As far as being prepared is concerned, when you live out in the country, having a generator is not even an option. Power outages happen all the time on the count of trees hitting lines or lightning or whatever. The power company usually doesn't get to us immediately if its serious enough so we have to be prepared for the inevitable power outage. Even better is having two generators. We ended up getting a hold of my mother's old generator after she upgrades to a whole house generator. While it worked back then, fast forward to now and the generator is in need of some service. The thing that is most likely to go wrong on any small engine is the carburetor. In this case we found out the generator needed a carburetor when we needed to fire it up during a power outage. When the unit wouldn't stay running without starting fluid we had to go to our old genny for the backup. While it was a good thing to have the second genny on hand, it also meant getting this unit back up and running more sooner than later. I ordered another carburetor online for the genny and once it showed up I got to work. The old carb was held on with two nuts holding the unit on the studs in the engine. The new carb came with the gasket and the couple of extra choke lever configurations typically used on this carb. The new unit went on pretty fast all things considered. The old carburetor was rather grungy looking which explained a lot. After replacing the generator I had to give the thing many pulls before the engine could pull gas through the carburetor but once it did the machine fired right up. Our other generator always needs a shot of starting fluid in order to get it started but this one fired right up and ran pretty good. I let the thing run a good 15 minutes before shutting the fuel valve to let the carb drain back out so when it sits up there won't be any gas in the carb to gum things up. We are now back in business with two full size generators ready for use. The next little side project I did was plant a few plants we had within the rock garden. we had a yucca plant that was in a pot for the longest time on the porch and a couple of newly acquired aloe vera plants that were small that I figured would make good residents within the rock garden. The yucca plant is over 3 ft tall and is in dire need of a transplant to a bigger area. I went ahead and moved the lava rock out from the area I designated as the planting spot for this plant and tore the plastic I had on the ground prior to laying down the rock. I dug out a good five gallons worth of the shitty native soil and pulled the yucca from its pot and laid it in the hole. I had some potting soil left so I put some of that around the plant to further fill the hole before putting the plastic back over the area and moving the rocks back around the plant. I did the same thing with the aloe plants, except I didn't have to move as much dirt since the plants are in small containers, approx a quart in size. I was able to get these two plants in the ground, spaced a couple of feet apart from one another and from the yucca, which itself is spaced a couple feet away from the citrus trees that are still in the ground in the same area doing rather fine. With these three plants in the ground within the rock garden, I probably have room for two more plants before I can sign off on completing the planting of the rock garden.
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