The Ultimate Answer to Kings

They’re on their way this morning. ETA Tuesday evening, I think more likely Wednesday morning.

The neighborhood is putting out the welcome mat: There have been three offers of lodging including Landlady’s house which is what we’re going to do. That house has a big tub but no shower and no hot water at present so in case J & B want a hot shower after their long journey sleeping in the truck, that has also been arranged.

They call me Mr. Booger Brain.

While I was in the big town 50 miles away the other day to visit the (shudder) DMV, I also bought a real new dog bed.

Yeah, with a tear in my eye, too. What that thing cost, if Laddie refuses to use it I’m gonna barbecue the ungrateful mutt.

Landlady came a day early just to haul my ass to the aforementioned DMV, and she brought care packages!

Somebody hit the Amazon wish list again. I’ve got a new heavy hoodie, which with the other new kit from the past couple of years basically sets me up for an ice age. In your face, Al Gore. Also a couple of socket organizers, which will help with the tool chest’s top drawer. Thanks!

Three brand new stump socks! I’m not the only amputee out there, I see.

Food and snacks! One of those sealed cans of saltines is going next to the sick box.

And Big Brother sent some munchies and…

Yay! Always welcome.

Also another Generous Reader sent a sack of kibble and a new brush for Laddie, and I’m told it arrived at the maildrop in plenty of time for the usual care package dump. But as previously mentioned Landlady was already stuck in a storm by then, so…it’ll get here in 2-3 weeks.

Thanks, guys. You rock.

I just put this thing up! And I’ve already had to repair it twice. You think there may be something wrong with my construction plan?

One thing’s for sure – the flash flood overwhelmed that whole area. Probably due to changes in the riverbed caused by last year’s floods, the target area wasn’t nearly as immune to water as it usually is. The talus slope that used to be behind the paper target stand, which has probably been accumulating for centuries, was almost completely washed away. Continue reading →

So yesterday morning I told Landlady’s sad tale of trying to visit her desert place at the height of Monsoon. It’s an old tired joke that she always brings bad weather with her, but I must admit this was a masterpiece.

I didn’t mention the other thing that happened that night…

Holy shit the wash just f*cking exploded

As the rain diminished I suited up and went out to see if the wash was running. This was mostly in the interest of determining if Landlady was ever going to be able to drive to her place that night. I came back and texted that the wash was indeed running a little bit but only a little and probably wouldn’t last long. I should have trusted experience a little more than that. Continue reading →

Okay, look: You could almost say the Department of Motor Vehicles is what drove me to become a hermit in the desert. It’s not literally true, but the DMV symbolizes everything I find intolerable about life in “civilization.” Sweartagod I have never, left to my own devices, walked into a DMV office and out again with my business successfully done on the first try. I hadn’t brought a title, or my insurance was expired, or the chicken I brought for sacrifice was blemished or of the wrong color, or…something. These days I sometimes preen around like I’m this great freedom outlaw, but here’s Joel’s dark guilty secret: I’m really just a gimp who can’t keep his papers in order.

When I got married, one of the advantages was sudden access to somebody who loved all that shit. Say what you will about my ex-wife, when I lived with her I didn’t have problems like that. My papers and tax payments and all the excreta of modern life were kept so orderly I could order a renewed driver’s license through the mail and get away with it.

When I wasn’t married any more, dear god, then were all my sins remembered. I was no longer welcome in the great state of California within five years.

I’ve lived in the desert sans Government-Issued Photo ID for twelve years. So you can imagine how gladly I regarded a trip to the DMV. But it had to be done. Landlady has concocted an elaborate plan to get me back into legal existence – kicking and whining, mostly – because I’m starting to need an increasing amount of medical care, turn 65 soon, and really need (So help me god if I get one comment about this I’ll track you down wherever you hide and yodel Lovesick Blues outside your window for the rest of your life) to get on the government tit.

Yeah. She had to contend with whining, but I didn’t argue very hard. The alternative involves living with pain and blindness till I stick a rifle in my mouth and blow the back of my head off. Sit up at night with that a while, and we’ll see how inflexible your principles remain.

And that was why I found myself parked outside an DMV office about 50 miles from my home this morning, fighting down hyperventilation. The only thing that even got me here was Landlady’s assistance in acquiring (concocting, really) the last required piece of paperwork attesting to my existence on the earth. And the story of that acquisition is a hair-raising tale which will remain untold, since it didn’t altogether end well. Let’s just say I was brushed by the leathery wings of the Last Revenge of the Ex-Wife.

She basically babysat me through it. We even got our story straight on the way to the town – preparing an explanation, should one be needed, why this younger woman was helping this old gray man do something so simple as acquire a state ID card. And also why the address on that card was nowhere near that town. I was prepared to dodder, should the muse demand it of me.

