you don’t take the nut all the way off. Just loosen it, and then work the steering wheel back and forth until it pops off. If you take that nut all the way off first, you’ll break your nose with the steering wheel when it finally does!”

Sound practical advice is like money in the bank, I always say. The man even was kind enough to fetch a replacement module in order to show me exactly how to remove and replace the worn part. Childlike anticipation restored, I couldn’t wait to get home and take off my first steering wheel.

I knew I had a socket set under the seat of the car somewhere; it was one of those “Made in Taiwan” deals with about 75 sockets of both English and metric sizes. The kind with a cheap plastic floor with indentations in it for each socket, and a mysterious mechanism that moves all of them into a big random pile at one end of the box as soon as it is shut. Two things were immediately obvious when I got home and opened the box: (1) The ratchet handle was so short that it was more likely to break than to be able to loosen a 19mm nut, and (2) The largest socket in the kit was only 15mm. No doubt these observations were related.

But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I went into the house and down into the basement to rummage through my junk. I found an old tool box I had equipped with left-over, odd-ball tools and gadgets for the kids when they were little, and when I opened it there was one big, fat socket sitting on the top shelf, and hang me if it wasn’t 19mm! After this minor miracle, how could the short-handled socket wrench possibly break on me?

Nor did it. I followed the Toyota man’s instructions to a “T”, and had the whole thing apart and back together in fifteen minutes.

(Well, that’s not exactly true... He had neglected to tell me that the pad over the center of the steering wheel is held on by four plastic pins with flexible, split flared ends, and is simply popped off with a little force. Viewed from the bottom side of the steering wheel with the help of a mirror, those split ends look exactly like the heads of standard screws! It was quite confusing to me that when I turned them, there was no sudden decrease in resistance, but rather a kind of mushiness that returned the supposed screw to its original position no matter how far I rotated it. Eventually, of course I managed to rotate one too far, and it broke in half. The up side of this cretinism was the ability to examine the thing and finally realize that I simply should have popped the pad off in the first place... That and the fact that only the most careful observer would be able to tell that the pad is presently held on by only three of the original four pins.)

The moment of truth was at hand! I pressed one of the horn buttons, and rejoiced in the obnoxious, nasal “BEEEEEEEEP”. I pressed the other with equally satisfying results. Unable to stop grinning from ear to ear, I wondered if anyone was watching me as I alternated short belches of familiar outrage with the left and right horn buttons. It was a little like running into an old friend that you didn’t realize you missed. Then reason prevailed, and I put my tools away, master of all I surveyed.

Funny thing was, I had become so accustomed to not having the horn when I needed it, I had to reteach myself to use it when an appropriate situation arose. But I’m back up to speed now, so to speak, and even though it has been a couple of months since I fixed the horn, an involuntary smile still breaks over my countenance whenever I hear its impatient and impertinent beep.

Atrial fibrillation experience

2009-08-07T08:08:00.000-07:00

The following describes a personal experience with atrial fibrillation, and I would be very surprised if it were generally true for all sufferers of a-fib. But it worked for me.

I started experiencing episodes of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation shortly before turning 60 years of age. Approximately ten years later I underwent two catheter ablation procedures, separated by about a year, neither of which was successful. On December 20, 2008, I Googled "a-fib research", and came across the statement that atrial fibrillation may be triggered in some people by sleeping on their left sides. I decided to restrict my sleeping to my right side (or my back) to see whether that would have any effect on my episodes of a-fib.

I keep a record of my a-fib episodes, and before December 20, 2008, I was in a-fib for very nearly half of the time. After I started sleeping on my right side, the episodes become shorter, and by January 8, 2009, they disappeared altogether. Well, not quite altogether: Occasionally when I played racquetball, if I drove my heart too hard, I would experience an a-fib episode that would last for one or two days. This happened a total of three times before my cardiologist put me on a small dose of Digoxin (0.0625mg/day), and this eliminated the racquetball problem. Right now I feel confident that my a-fib days are over, and apparently all I had to do was roll over in bed!

EFM II

North Lake Property For Sale

The Horn

Atrial fibrillation experience