The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Ridiculously pleasant day, warmer than yesterday though maybe a little breezier than I’d choose. Sometimes, even in January, you get a shirtsleeves afternoon. Not that you want to hear about my underwear, but for the first time since November I’m not even wearing longies.

Time to put the book down and go play outdoors.

Landlady was up last weekend so her woodbin is mostly empty. It’ll take a couple of these to get her back to full.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve moved the game camera around, trying to find a good place to photograph wildlife. In all that time it has photographed an occasional rabbit, and even that was rare.

I’ve got maybe another month before the cattle come back, so I figured I may as well take advantage of the watering station while I have it to myself.

Took me a while to figure a way to check the camera’s field of view without access to the laptop. Turns out I could put the mem card in that sweet little Nikon point-n-shoot and check the pics on its screen. So I set up the camera in what I thought would probably be the right direction, walked around and let it run, then checked its settings and inclination with the Nikon, stuck a big mem card in it,…

…and knew it would be all right instead of just hoping so.

Check this out…

Previous best day ever was almost two years ago, when Milo Something Greek and Obtrusively Gay tweeted a link to a TUAK post and for about two hours the stats counter smoked its bearings trying to keep up.

What’s even more ironic is that yesterday’s spike didn’t have anything to do with the Uncle link. Instead, Commander Zero wrote a very nice post linking to all those old Mountain House reviews, and things went nuts and remain so.

I got in Uncle’s gun porn.

I’m very briefly famous!

First I want to apologize if anybody got any wrong ideas from the last post, which was admittedly a bit vague. Big Brother’s wife died last weekend after a long illness. BB spared me the drama of what was probably a drawn-out tragedy, so it came as a bit of a shock. Many years ago when I was in a hospital for months, BB wore himself out worrying over me and I could only try to imagine what this had put him through.

I tend to deal with that sort of thing by working outdoors. So while wading through a great deal of encrusted dirt I got the Jeep’s new driver seat installed…

And not a moment too soon…

Clearly between now and summer I’ll be getting some seat covers for it. Black vinyl isn’t going to get it in the summer sun.

Then, work done, it was time to play.

Took the AK out to the wash with a target and some tools and got it zeroed. Due to a bit of vagueness as to exactly how I was supposed to get the new rail parallel with the barrel, that took a while and quite a lot of fiddling and ammo. But now the bullets go where the red dot tells them to and everything is Locktited down.

I do need to come up with a fixed buttstock – I always liked the folder but it isn’t a lot of help with the raised optic. If I can’t scrounge one from one of Ian’s piles of old AK parts, I may end up carving one from palletwood or something.

I received some terrible news yesterday, of a death in the family that affects one of the few people I really care about. I try to keep things light here at TUAK and I’m just not in a joking mood.

I’ll be back, but not just now.

Somebody else is buying themselves nice things with your money.

$24 million for to replace the custom refrigerators – on planes that are being replaced anyway.

Remember when Obama criticized corporate fatcats for their fancy jets? While spending $4 billion on a new fleet of 747s for himself? Good times…

…is twofold:

a) It’s an AK. There’s a simple way to do it.

b) 10,000 geeks on youtube are panting to bend your ear about it. Approx 90% are full of shit.

Therefore, when looking for an AK procedure on youtube, initially disregard all those involving more than a 2-pound hammer. But don’t completely dismiss the possibility that hammers will become involved at some point. Because it’s an AK.

I wanted to replace the rear sight on the World’s Ugliest Carbine with a rail. This is not as simple as it looks if you’re not strong like Andre the Giant. I got it done, but hammers were (gently) involved.

While looking at many red-dot sights on Amazon I got to wondering how much laser boresights cost these days. Turns out a very simple one (turn it on by inserting the batteries) is reasonable if not as cheap as a kitten-toy pointer.

So with the red dot turned on and a frickin’ laser beam coming out the end of the barrel, I could dial the sight in to minute of bedroom wall in no time.

Tomorrow I’ll set up a paper target and pop some caps. Still getting over some back issues today.

Actually I purchased some of this stuff myself. But since my income these days comes almost exclusively from the blog in one way or another, maybe that qualifies as care packages too.

Some of these are large and/or expensive and important. For “large” I don’t think we can top this… Continue reading →

Landlady came up last night, and she really truly had a carful of care packages…

We enjoy going through them together, but after that there was no time to play. We were due to replace the temporary kitchen counter in Ian’s cave with a permanent one…

…and we got farther than that before I cried sore back, but that’s the only picture I have right now.

I do have like two dozen care package pictures, but my cell reception is extremely poor right now and it took almost 45 minutes just to upload those two above. This was a hell of a good care package day, so expect an extensive post probably tomorrow.

…without one of these…

Elon Musk’s $600 Boring Company flamethrower is now up for pre-order – sort of

As my eyesight and marksmanship continues to deteriorate, I foresee possibilities here.

Actually since everything we know about this proposed, er, thing is in the picture, I see big issues. Like the fuel tank must be minuscule and I see no pressure tank at all. So is it a poorly-designed (however cool looking) brush burner with a tiny fuel tank? I can get far better at any hardware for $50.