But in fact there were no substantial roadblocks at all. We were in and successfully out in a record 45 minutes! And soon I will own an expensive little laminated card. My life will be so very enhanced thereby, I’m sure.

Yesterday was a perfectly pleasant day, aside from being hot, right up to virtually the moment Landlady arrived. It hasn’t rained at all in almost a week but yesterday I sat out on the porch in the late afternoon and watched storm cells charge toward the Gulch from virtually every direction – it was like somebody had decided to throw a storm cell rave right frickin’ here. I knew she was planning to come here but not when, so I texted her. She said she was just approaching the little town nearest where we live, and that she had borrowed a 4WD for the trip, so I relaxed. Nothing could possibly go wrong enough to stop her in so short a time.

“HAHAHAHAHAHAHA….,” said the weather. “Hold my beer.”

Okay – to get to the Gulch from the little town, you do the following: Drive a few miles up a well-maintained dirt road, down and up a cemented dip through a wash crossing, wind around a bit, up a hill, hang a right through a cattle gate, wind around some more, go down a hill that turns to absolute terrifying snot on glass when it’s wet (with gullies somehow on BOTH SIDES for extra clenchy points, through a small wash crossing, and then…

No, stop there. There was no “and then.” Because she got down Snot Hill only to confront a raging river where Small Wash Crossing used to be. Aaand now she’s stuck between them. In the middle of a raging lightning display that seems to have nothing to do but be a dick to her personally. Without actually driving into the raging river to your death, that’s about as bad as it gets.

Her adventures had only begun! There’s a sort of semi-abandoned homestead halfway up Snot Hill, and I suggested (we were texting through this whole thing) that she could maybe take shelter in the carport that’s there. She couldn’t negotiate the now-impassible driveway, but having gotten halfway up the hill decided she may as well drive the other half. That let her get back to the county road, and now she had to decide: Back to town, or further into the desert where she could take refuge with other, more distant neighbors? She went further into the desert…

…only to be stopped by more water over the road, of course. By now it’s getting dark. She turns back toward town…

…and you know I only mentioned that cemented-over dip with the dry wash crossing for future foreshadowing, right? Yeah, dry no more. Raging river.

That wash flows like crazy but never for long, and it’s cemented. So she was able to cross and get back to town around nine. Holed up in the town’s one crummy motel. Now we’re off to see how bad the road is torn up and if she can make it here.

And I almost hope she can’t because if she can, the day’s adventure begins. I have to go with her to the big town about 50 miles away, to do something I really* don’t want to do. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode…

“Joel Goes to a DMV Office!!!”

dundunduuuuunnn….

—
*reallyreallyreally

This morning’s main task was shortening what used to be the Fortress of Attitude into Li’l Gitmo.

…you may recall that was the morning’s main task day before yesterday, too. And it will be Sunday’s morning main task. Tomorrow and Saturday are booked. Because, of course, complications. Continue reading →

Last fall a neighbor asked me to haul off a perfectly good propane barbecue. Beginning this Spring I started learning how to use the thing to grill meat, something I was never quite enough of a suburbanite to gain any experience with. Turns out it’s pretty simple, of course.

The meat available at the local food market is sometimes dodgy – it pays to note carefully the meat’s actual condition rather than just go by the “use-by” date – but since there are so many low-income people around they do tend to stock a lot of low-priced chicken cuts. In particular I can get several meals worth of thighs – my favorite bit of the chicken – for like three bucks. This summer I’ve been eating a lot of it grilled outside.

Normally I marinade it in orange sauce or crack sauce or barbecue sauce. But I was rearranging some stuff in the kitchen the other day and came upon a gift from a Generous Reader, from last year I think…

Substantially different from what I’m used to, and I think it ended up at the back of the cabinet because I just didn’t know what to do with it. But the label suggests using it with chicken so I did yesterday. And it’s damned tasty! That’s all I was trying to say.

Didn’t mean to leave it a week before returning. It’s the busy season, brush trimming isn’t part of the routine yet and I’m fitting it in among other jobs.

This time I upped the power level a bit…

With the addition of the Honda and the heavy sawzall I can cut branches right up to jobs where it would make more sense to take the chainsaw out of mothballs. And the proposal specifically specifies that The Chainsaw Pays Extra. I really don’t want to take the chainsaw out of mothballs.

Only planned to be out about an hour, but the objective was to finish trimming the road shoulders all the way out to one of the busiest cattlegates at the county road and it turned out there was more trimming to be done than I thought. So I filled the trailer twice, then I had to backtrack to the boonies well away from where anybody lives to dump it.

When you’re a trained professional you get to call it “building habitat.” 🙂

If you were a state governor and found yourself with the power to arbitrarily outlaw any little thing you wanted, what would you choose?

