The Ultimate Answer to Kings

…about things you can’t possibly know for sure.

The first sparrow came down my stovepipe.

I really need a better weathercap, but have no idea who I’d con into installing it even if I had one.

This little guy could have waited a couple of weeks and I wouldn’t have minded. Not cold enough to need the fire lit – if it had been, he wouldn’t have made the trip – but a little brisk to be wanting to sit around with the windows open waiting for him to leave.

Not long ago I scrounged this Chinese shoulder pouch for my AK mags. Unfortunately it’s cut a little too deep. With all five slots filled you can hardly get your fingers in around the magazines. If I ever really wanted it I’d want it in a hurry, and the magazines are kind of hard to get out.

It got annoying after a while. So on the afternoon of this blustery day I decided to fix it while watching an old movie. Continue reading →

?? I dunno…

I need to go back and check the batteries. Those are the only frames on this mem card, and it usually shows a blow-by-blow of me changing the card.

Some blogger I am. I neglected to take a picture of the lovely pork and potatoes breakfast I roasted early this morning in celebration of the really crappy weather.

Right on schedule the temperature fell, the wind rose and the snow blew by like bullets. Not very cold and hardly any snow so far. But windy enough to make 40^o feel like 20^o.

Forewarned, I took the precaution of pulling out one of the 1-pound billets of frozen pork roast Landlady brought up week before last and let it thaw overnight. That had the double advantage of warming the cabin without having to deal with the woodstove, and of being roast pork.

Meanwhile just to spoil the aroma I’m testing the gaskets on some fancy tire valves Big Brother sent me some time ago.

The valves obviously aren’t designed for submersion in gasoline, which is what I hope to use them for.

I said the next time the Jerry can vents started to leak I’d either replace them with tire valves – as numerous readers have suggested over the years – or retire the cans. Well, I brought two of them to town yesterday and they both leaked all over D&L’s truck. So here we go. If that gasket doesn’t dissolve in the cup of gas today, I’ll work on a method of pulling the tire valve up through the holes where the current vents are.

But not today. Whoa, I should have held off on taking that exterior pic because at this moment the snow is really shooting past. Still don’t think we’ll get any accumulation but I’m frequently wrong and the temp is still dropping. I’m gonna pour an irish coffee and open a good book now. In the propane-heated bedroom of my nice, snug and finally windproof cabin. 🙂

It’s related to the principal reason.

Stupid EVIL cow. Walked along my beaten path leaving a nice round pie every couple of steps.

Put this up in Spring of 2015. I remember because it was right after this, which was memorable.

The nylon netting it’s based on is in fine shape. Nylon, like polypropylene, seems impervious to sunlight.

But whatever the camo material is made of, it’s good for no more than 3 years. It’s falling to pieces and can’t be put back together, because every time you put tension on two bits trying to tie them together you only rip some more apart. Yesterday we had a windstorm that did serious damage, because it has no tensile strength left.

It will probably be better than nothing for another year or so, but that would be stretching the heat and glare resistance of chickens. For the record, in case you ever wondered, at least in the high desert it’s three years and out.

Was I this stupid at that age? I don’t…lemme think…uh, yeah. Maybe sometimes.

Oh, Jesus, I’d forgotten about that…

…never mind…

h/t

Bunch of cattle came through my area early this morning, apparently first taking the time to save up a few days’ worth of shit. Appreciate the thought.

Then I collected the gamecam’s mem card, and…

Yeah, there’s lots more where that came from. What the hell is so interesting about my game camera?

March is the meanest month.

And I know that. I go through this every year, with the unrealistic expectations. So now I’m piling on layers, huddling indoors and demanding that the lousy weather get the hell off my lawn, which will actually happen sometime in late May – just in time for the first heat wave of the year. But at the same time I’m idiotically refusing to light a fire in my perfectly good woodstove because I’m sick of dealing with fires in the damned woodstove. I want SPRING.

Yeah, so yesterday. Wednesday was actually a fairly pleasant day, but then yesterday the peak temp dropped 20^o and it rained in the morning and the wind! Oh my god the wind. Pretty sure the Big Chickenhouse door is breaking again if it hasn’t blown right off its hinges by now. And oh by the way yesterday’s total lack of any post at all was only partially my fault because most of the day I couldn’t get on line anyway because when the weather gets like that my cell coverage can completely go away. I didn’t blow you off, really. I just had nothing pleasant to say and no technological way to say it.

