Don't you just hate it when your tractor dies in the middle of a field of dry grass, and when you go to investigate, gasoline is gushing over the hot engine? I know I do!

Gas was pouring out of the air cleaner side of the carburetor and out of the the fitting of the bottom of the gas tank as well. Not good!

I took off the gas cap to see what the deal was, and there an enormous "whoosh" and the cap shot up ten feet into the air.

After finding the cap again, I verified that it said "Vented" on it. You couldn't prove it by me. What the heck?

The gas continued to leak out the carburetor after the pressure was relieved, but banging on the carburetor with a wrench recalled it to its duty. The pressure must have jammed the carburetor floats temporarily.

Here's a picture of my tractor during an outbreak of teenagers a while back:

Now I'm down to an annoying slow leak at the outlet of the gas tank, of maybe a drop a minute. The pressure must have distorted the O-ring. This is not an easy part to get at. I may have to take the top cowling off. Grumble, grumble.

So what the heck happened? I thought all vented gas caps were the same -- basically a gas cap with a hole in it to keep the tank from building up any pressure (or vacuum). But unless the cap I had was simply defective, this is clearly not the case.

The cap wasn't specifically recommended for a Ford 600-series tractor, it's just that I noticed that a cap for my 1972 Ford F100 pickup also fit my tractor. I needed a new gas cap because I lost mine and Ford/New Holland no longer carries them. On the theory that all unvented gas caps were the same, I got the vented version of the one for my pickup. This clearly was a mistake.

The smart thing to do would have been to go to Yesterday's Tractors and order the right gas cap. They've got everything, including forums with good advice. Check 'em out. I ordered the right gas cap and that should be that.

So the take-away here is that gas caps contain mysteries that are beyond mortal ken. Buy an exact replacement.

[Later:] I thought I had the gas tank fixed, but it turned out it still had a slow leak. After considerable fiddling around, it turned out to be a leak in the tank itself, rather than at the valve. I have ordered a new gas tank.

[Later still:] This is a serious problem! I've discovered several things:

• Cheap Chinese gas caps sometimes contain parts that dissolve in gasoline! I am not making this up. Buy a name-brand cap, like Stant.
• Even with the recommended Stant gas cap, the tank would over-pressurize and leak. The problem seems to be that putting a gas tank directly above the engine isn't the smartest thing in the world, and the hot engine pressurizes the tank beyond what the gas cap's vent can deal with. In the end, I used the trick I read about on Yesterday's Tractors: there's a spring-loaded plastic button on the inside of the gas cap in the center. That's the vent. Drill a teeny-tiny hole in it. This gives you a non-pressurized gas tank.

Earlier tractors like the Ford N series had non-pressurized tanks, with a dome built into the top of the tank with a pinhole in the top and bottom to vent off gases. I'd rather have a proper spring-loaded vent (since it reduces emissions and minimizes the amount of gas that dribbles out if the tractor turns over), but I have to select something that works over something that doesn't.

The safety issue, by the way, is why old tractors have metal gas lines rather than rubber ones. Because they use gravity feed rather than a fuel pump, turning off the ignition does nothing to stop the flow of gasoline. If you ever feel moved to use a rubber fuel line, you need to put a fuel shutoff solenoid between the tank and the rubber, and have it turn on and off with the ignition. Such shutoffs are available.

P.S. Check out my other tractor pages.

Before I landed my current job working remotely for Citrix Systems, I was a free-lance technical writer for about ten years, and I had a page designed to draw in business. Yesterday, I finally got around to ripping all the irrelevant stuff out, and what remains are a few articles about my life as a technical writer and technical writing in general. Check it out!

Technical writing is a very strange line of work. It centers around the intersection between product development and publishing, two very different lines of work.

Then there's the fundamental problem of writing: it's hard. It's almost impossible to get started, and it's easy to stop. Once you're in the zone, you don't want to stop until you're done. It's "lock yourself in your office and turn off the phone" work. Different writers have different ways of coping with the problem, which, taken as a whole, tend to explain why people think we're weird.

I like the "total immersion" method of technical writing: learn everything I can about the topic so that when I start writing, I can plow through to the end without stopping. But that's just one of many approaches.

