The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Another ton of wood pellets at D&L’s place.

Unlike other times I had to take prior precautions to make sure I had two functional legs for this one. The knee is feeling better but this wasn’t the time to indulge in a 10-mile hike or something equally stupid, because…

L can get them off the pallet and onto the tailgate but of the three of us I’m the only one who can still haul 50 bags from the truck to the pile.

And in the end…

…I got some nice hardwood for the woodstove.

Which makes it hard to get your chores done, to say nothing of explaining all those truncated walkies to Tobie the Peripatetic Mutt. But…

…my right knee, which is my only intact knee, started going south on me about a year and a half ago. Just an annoyance until this past week when I got out of bed and couldn’t even fully flex it. I expected to have trouble with the left one when I got old, it was put back together from little pieces. Ironically it’s fine. It’s just the stump that keeps fraying at the end.

The right one got operated on twice: Once to install a big metal spike through my shinbone, then again to remove the spike when it worked its way out and wrecked the cartilage in the knee. I had trouble with the knee for a while in my twenties, then it seemed to heal. Part of getting old is finding out that all that self-congratulation for your healing ability was just waiting to bite you in the ego.

So I’ve been sitting a lot, and taking a lot of ibuprofen and slathering the joint with menthol-smelling goo. It’s not as bad as it was, but I don’t think it’s really going to get better. Maybe next year’s building project will be adding a lame-old-man ramp to the porch.

I think this is as long as I’ve ever gone without posting when the blog was actually working: Sorry about that, just haven’t been in a very talkative mood – besides which nothing special has really been going on. But I have at least been keeping up with the daily stuff, if sometimes only minimally. This morning dawned pleasant, so I caught up with some laundry…

…and that’s probably all the excitement there’ll be for the day.

It’s kinda funny that my most constant seasonal cue is that tree, right across the street from the water vending station Neighbor L and I go to every week.

I guess because there’s nothing better to do while waiting for water bottles to fill than look at the trees. I don’t have much in the way of trees where I live. And that one won’t raise my spirits for another six months or so, when it buds out again.

Speaking of winter…

I reached another milestone this morning, with mild fingertip frostburn for the first time. Picked the wrong gloves.

Speaking of trips to town…

Tobie has become completely spoiled with Jeep rides. He’s plenty old enough and plenty smart enough to know that he never gets a ride when I load the water bottles into the Jeep, and he never used to give me a hard time about it. He just goes to his bed and shoots Guilt Rays at me till I’m gone. But this morning he apparently figured that since Jeep rides have been so abundant lately it was worth a try. Imagine that imploring stare while his hindquarters oscillate so hard you expect them to unscrew from his frontquarters. Alas, Tobie, I’m an old hand at this by now. You can make me feel guilty, but you can’t make me change my mind. You’re not gonna die.

And the last harbinger of winter…

…these damned things. And the poor battered tailgate of my poor worn-out Jeep, which couldn’t take a mild knock from a rolling propane bottle. Shouldn’t have loaded it like that.

Nice sunny day, though. Might hit sixty. So it’s not quite winter yet.

In the Spring my redneck water heater’s hoses were so full of loose scale I couldn’t get any pressure out of the spigot at all. Took forever to clear it all out. I swore that this time I’d take the whole thing down, drain the hoses and leave them on a slope for the winter. Doesn’t take long.

So for the record I did that this time. Putting it all back together will take much longer – but I’d almost certainly have to do it anyway, so this way I at least save the effort of clearing out the inside of the hoses.

This sort of thing has happened before but not for a long time…

The dough basically doesn’t rise in the bowl or the bread pan at all. Stuck with the option of throwing it away or baking it and seeing what will happen I elect to waste some time and propane, and this is the result. Would have been better off not baking it.

What did I do wrong? Probably I absently failed to include some ingredient. Nothing came to mind but I was a little hung over at the time. Anyway: This was useless so it fed the birds and I tried again…

Happily it was a bright sunny day so it didn’t hit my batteries at all. And this one came out fine. Exactly the same recipe. Sometimes life is an adventure, if by adventure I mean sometimes I screw things up for no apparent reason.

Keeping me company while I took laundry off the line…

He’s not always so dignified. Last Sunday at a get-together on SurvivalDave’s deck he met two ladies he doesn’t see often – and we’ve never met a female human he wouldn’t immediately abandon me for. He got so excited that at one point he had to leave the deck and throw up. He did at least have the dignity not to do it on the ladies.

