The Ultimate Answer to Kings

I could blame it on the weather but really I just haven’t been feeling it, and there’s been no pressing need. But this morning promised to be typical Monsoon, still and warm in the morning and then hot and threatening storms in the afternoon, and I knew a couple of packages were waiting for me in town, and there wasn’t anything else I felt urgently needed doing this morning, so…

Screw it. Let’s go for a ride.

And now, ladies and gentlemen! From the far-off, exotic lands of China and Thailand! We present for your enjoyment and edification…

Traction tape! And…

Chili sauce!

On the way home I was struck by the amusing thought that both of these packages involve Big Brother, but in opposite ways. I ran out of traction tape for my porch stairs, and Big Brother decided to send me this roll. I also ran out of the rather large stock of chili sauce that Big Brother sent me over time since I recently got back into eating rice dishes, so I bought some on my own. Symmetry!

So this morning I went into the local drug store briefly, intending only to confirm that there’s really no reason to look for 9mm ammo there. Instead, here’s what I saw…

Half a shelf of 9mm, with quite an assortment of the expensive stuff! At – not good, but at least competitive prices! This is not what happened last time.

So here’s what I (pretend I) think happened…

First Wednesday of this month was Senior Day at the Palace of Food, AKA the Safeway in the biggish town about 35 miles away. That also happens to be the only nearbyish town with a decent gun shop. So last time, like two weeks ago, I went into that gun shop and bought an assortment of practice ammo brands for the Arex. And while I was there, I mentioned to (what turned out to be the manager) that ammo availability in the town nearest where I live was down to 115gr Blazer at almost exactly twice what he was charging.

He was quick to correct me. “That’s not possible. We supply that ammo to them, they can’t be selling it for over $30 a box.” To which I replied, “Maybe it’s mislabeled, but that’s exactly what I saw. And I can prove it.”

And with that I whipped out my magic elf box, swiped through the pictures I’d taken for the blog, and voilà…

Yeah. I might be misinterpreting what I saw, but I saw it.

And then I went back into that drugstore today, and the available assortment (and pricing) had dramatically changed.

I’m not saying it’s [that conversation Joel had with a random gunshop manager], but it’s [that conversation Joel had with a random gunshop manager].

9mm carry ammo is still too damned expensive. But at least commercial practice ammo is affordable. Weird that it ended up bifurcating like that while I wasn’t looking. And when the only .44 Special anybody sells is aluminum-case Blazer at $70/box, it’s still a lot less expensive than feeding my wheelgun.

Seven ayem and I’m already sweating.

Tobie found a friend, sticking out into the driveway to warm up and start her day. Actually Tobie was at the far end of a 15′ walking lead when I took this picture, because he’s a good boy and knows snakes are bad companions.

This is how native I’ve gone in high summer: Cut-off loose shirts and bandannas, because T-shirts and baseball caps are uncomfortable in the sun. When I was younger I thought it was trashy; now I just think it’s practical. Maybe it’s all about context.

And dammit! Dammit! I went through this last summer, finally ended up tearing the plumbing right out from under Ian’s sink to get rid of the centipede infestation, and now they’re back. A year ago almost to the week! I HATE these things! Now I gotta research how to get genocidal on their creepy asses. They made me do this.

…but I’m only human… 😀

Going on seven years ago…

I overslept a lot, Tobie finally checking my pulse at quarter to six. Dammit, the cool morning is the best part of the day for getting things done, June through August, and I hate it when I’m an hour behind schedule before I even open my eyes. Still, there being no special reason for oversleeping I assumed I must have needed it. And I wasn’t leaving anybody in the lurch: If I’d done that yesterday I’d have really been behind the eightball because Neighbor S was coming over. This morning there was nothing really urgent going on though I did have plans.

Went to Ian’s with Tobie to start some laundry, and…

Though far from unexpected, that was not what I wanted to see. I ran into that guy yesterday evening at his truck*, supposedly waiting for his friend to come help him get it out. Either the other guy didn’t show up or they failed utterly because that truck has not moved an inch except maybe further down. I warned him again about the wash: It has already run three times and it won’t take much rain to make it a fourth, and if that happens with that truck there it’ll be part of the landscape more-or-less forever. Since I know of no other case of that actually happening, that would make this guy locally famous in a very bad way.

Whatever, not my problem. Can’t say I didn’t warn him.

Speaking of things that offend me…

The asymmetry of the ground mount has always offended me a little, with those two – recently four – pieces of rack sticking out like that. I put up with it because I figured something else might come along and I could stick it on the rack extensions. That never happened, and now it just looks retarded.

