Another beautiful day is promised, and I was out in it early to pull the weeds currently trying to take over my yard. Having filled the wheelbarrow with them, I started picking up some of the more ankle-turning and leg-breaking of the rocks that have accumulated from only the gods know where, culminating with having to go get the shovel for one that I swear was not here in autumn…

Of course it was still doing the iceberg thing, and I suspected I was just going to have to live with it. But fortunately it turned out not to be unbeatably large and now it’s in some other part of the yard rather than literally underfoot.

Then I spent an hour or so with the recip saw, going around and cutting brush from paths before I had to go to Neighbor L’s to drop off eggs and laundry. Back to Landlady’s to deliver eggs and give the mousetraps one last check (the bucket trap got another kill) and then…

Well, then I was actually there for quite a while because the Jeep’s back to its old vapor-locking tricks and took a while to cool down and restart. Now it’s back home to cool off and get topped off with coolant and I’m getting ready to bake bread on this lovely, breezy, warm morning. If every day were like this one we’d have to chase the tourists away with guns – far more often than we already do. [/joke]

…why do presidential candidates hate me so much?

As far as I’ve been able to tell, if you discount the old white guys the current favorite for the driver’ seat in the Democrats’ clown car is somebody named Kamala Harris. I don’t keep track of these people so I’m not exactly sure who she is and why she thinks we’d profit from her being in charge – if she even makes any such claim, maybe it’s just a Hillaryesque “I will RULE the WORLD!” sort of thing – but I do know that she has decided to cut that guy Swalwell off at the knees by taking point on “curbing gun violence.” Which of course means “Taking Joel’s favorite toys away.”

You know, I really prefer a world in which I can ignore politics, in the serene knowledge that it’s comfortably ignoring me. But it’s 5:30 in the morning, I’m not quite through with my first cup, and there are no less than four “kamala harris” tabs open on my ‘pooter. AND I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHO SHE IS!

Why don’t politicians ever run against cancer? Or glaucoma – that’d be good. But my guns are kept well-fed and content, and they don’t go out and commit acts of violence on their own. Really. I just asked them, and they swear it’s true.

If there’s some street gang calling itself “The NRA” and slaughtering 40,000 people a year, I sure wish the cops would go arrest them. So Kamala Harris would leave me alone. But now she proposes to just cut the crap and ban guns through royal decree. It won’t “keep our kids and communities safe,” but it’ll cause all sorts of trouble with that basket of deplorables in flyover country and then oddly she’ll run for re-election on her courage in taking bold action. And no doubt the flock will cheer her back into office for it.

Wait. It says here (SIXTH TAB!!) that this Kamala Harris person is a U.S. senator from CALIFORNIA! I lived in California – it’s got really strict gun laws, and all its big cities are hellholes. So clearly “more laws disarming the peaceable taxpayers” isn’t going to solve any “gun violence” problems. Shouldn’t she be expected to know that?

Maybe she should go home and get California in order before she presumes to rule (and disarm) the rest of us.

On my morning walkie I came to the hill overlooking what some people used to call the Claire Cabins…

…not because Claire had anything to do with them. Actually I’m not sure why they called them that. Maybe Claire just liked them.

I’ve written about these buildings before. And it occurred to me this morning that I haven’t visited them since then, going on six years ago. So even though I’m reluctant to go near other peoples’ stuff, it’s pretty clear by now nobody’s coming back here.

So after a bite of lunch, I did.

There are a lot of stories in the naked desert. Here’s one of them. Continue reading →

…there’s always a fee. er…fine. Tax, maybe.

These have been up in the pantry for quite a while, because they’re special and I sort of saved them for a treat. But I happened to notice last week that some packaged food Big Brother sent me a long time ago…

…was already well past its best by date and not the sort of thing where you ought to disregard that. So I looked for something that would go with turkey stuffing, and…

…there you go. Chunk meat of this sort tends to work well in cans, and this was no exception. It’s fully cooked and tastes like it just came off the bird. Mixed with the stuffing, it was so good that…I sort of stuffed myself, as well.

And today, having finally recovered, I got to thinking about what I could with this…

I must confess I’m cheating here, because I already tried this out about five years ago. It hasn’t changed: The texture of this stuff isn’t nearly juicy or gooey enough to squeeze into burgers, and honestly it’s not a taste treat by itself.

But for adding taste and texture to cheap canned spaghetti sauce, of which I have a lot, it’s the bee’s knees. Break it up into the sauce and let it simmer for half an hour or 45 minutes and the beef breaks down so nicely you’ll never know the difference.

