Oh, look what I’ve got.
Inside that plywood box is a gasoline generator with which I have managed to amass quite a history. I really don’t know what I did to deserve it.
It arrived on Landlady’s property, attached to the back of a fifth-wheel RV trailer that came to be called the White Whale. It had not been started in ages, and certainly did not run at the time. And it was sealed, absolutely sealed inside this big box that was clearly constructed by Noah to survive the flood. Which is a pretty dumb thing to do to an air-cooled engine. It took longer to get the top off the box than it did to clean the carb and get the engine running again.
Anyway, the folks who owned the trailer sold it and moved on. It ended up in the possession of one of our neighbors, and while the trailer has been put to good use he didn’t want the generator either. And so even though I got it running for him a second time it sat without being run, and so stopped working on command. He eventually took it off the trailer, trundled it into a corner of his yard, and there it sat.
About a week ago he started pressuring me to take it off his hands. I told him flat out I didn’t want it. I have little use for a generator, and in my opinion if you aren’t going to use it regularly it’s just another thing to pointlessly maintain. I don’t even know if it’s worth fixing properly.
But he’s a good customer, so if he wanted it gone I’d get rid of it for him whether I can really use it or not. This was why I needed to get Ian’s tractor working, so I could unnecessarily complicate my life with this thing. Ah, well. The first thing I’m going to do, once I’ve got it in a place where I can work on it, is take a crowbar to that dumb box.
