The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Starting on the new 12 volt line from the powershed to the cabin.

Needed a short, shallow trench, shouldn’t have been ten minutes’ work. Felt fine yesterday and the first part of this morning, but halfway through this little thing my back starting whining at me to stop. Got it dug, though. Also got the hole for the new conduit drilled in the powershed floor. Never know when you’ll want a 2 1/8″ hole saw.

Last September that friend of the blog who came to help with the addition insulation and drywall brought me a gift of this 2″ flexible conduit. I’ve got four courses of low-voltage wire in it: two for the battery voltage display, one for the someday porch lighting, and one for because. Occurred to me that I should also run some cord through it, in case “just because” turns out not to be enough. I’m used to improvising conduit with water pipe and such and not being able to pull new wire if I want it.

Before I can bury it I also need to take my ohmmeter and figure out and label which of these wires is which. Big Brother gave me a coil with like 30′ of low-voltage duplex cable which I doubled up in the conduit, and all four conductors are black. So labels first, then bury the conduit.

Also need to figure out how I’m going to get the wire into the cabin. It was easier when I could just bore a hole in the floor whenever I wanted to, but I’ve put down cement board and tiled since then. Still working on it.

But our elected leaders are the finest among us! They’re our representatives, our chosen legislators and guides! If they don’t tell us honestly and up front the truth about their personal policies and beliefs as they relate to laws they’ll promote and vote on, how can we make informed choices? I’m … so confused…

Caught on Camera: Tedra Cobb Tells Supporters She Wants ‘Assault Rifle’ Ban But ‘Cannot Say That’ in Public

“When I was at this thing today, it was the first table I was at, a woman said, ‘How do you feel about assault rifles?’ And I said they should be banned,” Cobb can be heard saying in the video recorded by one of the attendees. “And I said, you know, people were getting up to go, to go get their lunch because it was a buffet, and I just said to her, I want you to know Cindy, I cannot say that.”

When the woman pushed back on Cobb keeping quiet on how she feels about banning certain firearms, Cobb said coming out in favor of a gun ban would lead to her losing her bid against Republican incumbent Elise Stefanik.

“And she said, ‘Well, I want you to’ and I said, ‘I won’t win,'” Cobb said. “I said Moms Demand [Action] says, and Tricia Pleau said, ‘Do not say that you want an assault rifle ban because you will not win.'”

This must be an anomaly, right? Just a bad apple. Politicians can’t lie – and certainly they wouldn’t come right out and announce that they’re lying…

Not sure if I wanted to keep it at all, I foolishly left this appliance cord outside during the last cattle attack. They helped settle the question of whether I wanted it.

A guy could really grow to hate cattle.

Stolen from Wendy McElroy, who has more information about lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Go run and play, kid.

You can’t know it, but…

…these are your good old days. Enjoy them while you may.

Also stop screwing around with my game camera.

I am truly humbled in their presence, and feel compelled by the purity of their logic, the consistency of their morality, and their palpable benevolence. I shall disarm immediately!

Or…not. Not is good.

Exactly one year ago this month, Big Brother sent me a dozen small bottles of crack sauce, the substance that can make even the most indifferent cook – like me – look like a genius. I received eleven intact ones and a big mess…

A few days ago, as previously reported, I opened the last of those bottles.

Big Brother was watching. Shortly after that post I received the following email from my maildrop…

Good news! You got a care package (actually, you’ve gotten a crap-ton of them, but only one today)

Bad news! It was damaged & leaking oozy orange stuff

Good news! You have a full resupply of crack sauce, along with some spam and meal-thingies.

Bad news! You have one less bottle of crack sauce than the sender intended

Good news! I washed it off all the other stuff and repacked them into a different box.