Watch your spices because it doesn’t taste exactly like what you get in the supermarket even after simmering, but it’s not bad at all.

And it makes lots. Thanks to the refrigerator at Ian’s place I’ll be lunching on this well into next week.

Torso Boy thought it smelled so good he even wanted in on the action, and he usually isn’t much use for pot-cleaning. Though he liked the turkey and stuffing as well.

So thanks very much to the Generous Readers who’ve been sending canned meat!

What is it with militias and whackos?

Full disclosure: For several-going-on-many years I was provisionally in favor of the militia movement. I suppose I still am, in a theoretical principle kind of way. I kept going in and out of touch with this group or that. It should be a good thing.

But in practice they just don’t work.

For years I’d have said they don’t work because of the snitch problem: The old joke goes something like for every group of three, at least two are confidential informants snitching to the feds on each other. But it finally began to dawn on me that there was another, even more reliable problem: The person in charge is invariably a few cigarettes short of a full pack. Under the best of circumstances, standing too close to that guy is just flat dangerous.

A few days ago Big Brother sent me a link with the annotation, “This is the result when militias fail to resist the impulse to stick their noses in someone else’s business.”

Leader of right-wing militia arrested by FBI ‘for detaining migrant families at gunpoint in New Mexico’

I don’t know anything about the “United Constitutional Patriots,” but it’s well known that militia groups have been active on the border for decades. Back when I was peripherally involved (in the movement, not the activity), the doctrine was “observe and report to the border patrol.” Apparently this bunch took it upon itself to round people up at gunpoint. A more sensible person might detect the immediate downsides of that.

I didn’t give the matter much thought, to be honest. But by the time the CIs in the UCP were through getting their stories straight, it had morphed somewhat…

Militia Leader Arrested For Kidnapping Migrants At Border Previously Said Group Was Training To Assassinate Hillary, Obama

And now we’re getting into Hutaree levels of crazy, no matter how much truth there is in the charge.

This is why the militia movement never went anywhere, and never will. Too much tolerance for crazy.

The desert does enjoy its drama. I may or may not be making an afternoon chicken run today.

Just got back from my morning walkie.

I was promised cool weather and thunderstorms for today. The forecast still says afternoon t-storms, but right now it’s looking like sunny and warm. Had a lovely walkie but I’m trying to take it easier because I’ve been fraying the end of my stump lately. Still waiting for those callouses I was promised…47 years ago.

The “get Joel’s wind back after he sat around all winter” project is coming along nicely, but I need to find something useful to do. I’ve been having this recurring anxiety dream in which I’m a cubicle dweller in some business – and I don’t even know what the business does – and I’m desperately trying not to draw my bosses’ attention to the fact that I’m not doing anything. It’s not a pleasant way to wake up in the morning.

NOTICE – NSFW

😀 Y’all stay safe out there. I’m barring the doors to be on the safe side: Far too many bunnies around here, now that I think about it.

It’s only late mid-April, there aren’t many hummingbirds about, and it makes absolutely no sense for two birds to fight over a 4-station feeder. But they’re hummingbirds: They make chickens look like Greek philosophers.

There’s probably a good reason for it. They’re both male – actually I’ve never seen hummers I was sure were female fight over anything. They just hang out and feed. But the males fight when there’s no apparent reason for it, which means the reason probably doesn’t have anything directly to do with the feeder. Like mating rights or something.

Maybe they’re trying to impress the badgers.

Yeah, they get into it, too. I mean, they collide at high velocity. I can only imagine they’re only saved by their more-or-less total lack of mass.

But I’m never quite sure how seriously they’re taking it, because there never seems to be a winner. They’ll go at it all evening long, with frequent breaks. It’s not as though they’re fighting to the death.

Once the main flocks get here, things really get entertaining. And I start going through a lot of sugar.

Oh, and I do seem to have been able to fix that big crack. So Seal-All to the rescue!

I patted myself on the back too quickly. Went out to mark the wash end of the driveway this morning and found fresh coyote tracks. Checked the game camera, and…

That’s something I never expected to see. I’ve have expected them to be deadly enemies, but I have seven or eight frames of them just hanging out. WTF.

I was going to let this last bottle go empty, just so I could neatly refill it. But that offends my sense of frugality. I’ve left the thermostat off but the furnace pilot on for a couple of weeks now, waiting for that cold snap that will let me bless the bedroom heater one last time. But it appears the need for heat is past.

It might be a while yet before the windows are open all night. But as of this morning, summer has officially come to the Secret Lair.

