The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Should have, could have finished. But it was already three in the PM by the time I had steel and plywood ready to go out to the wash, I was tired and cranky, the sun was in my eyes, this glove is too big, I tripped on a rock, and the umpire is blind. Totally not my fault. Seriously the thought of dragging the drill, generator and power cord out into the sand and drilling holes in thick steel over my head in the hot sun made me contemplate different things – like not doing that. I’ll get it over with early in the morning when it’s cool.

But I did get the horizontal supports cut and drilled for the paper target stand…

…and I did cut chain so that I could hang the last three steel targets.

Never looked so good! (Yeah, I think I’m gonna shorten up those three bottom chains.)

Hey look! Flowers in the desert.

I love the crappy market in the little town nearest where I live…

…in the way one might love the cranky old uncle who lives in the spare bedroom at the end of the hall, and still want to put a pillow over his face one night…

Okay, so they no longer sell those cheesy 3-gallon water bottles. No problem. Plan B…

I swung by Ian’s Cave and grabbed my one remaining 5-gallon bottle, and I’ll just use that for LB’s water bowl while it lasts. That’ll spread the water out comfortably for a week.

Meanwhile it’s beginning to look like I’m gonna take a day out of the week and go to the big town about 50 miles away. I’ll probably need some trim lumber by then anyway, and that’s the only practical way to score it.

…but ran out of bux. So I’m going to have to go the cheap route for now.

For years, ever since that dehydration/kidney stone incident in 2013, I’ve been hauling drinking water home from town. That – I’m a little ashamed to say – is on a week-to-week basis: I don’t have capacity to store much in reserve, but of course there’s nothing actually toxic about the well water. It’s just so hard it’s unpleasant to drink in summer, and it turns out long-term consumption does bad things to your urinary tract.

Late last year Little Bear started having similar problems, and so I started hauling drinking water for him as well. I bought a couple of new bottles, and we were good all through the winter.

But as it warms up, we’re both drinking a lot more water. And all this weekend, for the first time basically ever, I wondered if we were going to have enough.

Now it’s Monday, I expect to go to town in an hour or two, and this is how much drinking water there is left in the whole Lair…

That’s cutting it far too close. I can’t afford to order new good bottles right now, and anyway there will be no Landlady visits for a solid month and we’re definitely due for at least one good heat wave before then. So I’m going to see if the local market has any of those cheap 3-gallon bottles I used to use. I stopped buying them because their plastic got so chintzy you could poke a hole in one just by injudiciously placing it on the ground, but they’re better than nothing and I need to stock more water than I have in previous years.

I had two five-gallon reserve jugs for potable water but one fell out of the Jeep and now I have one, and it’s currently at Ian’s. This incident reminds me I need to move it to the powershed for the summer.

ETA: I’d also like to acknowledge the Generous Reader who hit the tip jar a couple of days ago! That was most appreciated.

Regular readers know that Uncle Joel loves him some Spam, and in fact I do go through quite a lot of it. So the recent Hormel announcement of a Spam recall literally hit home. And numerous concerned friends have emailed and texted to be sure I knew about it, too.

By coincidence, only Saturday – having just received another half dozen cans from BB – I was up in the loft making sure my Spam rotation order was correct, which involved spending the better part of 15 minutes looking at “best by” dates. And so I can say with absolute assurance (and a certain amount of relief) that none of the Spam in the Secret Lair’s Secret Loft is included in the recall notice.

Life may continue here at the Gulch. 🙂

Don’t know how you guys put up with it, I truly don’t.

One thing I didn’t do at the end of last year’s busy building season was sort out all my scrounged fasteners. In fact until last week’s scramble to find enough bolts to assemble the new metallic target stand, I hadn’t really given the issue much thought.

And it was a mess. I pulled a lot of nails and unscrewed a lot of screws last year, some got re-used and some did not, and they all got tossed into cans willy-nilly, the junk taking up space with the useful. If I’d found a can hiding eight or ten 3/8″ bolts of the perfect length with nuts and washers that would have let me finish the paper target stand, I might have cried. Fortunately or unfortunately that did not happen.

But now things are back under control. Because of all the scrounging and construction around here, picking up screws and nails with tires is a real issue. So among other issues – like going over work areas with a drag magnet – I try to be careful about how I dispose of non-reusable fasteners. In this case I disposed of about 1.5 #10 cans worth – covered, wrapped in duct tape and carefully placed in the bottom of a garbage can to be covered with bagged kitchen garbage in the fullness of time, then transported to the county dump. All the rest is sorted and stored – I even put up a new screw shelf in the powershed to make things easier to find than they were last year.

With my other hand, I played Domestic Joel on this quiet Sunday…

…and now I’m going to pop a beer and read a book.

Slow day. I hoped to go to the hardware store in the little town nearest where I live, because then I could get the bolts and drillbit(s) needed to finish the stand for paper targets at the shooting range. But Saturday trips are only sometime things, this one didn’t happen, and so I was at loose ends. Landlady came up with a couple of care packages from Big Brother, and he included that new ceiling fan controller with remote that I mentioned before. It was the work of a few minutes to get that going… Continue reading →

Is that what this idiot was trying to say?

I guess because without Dear Leader’s own-people-murdering skills the Norks would just dissolve into chaos and anarchy, so he’s duty-bound to keep doing it even though he’d rather be watching basketball? Really, I don’t know how we’d ever get by without the wit, wisdom and social commentary of television talking heads.