When I picked the fruit in August I had a lot of trouble with the tall vertical branches in the middle, so I determined that before winter I’d prune them off. I hesitated, of course, because that’s a pretty major operation on a tree I don’t want to hurt.

But I think it’ll be more manageable next time the tree fruits.

Tobie had his dinner and immediately began harassing me for his evening walkie. No problem; beautiful day, can’t wait. We got to the top of the climb on the beaten path between the Lair and Ian’s Cave. The moon was just coming up over the eastern hills and it was perfect. I had to have a picture of that. A few minutes later and the light would be all wrong. Of course all I had with me was my phone and that wasn’t up to the job…

Okay, I’ve gotta go home right frickin’ now and get a proper camera. Tobie, no lover of landscape photography, hadn’t yet begun the main business of the evening walkie and wasn’t about to speed things up just for me. He has his own ideas about aesthetics: A proper poop must involve exactly the right setting, the right mood. You can’t rush art, Uncle Joel. He tested and rejected four or five widely-spaced poop spots – toward the end I swear he was just doing it to annoy me.

At last the deed was done and I rushed him back to the Lair with what he clearly considered indecent haste. Got the Treat Ritual out of the way with very little ceremony and rushed into the closet to grab my small camera body. Never mind the lens, it’s probably already too late!

And it pretty much was: The light was going and the moon had already shrunk.

We’re all on wells, we all built our own electrical and plumbing systems, we’re all on solar power which doesn’t always work even in the desert, none of us knew what we were doing, we all get dry water tanks from time to time. But when you take the path Ian and I did, a dry water tank is a much bigger deal.

There are two possible approaches: A standard 110v pump that moves 6-10 gpm at the cost of massive but periodic amperage, or a 15v low-flow pump that runs near-constantly (in daylight) at low amperage, with a much simpler electrical plant, at the cost of, well, low flow. We built that second thing. And now, ten days after I fixed that check valve that emptied the tank …

…the water tank is nearly but still not entirely full. First snow of the season and some cloudy days didn’t help. But I’m at least now sure I fixed the problem and can stop rationing well water.

Due to a parallel but unrelated problem with Ian’s electrical system…

…it took a long time to catch up with laundry. Ian’s electrical was more or less trouble-free for all the summer, which caused me to forget all the trouble I had with it last winter after replacing his eight worn-out L16s with eight much smaller T105s: The trouble being that his pressure pump is a huge amp draw that can easily suck the batteries down to the system’s cut-off point and there’s not enough sun to counteract the effect.

Even in summer the pressure pump is on a 12/12 timer because it’s just really important that the pump not be allowed to run at night. But even at peak solar input the amp draw from the pump is twice what the panels can bring in, and if the batteries get to 80% charge the whole damned system shuts down. And in winter it takes days to fully recharge them with full sun and minimal drain.

So I have to be careful about the washing machine, showers are right out, and I have to keep the pump turned off most of the time. The fridge is also on a timer, and the daylight schedule has gone to 2 hours on/off which is enough to keep frozen stuff frozen without stressing the batteries. Unless, of course, we get a few gloomy days which throws everything off. Basically, that big pump requires bigger batteries and a better-placed solar panel array than it has or is likely to get.

I could – and might – bring the Honda back over to his place. It’ll run the pump without difficulty as long as that’s all it has to do. But I’m reluctant to do that since I can now use it to keep my own batteries topped off. Basically, this is why all sensible people who live on solar also have capable generators. Even in near ideal conditions, sometimes solar still sucks.

Where are those crying in laughter emojis?

Screenshot

From Commenter Eric, I don’t quite know where…

That’s pretty impressive for November.

We don’t usually go into the teens overnight before December. Everything is working fine, the Lair is insulated against far worse now but I was surprised to get this kind of weather so early in the season. It must be man-made climate change: I’m a convert, the new Trump/Biden/Cheney triumvirate should assume emergency powers immediately to save us all.

Hey, it’s no crazier than anything else going on out there.

The snow finally slackened off around 10:30 and I went outside to clean off the solar panels on the ground mount. Turned out I could’ve stayed indoors…

That’s not supposed to happen. Here’s what the roof-mounted panels were like at the same time…

The ground mount panels are at a steeper angle but so were the old ones and they never spontaneously cleared themselves while it was still cold and grey. Is a puzzlement.

ED NOTE: I wrote this yesterday morning but somehow didn’t post it, and didn’t notice that I hadn’t posted it till just now. The last chapter in my latest water hassle.