And if it turns out I’m completely wrong about that one frosty morning, the line is still pressurized and it won’t take forever to relight. But I think we’re done with it for the season.

At some point this coming summer or fall I’ll want to replace the bypass regulator that failed so inauspiciously in January. But for now I’ll leave the near-empty bottle connected to keep spiders out of the pipe.

These are the only strange animals in evidence lately…

I’m still working on marking the other approaches to the Lair, to let the coyotes know I disapprove of their latest encroachments. It sounds stupid, but really seems to work. It just needs to be re-applied from time to time. “This is mine, you can have everything else” is a message coyotes actually seem to get.

h/t

Baking day, which means I finally get to try out that new sifter. Never used one in all my life, but it seemed the logical way to sort out that old lumped-up flour…

And it works just fine! Problem solved.

A nice warm day, though a bit windy. I finally decided to set up the porch for sittin’ and thinkin’.

And I went to fill the hummingbird feeder, only to learn why it has seemed to be leaking… Continue reading →

Every time I climb the ridge on the far side of the wash I get a lovely view of the Lair – and it always takes a terrible picture…

Because I always forget that the only time the sun hits the front of the cabin, even at the height of the summer solstice, is first thing in the morning!

So if I want that picture I’m just gonna have to take my walkie as soon as I’m caffeinated.

I’ve been feeling a little bad about myself for the past couple of days because I did something no hunter would have thought twice about: I killed an animal that wasn’t doing me any harm and that I didn’t plan to eat.

I’ve talked about this before: One of my sort-of heroes is Elmer Keith, a man who hesitated not one bit about shooting anything that moved. I swear he seemed to only get sentimental about paper targets. And I just can’t understand that. When I kill an animal just for the fun of killing it, I feel kinda like a bad person.

Oh, I’ll kill to eat, and I’ll kill to protect my food. In 2015 I carried out a regular jihad against a plague of ground squirrels that trashed my pantry, to say nothing of all the rats and mice I’ve offed over the years. If there’s a reason to shoot an animal, up to and including a feral dog, I’ll shoot it. If it’s food I’ll clean it, cook it and eat it. But I don’t kill for laughs.

On the other hand I keep my guns for the specific purpose of killing animals, and over the years I have developed a sort of superstition: I don’t know why, but until I’ve killed an animal with a gun I don’t solidly believe I can. It’s like this old anxiety dream I used to have about pistol shooting: In my dream I’d get into a situation where I had to shoot and then the gun would jam or wildly miss or fall completely apart.

I can test fire a gun all I want, zero the sights to a fare-thee-well, know with absolute intellectual certainty that the gun will work just fine if I need it to – but if I don’t take it out and kill something with it, I don’t really believe it will.

I have this one long gun that never had a chance to pass that test, and as I’ve been carrying it lately that got to bothering me. A couple of days ago while we were out on a walkie this big jackrabbit presented itself, standing still and watching while believing itself far enough away to be safe from harm. It was wrong: I paced off the shot later at sixty yards sharply downhill, and the jack fell like its strings were cut. The body didn’t stay there long; some coyote got a good meal out of the deal. But I’ve periodically been beating myself up over it, as I don’t when I kill an animal I objectively have to kill.

I’ve always been like this: I’m just missing that whatever it is that makes a happy hunter.

Though in this case it’s women.

I don’t know if this is the worst headline ever written, but I believe it may be the worst I’ve ever personally read.

Tourist mecca Notre Dame also revered as place of worship

Really? People also worship at the most famous cathedral in the world? I think I may have heard that somewhere. The bulk of the article suggests that the writers found it genuinely surprising.

Next you’ll tell me tourists occasionally visit Disneyland.

Most beautiful day so far this year – seventy in the shade before nine, barely a cloud in the sky. My morning walkie is becoming a tradition, but this time I did it in a t-shirt and lugging water.

One of the fun things about walking around out here is that you’re probably not the first person ever to be in that particular place but you might be the first in decades or even centuries. Pay attention to the ground and you might find something cool that somebody else dropped. I actually got my firewood axe this way, long time ago.

Mostly it’s just rusted junk, though, and sometimes it’s a little weird. Like this morning – I’m walking around in what could justifiably be called the middle of frickin’ nowhere, right?

…and up ahead I see something shiny on the ground. Could be something metal, might be a flake of mica. Probably just a trick of the sun with some quartz. But I get up close, and…

A perfectly good little stainless steel fork. Looks like it hasn’t lain there since much before the last rain, though of course it could have been years. I have no idea why it was there.