This morning’s revised forecast says this will go on until more-or-less Wednesday. It’s like that sad memory of the time you finally scored a date with that beautiful girl you pined over for years in high school. I always look forward to March – and it always turns out to be a raving bitch.

Claire is working on a book, Basics of Resistance. For reasons not yet entirely clear to me she’s now looking for freedom-related memes, and has turned it into a contest.

Okay, well, I’ve got hundreds of’em. Of course most are specialized to particular TUAK posts or personal or in some other way not applicable, but I still sorted out more than fifty I told her she’s welcome to except I don’t want to flood the pond.

Meanwhile I came upon yet another of those pictures of Thomas Jefferson quoting something I’m pretty sure he never said. Which reminded me of a meme I came up with specifically for that situation…

A few weeks ago a Generous Reader sent me a couple of pairs of surplus woodland BDUs, in excellent condition. One of them made me chuckle when I first saw them, but it came out of the closet for the first time this morning and I stopped chuckling…

There’s something about the sight of a uniform item made for combat but expertly ironed and starched into boardlike stiffness that seems really incongruous to me, even though there’s nothing new about it – in fact I first encountered it when I was a little kid. But since then the Army went to dressing everybody in camo whether or not they ever expected to hide behind a tree, and it just seems to have extra incongruity points somehow.

In case you ever wonder, old BDUs are perfect hot weather boonie clothes. It takes years to wear them out under heavy use, woodland pattern works well for those rare but real times when your day suddenly turns into a hunting trip, you never have to worry about whether the belt loops will accommodate your chandelier’o’gear, and they’re just darned comfortable no matter what you’re doing. Or normally they are. Right now I’m sitting here thinking maybe I should give these a wash to get some of the starch out first.

Nobody’s said it to my face for going on forty years but I imagine some people look at all the surplus I surround myself with and conclude that old Uncle Joel enjoys playing army. Almost literally nothing could be farther from the truth – back in the very early ’70’s the Army was my biggest worry because there was a war on and not many people I knew were enlisting to fight in it. I still wore surplus, even then, because then as now OD Green was my favorite color. But I did occasionally surrender to Sharpie-related impulses.

It’s not that I knock “service,” or “patriotism” – I have always had a complicated relationship with patriotism* – it’s just that I could never thrive and might not survive in such a seriously regimented environment. Take marching, for example – I once seriously ran into a militia group where a couple of the people in charge wanted to train on marching. Their reaction to my impulsive laughter gave me notice that this group and I weren’t going to work out. But that’s the nice thing about militia: As long as the shooting hasn’t started, you can just quit. Can’t really picture me doing well in an actual army, and it would take Japanese amphibious craft on the beaches of Oregon** to make me voluntarily try.

Anyway, I got all blowed up in early 1972, which taught me the most important (and too often the last) lesson a young man can learn, and which also had the side-benefit of ending my worries about getting drafted. My draft-related worries about prison were eventually resolved***. But I still like a lot of the gear, because it’s cheap and useful even when it’s not always an improvement over the fancy stuff the threepers like to accumulate. And in particular I’m very fond of old-pattern BDUs. Can’t say I’m likely to get used to starch real soon, though.

These are just a few of the rambling thoughts I shared with my coffee this morning, inspired by a pair of heavily-starched pants. 🙂

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*Just as an example, I personally believe that “My Country, Right or Wrong” is one of the most unpatriotic slogans I’ve ever heard. For more information see Oathkeepers.

**The Japanese could have California. They could only improve California, but I’d be there to fight them at the Nevada border.

***The Selective Service actually did catch up with me in the late ‘seventies, but I suffered no harm beyond disapproving frowns on the faces of large uniformed men. By then they’d stopped throwing draft-dodgers into federal prison, and even to these guys the act of prosecuting a one-legged kid for failure to register was a sufficiently blatant waste of resources as to be a non-starter. So that worry went away. Got a severe talking to, though.

Claire has more.

Now if you’ll excuse me, a flyover-country dweller’s work is never done. I have to go out and lynch an uppity swarthy person, ass-rape a tourist or two and maybe practice on my banjo for a while.

Imagine how horrible I’d be if I’d voted for Trump.

And judging from the condition of the porch, at least part of the night.

