Me so handy

There are days when I think I’m never going to get this right. I’m too clueless to ever live a free life. I should get a subsidized apartment in a housing project and spend the rest of my miserable, unworthy life on welfare.

Then there are days when I think, “Fear me, Powers That Be! For I am the coolest old fart that ever retired to a shack in the desert!”

Got all the water back on line today. Yes! The repairs I made to the water supply held up nicely, and only needed to be insulated against the cold and reburied. That took less than an hour.

But there was still the problem of that frozen drain line. I pulled it apart this morning and flushed it out with water from the hose. Much kitchen grease, hair, and unidentifiable smelly goo flowed into the grey water ditch. Put it all back together, reconnected the sink trap, and it’s working fine again.

Still had to bury the cistern manifold, and that would be complex. Load the boys in the Jeep. Gas the Jeep from Landlady’s five-gallon cans I’ve been stockpiling. Hm…need to do something about that right rear tire, which is low again. It’s got a rock or something stuck in it and I can’t find the leak, but it goes down ever three weeks or so. Drive toward Landlady’s. Stop at the cistern and wrap the valve cover with insulation and plastic. Go to Landlady’s, fire up the compressor. While I’m waiting I check the electrolyte levels in her batteries: So far, so good. Air up the tire. Drive back to M’s.

M’s tractor has had charging issues lately. If it’s the alternator we’re hosed, because nobody’s got more money to sink into the old thing since it failed to perform its primary function of covering M’s Dome. But it’s still god’s own hole-digger, and there’s no question that the battery cable clamps do not make tight contact. Maybe it’s that simple. Last time I went to town I bought two new clamps.

Cut the ends off the cables. Install the new clamps. I took the battery out weeks ago, and it’s spent most of the winter inside M’s powerhouse getting worked over by my Battery-Minder. (Very useful tool. Donated by friend-of-the-gulch S some years ago, and put to much good use since then.)

Take the boys back to the Lair. Install the tractor’s battery, fire him up. Since M hired some professionals to do the work I failed to do last summer, there’s been an extremely handy road out to the wash that they dug to harvest sand. I make two runs out there, and dump two bucket-loads on top of the cistern manifold and valves. Grab my shovel out of the backhoe bucket and pile it high over the manifold. That should hopefully do the trick for the rest of the winter.

The weather has been very iffy. It’s sunny, then it clabbers up and rains, now it’s sunny again. My batteries haven’t hit float in three days, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the ‘pooter. But I’m feeling pretty good about getting the water working again, and now I’m going to bake bread.

Hope you have at least half as nice a Sunday!