Bad news! My hands are sticky and smell like crack sauce…

Of course there are different schools of thought. Phil over at The Vulgar Curmudgeon has his own favorite…

And I no longer compete, and sometimes I see things Ian’s been up to and kind of get down on myself. I barely even practice marksmanship anymore, because I hurt all the time and don’t like to spend money on ammo. Yeah, I’m a stiff, penniless old hermit but what if I needed to channel Ninja Joel? Is he even still in there somewhere?

And then I see things like this…

…and I think, I’m good. Thanks anyway.

One is famous only for its extreme length. The other is seldom mentioned, but it’s my favorite. In fact I have it committed to memory. It goes like this…

“Get the hell out of my way!”

That was written a long time ago, and from that day to this I very much doubt our beloved central planners ever considered for a moment taking John Galt seriously. But now and then there’s a blip in the program…

She wanted a bench and bookcase for the corner of their enormous kitchen…

…and he made her this mission style set out of old oak lumber he had gathering dust in the barn. Hung a nice new ceiling lamp and everything.

Cool, huh?

This is why nobody ever wants to show D how their construction projects are going. 😉

Yesterday afternoon was a fairly typical Monsoon day. It barely rained at all but boomer cells passed to the north and south and it was hot and muggy. I live in the southwest high desert: I don’t mind hot so much but I don’t do muggy. So when I say I wasn’t wearing a gun, just understand that’s because I wasn’t wearing pants.

In fact I was pretty much wearing Caractacus’s uniform when I heard a crash, looked outside and saw like a dozen cattle on a leisurely stroll through the yard, chewing what could be chewed, knocking over what could be knocked over, and shitting on the rest.

A guy could really grow to hate cattle.

I grabbed my cattle-chasing stick…

…and stomped outside, yelling at the top of my lungs. The yelling didn’t make any impression until they got a load of this naked one-legged wildly-gesticulating old lunatic coming at them with a spear, at which point fringe elements of the herd abruptly decided to relocate. I saw that and was encouraged to redouble my efforts, heading right toward what I took to be the center of the herd, half-hidden in the brush…

…and that was when I was informed of my tactical error.

As a matter of policy I avoid situations involving confrontations with breed bulls while I’m on foot. Times two, I suppose, when I’m on foot, naked, and essentially unarmed. I truly hadn’t planned this encounter well at all.

I swear to the gods, this bull had testicles the size of my head. He looked up at the commotion, and just sort of loomed. He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t impressed. In fact he seemed barely interested at all.

Sweartagod I didn’t know the rancher had released any breed bulls. Must have had some earlier misfires or something, I don’t know…

I had a spearhead mounted on a flimsy paint pole. I also had two very distinct mental images, sort of superimposed: The perfectly good rifle leaning against the cabin wall, and this stupid spear penetrating just enough bull muscle to really piss him off, just before the pole shattered.

There was nothing to do but carry on – or at least nothing else occurred to me at the time. I barely dared continue, but I really didn’t dare turn my back on him, retreating to rearm and try again. If I could get him moving he’d keep moving and so would the herd. If I couldn’t, though, I didn’t have much of a Step 2.

So I kept walking and yelling and gesticulating with my silly flimsy stick. And to my everlasting joy he blinked first.

But two things for the future: Reconnoiter, then attack. Also, find somebody with a welding rig because I want a pointy stick based on a nice heavy walled pipe…

Rained off and on all afternoon, then a big thunderboomer cell rolled in right at last light and after the big scary storm it settled down to raining steadily till after one ayem.

Water’s beading up nicely on the new porch’s floor. Fortunately I already have a floor squeegee I’ve used for cleaning snow off the solar panels for the past couple of winters – now it’ll get more than three uses a year.

The wash didn’t run, of course – after such an extended dry spell that would have been shocking – but also after such an extended dry spell I’m going to have to learn to cope with mud all over again. The volcanic ash that makes up a generous quarter of the dirt around here makes a glutinous gooey mud that makes caliche (another quarter) look positively benevolent by comparison.

