The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Back around the time I replaced it, I took this apart to see specifically what went wrong with it and its twin at the bottom of the slope beside the cabin. Turns out to be pretty simple. The gate is that roundish little brass thing there…

…and when everything’s working it rides up and down on the threads on the shaft that the handle turns when you turn the handle. The treaded shaft is not present in the picture above, because…

…it got stuck to the gate and broke right in two when I tried to force the valve closed. And then once the shaft is broken, one of two things can happen: corrosion and friction can hold the gate open, or gravity can close it. In the case of the valve yet to be replaced, that second thing happened which is why there’s no water to the cabin. Oh, and now that Landlady is here and on the wrong end of the muddy road, winter has returned.
So I won’t be digging all that plumbing up just now.

Big Brother outdid himself…

Look at all this canned meat! BB forewarned me that he was updating his own stash and sending me the stuff that was creeping up on its best-by dates, so this stuff has to go to the front of my own rotation but none of it is near going bad or anything. Riches! Plus snackies, and Laddie is well-set for his favorite evening treat.

Not completely sure if CH is having a joke here – 🙂 I don’t actually eat all that many MREs but here is some new stock from a survival supply store rather grimly named The Epicenter Supply. Actually since they’re here and include some easy-to-eat sandwiches, I’ve gone ahead and put those in the Jeep kit. I don’t really need emergency food there – but I don’t really need a blanket either but a blanket is in there. You don’t need anything until you do.

Some kind soul hit my wishlist! This may seem prosaic, but I live in a weird place. I have to order coffee filters online because the local store doesn’t stock cone filters. Sometimes that store has dry milk but it’s only in small overpriced envelopes. So this is a big help – I don’t use a lot of it, but sometimes for baking and such.

Landlady brought me a can of coffee. I’m still working on finalizing a new favorite since those dirty capitalist bastards at Trader Joe’s cancelled House Blend – but the Columbian Supremo is pretty good. I don’t usually like CS very much because it’s usually kind of acidy, but this is a good dark blend that’s not quite that harsh.

Thanks very much, guys!

Ian’s been promising/threatening something called Project Lightening, a series of videos in cooperation with C&Rsenal involving basically all the LMGs/automatic rifles of WWI. And by “involving” I mean “shooting them a lot while putting them through various trials.” The logistics of getting their hands on these century-old and absurdly valuable guns (combine the scarcity of fin de siècle battlefield relics with the market distortion involved with all Class III firearms and then ask yourself why any owner would ever let a bunch of strangers shoot them a lot), then getting them into working shape, must have been quite a story in itself.

Anyway, the first two videos are up and they’re a blast. Laddie was quite late for his walky this morning and I heard about it. If you’re into that sort of thing, the intro is on Ian’s channel here, and then the first substantive trial is on those other guys’ channel here.

I’m hoping to see Landlady tomorrow or even this evening, depending on weather, bad weather being more likely to push the meeting forward since I’ll have to ferry her in from the county road. That means Care Package Day, which I’ve been looking forward to because she’s (hopefully!) carrying various small parts and tools some of which I ordered on-line in December. They just missed the last package dump which was a month ago. Hey, it’s winter.

This sort of thing happens all the time and isn’t at all remarkable, it’s just the price you pay for choosing not to have a mailing address. Save your suggestions about PO boxes, I know where they are. It’s not about freedom, it’s about neurosis: Officially-looking envelopes full of bad news and impossible demands are what drove me into my current profession.

If it’s not remarkable, why am I remarking on it? Good question. The subject came to mind this morning, serendipitously while I was scratching for any topic to post about that didn’t force me to mock the green new deal. A very Generous Reader sent me a package, the shipment got futzed up by a day or two and he has been posting increasingly annoyed updates on its progress. It won’t make the tonight/tomorrow care package dump, which is just Murphy doing his job. I try not to let Murphy get me down.

Anyway, if there’s a lesson to be drawn from this it’s of the “2 is 1, 1 is none” variety. With a dash of “don’t sweat the small stuff.” Stock up on the important things, don’t get upset about doing without the unimportant things when they fall scarce. Scrounging and substitution are learned art forms and can be fun.

Sorry, I know I haven’t been posting a lot but the weather has been so changeable that connectivity has been a real problem. I have a lot of photos but they’re taking forever, so even as I type this I don’t know how many i can actually post. Yesterday was gorgeous but today’s cloudy and windy again. Tomorrow it’s supposed to rain. It’s warm, though, high fifties, so I can strip down and do an indoor chore a little birdy told me I can’t put off any longer. Continue reading →

Beautiful day! Mid-fifties, nice sun, no wind to speak of. And that was exactly what the forecast predicted, so I was happy when Neighbor D called and said it was hay day. I had just been trying to plan some way to spend the day outdoors without walking my stump to a bloody sore.

D&L keep about 50 bales for their two horses. When one side of the room is empty, they restock. That way we only have to mess with about 25 bales at a time, which isn’t hard for old folks.

