The Ultimate Answer to Kings

I was going to take the day off entirely – in fact I considered spending the afternoon in bed – because I raised some pressure sores on my stump from all the walking I’ve been doing and they need to heal or they’ll get chronic. But it was such a lovely day.

I ended up spending a couple of hours crawling around under the cabin working on insulation. That’s not as incongruous as it sounds because I have a bunch of insulation piled in my powershed, which is only 8X8, and I need to get it out of there. Best way to do that is to use it for the purpose I saved it to serve.

Anyway, crawling around under the cabin means I’m gritty and filthy and need a bath bad. That means heating a couple of pots of water and getting naked in front of the sink, and the difference between winter and not-winter is whether I can do that without heating the room first. But this afternoon I found I was doing it with the windows open. And that’s a first for the year.

In two months I’ll be taking baths out in the yard with the garden hose and it’ll seem like nothing. But I’ve been cooped up for what seems like a two-year winter, and this is a milestone worth noting.

Ever since the suggestion was made I’ve been kicking myself for not thinking of bolting a wider shelf up there. Never really occurred to me that she’d come back to that spot, to be honest. Too late now, but I guess if she thought it was too narrow she wouldn’t have come back.

🙂 Just saw her. She’s working on a nest in the same spot as last year. I’ll post a picture when I can.

…if you zoom in and squint, it’s right above Ian’s solar panels. Yeah, it was pretty faint and I didn’t have a lot of hope for the photo. We had some very light rain yesterday and the clouds seem to be moving off to the west – or maybe those are incoming, I don’t know.

And this is the prettiest I’ve ever seen the pear tree…

It’s five years old, planted in deeply amended soil from back when the backhoe worked. I pruned it back a bit a couple of days ago. It grows a little (a very little) every year, never looks actively unhealthy, but this is by far the most enthusiastically it ever flowered. And the newly unhibernated bees certainly find it interesting.

I spent much of the morning up in the pantry loft doing something I’ve been putting off for weeks now: Sorting out canned goods. Because I know how to have fun, and also I suspect “best by” dates on cans of meat might turn out not to be completely meaningless.

Yeah – I need to scrounge another shelf.

Anyway, I came down and was making lunch when Torso Boy apparently lost his mind in the other room. He was in the bedroom barking and snarling like Steven King had repeatedly threatened to tell him a bedtime story. I hurried in there to find him fixated on the window facing the driveway, still carrying on. And what was the awful existential threat he was trying to drive away by hurling his unconquerable doggy will at it?

This…

He has pulled this before. For some reason any living thing that he can see approaching his house, no matter how obviously inoffensive, must be threatened with horrible bloody death.

Also he really does seem to have something against small birds in particular.

Betcha can’t guess where the trailer tire was leaking.

Yeah, of course you can. Same thing: The valve stem is rotten.

Who mounts a tire, replacing an obviously years-in-the-sun bald tire, and doesn’t at least check the valve stem?

There’s something I frequently forget/neglect to do when cleaning the Tracker…

The Tracker is chambered for .44 Magnum but it’s a lightweight gun more intended for a lot of carrying than for a lot of shooting so believe me you need a really good reason to feed it a solid diet of Magnums. .44 Special is more than enough for the average varmint, but deafening with that muzzle brake. Magnums are just plain unpleasant.

But Special brass is .10 inch shorter than Magnum brass, which leaves a tiny little gap in the cylinder that can, if you don’t scrub it out from time to time, get filled with powder residue not normally removed with a bore snake.

It can get so bad that you can’t even get a .44 Magnum cartridge in there. That would be fine with me, except…

You think I’m kidding? We really got a couple of bears around here several years ago when there was a big forest fire south of here. And you know what? When a bear gets scared and hungry, it goes looking for people stuff to take. One actually broke into a guy’s house. While he was in the house. He chased it away with a 9mm but the little pistol could just as easily have pissed it off, right? And that’s the same bear that was the reason I found myself crawling under a house with a .45 and a spotlight, wishing I was much smarter and/or had something much bigger – like a tactical nuke.

And that’s why I keep these Bearkiller rounds that a Friend of the Blog sent me when I got the Tracker. Just in case I find myself stuck in that situation again. 300 grain hard cast bullets at 1250 FPS ought to keep a bear interested while you run for your life and call for satchel charges and an artillery strike, right?

