The Ultimate Answer to Kings

So I took the second squirrel (small male, possibly immature) flying into the wash, then set the game camera up to watch where it landed.

And we’ll see what we see. 🙂

And with a third apparently anxious to get in and perform a rescue. The game camera didn’t really picture it, but the one on the outside dug around the cage, as if to release the one inside. That’s a level of concern I’ve never seen in a squirrel.

I threw that dead squirrel into trackless sand in the wash near Ian’s place, a good respectful distance from the Lair, where I’m accustomed to disposing of rodent bodies without giving scavengers the notion that the Lair is a good place to come for dinner.

I expected the body to be gone this morning, and it was.

It never occurred to me until I looked the scene over that this would have been a really great use for the game camera.

The tracks say it got taken by a coyote, no surprise there. But there are also bird tracks – could be hawk or owl but from the tracks I’m thinking roadrunner. Raptors don’t walk to and from a corpse. But I didn’t know roadrunners would scavenge roadkill.

Game camera. Something to keep in mind next time I need to dispose of a squirrel or big packrat. I could have learned something new, and I didn’t from lack of forethought.

Came as no surprise, the winter and spring having been so dry.

Woke up, put my leg on, let LB out for a pee and immediately got a big snootful of woodsmoke. As the sun came up it did so through thick haze. Haven’t checked the news but they’re so common in the dry season they don’t usually even make the news, but it’s clear there’s a big grass fire in the prairie land upwind of us.

It’s a problem that keeps some folks indoors with their sinuses all messed up. Fortunately it’s rarely a big problem at the Secret Lair except right now the smoke is so thick it’s affecting the solar panels. Really may as well be cloudy.

…what this could possibly be for.

It appears to be a real thing, not just a whimsical little boat somebody built – of course I could be completely wrong about that.

Spent some time searching around last night and came up with nothing but the picture. I can’t find a word written about it, and it’s got me puzzled. Can anybody spare me a clue?

Oh, he was pissed, too. They don’t seem to consider live traps humane at all, but he settled right down after I shot him through the bars. More and more often in the summer season I just carry the Ruger, because while I might want to shoot something dangerous that would respond better to a bigger gun, that’s quite rare and it’s a rare week when I don’t take at least a few shots at squirrels. Good thing .22 has gotten easier to find, for a few years there it was a problem.

I hike over the ridge with them and throw them into the wash on Ian’s side of the horseshoe bend, and they’re never there the next morning.

On an absolutely gorgeous late April day in the high desert, I tackled the dreaded front Jeep shocks.

And I do mean dreaded. Look, technically it’s no big deal. When I wrenched for a living this would have been considered a gravy job, except for all the encrusted mud and the chance of a broken bolt. A Generous Reader actually sent me the money for the shocks some months ago, so money wasn’t the item.

It’s just…I know the Jeep and I know my life, and this job had “Jeep-breaking disaster” written all over it. Something was going to go wrong. Something bad. And there I’d be, right in the middle of the shit, looking for a field expedient repair to get the poor thing back on its knees. Continue reading →

…that if you type “dumbass gun video” into a Youtube search window you can pretty much kiss the rest of the day goodbye? Assuming you find stupidity-induced personal injury entertaining, of course.

I don’t, really. But the phenomenon is fascinating in a can’t-look-away-from-the-train-wreck kind of way. I did some dumbass things with guns when I was (much) younger, and the memory of a couple of them still chills my blood. But I kept them to myself – I didn’t post the damn video for the world to see. That’s the part that perplexes me.

Well, I’m certain California will be able to make it work.

Finland is killing its world-famous basic income experiment

Hey! D’you know what you get when you subsidize sloth? More sloth! I know, right? Who could possibly have predicted that?

Claims of “Yeah, but Finland just didn’t do it big enough” in 3…2…1…

Oboy. Y’know, I used to rather enjoy working on cars. Well into my mid-twenties I enjoyed tinkering with cars. I really enjoyed tech school – in fact I kind of understand why a lot of people look back on school as their happiest time, though I don’t share the sentiment.

Then I went to work in dealership back shops. I quit wrenching fulltime … lemme think… 1984? Something like that. And I still hate working on cars. You’d think I’d have gotten over it long since. Not so bad when they’re new cars, really. The Jeep hasn’t been new in 17 years. Been about that long since it was last clean.

Got’er done, though. The rears, anyway. I’m getting too old and my joints are too messed up to want to tug wrenches hour after hour unless there’s a better reason than “There’s still the fronts to do.”