By the time he got there, I had the gates open to pass the trailer. Normally all three of us work on this but L is still healing from her broken knee, plus she had more surgery yesterday and is definitely not feeling well. So D and I took it in turns who was going to handtruck the bales but he did the stacking and I unloaded the trailer. Took about 45 minutes and I got a nice sweat going. Now all is done and I’m home sipping on my last hoarded beer in celebration of what turned into a very fine day. 🙂

Not even birds. The only wildlife is that which we make for ourselves, I guess…

Getting off to a cold start, but only because it was clear all night…

Less than an hour later it’s already 50^o in here and climbing fast. I slept like a rock from eight to six-thirty and am feeling pretty good about life for once. Having finally got a place I can heat when I want to, I don’t mind the cold so much. The wind and the gloom can still get me down, though. Wind is just a feature around here, get used to it or leave. But the gloom is depressing. I love a sunny day, and today’s supposed to be that and into the fifties to boot. And maybe the wind will back off to where a guy can stand confidently upright.

The clouds blew away around 9 but the wind persists and it’s still in the 20’s.

The wind has been blowing the sand around for days, to where tire tracks only last a few hours. The new snow is cold dry powder and once the wind has pushed that out of the way it sees no reason not to cover the brand-new snow with dirt. So all over the place there’s big patches like this…

Brown snow, not 3 hours old but already covered with dirt. This’ll be gone by mid-afternoon everywhere the sun shines, if the sun continues to shine.

Woke at 5:30 not exactly ready to face the world. Went out with Torso Boy and the air was warmish and moist-smelling; there were no stars and the thermometer said 31^o. I just took my leg off and went back to bed; another day in overcast winter, maybe I could just sleep through it. It’s been a wet dark cold winter by our standards since before the turn of the year and I think it’s starting to depress me.

Anyway, the wind came up outside, really howling, and that did nothing to improve my mood. I actually slept till almost eight, which shattered the old record because I’m normally early to bed/early to rise. But what was the point? The chicken water didn’t freeze overnight so they can wait. At some point Laddie got out of bed and was apparently becoming alarmed because as soon as I finally stirred he rushed over to give me a piece of his mind, not that he has any to spare.

I put my leg on, let him out of the bedroom, twitched open a curtain, and spoke the words of the title…

Temperature dropped eight degrees during my nap, the wind is gusting so I can’t say how much snow we got this morning but it was no dusting. The past two days have been kind of pretty except for the wind but this’ll feed the mud again. Bother.

I feel like a snowflake myself, cursing the weather when this is easily my most comfortable winter to date even though I do believe it’s the harshest we’ve had in ten years. I’m just stiff and bored, like a barn-sour horse. Sick of being stuck inside all day. I got a little work done yesterday, mostly cleaning up wind debris, and the day before I got water back to the yard spigot and running clear. And that’s about all I’ve done. Mostly sitting around. Just like I’ll be doing today.

This one’s just about exactly a year old.

And it didn’t survive the last couple of windstorms. It would probably be fine as shade cover for camping trips and such, or in a place with milder weather. But the UV weakened it and the wind finished it.

Not that it matters a lot, at present. I remodeled the Fortress of Attitude for a dog kennel last summer, should I need one. So far I haven’t needed one.

The water tank on top of the ridge is nearly full at last. This afternoon I’ll turn the pump off. And every morning for the past few days I’ve trudged up the slope to see how much the water level dropped during the night when the pump wasn’t running. And every morning I found that the level hadn’t dropped a fraction of an inch. There’s nothing wrong with that part of the water system I didn’t break myself. Apparently I just thought I checked the level, but didn’t.

So it was time to open that expensive new ball valve and send water down to the Lair’s yard. This isn’t quite as simple as just opening the valve, because of all that goo in the bottom of the tank which is now most certainly in the more than hundred yards of underground pipe between the tank manifold and the yard spigot.

Pull the yard hose out of storage, hook it to the spigot and uncoil it downhill. Go up the hill, open the valve, come downhill and open the spigot. After several seconds the hose will spit red goo, then it’ll run orange for anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour…

Eventually, no matter how much you may come to doubt that it’ll happen, the hose will run clear.

And at that point, I have water back in the yard. Not in the actual cabin yet, of course, because there’s still that broken shut-off valve that needs to be dug up. Honestly I considered holding off on this step till sometime next month or even April, because when I fix the shut-off valve I also want to tear out the plumbing to the cabin and do more insulation-related retrofitting and I don’t want to do that in February. Today’s warmish except for the wind, but the cold is coming right back. And now when I do that, I’ll basically flood the yard emptying the pipe from the tank. But most of that water can be shunted downhill with the hose, and at least now I can haul water for dish washing and toilet flushing. I’ve been spending drinking water for washing and not using the toilet at all for well over a month now and it’s getting a little old.