Somebody sent me a box of Cheez-it crackers, which I haven’t tasted in a dozen years. Probably shouldn’t have eaten almost the whole thing, the resulting stomach ache from which kept me up and loitering near the ivory throne until after eleven. I’m as bad as Little Bear, I’ll probably shit orange for a week.

Took all day yesterday in my reading chair because what with all the moisture my knee flared up again and by afternoon I couldn’t bend it at all. A little better though still quite sore this morning, which is at the moment still totally overcast. So I don’t really plan any marathon projects today, either.

Got a helluva good night’s sleep when I finally got to sleep, didn’t stir till after eight. Still need coffee. And it feels like maybe a trip to the throne. Struggle over to Landlady’s ASAP to say good morning to chickens, then probably right back to the reading chair. Gad, I’m falling apart like an old clock…

Landlady came up this weekend with some unexpected care packages. Thanks, guys!

Check out Joel’s new duds! A brand-new waterproof ATV suit, and though I confess at the time I wondered when I’d ever get to use it since I usually just stay indoors when it rains, this very morning I got my chance to break the jacket in proper as it has rained pretty much constantly today and LB and I had to get Landlady and Dharma to their car out at the county road. So, good timing, and thanks!

The same package contained a whole bunch of 12v CFL bulbs, which are not available locally…

And some other goodies including good tea I’m looking forward to trying.

Tools and parts!

A bunch of recip saw blades, always welcome. I go through several of these a year lately, and they’re not free. A spare valve for my inevitable next toilet failure, thanks to the very hard well water. A couple of bottles of CLR, which I really use vinegar but who knows what the future will bring. A robot-themed pillow case, because I don’t know why. And a trick little waterproof keychain flashlight I think I’m going to put in the Jeep.

And Big Brother laid a care package upon me…

Canned meat and veggies, snackies, leather bones, books! And a not-yet-sterile empty peanut butter jar, whose condition LB has since fixed.

Thanks, guys! I appreciate it.

Which is bad because mud, but good because it so promptly gives me a chance to try out my new waterproof.

Which brings me to the subject of care packages, of which there were some this weekend. But we’ll get to that later, those are time-consuming and I have to go taxi Landlady and Dharma out to the county road in half an hour or so. Be back.

But before I go, a quick anecdote…

Landlady and I enjoy going through the care packages together on Saturday morning after she arrives, it’s gotten to be a regular thing. And when I cut open Big Brother’s monthly package yesterday she was the first to notice that it contained a mostly-empty peanut butter jar.

BB’s care packages can be quirky – one contained a Koran – but this looked more like a messy accident. Still there was no mess, and so I was a little perplexed until I opened the accompanying letter…

…I may have forgotten to put LB’s leather bones in the last package. The enclosed empty peanut butter jar is my attempt to not only make amends to him, but hopefully to restore LB’s faith in the human race (which probably never was that great anyhow.)

LB says BB is forgiven…

The Secret Lair has a refrigerator. Sort of. Provisionally. It’s AC/DC and works on some principle I forget and doesn’t use a compressor. So maybe it will work for keeping butter and a couple of beers cool in summer. We’ll see how it works and what it does to the power system, but I think it’ll probably be okay.

Opened the manual that came with it and read the following caution, which I am absolutely not making up…

CHILD ENTRAPMENT WARNING

Risk of child entrapment. Before you throw away your old cooler:
1. Take off the doors
2. Leave the shelves in place so that children may not easily climb inside.

Really, though, I think that might not be a problem, because…

…any kid small enough to fit inside yet still able to reach the door to close it, will be very unusual indeed, and possibly precocious enough to know not to do it.

You kids today. Why, when I was your age we had these things called stores. And we had to travel to the stores on our own dime, they never came to us. Except for the Sears catalog, which had its charms though mail order could be … limited. And we liked it that way.

Now it seems we’re prohibited by law from buying in stores things that are freely available online. Must be an improvement – it’s modern.

Of course when it comes to buying things you’re going to wear on your body, mail-order hasn’t changed that much – it’s almost guaranteed not to fit. So I’ve* discovered an online source of amputee supplies I really have no excuse for not knowing about all along, have actually purchased a single stump sock and a single nylon sheath from it, and when they arrive – at least two weeks from now – I’ll be able to adjust my order if necessary and make a bigger bulk buy. There will be whole, untorn, non-threadbare stumpsocks this summer!

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*And by “I,” I mean Landlady.