Apparently this is the situation New York Governor Andrew Cuomo finds himself in. I don’t know how – possibly New York has some peculiar amendments squirreled away in its constitution. I’m not judging. Anyway, Cuomo apparently awakened to the knowledge that in the state of New York, a thing becomes illegal the moment he wants it to be illegal. And so he donned his crown, took up his orb and scepter, and spake thus:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he’s discovered a way to kneecap the NRA by outlawing its gun-liability insurance program and is urging other states to follow his lead, saying they have a chance to exploit the gun-rights group’s admitted dire financial situation.

Mr. Cuomo said the National Rifle Association let on in court papers last month how much it relies on the liability insurance program to bolster its bottom line, and could succumb to pressure.

“I believe this insurance product is going to be illegal from a public policy point of view in most states,” Mr. Cuomo said on MSNBC. “Now that the NRA has said this is a major source of revenue, I’m going to pursue it nationwide.”

“Illegal from a public policy point of view?” What does that even mean?

Except “It is in the way of my gun grabbing policy, so it’s illegal now.”

Today’s project was supposed to be converting the Lair’s chicken yard into a more practical dog kennel.

Seemed simple enough. Finish cleaning out the deep litter. Take the top off the coop, take the coop off those tall pedestals, turn it around, remove the end door, put it on shorter blocks, clean it up, put the top back on and generally turn it into a dog house.

Then shorten the whole yard by four feet, which will still be plenty for temporary Corgi shelter but will stop interfering with the new back stairs. That was supposed to be the hard part.

Shortening the yard means re-thinking the whole top cover, but that really ought to be the easy part. A shortened yard means the new section of camo netting, which currently only covers half the yard, will go further. I thought I’d entirely discard the old camo netting, since the small part of the kennel it will still cover doesn’t get much direct sunlight and anyway the shade fabric is completely done. But actually I think I’ll retain the actual net, which is still in usable condition and I’m not completely certain a Corgi-size dog doesn’t need to worry about raptors.

But I never got that far anyway before totally running out of steam…

…because I forgot how stupid heavy that chicken coop is. I got it turned around and up on blocks – finally – but other than some easy preliminary work that’s all I got done this morning. I quit almost half an hour ago and I’m still panting and in a muck sweat, and in no mood at all to wrestle with third-hand chain link fencing. And the coop needs some minor repair before I put the top back on. Maybe I’ll do that later today, but the fencing will need to wait.

…not a lot going on right now.

I do have a new project planned, that will take a few hours and substantially change the yard’s profile. If I can get off my ass, finish breakfast and put some pants on. So far it’s not looking good.

…and your main path to and from your cabin as well, I suppose…

is that, in the very nature of it being a riverbed, it isn’t always dry.

Just kind of marking the event. Last night the wash ran for the very first time this year other than one trickle. It wasn’t a big terrifying flash flood or anything, but it did rain for about five hours in the afternoon – for the first time in almost two weeks, this has been a pretty dry Monsoon so far – and the wash did run.

And now I have to go to town. Monday water run.

Because otherwise they’ll make wrong choices. Like use plastic straws.

Yeah. Somebody who makes up laws for a living really said that. In Santa Barbara, California. About using plastic straws.

Two dead and one still alive – and more durable than the others. From the beak I’m guessing it’s some sort of finch?

Sigh – I really need a better chimney cap. I go through this every Spring, but for some reason this year it’s stretching all through the summer. And yeah, those dead ones are dead because I got tired of trying to rescue them. It’s not like they ever appreciate the effort, and the sparrows – the usual victims of my bird-eating stovepipe – are so stupid and freaked out by the time I let them out of the stove that they just bash themselves against all the closed windows – carefully avoiding the ones I open for them – until they die anyway. Since they never live long in the stove, these days I just wait till they stop scritching around in there and shovel out the bodies.

But this one was different – it kept it up all damn day. So this afternoon I looked inside and found an apparently perfectly healthy not-a-sparrow, clearly not planning to keel over and die very soon. He was going to keep scritching and clanging until I let him out of the damned stove.

So I opened the front door and took the screen out of the window…

…resigned myself to an hour of trying to shoo a bird out of my cabin, opened up the stove all the way, reached in to grab it – which of course it wasn’t having any of. It flew out of the stove and, to my complete shock and wonder, straight out the window.

So I guess I should have done that a few hours ago. I’m a bad person.

And it only took till August!

I finished installing and caulking the trim around that front bedroom window a couple of days ago, and with a quiet sunny day before me there was no reason not to finish painting it and a few other little touch-ups here and there.

I had a laugh at myself this morning, considering that in the past month the Secret Lair has become a stop-off place for neighbors to exclaim over how nice it’s looking. They never used to do that.

There’s not a lot left to do on the structure itself this year. I had intended to turn my attention to sealing, trimming and painting the back door…

But I also intended to have the concrete steps finished before now. And I’m stuck till next weekend earliest. So I’m going to put that aside and move to the two off-building painting jobs. Both the solar panel rack and the woodshed need a good scrape and a coat of paint, and I have just enough green paint left to do a good job of both.