One thing that surprises people is that there really isn't any difference between "technical writing" and "nonfiction writing" in terms of how the actual writing step works. Technical writing just means that you're writing how-to stuff about a product (mostly user's guides and reference manuals) and you're probably being paid by the product's manufacturer. In othe words, a book about bass fishing is technical writing if its title is "Catching Bass with the Gizmo Complete Bass Fishing System," but it's not if the title is, "Backwoods Bass-Fishing Secrets." This means that general nonfiction writing skills all transfer to technical writing and vice versa.

My technical writing site is HighTechWriting.com.

Suppose you bought 100 pullets from the lowest-price hatchery you could find, and 100 pullets from an expensive hatchery. What do you think the results would be?

I don't know if anyone has tried this recently, but I found this very experiment in an old British poultry magazine. The results went like this:

The box from the expensive hatchery had more chicks in it (something like 106), and they were all alive. The chicks were energetic and did very well during the brooder period. The order was for pullets, and what was delivered were pullets.

The box from the cheap hatchery had no extra chicks in it. Some of the chicks were dead. The chicks were did less well during the brooder period. Many of the pullets were really cockerels.

(I wish I hadn't lost the reference to the article, because I'd like to quote it directly, but you get the idea.)

So what's up with that? The explanation goes like this: Suppose you're running a hatchery, but you're not very good at it, and you get complaints about quality. You need more money to put the kids through college. You have two choices:

• Clean up your act and produce a product that can compete with the best.
• Lower your prices to attract cheapskates. Cheapskates ignore quality and buy solely on price.

On the other hand, suppose you run the best hatchery anywhere, but profits are disappointing and you need more money to put the kids through college. Your choices are:

• Find more sources of efficiency so you can make enough money to live on without raising prices.
• Raise prices.

The difference between the options at the two hatcheries will eventually mean that the crummy hatcheries are all cheap and the good ones are all expensive.

Take-way: never buy from the low-price leader. It's not just that cheap chicks are more expensive in the long run, it's that it's so depressing to have them die on you. You should insure yourself against disappointment by buying quality chicks.

Actually, the best thing to do is to ask around and see where the most successful local poultry folks buy their baby chicks. If you're raising show birds, ask the show-bird raisers, since the commercial guys won't know, and vice versa.

I always buy from Privett Hatchery in Portales NM, since in my opinion they're the best hatchery in the West. I've tried 'em all, and their commercial-quality layers are very good. I use Phinney Hatchery in Walla Walla as my backup hatchery. I'm less familiar with hatcheries in other parts of the country, but I know that there are good ones and bad ones. Probably most of the well-known ones are good ones: Murray McMurray Hatchery, Ideal Hatchery, Stromberg's, Moyer's, Belt.

I go into this topic (plus many more) in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. If you don't have a copy, you should. I went through an enormous amount of source material and tried all sorts of different techniques before I wrote the book, all aimed at keeping your baby chicks happy and healthy, giving you that wonderful baby-chick experience that's what attracts us to poultrykeeping in the first place. I can guarantee that it will be worth purchasing, even if you're an experienced poultrykeeper. And that goes double for beginners, because there's a lot to learn, if you don't get good results with your first batch of chicks, the heartbreak of letting down the baby birds who are so dependent on you will likely leave you discouraged, and you might never try again.

I'm told that SUVs and trucks have lost a big fraction of their resale value because they get crummy gas mileage. So it's a good time to buy.

Not me, though. I've had mine for years -- a 1972 F100 pickup, that I bought ten years ago for $650. It has a 390 cubic inch V-8 and gets 10 MPG. Its low gas mileage has never been a problem, because we don't use it for anything but hauling. And that's the point. If you live in the country, you need a vehicle that can haul a lot of stuff -- feed, hay, lumber, firewood -- whatever. You can have an economy car, too (I do), but you need a hauler.

Admittedly, my truck needs a lot of TLC, or possibly a wrecking ball. It's a buyer's market out there, though, so if you look around, you can probably find a good deal on something nice, whether it's a truck or an SUV.

Let's assume that you're like us -- too cheap to buy a vehicle built in this century. The trick with old vehicles is to have a spare, but you must keep the spare running. For example, there are two drivers in our family, so the working minimum is three vehicles: Two to drive, one in the shop.