Good news is now I’ve got a place to take my boots off outside if I need to – that benefit honestly never occurred to me when the extended porch was proposed. 🙂

Fortunately the new gutter works fine, so I don’t have to deal with thick mud right outside the Lair like all last summer. I didn’t see the babies, but the nest came through the storm fine.

I had a much better (ie much less painful) day yesterday. Didn’t accomplish anything, just sat around reading, but at least I wasn’t all pain-wracked and grumpy. Today’s not getting off to such a great start but we’ll see – it comes and goes. Sorry for whining just before the server crapped out so that was all there was to look at yesterday, but I do appreciate the good wishes.

…but who wants to bet he didn’t get his ass thoroughly kicked seconds after the events in this clip?

Like a race driver, he’s not watching for the signal. He’s two steps ahead, watching the other guys’ treats.

Because I haven’t been able to, apparently because the server is FUBAR, since shortly after the morning post. And pageview numbers are low which suggests I’m not the only one, but still it’s clear some people are able to. It’s confusing.

So if I’m the bird, and the cat is Life…

Sorry – I’m about to whine. I’m still kind of depressed over Little Bear. And I’ve had this chronic backache for – I’ve lost count – five weeks? Six weeks? And I’m getting less and less motivated to get out of bed. I’m getting some work done but not really a lot because everything’s a struggle. Monsoon is starting, and that’s not my favorite time of year by any stretch.

I thought the back thing was improving but yesterday was bad. I did get the dump run done and those heavy things moved but it was against a drumbeat of spasms and pain that had me creeping around like a very old man and then I did something dumb. I went home and drank a couple of beers – okay, boilermakers – and then slept from two till around five, probably would have slept longer but the heat and humidity woke me, all dehydrated and muzzy-headed so that didn’t help. Never even put my leg back on all evening, just creaked around on crutches feeling sorry for myself.

There are things I should be doing. I’ve still got that new 12-volt line to trench in, and that’ll let me wire up my new battery voltage display. There’s the concrete stairs in the rear, but I can’t really do that until a money infusion hopefully next week. I’m only about halfway through converting the chicken yard into a dog run, not that I have a dog (sob). Hell, I’m still not done painting – haven’t done anything about that since completing the porch. The solar panel rack really ought to be scraped and painted before Monsoon gets serious. I don’t really care about any of that. My back hurts.

Sorry – I’m just whining. I’ve been in pain before, and I always get over it. This does seem to be carrying on for an unreasonable time, though. Took me a bloody year and a half to mostly recover from that torn rotator cuff and then just when I was feeling pretty spry again, this happened. I want to go out and play, and also I want to go back to bed for the whole day. Haven’t quite decided.

Went to the dump with D&L this morning, helping them load/unload smelly garbage in return for getting to pack along one of my own garbage cans and whatever misc. yard trash would fit in the relatively tiny cargo bed of their enormous Dodge truck. I compost what I can and burn what I can and feed to chickens what I can, but garbage still accumulates and I’m not one of these lowlifes who just pile it up downwind, and when you live alone in the desert without reliable transport and you own three garbage cans and the second one is getting pretty full a chance to empty one of them does not come every day and is not to be sneered at*. So I almost always look forward to a chance to help D&L with their garbage. Also they were throwing away some perfectly good buckets, which went right into the Jeep.

Finally got back, and since the trailer was already hitched up I went straight to Landlady’s place to finish that cleanup job…

Oh, the end pieces of that fuel tank rack are heavy. I still want a chance at splitting the nuts on the big bolts holding them together with a cold chisel – or a nut splitter if I can find a neighbor with one he’d loan – but I don’t know when that’ll be and the principal objective was to get them the hell off Landlady’s plaza. And though my back is singing at me like Angry Pavaratti, the objective has been achieved.

Now I’m going to have a beer, or two, and sit out on the breezy porch for a while. I remember, when I was young, that that would not have seemed like a pleasant prospect in the middle of the day. But screw Young Me. He was an idiot.