I cleaned up after Phoebe this morning, and finally had a good look at her abandoned nest…

…a messy but deceptively complex little thing. A base of small twigs and shredded juniper bark glued to the lumber with mud: The whole bottom was a layer of mud and that must have been hard. Then she built up a barrier against the open space with bark, baling twine, chicken feathers, shreds from an old poly tarp, whatever. Then at the very top she very finely shredded some white baling twine for a bed for her babies. It’s really small considering I saw her crammed in there with two nestlings one rainy afternoon, but it got the job done. No dead babies.

Well – not precisely dry. Got full marks on liquid refreshment…

That’s all the propane bottles I’ve emptied since sometime in late March, I think. Though the one currently feeding the cookstove might be getting a little low.

But I primarily went to get more concrete for the rear stairs…

…only to find that my Monday concern that the store would run out of concrete was well founded. They had none at all except for some sacks of quick-cure, for which they wanted $10/sack. I told them they could keep it.

I’m going to the big town about fifty miles away next Friday, and maybe I can get what I need there. If not, the back steps will be on hold for quite a while, probably.

This is currently my entire concrete wealth…

…and that ain’t nothing.

Via Claire, so far it’s only in Illinois. So far.

Elementary schools will need a new curriculum plan to teach kids how this blessed new commemoration can best be celebrated. But I’m sure they won’t find that difficult. They’ve been working on it for ten years.

Sing along! While it’s still voluntary.

I’m thinking Shakespeare needs a re-write. How about “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the professors.”

Prof says ‘wealth redistribution’ key to ‘sexual fulfillment’

Northeastern Illinois University philosophy professor Tyler Zimmer claims that “wealth redistribution” could boost “sexual fulfillment” in the U.S.

In an op-ed published by Slate last week, Zimmer argues that “a few conservative commentators” are starting to “warm up” to the idea of making a “full-throated case for [wealth] redistribution,” claiming they are motivated by “the rise of the violent ‘incel.’”

The single example of a ‘conservative commentator’ cited in the Slate piece writes for the New York Times, so this recipe might require a pinch or two of salt.

As the incel movement gains traction, some entrepreneurs have attempted to tackle the problem by inventing and manufacturing sex dolls designed for men. Zimmer, however, believes that the incel movement is the result of a “sexual fulfillment” problem in America, which he believes could be easily solved by redistributing wealth among citizens.

“If we think that promoting human flourishing is a worthy political goal, it’s not crazy to think that politics should concern itself with various obstacles to flourishing, among them obstacles to a healthy sex life,” argues Zimmer. “And this is precisely where the redistribution of wealth, not of sex, becomes even more attractive.”

And that first sentence in the first para is what attracted the attention of my funny bone. I came to mock the notion that ‘wealth redistribution’ will get you laid. I stayed to mock the notion of an “incel movement.” There’s a movement?

Okay: For those of you who have mercifully remained ignorant of it, “incel” means Involuntary Celibate. It was presumably coined by someone who thought it sounded better than “loser who can’t attract women because of the vile and repulsive nature of his very being” and is characterized by a sometimes violent hatred of women, whom the “incel” holds to be the clear and obvious source of all his problems. If they weren’t so stuck up they’d have sex with him, the fact that he has the personality of a tapeworm couldn’t possibly be relevant.

That such people exist, there can be no question. But a “movement?” Doesn’t a movement have to be something people would voluntarily join?

I mean – I’m a celibate. But that’s deliberate. I’m a (forgive me) volcel. Yes, it stems from my awkward and neurotic nature, but I don’t blame women for it. Some guys are natural bachelors, and I’m the very stereotype of that. I could have relationships with women, but they invariably ended badly. Finally decided that my path to a peaceful life involved voluntary celibacy. I’m much happier, and so in theory are at least a few women.

Worked for me, but I don’t proselytize. I can picture a “volcel” movement, though I’d predict it would remain rather small. But an “incel” movement? No.

What’s next? A “dodgeball target” movement? A “wedgie magnet” movement? Sheesh.

Oh, and…

According to Zimmer, “these social ills could be easily remedied” by “laying hold of a few days’ worth of Jeff Bezos’ ‘earnings.’”

I’ve never tried it, but I’m guessing a lonely loser with a pocketful of stolen money would find ways to remain a lonely loser. Could be wrong. But I doubt it.

The Gulch is getting a new Official Dog.

This is Laddie. He’s a 7-year-old Corgi, formerly belonged to Mama Liberty, has only ever been the only dog in the household and sees no need to change. He’s good with people but (based on recent evidence) compulsively tries to herd other dogs out of his life.

That’s all I know about him, but starting in the next few weeks and for the foreseeable future we’re going to learn more.