For a lot of people, it's so inconvenient to leave a car in the shop for a few days that they never do -- until it dies. A spare vehicle makes it a lot easier to get the other ones repaired. It's not that they need to be repaired very often, it's just a hassle when you live way out of town. Also, it's helpful to have a spare so if something happens to your regular car -- a flat tire, say -- you can drive the other car if you're in a hurry, and attend to the first one later.

If you insist on doing your own repairs, you can justify one more spare. But don't accumulate dead cars with the idea that they count. By definition, a spare is a car that will run whenever you want it to -- not one that runs in some vague, theoretical sense. Spouses should be given carte blanche to take their personal vehicles into the shop at will, even if you think you're god's gift to car repair and will get around to it any month now.

When Karen was looking around for a pickup, everyone said she should buy a Toyota, even people who were sitting inside Ford pickups at the time. ("His and hers" pickups are every couple's dream, right?) She ended up with a 1996 Toyota T100 3/4 ton extended cab pickup and has been very happy with it. It gets about 18 MPG. The word on the street is that the Toyota's have a very effective 4WD and are much less likely to get stuck on wet pastures than other rigs, and they seem to last forever. We were tired of towing my pickup out with the tractor.

I have a 1990 Isuzu Trooper SUV, which I like well enough. Its 4WD isn't as good as the Toyota's, and it's only rated for a half-ton load, but it seats four in reasonable comfort and five in reasonable discomfort, and it's been very reliable through 200,000 miles, though it needed a cylinder head replaced when it was about 15 years old. I'm not very familiar with the other SUVs on the market, but if you need to haul a bunch of stuff and maybe seat 4-5 people at the same time, an SUV is the only way to go.

We used to have a Ford Taurus station wagon, which we hauled feed in all the time, and it tended to eat shocks, tie rods, tires, and other parts. So I figure that hauling needs to be done in a vehicle designed for the task -- one with a commercial chassis -- a truck, SUV, or full-sized van.

Cell phones could have been invented for farmers, just to make it possible to get in touch with spouses who are in town on one errand and vector them off on another -- for a hundred pounds of chick starter, say. I got my first cell phone after moving back to the country.

Eventually I'll have an iPhone, but the first rule of rural cell-phones is, "Use the carrier with the strongest signal at your house." For me, that's Verizon. For the iPhone, I'd need AT&T, and their signal stinks out here.

But I digress. I was going to talk about the iPod Touch, which pretends to be an MP3 player but is really a PDA, portable Web browser, video player, and many other things.

With the new 2.0 software release, the iPod Touch has suddenly become a very capable machine. It connects easily to the corporate email of my day job at Citrix Systems, so I can check my mail wherever I am, if there's a wireless signal. And there generally is, these days. And I'm delighted by OmniFocus, a fancy task manager for the iPod Touch and iPhone you can download for twenty bucks.

The iPod Touch uses any available wireless access point to figure out where you are (this works even if you can't connect to the access point). This is integrated with Google Maps and OmniFocus. Google Maps can give you directions and do location-based searches from where you are. OmniFocus can give you to-do lists (like shopping lists, sorted nearest-first. Very handy.

The technology for this is based on a huge database of wireless access point locations, that were compiled by having people drive up and down every highway and every street in every town. Wireless access points broadcast their Ethernet addresses even when they have been secured in every other way, so every one of them acts as a beacon. If you can hear just one access point, you know where you are in general terms. With three, you can use triangulation to pinpoint your location. All of this is done automatically in the software.

The process is very accurate -- so accurate that if I put an access point in my barn, it could probably pinpoint my location on the farm, so if I'm on the back forty, the back-forty to-do items would jump to the top of the list.

Now, if you're in the country, the drivers haven't bumped down your road, so your wireless access point isn't in the database. But this has been taken care of, too. Skyhook Wireless (the people who are doing all the driving and maintaining the location database) has a page where you can submit locations of access points not on their list. I've submitted mine! It takes a variable amount of time for the results to show up. My iPod Touch still doesn't know where it is when I'm home.

If you're going to use an iPod Touch or iPhone while doing chores, like I do (I listen to audiobooks all the time -- right now I'm listening to "The Civil War" by Shelby Foote), get a rubber cover and a screen protector for it so it will bounce instead of breaking, and so it doesn't get exposed to too much dampness. I use a ShieldZone Top Skin and have been very happy with it.