Also, it’s about time I fired up my generator just to give it some engine time anyway, so…

How’s this for a bum’s paradise? I used the generator [unnamed Generous Reader] gave me to run the heavy Skilsaw Big Brother gave me, to cut off the ends of the racking Landlady gave me. I bought the blades, though…

…and I have enough spare racking to hold more solar panels than I ever expect to use.

Then it was time for bread before things got excessively hot indoors…

I finally have that under control, if nothing else.

Then a nice lunch…

…and now it’s time to head up to Ian’s to collect laundry and give Tobie a leisurely pee break.

—-
*Where Tobie embarrassed me, BTW. Here I was posing as the one who had his life together, and my peabrain dog totally lost control of himself and tried to fling himself over the edge of the wash to say “Hi! Hi! This is just the most exciting thing that ever happened!” whereas the drunken loser’s dog was as polite and well-behaved as you could ever ask.

No sooner had I finished the post below than Tobie and I heard another engine in the wash. I thought at first maybe Neighbor S had come back, but no…

…a big old white pickup was coming from the opposite direction, and I watched it sort of split the difference where the wash forks and get itself stuck in the sand.

And at first I thought, “It’s some wayward tourist following what he thought were random tracks, and he got flustered when it turned out to be a possibly hostile hermit’s driveway.”

If only. It was so much worse than that.

I waited to see if he’d get himself unstuck, and when it was clear the answer was no I got in the Jeep and went to see how I could help. And that right there was Uncle Joel’s big mistake for the month of July, possibly for all 2024.

I have often meditated on the difference, practical or otherwise, between “redneck” and “white trash.” My extended family could certainly be called redneck-adjacent, at least in certain branches, and I don’t object to the title. I use it myself. I like to think of rednecks generally as decent, independent, hard-working folks of a rural tradition who may or may not have regular cash jobs but who haven’t strayed far from the hunter/gatherer mindset.

But there’s no denying that one variety of Homo Redneckius is not the sort of person you want getting their piece-of-shit pickup stuck at your door, lest they decide you’re their friend and benefactor forever and ever. And I’m familiar enough with the type to know one at first whiff.

And I do mean whiff – it was maybe 8:30 on Sunday morning and this guy was clearly plastered – and getting steadily more so, as the beer in his hand testified. In our far-too-long interval together he scarcely ever spoke a coherent sentence. Unfortunately this was no lost tourist: This guy lives not far from here and I did not want him thinking of me as a friend.

Okay: So I want this guy unstuck and gone ASAP. This turned out to be far more difficult than I hoped. Oh, I got him unstuck. But then I went to lead him back to the road, and in turning around in a too-narrow part of the wash…

…he got so very stuck. And his 4-wheel-drive wasn’t working. And apparently his steering wasn’t either, because “Turn your wheels to the left” meant nothing. He wanted to know why the Jeep was physically incapable of dragging his truck sideways when his rear wheels were dug to the axle and his hard-to-the-right front wheels were snowplowing him deeper yet, and I gave up while the Jeep still had a functioning transmission.

Okay, so there was nothing for it but to drive this guy – and his adorable dog, who thought all this was the greatest adventure ever – home. Supposedly he has a friend with a powerful truck who’ll be able to get him unstuck. I did warn him about Monsoon: If he doesn’t move his truck before the next time the wash runs, it’ll be part of the scenery forever.

And then I drove him home. Before we could leave, he unloaded a large heavy cooler from the shotgun seat and loaded it into the rear of the Jeep. We weren’t even out of the wash when he asked me to stop a minute: He needed another beer.

And I was unsurprised at where he lives…

There’s this one road I have named in my mind the “avenue of the ne’er-do-wells,” and nothing good ever seems to come of the inhabitants thereof. And I didn’t even have to ask if this drunken loser lives on it. I’m not any sort of Karen or tea-totalling bluenose, do what you want with your own life, Homer. But oh how I hate it when I end up involved. Brings back too many memories of people who you try to help out of one jam only to have them screw themselves into your flesh like leeches…

I’ll probably never see my good tow strap again.

Neighbor S came by to help me swap out the solar panels on my ground mount. We had agreed on 7 ayem but ended up starting rather earlier. It’s not going to get anything but hot today and wrestling heavy awkward solar panels while balancing on a ladder is best done in the cool.

Speaking of awkward, the sun’s angle didn’t make for Pulitzer-worthy photography so early in the morning, so play along.

Every time I see new solar panels retrofitted onto an old mount that was built for something else it always looks like hell. But other than that the job is done and the two new panels are functioning at least as well as the four old ones ever did (he said defensively).