Now having washed my head and hands, I’m going to enjoy this nice cup of tea and then LB and I will go for a test drive in the wash.

You probably have this problem all the time. You check out the chicken coop, find a couple of eggs, drop them into your cargo pocket, get distracted by the next thing. Hours later you climb under the Jeep or drop something heavy into the same pocket. Next thing you know…

…next thing you know you’re dropping what you were doing so you can rinse out what were a perfectly good pair of pants a minute before. Bother.

I purchased a Hav-A-Hart trap 3 years ago, not because I’m interested in humanely and non-violently removing peaceful, harmless squirrels from my area of influence but because it was the only trap available locally that seemed capable of dealing with squirrels. It has always been a problem. Squirrels aren’t the problem they were when I declared Holy Jihad on them 3 years ago because the food pantry is no longer in the powershed, which is by no means squirrel-proof. But lately they have chosen to take the fight back to me, and are literally (yes, I mean literally) beating a path to the chicken feeder. I have so much documented proof through the game camera I can’t even show it all to you.

Two nights running I’ve set the live trap, continuing to use the modification suggested by readers several years ago. And every morning the trap is sprung but contains no actual squirrel.

I’m getting pissed off.

On his way east, Big Brother was attacked by a suicide collider.

Antlerhu Akbar! Or maybe it thought BB insulted its mother.

BB speculates that its method of crossing the road involved closing its eyes and trying to get it over with quickly. But I suspect that if the SPLC hears about this it’ll probably try to get BB charged with a hate crime.

If “everybody” owns them, nobody owns them. Which means they don’t get maintained.

The Gulch has one really good ladder, and of course it does have an owner – Landlady bought it, Landlady owns it. But it gets used promiscuously at three different locations, and tends to stay wherever it landed last. So it spends a lot of time out in the weather, and doesn’t get cleaned or lubricated very often.

Despite in other ways being a veritable freedomista paradise, the Gulch is economically a sort of manorial system with me as the only resident villein. I pay my rent by finding ways to be useful. Also, since I’m here full-time I’m more likely to notice and have time to do the actual maintenance needed by things that spend too much time baking in the sun.

During building season I get more use out of Landlady’s ladder than anybody does, so it behooves me for more than one reason to keep it working. This isn’t the first – or for that matter the fifth – time it has gotten a lube job while visiting the Lair, but it occurred to me last week that the poor thing has never really been the same since what we might call the Summer of Stucco over at Ian’s Cave. Maybe, I reasoned, what it really needs is to get taken completely apart and cleaned of all that stucco on its sliding bits.

So that’s what we did this morning. I don’t know if it’ll fix everything that ails the ladder, but it can’t hurt. And it makes me feel better about things.

When I started on the Lair’s bedroom addition last year a friend’s mother said she had some kid’s bedroom furniture that had been in her basement for a long time, and I could have them if I wanted. I wanted.

I literally sized the closet wall to accommodate the dimensions of the headboard and night stand. It worked out fairly well but, naturally, not perfect.

Continue reading →

(“LB, did somebody break in here and drool all over my laptop?”)

At one point there was actually a line at this thing, five cedar rats long. And I was at the front of the line!!!11! Because seriously, that last thing never happens.

Good thing I was doing all right for cash, because this morning put a serious dent in it. Between filling every single gasoline container I own, starting LB on a different (expensive!) brand of dog food, topping off the chicken feed barrel, buying some ammo and getting a prescription filled, I filled the Jeep and damn near emptied the wallet. But it’s all good. Thanks to Big Brother I ended up not paying out of my own pocket for last Friday’s eye doctor appointment OR the first round of my new and really expensive eyedrops, so I was in fact in pretty good shape for cash and as I always say, lots of stuff is better than lots of money.

Hi, guys. Yeah, it’s me. Haven’t been on the keyboard since December, hope you’re all well. Dad went to town for the Monday water run, and I thought we could just take this time for a word about snackies.

Look, I’m just going to get to the meat (mmmm…what was I saying? Oh yeah!) the meat of the issue here, which is that I’d appreciate it if you’d stop raining on my parade, okay? I mean, thanks for the concern. Really. But I’m fine. So if you could just stop telling Dad he shouldn’t give me food. He’s already really bad about things like rat poison and chocolate and cooked chicken bones, like somehow those are bad things. Do you know how good they smell?

So anyway – thanks for the concern, I do appreciate it. But things are bad enough around here without you guys commenting and emailing and all but hollering over the fence that he should not give me part of his snackies. Okay? Thanks again. Bye.

