REWahoo
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give
…and no, it isn’t what you think.
As is customary when retiring, I made a long list of projects (43) I wanted to get done around the house. Fortunately I set no deadlines on any of them, which was a wise move since 18 months after retiring I have just now passed the halfway point and don't give the list much thought. (Hey, priorities change.
) I did unexpectedly complete one project today, one I had been ignoring because I thought it was going to be expensive to accomplish.
25 years ago I bought DW a very nice grandfather clock for Mothers Day. It survived several moves with no problem, but after selling our house in 1997 and moving to a rental while we built our retirement “dream home”, it stopped working. I’m reasonably handy with mechanical devices, but I could not see anything wrong with it. The clock would run for 15-20 minutes, and then stop. I tinkered with every setting, cleaned and oiled all the moving parts, but nothing worked. When we moved into the new house 8 years ago we placed the clock in the entry way and it has been sitting there ever since, giving the correct time twice daily.
I looked into the cost of getting it repaired and found there weren’t many grandfather clock repair shops around, and those who did work on them were very proud of their work. I considered ordering and replacing the entire clock mechanism, but that was even more expensive, running almost $1,000! DW has been very patient, but we were doing some furniture rearranging today and she said (and meant it), “We need to get that clock fixed or get rid of it!”
Resigning myself to spend some serious cash on repairs, I decided to take one more look at it. And what do you know, I noticed the point where the pendulum hooks over a small pin in the clock mechanism was off center ever so slightly. I made a small adjustment, started the clock, and after sitting silent for 9 years it has been running perfectly for the past five hours!
It helps to be good, but it helps even more to be lucky…
As is customary when retiring, I made a long list of projects (43) I wanted to get done around the house. Fortunately I set no deadlines on any of them, which was a wise move since 18 months after retiring I have just now passed the halfway point and don't give the list much thought. (Hey, priorities change.
) I did unexpectedly complete one project today, one I had been ignoring because I thought it was going to be expensive to accomplish.25 years ago I bought DW a very nice grandfather clock for Mothers Day. It survived several moves with no problem, but after selling our house in 1997 and moving to a rental while we built our retirement “dream home”, it stopped working. I’m reasonably handy with mechanical devices, but I could not see anything wrong with it. The clock would run for 15-20 minutes, and then stop. I tinkered with every setting, cleaned and oiled all the moving parts, but nothing worked. When we moved into the new house 8 years ago we placed the clock in the entry way and it has been sitting there ever since, giving the correct time twice daily.
I looked into the cost of getting it repaired and found there weren’t many grandfather clock repair shops around, and those who did work on them were very proud of their work. I considered ordering and replacing the entire clock mechanism, but that was even more expensive, running almost $1,000! DW has been very patient, but we were doing some furniture rearranging today and she said (and meant it), “We need to get that clock fixed or get rid of it!”
Resigning myself to spend some serious cash on repairs, I decided to take one more look at it. And what do you know, I noticed the point where the pendulum hooks over a small pin in the clock mechanism was off center ever so slightly. I made a small adjustment, started the clock, and after sitting silent for 9 years it has been running perfectly for the past five hours!
It helps to be good, but it helps even more to be lucky…