A couple of cool wet days. Night before last we got our very first minor snowfall…

And yesterday I scored a new check valve even though the old one cleaned up very nicely…

It would have been a little less unpleasant to wait till this afternoon to install it, since it’s supposed to be sunny and sixty. But since it’s supposed to be sunny – and in fact the clouds cleared out overnight – that means I needed to get this thing wrapped up for maximum sunshine on the pump’s solar panel in hope that useful quantities of water will be deposited into the tank before the clouds roll in again. Which they are supposed to do this evening or tomorrow.

And of course installing an in-line valve where there already had been one isn’t the most daunting task ever devised by the evil mind of men, so it didn’t take long at all. I was just about done with the new/improved insulation…

…when I found I hadn’t brought enough duct tape. Not to despair, though…

I never leave home without duct tape, and buried in the center console was a mostly-depleted roll. Heavily infested with dog hair, of course, but otherwise fully functional.

And now I sit back and see. Tobie and I were just up there on morning walkie and the pump is humming happily to itself. Around noon I’ll see how things are going: Experience shows that a difference probably won’t show up on the sink pressure gauge until the air’s been bled out of 300-odd feet of buried pipe.

It’s really snowing out…

It wasn’t supposed to amount to anything – in fact it was forecast to have stopped by now. But I think even Mike would acknowledge that this is at least snowfall.

Two pieces of semi-related good news: This is supposed to be Senior Day at the Palace of Food in the biggish town about 35 miles away. I’m all dressed for it. And when I got up and peeked at the internet to see if an election winner had been announced, I moaned at the prospect of 2-3 hours trapped in a pickup truck with Neighbor L while she hurled curses at the gods for dooming us with the never-sufficiently-demonized Demon Trump, who’s gonna – I dunno, do something demented that’ll kill us all. Unlike those other guys who would have led us to paradise or something. Television has truly become a wasteland, it seems – after I betray the revolution and set myself up as president for life I’m gonna outlaw it.

So the good thing about this snowstorm is that it’s extremely well-timed, sticking all us geriatric hermits in our houses instead of hobbling off to get blown into a ditch – and being trapped in small spaces with other people’s political opinions. If you can call them opinions and not regurgitated agitprop.

The other good thing is that I don’t have to do it without running water…

We had about three quarters of a nice sunny day yesterday and the pump did its job admirably. The tank level is low – I really could have used another sunny day or two – but a workable amount of water is present. Late yesterday I drained the inevitable goop out of the pipe from the tank, and the sink and the toilet are fully functional once more.

So here’s me, cocooning away from the weather and counting my blessings. Hope you all are well.

Unfortunately it’s a little late. I came into the kitchen this morning, looked at the water pressure, and…

Empty tank. Yesterday there was nearly a thousand gallons in there.

Lying in bed last night it occurred to me that there was one possible leak I hadn’t thought of when I was looking for one yesterday morning. The water tank mysteriously emptied itself 13 years ago, and the fix turned out to be installing a check valve in the water hose between the pump and the tank. That check valve has been quietly doing its thing under a bunch of insulation in the wellhouse ever since.

Until now, I think.

It’s overcast and drippy today, so I didn’t expect the pump to be running but it was slightly. When I opened up the flexible pipe I was able to confirm that the pump is pumping. So that’s good. But…

That little valve was stuck. When I finally got it off the pipe it was stuck closed, but just a little fiddling convinced it to stick open. That would have done the job.

I’m shitting into a bucket for the umpteenth time since committing the hubristic act of arranging my own plumbing, but in a way I feel kind of better about the whole situation. When that check valve fails it can empty the water tank fast. I was pretty sure I hadn’t gone a week or more without checking the pressure – in fact I was completely sure of it, but I’ve been wrong before. But if that check valve turns out to have been the problem it was just corrosion and karma, not negligence.

Assuming that really turns out to have been the problem, of course. The valve is soaking in penetrating oil at the moment, not that I really expect that to fix a brass valve. But if I can’t find a replacement early in the week I’ll give it a try anyway and see if it works again.

At the back of my sink is a big goofy-looking water pressure gauge, a gift from Big Brother several years ago, which can tell me when the water tank at the top of the ridge is not filling.

And this morning, probably some days late because I haven’t paid enough attention, it did exactly that.

The pressure is slightly higher when it’s cold out; this time of year before the sun beats on the dark plastic of the tank, the gauge should read about 18 1/2 psi. Instead it read 17. Not a lot of difference, which is why the gauge needs to be so big, so it’s noticeable. But it announced either an active leak or a low level in the water tank.

And unfortunately…

…the level was quite low. Continue reading →

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