I was sitting at the computer, munching on a bowl of raisins. LB had crept up behind me and was earnestly bathing me in “If you need help with that, I’m here for you” rays. I said, “I don’t think you’re gonna want this, buddy,” and put down the bowl with maybe a couple of dozen raisins left in it. He stuck his muzzle in, came up licking his lips and looking like maybe that wasn’t so desirable after all, seemed to think it over, and then…

Guess it shouldn’t surprise me. I’ve read (I don’t know how accurate this is, but it does have logical appeal) that one reason dogs won out over wolves in the “who gets to move in with humans and live long enough to get old” sweepstakes is that dogs can metabolize carbohydrates and wolves can’t*. Hence dogs, though often capable predators, are really adapted to be scavengers – they’re more like omnivores. Whatever humans can eat, dogs can eat.

And if they’re Little Bear, they’ll eat everything offered.

—
*Maybe related, I see evidence that coyotes also can’t. You often find scat that looks like a bunch of slimy juniper berries. For my first couple of years here I didn’t know what leaves scat like that. Finally a coyote hunter I know told me that coyotes do that. If they’re on the hunt but really hungry, they’ll eat juniper berries just to ease their empty stomachs. But they can’t digest them, so they shit them out intact.

He was going to pull out sometime this afternoon, having a appointment to meet a guy tomorrow in the big city about five hours away. Then the meeting got bumped up to this afternoon, and he decided to boogie. We were kind of done anyway: We agreed we should do it more often and not for quite so long.

One thing I’ve always liked about BB is that he’s not afraid of companionable silence. But no longer having a lot of experience with human company I kept feeling the need to fill the silence with stuff. It became uncomfortable. Yesterday afternoon he just went off to be by himself for a few hours, and I got some single-person stuff done.

Finally took half an hour and replaced the vents on the remaining two Jerry cans. Took a lesson from some things that could have gone better the first time, and the last two were done in less time than the first one took. Just in time, too, because I haven’t been this out of gas in years – there’s literally no gas in the place except what’s actually in the Jeep and generator tanks – and now I can top off tomorrow morning without spilling gas all over the back of D&L’s pickup.

(BTW: Private to the person who sent me that Honda generator – still transforming the way construction jobs get done around here. Just what I needed, really, and I didn’t know it till it happened.)

Speaking of power tools I was so pleased with myself over the way that the gas can vents went that I immediately proceeded to make a big mistake with the chop saws. The Lair now has two Official Chop Saws, one (the Makita that belonged to my father) is of far higher quality than the other but the blade is extremely dull. So I thought I’d swap blades on the two saws and then Jeep the Ryobi up to the pumphouse so it’ll be convenient to the woodlot. I was so invested in doing that chore that I never stopped to see if the two blades were even the same size. Which put the cherry on top of my foolishness in never reading the Makita’s manual, and I took the bladeguard off without ever asking if that were a wise thing to do. Not only was I not able to switch blades, I also spent nearly an hour trying to figure out how to put the spring-loaded guide back together. Ah, so.

But from there I did something easy…

I’ll be able to retire the stick I’ve kept in the back for years. Felt kind of stupid: New rear window lift supports are cheap on-line, and I never bothered to look. Took less time to install them than I’d have believed, too. Sometimes I put too much effort into finding work-arounds for things that break or go wrong.

Finally, speaking of things that turn out to be cheap (if not necessarily easy) to repair…

That is the new float switch kit for Ian’s water tank. I spent all winter leaving the well pump turned right off until the tank level was down enough to spend a whole day pumping it back up again, to minimize the overflowing caused by the tank’s failed float valve. Since I’m here alone it takes a long time to wash enough dishes, flush enough toilets and water enough chickens to half-empty a 2500-gallon tank. I actually considered not fixing the switch at all, since historically my first hint that something has gone wrong with the water system is an empty tank and with the switch broken I’m forced to remember to manually check the tank level from time to time.

But “leave it broken” just isn’t a good strategy, all things considered. So in the near future the tank will get a new switch.

Now all the folks are gone and I’m back to my silent place and (as usual) loving it. There are other little things I could be doing, but I think I’m going to declare this an afternoon of rest except for baking some bread.

Though when the promise comes due in the middle of winter, it might take me a while.

I promised that if the Patreon account crossed $100/mo, I’d put actual shock absorbers on all four corners of the Jeep.

Voilà!