I hate roost mites. Roost mites (or chicken mites, or red mites) are nearly invisible blood-suckers that are transmitted to chickens by wild birds. They multiply like crazy in warm weather. They bother the chickens and can even kill them under the right circumstances. And I hate that creepy-crawly feeling! Ewww! Get 'em off me! Humans are a non-target species, but still ... yuck!

I have an article about them here. Roost mites live in cracks and crevices in the chicken house, in littler, and especially on roosts and in nest boxes. Roost mites are easy to control once you know they're there, but they're pretty stealthy -- right up to the point where their population explodes and they're everywhere. Roost mites are particularly dangerous to broody hens, who sit around in the danger zone 24/7, instead of spending all day outdoors like the rest of the hens.

While roost mites are easily killed with insecticide, this doesn't kill the eggs, so it usually takes at least two applications to get 'em. More, if you miss any. I don't know about you, but spending my summers spraying houses over and over with bug poison is not why I got into alternative agriculture. It's unaesthetic.

Still, you gotta take care of the hens. When using insecticide, I prefer Malathion, which has almost no persistence at all (its half-life is only eight hours), so pesticide build-up is a non-issue. It's also nearly impossible to poison a chicken or yourself with Malathion. Some of the things recommended in old-time poultry books were amazingly toxic (nicotine sulfate, sodium fluoride), or poisonous, carcinogenic, and generally disgusting (creosote). Don't use those.

For longer-lasting protection, the traditional solution is a good one: oil the roosts with any kind of non-drying oil, and it will kill the mites. The oil will stay liquid and potent, at least in the cracks and crevices where the mites prefer to hide. Many oils have been used for this. Linseed oil works and smells great. Used motor oil also works great and is free, but it's less pleasant than other oils. I changed the oil in my tractor yesterday and used the old oil to paint roosts areas around nest boxes that looked like it could use it. The dry wood soaked up the oil very quickly, so it's not like the chickens are going to leave oily footprints everywhere. If I'd had a bucket of used french-fry oil, I would have used that, though I'm a little concerned that edible oils might attract mold or insects or french-fry pixies or something. I'll try it someday.

The last time I did this, the treated areas seemed to stay mite-free for over a year, in spite of the wood seeming completely dry to me. Mites are almost microscopic, so no doubt they experience things differently.

As always, it turned out that anything that causes me to spend time in the chicken house resulted in my noticing things I'd missed before. (Half of farming consists of slowing down and paying attention.) I found mite-filled areas in places under the nest boxes where I had never suspected them before, though I've had that nest house for years.

The last time I did this, the oil smelled to high heaven. Something must have been wrong with the engine that the oil came out of, or the oil must have been a million years old. (Well, okay, all oil is a million years old. That's why they call it a fossil fuel. But you know what I mean.) This time, it didn't smell at all. Painting roosts is an odd way to monitor engine health, but there you go.

The other things I need to do are to reattach the door to the nest house so I can exclude the hens at night and keep the broodies out of there (It blew off in a windstorm and I haven't gotten around to reattaching it, since I usually leave it wide open anyway) and move all the houses to a new patch of ground, which will leave most of the surviving mites behind. Finally, I'll take my remaining wood-stove ashes and dump them in the hens' favorite dust-bathing sites. Juicing up the dust baths with ashes helps rid the hens of lice and mites.

We found a couple of additional game trails with telltale feathers here and there, showing that chickens had been taken that way by predators, and we set some more snares. So far we've caught a large raccoon in addition to the previously reported bobcat, and predation seems to be down.

I should mention that I learned predator control partly from the local Federal trapper (courtesy of the USDA-APHIS Wildlife Damage Program), partly from the instructional DVD that came with the Dakotaline Snare Package I bought to get myself started with my own snaring, and partly from Hal Sullivan's excellent book, Snaring 2000

The latter two products get you up and running very quickly and easily. Catching predators with snares is easier and far more targeted than I thought. This is partly due to changes in snaring technology that have taken place over the past 20 years or so, and partly due to the fact that game trails are laughably easy to identify. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a game trail with chicken feathers on it, that heads straight onto my chicken pasture (through the electric fence), is not the work of an innocent creature.