My peals of laughter should not be taken as lack of sympathy, but are entirely to be blamed on the commentator.

Was there anything wrong with it at all, before I started tinkering and breaking things?

Because as far as I can tell, the tank is holding its level overnight. I’m beginning to think I just used more water in a shorter time than I imagined, and should have checked it more often.

Meanwhile we had another coldish night…

Far from a record for the date, but still scraping the upper single digits overnight. The day is still predicted to be 20^o warmer than yesterday, though. And with the wind having settled down, yesterday was less unpleasant than the day before. And fortunately for these old bones…

I know I say this a lot, almost as though I’m trying to convince myself. But I do seem to have effectively if not entirely shaken my chimney fire phobia.

Laddie got me up at 4:30 with an urgent demand, then we both just climbed back into the sack until seven. It’s not that cold, 15^o at present, but it certainly feels cold compared to the past mild week or so. I haven’t even been lighting the woodstove. But it’s roaring at the moment, for sure.

Stayed in the mid-thirties all day which wouldn’t have been bad at all except for the 40mph+ wind. Went out to walk the dog in just a hoodie and came back frozen after only a circuit of the driveway. So I bundled up good before visiting the chickens, measuring the tank water level and gassing up the Jeep.

It’s supposed to get to the mid-teens tonight and then repeat the whole thing tomorrow but without so much wind. I don’t know what the wind chill factor is this afternoon but my fingers are still tingling.

Also I still haven’t found anything wrong with the water system. I’ve definitely established that there’s nothing wrong with the pump, and indeed the level didn’t drop much overnight though I do confess I kinda forgot to check till pretty late this morning. I’ll do better tomorrow.

Heavy wind in the afternoon often means a change of weather, so I woke this morning to see our brief mild spell has gone. There’s a dusting of snow and the weather man (person of undefined gender?) says the temp is supposed to stay in the 30’s all day.

I had to go out first thing to refill the Jeep’s antifreeze. It started to overheat during evening chicken chores, indicating that the new water pump leak is more severe than I hoped. So it’s not shaping up to be one of those really great days.

I went to have a second look at that scat pile Laddie found this morning. And you know, it kinda looks like cat. We do have quite a few bobcats here, and on one occasion we even accidentally documented that they will come close to the cabin.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier, but the possibility exists that he tried to challenge a cat for his territory. And that would have been bad because a bobcat would have run away, and Laddie most certainly would have wanted to chase, and it was dark, and… Anyway, I should have praised him more for listening to me and coming away.

…because I only get to town once a week and I didn’t get the right stuff the first time. Or…the second time…

…but I finally finished repairing/replacing the valves at the foot of the water tank.

Sunny and warmish, a perfect day for working outdoors except for the wind, which is like unto a tempest. But it wasn’t a hard job at all, once I finally got all the right parts. And so I could close off the valve to the cabin and turn the well pump on. I’ll let it run all this afternoon, then this evening I’ll measure the tank level and start to see if I can figure out where the water went. I’m thinking there’s only one possibility, since I never found any wet spots. But by tomorrow I should be able to confirm or reject that theory.

Since I had everything dug up, I installed this nice valve box rather than bury everything in dirt again. Tonight before I knock off I’ll stuff it full of insulation, though the past couple of nights haven’t been cold enough to freeze the pipes. Now that I have the plumbing complete, of course the temperature will crash.

One thing we’ve worked on since the day he arrived: First thing in the morning, as soon as I get my leg on, he obviously needs to go out and pee and I don’t want to have to futz with the leash. So we go out on the porch, I light up the grove right next to the porch, he picks a tree and has a pee, then he very promptly comes back in and has a biscuit. At the very first we did it with the leash and I swear this dog was so out of his comfort zone I had to unzip and show him what was expected, but he quickly got with that simple part of the program.

We’ve been doing that long enough now that it’s an expected start to the day, and as often as not he’ll bully me to get out of bed and get with it. If nothing else, he wants his biscuit. But this morning he trotted out to the grove and then stopped, sniffed around, and found something else between the porch and the tree that needed covering up. And no sooner was that done than he looked up and started to growl, and even from the porch I could see the hair rising on his neck, and he started to slink forward as well as a canine version of Peter Dinklage can slink. Torso Boy was going to war.

I called him back and he came to his senses, and by the time of the biscuit part of the program he seemed to have forgotten all about it. But maybe not, because a couple of hours later when we went out for a more substantial walky he nosed around and then went off the normal path and straight to some fresh scat in the middle of the yard, not far off from where he’d been looking earlier. So we probably interrupted some small nocturnal predator. I can’t identify the scat except that it wasn’t coyote: At a guess I’d say a badger or something similar. We have badgers and woodchucks and such, but I almost never see them because I’m not nocturnal. I do see a lot of small weird tracks in the mornings, though seldom so close to the cabin.

He’s not very well clued in or suited to life outdoors in the desert, but he’s not stupid and he’s not a wimp.