I was disappointed with myself that those Bearkillers would barely get into the cylinders because it had been quite a while since I had applied the solvent and brass brush. But we’re okay again now…

In early winter I replaced both trailer tires – the shop that mounted them failed to replace the valve stems which were long since rotted from the sun, and one of the new tires promptly went flat. I haven’t used the trailer since maybe January – but I needed it this morning and really wasn’t all that surprised to find the other tire flat…

Fortunately I didn’t need the trailer very badly. I pulled the tire off this afternoon and brought it back to the Lair but didn’t bother airing it up to diagnose the leak – I’ll do it mañana. It either picked up a nail at the county dump (very possible) or the valve stem failed…

The first hummingbird has been sighted. Not here at the Lair, but nearby. So I rummaged around under the kitchen counter and set up the feeder.

And it is now officially Spring. 🙂

A perfect day for the range! Nobody around at all, light breeze, mid-sixties, not too much sun. I can blaze away to my heart’s content with nobody to be annoyed with me…

Except for .22lr I didn’t even lose any brass in the sand! That’s got to be a first. I have range stakes out at 25, 100, 200, 300 and 400 yards but I’d be lying if I claimed to ever do more than check to see if those last two are still present. The scoped AK can get hits at 200 and monotonously at 100 but I’m hopeless at any range farther than that. Can’t hit what I can’t see, but that’s okay; in 12 years I’ve never even tried a shot in anger at more than 100 yards and varmints don’t shoot back. I’m much more concerned with fast at close range than precise at distance. Which is why I like these ugly guns my betters keep telling me I don’t “need.” They’re made for that. As for the Tracker: I’m sorry to report that the timing issue has deteriorated to the point where the pistol can no longer be called reliable in double action. I had one firing pin strike that actually missed the primer. Shoots just fine in single action and it’s very easy to get 25-30 yard hits with it – but it has not proven to be anybody’s notion of a high quality gun. If Ian reads this he’ll shake his head and say, “I told him so.” I’ll be examining the gun during cleanup to see if it’s shaving bullets – which it probably is. But thumb the hammer back and it works fine.

Junk on the bunk or it didn’t happen, I guess…

Now lunch, then to D&L’s to feed horses – and then I have a lot of cleaning up to do.

I’m a poor man and ammo costs money. The sight of a case of rifle ammo makes me positively Scroogelike – If I fire one round, I no longer possess a whole case of ammo.

There’s also the small matter of neighbors, of which the Gulch has acquired a few over the years. When I make noise at Ian’s perfectly good shooting range, I hear about it. Sometimes I hear about it in complaining tones. That has sort of become an excuse not to spend ammo in practice – but one really must practice.

Yesterday I got word that my two closest neighbors are both going to be away this morning. So we’ll be spending some time and ammo at the range today, and my inner Scrooge can stuff it.

We had a very little frost last night and I worried for the fruit tree since it’s flowering so nice…

But it seems fine. Honestly I don’t ever recall this thing flowering as prodigiously as it is doing this Spring. Maybe because the winter was so wet? Maybe because March was unusually mild – I don’t know.

Not that it’s actually going to fruit, let’s not get crazy…

…oh, wait. Are there any Visigoths left?

This sounded so silly, and the source from which I saw it this morning is so sketchy, that I spent a few minutes following rabbit holes to see if I could find a primary – or at least respectable – source. It appears to have originated on Facebook, so take it for what it’s worth. It’s still funny…

Muslim leader wants Spanish King to apologise for defeating Islam in 1492

The Ishbilia mosque has published a post on Facebook under the name of the Islamic Community itself and its president, Yihad Sarasua, in expressing “the sentiments among Spanish Muslims and those who for certain reasons, reside in Spain, for the lack of conciliation between the Crown and the heirs of the Andalusian legacy.”
“Sir, being the King of Spain, I believe that the historical moment has arrived to carry out the recognition of the vileness, plunder, displacement and murders carried out by orders of the Catholic kings and their most direct collaborators, which culminated with the surrender of Granada and the breach of everything subscribed to the Muslim community”, reads the letter.

Point of information: Didn’t the Muslims invade the Iberian peninsula first? And didn’t they rule there for, like, 800 years of constant warfare before finally being driven out? The counterbalancing reparations would be awesome to behold, especially since I believe the originally aggrieved parties are essentially extinct…

Once upon a time, way back when I was a real person, I had a 35mm camera body and a bunch of half-decent lenses and a casual, half-assed desire to learn landscape photography.

This was way before digital photography meant cameras got so expensive you needed to be a lot more than casual to pursue such things. And anyway I was never any good. There’s quite an art to it…

Not just composition but in juggling technicalities: How do you capture depth? I never came close to getting it right. And anyway, “casual half-assed desire” isn’t the same as talent or even ambition – both of which I completely lacked. If there’s an artistic “type,” I ain’t it.