I only recently started using snares. I used to rely on the Federal trapper. Unfortunately, the Wildlife Damage Service relies on matching funds from the county, and Benton County (in spite of being the home of an agricultural college) is run by clueless city slickers who think that all wildlife is cute and cuddly. Their understanding of rural issues is still at the Little Golden Book level.

In general, if you have a farm, you want to live in a rural county, where county government is run by farmers, since they know what's what in the country. Ideally, you would be in a rural county that's adjacent to an urban one, thus giving you a city market without having to put up with city cluelessness.

My 1975 VW Rabbit came home rejuvenated from the shop today. (As I wrote in an earlier post, restoring my 33-year-old Rabbit, which has been in my family since it was new, is the method I've chosen for achieving better gas mileage). Its main problem was that it had about a half-inch of rusty sludge in the bottom of the gas tank. This (and the underlying problem of water finding its way into the gas tank) had caused a variety of problems. The good people at the Independent Auto Werks in Corvallis cleaned the tank, blew out the fuel lines, did a partial rebuild of the carburetor (including replacing a clogged idle jet -- no wonder it didn't want to run!), and now the car is running better than it has in years, maybe decades.

An old Rabbit handles like an old-fashioned British sports car -- stiff suspension, responsive steering, with a little engine but also very lightweight. They're fun to drive but can carry a lot of stuff, though I'd take something bigger if I were making a special trip to the feed mill.

In a while I'll take it down to the body shop run by one of my neighbors (G&R Body Shop in Philomath, Oregon) and see what it will take to get it prepped and painted.

So far, this project looks to be a lot cheaper and more fun than getting a newer subcompact economy car, and the gas mileage ought to be about the same as a new one. (Actually, this old Rabbit gets about 30 MPG, while a brand-new one only gets about 25 MPG). And it amuses me that the car I learned to drive on has gone from "new car" to "used car," "old car," "piece of junk," and "collectible classic."

I found a bobcat in one of my snares yesterday, which was Day Three of having snares out. It was a big male -- 26 pounds. Most my chicken losses are consistent with how bobcats hunt (dawn or dusk, with a short chase, a quick kill, and the chicken carried away without being dragged), but I think I'm losing chickens faster than can be explained by a single bobcat, however big, so I'll keep up my anti-predator efforts.

My flock size and egg output are down to shockingly low levels, thanks to large numbers of hens vanishing without a trace. I only had 13 dozen to take to the Farmer's Market on Saturday, where a few weeks ago I was routinely selling over 50 dozen even on a slow day.

The stealthiness of the local predators probably means that I can't rely on the electric fence as my only permanent anti-predator measure -- I have to do more.

Living in the country requires trade-offs, and so does farming. Taking vacations in February instead of August, for example.

Sometimes the trade-offs seem like a good deal. Corvallis has an excellent fireworks display every Fourth of July, but we are so far north that the city waits until it's fully dark at about 10:15 PM before starting the display. After it's done, there's a brief traffic jam and then (if you're me) a half-hour drive home.

I decided a while back to never drive if it's past my bedtime. It's way too dangerous. So we spend the night in Corvallis at the Super 8 motel. The odd-numbered rooms on the third floor have a wonderful view of the fireworks. So much for late-night driving!

An added bonus is that the Riverfront Park in front of the motel is swarmed by holiday-goers who set off their store-bought fireworks while waiting for the Main Event. It's a madhouse, but in a good way. My kids like joining in.

Our fourteen-year-old, Karl, who is autistic, found the flash and bang a little overwhelming (even with a set of hearing protectors on), and was greatly delighted to be able to retreat into the motel room, where he could still see and hear everything.

(If you have an autistic kid who hasn't tried hearing protectors (Karl likes the standard 3M over-the-ear kind), give it a whirl. Karl can enjoy environments he found overpowering before.)

This year, with the Fourth of July on a Friday, we loaded the van with all our Farmer's Market stuff so we'd be ready for the market the next morning. In fact, the motel is only two blocks away from the market.

Not too many years ago, I wouldn't have sprung for a motel room, on the grounds of misplaced macho. It's better to focus on what's going to provide the best outing, and to cut oneself some slack into the bargain.