—
*There’s a run-on sentence worthy of St. Paul! 😉

Gradually getting used to this “no bandwidth limit on the smartphone” thing, I’ve been spending my evenings with Youtube documentaries lately. I was perplexed by a saying that was apparently current around the time the Brits were planning for the Battle of Britain, to the effect that “The bomber will always get through.” I wondered, how would they know? To the best of my knowledge at the time, prior to WWII Britain had only been bombed from the air by an occasional airship.

Turns out that is not the case. Turns out the Germans devoted substantial resources to bombing England in WWI with great big bomber aircraft, apparently because England was their only European opponent not getting its homeland kicked and they didn’t think that was fair or something. They didn’t do a lot of substantial harm, but they did bomb England with fixed-wing aircraft.

Their first generation of strategic heavy bomber was something called a Gotha…

And when that stopped working due to improvements in English fighter technology they came up with a real monster called the Zeppelin-Staaken, a plane with a crew of nine and a two-ton max bombload…

…and the Brits never succeeded in shooting one of those down. Hence the aphorism, “The bomber always gets through,” which they subsequently devoted much blood and treasure to proving wrong.

That got me to speculating: If the Germans hadn’t pointlessly given the English a taste of aerial bombardment in WWI, maybe the English wouldn’t have been as ready as they were for the Luftwaffe’s attempt to flatten their airpower in advance of invasion in WWII. Which could conceivably have led to the Germans successfully knocking England out of the war, which might have made WWII much harder for the Germans to lose.

Another thing I didn’t know – Those weren’t even the first big strategic bombers. The Russians did it first with something called a Sikorsky Ilya Muromets. Fun fact, it seems to have been originally designed as one of the world’s first closed-cockpit airliners, at a time when most aeroplanes still looked like bizarre kites.

That was the extremely useful forecast today, and it’ll undoubtedly be the extremely useful forecast every day for the next two months.

I didn’t believe it. We did get a night and day of rain a couple of weeks ago, but that was pretty much the only time it had rained this year and now I think of rain as one of those outlandish things you read about that happen to people long ago and far away. Like Krakatoa, or the Dresden firebombing. Or Hillary Clinton.

But damned if it didn’t rain hard this afternoon for half an hour or more!

Good thing I didn’t put off waterproofing the porch floor, I guess…

I really do intend to take an hour and brace that target stand. Just need to find a sharp drill bit and rummage up a couple of bolts. Bolts will stop being a problem once I score a couple of boxes of nuts and washers for that allthread I found the other day – dull drill bits are an eternal issue.

I like this rig for the game camera. The mount is made for screwing into trees, which will be occasionally useful. But since lately I’m leaving the gamecam at various places around the wash and there are no trees, I just dig a quick hole in the sand and stick this 4X4 into it. Not exactly hidden, but I think mostly the camo is intended to prevent people from finding and stealing the camera and that’s not a huge problem here. I think we’ve established that, at least at night, the camera is obtrusively visible to the animals.

I have decided that the most uniformly useless of all rural questions is “Why (is/are)(that chicken/those chickens) doing that?” When you’re a chicken, there apparently is no why.

On July 30 of last year, or just slightly less than a year ago, Claire opined that the dozen bottles Big Brother sent me would be “a normal lifetime’s supply of crack sauce.”

That’s the last bottle.

And last evening I unlocked the front door, returned the furniture, and declared the sittin’ porch open for business once more. Just in time for a surprise fireworks display at the county fairgrounds eight or ten miles away as the raven flies. Surprising both because I’m in a hollow and can’t normally see more than an occasional glimpse of it, and because a lot of other surrounding areas had announced fireworks cancellations because the area’s so dry. Guess these folks figured there’s no forest or grassland around here to burn?

So yesterday I tried to unbolt the pieces of that old fuel tank rack Landlady wants gone off her plaza…

…with a humiliatingly total lack of success.

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