…even when you’re Gun Jesus. 😀

1: What is the proper term for the big gasket that’s supposed to run across the bottom edge of the rear glass? (Conspicuously not present in the photo above)

2: Where can I order a new one?

It’s been slowly dying for months. Two days ago while bashing through the wash it expired, and now the rear window won’t stay closed. It’s freaking my stupid agoraphobic dog right out, and clearly must be fixed before Monsoon.

Okay, I knew I had a problem before I even knocked off yesterday evening…

…because I was gonna need a bunch of bolts. And I didn’t have a bunch of bolts. Screws I got. Nails I got. Don’t really stock many bolts. Went through my coffee can’o’old fasteners and came up with half a dozen that would probably work.

I also wasn’t completely comfortable that I had a drill bit with enough edge to cut the angle iron. For three horizontal bars I needed twelve holes, and six of them had to go through pretty heavy stock. I really don’t work with metal much. Continue reading →

ETA: Some relevant reading for the good Congressman, whom I’m sure is prepared to do his research before writing his so-useful laws:

The Mathematics of Countering Tyranny

It’s James Wesley Rawles, so a little salt may be required to taste. But he’s not wrong about everything. Count the cost, Congressman. Those who start the war don’t always get to remain non-combatants.

And the end is nigh for my burn barrel…

It’s basically in two pieces now, it just has too much inertia to act on the fact. Gets great airflow, though.

I have often thought that if I knew where to get oil drums like this, I could put up a few flyers in town and set up my carriage. These things are like gold, with a finite lifespan and virtually no source of re-supply. I kind of stole scrounged this one 4-5 years ago, and it has become like unto the velveteen rabbit. But I think this one will be getting a ride in the trailer on the next dump run.

The dump, ironically, is where the burn barrel’s understudy came from.

I think it’s been a couple of years ago now, Landlady and I found it while at the landfill. It’s…better than nothing, and in the fullness of time I guess I’ll learn to live with it. But that hardware cloth cover will be more important.

This is the layout for Ian’s New and Improved Private Shooting Range!

Cutting up that fuel tank rack yesterday yielded me four eight-foot lengths of heavy-duty angle iron with feet welded to one end. I planted them in two pairs, one five feet apart and one eight feet apart. (Cutting up the rack also gave me plenty of 5- and 8-foot lengths of lighter-duty angle iron.) The smaller pair will be for metallic swingers, and the bigger pair for paper targets.

I wasn’t going to put the two sets so far apart, but it turns out… Continue reading →

Seriously.

Still, it wasn’t immediately clear what if any information Freidman could provide to investigators probing Cohen’s financial dealings. His lawyer, Patrick Egan, declined to discuss the deal and said he couldn’t comment on what the plea “indicates regarding any case other than my client’s.”

When I hoped out loud for four years of gridlock, this is not what I had in mind. I never could keep all the names straight in this soap opera, and I’m out of popcorn.

It’s so hard for us locals to find shade in the middle of the day.

P.S. – Could you ask Joel to open the window? I can’t get in.

I know I said the next construction project of the building season was the front porch, but I’m in a chicken-and-egg situation: The very first thing I need to do is tear out the existing porch and stairs, and then other than digging some holes there’s not a lot I can do toward project completion until I get the two concrete piers I’m waiting for. Which won’t happen before this weekend.

So screw that, I decided to do something fun.

Regular readers know that last July a magnificent, biggest-in-living-memory flash flood destroyed the Gulch’s shooting range. The 25- and 100-yard range markers were washed away along with the 100-yard shooting bench and the big ammo can with the target gear, and the fuel tank rack we’ve used for years as a metallic target stand was undermined, fell over and was buried in mud. The wooden stand for paper targets also went somewhere far downstream.

Last year was a busy one for Uncle Joel, plus I tore a rotator cuff in October 2016 and it’s only recently I’ve been able to shoot intermediate-caliber carbines again without pain. I may never be able to shoot full-power rifles again. Anyway, since I’m the only one here most of the time I had more important things to do than fix the range. I tried to stand the tank rack back up, but when that failed I improvised and left things be.

I always said I wasn’t going to re-use that tank rack, I was going to use the parts of the tank rack and build some proper target stands. Well, I’ve got four good weekdays with nothing else scheduled, so today was the day to start. Continue reading →

Left the damned thing out for four days and there was nothing but rabbits.

I considered putting this one to music, just because the muse assaulted me and I wanted to see how it worked. But then I figured not everybody would appreciate that. Possibly nobody would appreciate that. So if you’re in the mood, just watch it while playing this…

Really? You clicked on that? How the hell would I know?

Yeah, I got nothin’ this morning. Maybe later – I’m gonna check the game camera during this morning’s rounds. In fact I really (really!) wanted to make this a “shorts and sandals” day, but I want that pretty much every summer morning, then go over the to-do list and change my mind. Because I have a rule, but I can violate that rule a hundred times and get away with it until the bright still morning when I don’t. And then I remember the rule for a while.

My standing rule is that I don’t leave my front porch unless I’m ready to do battle with whomever or whatever. Normally I have a plan to kill everyone and everything I meet. But months can go by without that doing me any good, and after a while it starts to feel a little silly and bothersome. And then I get caught with the wildlife hostile and my belt empty. Live in the boonies long enough and it’ll happen – you just won’t know when.

So, yeah. I’m wearing big-boy pants and boots and heavy stuff on my belt. Just to go feed some damned chickens and water Neighbor L’s flowers.