I polished off that box of fifty Wolf rounds and then (sob) mag-dumped almost a whole box of the good stuff as fast as I could – and the Arex worked just fine.

So there’s just something about most 115-grain FMJ that it doesn’t like, and that’s good – in a way, I tell myself – since that’s not what I carry the gun with. I’m reminded of back during the lockdown when I went a long time not able to buy primers for my .44 reloads, and was stuck with 2 bricks of very old primers that had been badly stored and weren’t reliable, and that was actually better for practice because I never knew when the revolver would go click instead of bang and I just decided malfunction drills are good too.

As long as the pistol is reliable with the ammo I actually walk around with, I am content. In fact I’ve grown rather fond of the Slovenian Diva. Now if I could just get the optic to stop working loose…

I got an email yesterday from Regular Reader Kentucky saying he tried to leave a comment and only got an error message. Can’t help noticing that the newest comment on the blog is two days old and I was expecting more.

I have, of course, proven completely unequal to the task of tracking down any comment-related problem with WordPress. Everything has been updated, I swear. This is discouraging and tiresome.

So do me a favor, will you? If you have found yourself unable to leave comments on TUAK, don’t respond to this post. 🙁

I just now thought of something that should have gone into the post below.

There’s been a sea change in the way people spec solar panels since I first got involved with the issue. They used to be basically the most expensive part of the installation, so people put a lot of effort and skull sweat into carefully determining their total wattage requirements and then buying the minimum possible number/size of solar panels to make it hopefully work. Then they tried to squeeze the highest possible amount of performance from that probably-inadequate panel array with things like sun-tracking racks and seasonal angle adjustment, neither of which turn out to be very practical in real life.

Then the Chinese pulled the rug out from under domestic panel production by undercutting the price to what seemed at first an absurd degree. The price fell to a dollar a watt or even less – my new ones are far less, but I don’t really know how much of a neighbor discount I got – and it became possible to solve your wattage problems by just building a big array on a solid mount and calling it good.

Speccing the size of the array is more about how long it takes to charge your batteries than about squeaking by on minimums – and in my particular case, since my biggest mount was using old scrounged panels, making sure that my panel capacity always substantially exceeded my actual charging needs worked a benefit because those big panels were never 100% and sooner or later were bound to deteriorate. And I did not know at the time that replacing them wasn’t going to be a big deal. I could be running a substantially bigger battery bank than I do but that always seemed unwise, both for budgetary reasons – batteries are expendable and must periodically be replaced – and because more charging capacity than you need always turns out sooner or later to be a better policy than just enough.

So I’m just saying – as a general rule, don’t try to squeak by on minimal solar panel capacity. It can obviously be taken too far, so don’t go nuts but in general more is better. If nothing else, even in the desert the sun doesn’t always shine on cue.

I’m extremely lucky to have a neighbor who both a) installs solar power systems for fun and profit, and b) is actually good at it.

Also, the social security thing could have happened at a worse time because I’ve spent the past few months replacing things that were on their last legs, like…

Those four old panels were cast-offs from Landlady’s old system, which I acquired in 2016. They were kind of iffy then. They’re at least 20 years old and I have lately had reason to suspect that they aren’t working very well anymore. So I asked Neighbor S to come over at his convenience and confirm or disprove my suspicions. Not surprising, those panels are pretty much done. Happily, he gave me the neighbor price for a couple of bigger, more modern and brand-new panels he had kicking around his yard.

Taking the old panels down and reconfiguring the racks is going to be a chore. He wanted to hook up the new panels where they are and make sure my issues go away before going to the trouble, I thought that was a bad idea because it pretty much guaranteed a windstorm but we compromised by strapping them down good. Naturally it’s Monsoon so the sky is clouding up for the afternoon storms, so right now I can’t really see by watching my voltmeter whether there’s a big performance improvement.

Nothing unusual about Tobie going nuts at something outside his window in the middle of the night…

…but it’s been a long time since his nocturnal visitor left a calling card.

I was even able to easily track the coyote coming into the yard…

…but I have to admit there’s next to nothing I can do about it, if my current chemical deterrents aren’t going to work with this one. I need one of those rifle-armed sentry robots, the concept of which I really do not approve.

