Paul Nordberg
My activities & loves
Paul Nordberg
My activities & loves
Milwaukee Tool has a strong reputation for quality and reliability. As I read somewhere, you may still have the Milwaukee drill that belonged to your grandfather. Actually, I do have one I bought some fifty years old, and it is still going strong.
I also have a bench grinder of the same vintage. After five decades, one of its ball bearings was worn and screeching dreadfully. I bought a pair of bearings for $8.95 each. I was surprised and impressed that the parts were still available, though Milwaukee has ceased making bench grinders of all kinds.
As a comparison, a few years ago I bought a hand-held grinder made by another well-reputed company. The tool bearings gave out after a year and a half. On investigation, I found that bearing replacement was not a service an owner could perform. The nearest factory-owned repair shop is forty miles away from me.
Small repair shops have gone the way of small retail businesses.
It's spring, when everything comes back to life again.
Except when it doesn't.
I have been very careful in selection of trees and shrubs for planting in my yard, limiting the choices to varieties I have long seen flourishing in the area. I plant an experimental specimen and observe it for at least a year before adding others of its kind.
This year, things are not looking very good. My rhododendrons, a series going back four years, have acquired weevils – which I recognize as a hazard for them. Others up and down the street are doing just fine. There are treatments for this issue, but the better ones are laborious and work only for the short term. (One approach, advocated as environmentally sound, would be to pick the weevils by hand off the bottoms of the leaves at night, using a flashlight).
Beech trees are famously sturdy and long-lived, growing for centuries. Mine, started some fifteen years ago, are developing beech leaf disease, a fatal and incurable ailment thought to be nonnative to America. The disease has emerged nationally only in the last few years, after I planted mine.
An existing elm-like tree, carefully pruned and observed, was apparently in excellent health last fall. It simply did not leaf out this year, no reason apparent. This is not the natural history of Dutch elm disease, which manifests itself gradually.
Sigh.
When I recently went to a sunsetting antique store looking for a cabinet, I happened across a box of rusty woodcarving tools, sculptor's carving gouges, which are quite specialized and very expensive bought new. I told myself, you have more than enough of such stuff already and you won't ever use them. So, I had the self-discipline to pass them by.
I regretted my fortitude frequently and intensely over the next few days. To make a long story short, I returned and bought the tools for $20. New, they would have cost about $400. I have cleaned and sharpened the new tools as well as the old ones.
I enjoy woodworking, as do many others. I draw no particular line between high and low art. I might have built the cabinet I was looking for, but that would have taken a sizeable shop and a lot of heavy machinery, with expenses probably running into five figures.
As far as "Art with a capital A," I am very happy with the result that I achieve (on a good day) with stone carving. The process is something else. Because stone is so hard, the steps are nothing if not planned. Most often, I make a full-scale styrofoam model beforehand. Working the stone is a noisy, dusty process, requiring a lot of personal protective equipment. Most of the time, it needs to be done outdoors. It takes me half an hour to set up and break down a work session. Overall, it typically takes me a year from first sketches to a finished product.
I recently happened across a picture of a carved root that caught my fancy. I am working on an experimental piece of my own now, with pleasing results so far. I can go down to my cellar and work on it for five minutes on whim, and walk away anytime I like. I am elaborating within a form that is intrinsically organic. Nature is more creative and profound than I am.
I wonder if I can find a good source for intriguing stumps.
An earlier version of this website had a lot of material on cooking. I won't start time travel backwards, but I will report one variant on a very common dish that is worthy of note: chicken soup.
Nearly all of the chicken soup recipes I find today include an onion and carrots. The recipe here has neither. It is for a hearty dish that might be considered closer to a stew than a soup. It is a chicken-focused recipe, not a vegetable soup with a broth base.
The key ingredients are a couple of chicken thighs, diced (or less good, a breast), a quarter cup of peeled garlic cloves, some parsley, and a quarter cup of mirin – a rice wine used in Japanese cooking. The mirin adds savoriness, one of five basic tastes.
I agree with the common inclusion of noodles of some sort, or rice.
I enjoy a game of solitaire as part of my evening ritual, just as at other times I enjoy a crossword puzzle (of the British cryptic variety, rewarding cleverness, not the American style, measuring knowledge of trivia from the mass entertainment media). It is a fifteen-minute interlude in a life filled with tasks whose duration is measured in months.
I play a game called Freecell, as did my mother. Heaven knows where she learned it. It was popularized by Microsoft, but I'm sure she didn't get it there. She used a deck of traditional playing cards, as do I. I find it's as useful to keep my hands busy as my mind! – The one in the picture is six years old, two or three times the expected lifetime of an electronic device.
Freecell, unlike the much more popular solitaire games of Klondike and Pyramid, is almost always winnable, and calls for some skill and attention. In fact, it calls for enough of one's attention that other thoughts must be set aside. That is not a bad pre-bedtime condition.
Recently, I looked around to see if there were other solitaire games winnable with skill. I came across Accordion, which comes in different varieties. For a long time, it was considered nearly unwinnable, until somebody figured out an approach that almost always works. It does call for much concentration, so is still widely considered very difficult.
Accordion, unlike most other solitaire games, is not an exercise in sorting, but of matching and collapsing – hence the name. As such, it calls for different skills.
Unfortunately, I found little of value on strategy for the game. There is not even an accepted system of notation for recounting it, as there is for chess or bridge. So, I have created my own brief guide 
and notation system.
The sample game I describe is a relatively easy one. I invite comment.
Accordion does take some space, which is a challenge for someone who tends to build up clutter on the kitchen table. But adjusting that habit would not be a bad thing, either.
Last winter was very mild. The ground barely froze. I was able to get a jump, months early, on a pile of spring chores that is usually overwhelming.
This winter has offered unrelenting cold. The amount of snow has not been great, nor have there been extremely low temperatures. But the days when the thermometer cracks freezing have been few, and when they've come, often with gusty winds. My last monthly gas bill was over $500, far above the norm.
It's January. One should expect such things. I do have more than enough indoor activities, and have been getting better at having a balance of things that require thinking and things that don't. (A warm day, or even a warm afternoon, would be nice for a couple of pending tasks… one will come.)
The snows at least have been pretty ones.
Though early January morning weather has been offering a wind chill factor of 0° F, it turns out that there have been good opportunities for field observation, prompted by my new lichen book.
The growth here is a common greenshield lichen, one of the most prevalent varieties globally and locally. It is a symbiotic combination of a fungus (Parmelia sulcata) and a green microalga (Trebouxia).
The microalga component has the capability of photosynthesis, deriving nutrient energy from the air and sunlight. It is notable here that the lichen displays a greenish tint even in mid-winter, in contrast to most of the deciduous plant life around it, now dead, brown and yellow.
The cells of the fungus are filamentary. As my reference notes, these threadlike structures weave into and around the alga, providing a firm base and skin. The durability of the composite is evident in the photograph. The lichen is still present and evidently alive, hanging loosely around the branch, long after the tree itself has died, the bark has dropped, and the wood itself is in marked decay.
© 2025 Paul Nordberg