But on lovely crystalline mornings like this I can picture myself trying to climb peaks with a tripod and a big-ass view camera and a trunkful of glass slides like Ansel frickin’ Adams, looking for that perfect angle and that one perfect moment of light…

Yeah, no. I ain’t got it. 🙂 And it’s for sure there’s only so much you can do taking snapshots with a telephone…

Oh, no. Oh, God, I’ve stumbled into the next target for my daily political 2-minute hate sessions. I KEEP SAYING I’M GOING TO STOP DOING THIS! But…

I suppose it was inevitable. The newest endless prez campaign has begun – or rather is ramping up, since it effectively began in November of 2016. But this (forgive me) feckless broad isn’t even running – yet – so I have no hope she’ll flame out and go away before the conventions. She’s just going to keep doing this to me…

So yeah. Now “we’re” going to “innovate cow grain” so as to regulate cow farts out of existence. The wonders of totalitarianism: There’s literally nothing it can’t promise to do! At least she has backed off on her demands for bovine extinction*.

And get a load of this “town hall” setting! Was there ever a more blatant long-form infomercial? This clip is literally the only part of it I’ve seen, so if I voted I could lay claim to “low-information voter” – not that I’d expect to find a lot of actual information in that travesty.

I’m doomed. It’s gonna be a long campaign.

I’m going for a walk. Maybe I’ll shoot something…

ETA: I meant to add this: Yesterday I stumbled on to a silly and rather chilling movie from 1968, and damned if AOC’s performance in that clip above doesn’t remind me EXACTLY of a character from Wild in the Streets! In which the voting age is lowered to 14, and the first result that hits congress is exactly, precisely like AOC except blonde and a little more obviously stoned.

—
*I mean, yeah, I’m always happiest when cows aren’t wandering around half-wild near me. But I’ve never seriously called for their extinction. This silly twit has probably never seen a cow, and yet sees no problem with demanding that they just be eliminated!

And it’s getting worse by the hour: When the wind gets this way there are disadvantages to being downwind of all that sand. So I’m probably going to go visit the chickens one last time and then spend the afternoon petting Torso Boy while reading a book. But it started so promisingly…

After my long morning walkie I hauled the generator out of the powershed and fired it up…

You might recall that I had to pull the Honda out of mothballs in early January to help some neighbors who got stranded in the snow. That time it was really hard to start, presumably because I should have let the oil warm up indoors first. But this morning it started right up and is ready for another work season.

And it’s going to have its chance…

The patched-together porch floor has been an okay stopgap but it hasn’t lasted as well as hoped. I had to screw down a couple of popped-up corners this morning. Fortunately Big Brother wants to come for another visit to help me finish the porch – it’ll get a roof in time for the sunny solstice! And hopefully a more durable 2X6 floor, though that’s secondary. Looks like I’ll be ordering components soon!

And this morning I decided to do something kind of optimistic…

I put the woodstove to bed and got the long wall into summer mode. All the leftover firewood went back to the shed and I’ve hauled out the dog bed Terrapod sent a few months ago. I don’t know if Laddie will consent to use it but he might: He gets upset with me if I spend too much time with my back to the world playing on the ‘pooter, and might prefer to have a bed in the main room. That’s the theory, anyway.

Emptying the ash pail at the pit beside the wash turned out to be kind of a mistake because the wind had already come up: I probably should have put that off till early morning. But it didn’t make too much of a mess and there’s no way there’s still live coals. There was only a day’s accumulation of ash and I haven’t used the stove in over a week.

And now I guess I’d best go out in the wind to check on chickens…

“Mind your language.”

Yes, it’s that time of year again. That time that all Ruger Mark Whatever owners dread more than being invited by your wife to go see a screening of Dead Poet’s Society. It’s absolutely time to stop putting off cleaning your .22 pistol. Continue reading →

Okay, so my sick girl was still alive this morning, but still obviously very sick. I’m surprised she hung on as long as she did, because normally when a hen puts her face to the wall she’s dead within a day. But she wasn’t getting better and clearly wasn’t going to get better, so I spread a bunch of sunflower seeds out in the chicken yard and shooed all the hens that would go out there to enjoy. Then I shot the sick one in the head with my 22/45.

I figure brain destruction must be the surest, quickest and most humane way to turn a chicken* off but visually it’s spectacular, even upsetting the first few times until you’re used to it. Like when you decap them, the body goes nuts until it runs out of blood pressure or whatever. So she flopped around for a while, ending up near the outside door where I trapped the body between my feet until it ran down. Didn’t want her flopping out into the yard where I’d put all the other hens so they didn’t have to watch, right? Guess I should have taken her outside entirely.

I picked up the body and took it out to a box in the Jeep so I could toss it into the boonies on my way home. Went inside to finish my chicken chores, and…

“Blood! Delicious blood! Get it while you can!”

Yeah, they were all broken up…

—
*Works the same way with rabbits. A headshot makes them flop all over the place even when they have to be dead as rocks.