On a happier note, he did a little happy dance yesterday evening as if he’d never seen me re-fill his food bucket before…

Maybe that’s the dog equivalent of having your contract renewed…

When you live on scrounge, and also do labor gigs for neighbors, and also live deep in the desert where neighbors can be kind of transitory because they move here thinking it’s a good idea and then move away when they learn (or are convinced by their wives 😀 ) that it’s not, abandoned property is a good source of tools. But you can’t be choosy, which is how I ended up with – well, all three of my ladders, really. This extending ladder is not something I would have chosen if I was perusing the selection at Home Depot, but it’s what I’ve got. And though it always scares hell out of me, the thing I most hate about it is also what makes it useful: It’s light and handy. But it’s also wiggly-wobbly and its feet are too small and I really don’t want it to be the thing that cripples or kills me. So every time I use it I waste amazing amounts of time fiddling with its placement and support and going up and down it like a 90-year-old president when I ought to be briskly working. And I always wish I’d gone to the effort of using my (Landlady’s, really, but I’m the only one who ever uses it) real ladder which is a much better tool but unfortunately weighs a ton.

Speaking of not falling and dying…

…I gotta get another roll of this great traction tape a Generous Reader sent me years ago. Used up the last of it this morning replacing the two most worn pieces on my porch stairs.

This is my Arex Delta Gen 2, which I acquired late April – and which I want to like a lot more than I do…

In specs it’s exactly what I wanted: a very modern plastic striker gun with a decent trigger and an optic cut, and a trigger guard that works with gloves. But it has not proven reliable, with at least one and sometimes as many as three failures to feed per magazine. No matter which magazine I’m using. And that’s after I’ve put over 700 rounds through the gun, so it’s got no break-in excuses.

Longtime readers know how often I switch guns: I’ve had four principal handguns in almost twenty years. I tend to carry a gun for a long time between upgrades, because I’m one of the poors. So when I finally got a real modern 9mm you can imagine my distress when it turned out I can’t depend on it.

Now, all these failures have been with 115 FMJ practice ammo. I’ve only put one magazine of the good stuff through the gun, for obvious reasons, and that mag ran flawlessly but one mag dump doesn’t prove anything. Still, on the theory that sometimes you can get a gun that’s just a bit ammo-sensitive I went to the gun shop in the biggish town about 35 miles away and bought a rather large variety of 115 FMJ 9mm. The clerk may have thought I was a little off-plumb.

And you know the one brand that the Arex hasn’t jammed on even one single time? Through almost an entire boxful?

I didn’t even know you could still buy this stuff; didn’t Biden do an importation ban on Russian ammo just to be a dick? And with the possible exception of Tula, is there a lower-quality ammo anywhere? But so far the Arex feeds them perfectly.

Go figure – maybe it’s an Eastern European thing.

Still, calm, bright, hot…

After all the moisture of the past several days, the forecast called for Monsoon to take a break for a while. Today, at least, the forecast has proven dead right. It’s just after noon and we’re headed for mid-nineties.

I got the porch all painted and back together…

…and now I’m going to go sit on it while it’s shady, and pray for a little breeze.

Just got back from Senior Day at the Palace of Food, AKA the Safeway in the biggish town about 35 miles away. And while it’s usually pretty busy, today it was packed with people either sauntering the wrong way or having nonchalant conversations blocking entire aisles. I felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the building by all those lungs. Neighbor L said the unusual traffic might have something to do with tomorrow’s holiday, which of course I’d forgotten about entirely since I don’t really do holidays.

The years may have taught me some small measure of self-discipline, because situations like that would have me hyperventilating before I spent almost 20 years alone in the desert but this time I just coped, did my shopping, checked out and left, still able to wanly smile at the bagboy. Sure was happy to get home to my grubby little cabin, though. And then – almost the moment I walked in and greeted Tobie – I got a text from Neighbor L saying I’d left my manbag in their garage, so I told Tobie we had to “go for a ride” and got the Happiest Dog in the World Face as a reward.

On the home front…

…I’ve been painting porch gingerbread between rainstorms.

Considering these were made from scrap wood six years ago, they’re holding up pretty damned well if I do say so myself.

This is the strongest, though hardly a flood.

Around 4 this afternoon, after the rain.

And then here’s the wash a few minutes ago, when I went back for an evening cool-off shower.

You can’t ever tell till it’s over but so far this is shaping up to be a fairly wet monsoon, but not crazily so.

Not too hot, no thunder.

Send picture of no thunder.

Finally finished repainting the Lair’s porch, except for the roof over the stairs, which requires pulling the stairs away. I’ll do that bit when I set up the ladder to paint the wall over the bedroom addition. I’ve been working between rain squalls, Monsoon having pretty definitely arrived.

All the time I worked this morning this little guy kept me company…

Usually they beat feet whenever you get close, especially when you’re dragging big ladders back and forth a foot from their faces. But not this one.

I assume he’s a government spy. Only rational explanation, really…