But maybe I’m taking this too seriously. I hate a tease, that’s all. 😉

h/t to Big Brother.

No, really.

What the researchers found was that not all sandwiches are created equal and that some varieties have larger carbon footprints than others. The highest footprint was found in premade, prepackaged, all-day-breakfast sandwiches. These contain eggs, bacon, and sausage and are kept packaged and refrigerated until sold and eaten – all of which is estimated to add up to 1,441 g (3.18 lb) of carbon dioxide equivalent, or roughly the same as driving a car for 12 miles (19 km).

Remember when they finally came out and conceded that everything causes cancer?

Sorry about no post yesterday, nothing’s wrong, the weather just turned nice again and I went out and played. Now and then I go a day without giving the Internet a thought.

Today’s baking day so I have to spend some time indoors, but other than that I’ll be out and around again much of today. I’ve got a caching chore that got put off when the weather socked in, that’ll take me pretty far back into the boonies. Yesterday morning I tried (again) to move the tank rack we used as a target stand until last July’s big flood…

…and I still can’t move it. It’s not stuck in the mud any more, I dug it out where it had been, and a stronger man would be able to right it. But I lifted it to the point where I was bearing all the weight, and my back asked me how I enjoyed my last time in traction. So I stopped.

Truth is it never was an especially good target stand, and I think come Spring I’m going to cut it up for parts and then use the angle iron and some concrete to make a better one – that won’t try to wash away because it’ll be cemented into the ground.

Second truth is, I haven’t been shooting hardly at all since I wrecked my shoulder sixteen month ago. It’s not nearly as bad as at first – I can shoulder and fire a small-caliber rifle like an AK without too much pain, and I have enough movement to draw the Tracker from its holster – but I have little strength in that shoulder and still quite a lot of pain when I forget and move it just wrong. And that’s been the new normal for the better part of a year. So the target stand – and the shooting stations which washed away entirely – haven’t been a priority. On the few occasions when I’ve practiced with my pistol, I use the target in my yard.

But I did bring in the armor-plate targets, and I am going to fix that stand in Spring. It’s scandalous that the Gulch doesn’t have a rifle range. But I’m just falling apart like an old clock here. Continue reading →

😀 I can go whole winters and never put some of this stuff on. But when it gets cold, I finally – this is only my 12^th winter in the Gulch – have a full set of cold weather kit.

Some of it might not pass on a city street, but we’re not near any of those.

I have a plastic-and-carbon-fiber foot, and they used to wear out socks at an appalling rate. But I kept wearing socks in pairs because that’s what you do, right? Even after I moved out to the boonies and really couldn’t afford to replace socks, for the first year or two I still kept wearing socks in pairs. Came as quite a revelation when it finally occurred to me that: a) nobody’s looking at your socks, Joel, and b)if I stop doing that, my socks will last much, much longer. So now I only wear a sock on the foot that can tell the difference.

It was kind of like that with that pair of great Sorel boots my neighbors gave me last winter…

That’s my regular winter boot on the left, and one of the Sorels on the right. I probably could wear the left boot, but why? It would be very difficult to get on and off, it’s so heavy it would feel like my prosthesis was trying to come off at all times, and the left foot doesn’t care about cold. And nobody’s looking. Except you, of course. But you won’t tell. Right?

Several years ago Claire gave me a gift of a mad bomber hat…

And it was deliciously warm while clearing solar panels on those very cold mornings, but unfortunately too small for comfort. At one point I thought maybe it was stretching to fit, but that turned out to be wishful thinking. But as a proof of concept, it was great: I wanted a hat like this that fit.

This autumn, flush with contributions, I pulled the trigger on that want.

And like the boot, I probably won’t wear it very often. This isn’t Minnesota, winters here are episodic. We’re going through a cold snap right now but it’ll probably be a memory in a couple of days. But oh, it made chicken chores a lot less unpleasant this morning.

The only problem with it is that it’s lined with rabbit fur, and LB finds it strangely compelling.

For several years I’ve been using a WASR-10 that belongs to Ian instead of my own World’s Ugliest Gun (WUG.) Thanks to the lens implants in my eyes my long vision is better than it’s ever been but my short vision is basically gone – to the point where iron sights are useless to me. I originally borrowed the WASR because it has an Ultimak rail where the upper handguard is supposed to be. A Generous Reader sent me a long eye relief scope, and this resulted in what I like to imagine is the most peculiar-looking functional AK on the North American continent…

It actually worked pretty well for me, though perhaps a little clumsy and muzzle-heavy. I used it that way for a couple of years.

Then Ian got a Russian red dot that would only work with the WASR’s side mount. I tried it and really liked it a lot!

It’s the only time I ever used a red dot on a long gun, and this became the Lair’s official wall gun. Got a couple of troublesome varmints with it, too.

But Ian’s trying to run a business, and recently he told me he needs his sight back. It was time to pull up my big boy pants and actually get a red dot and rail for the WUG. Those should be arriving this coming weekend, but in the meantime I needed to swap furniture on the two rifles. Due to an old injury I can’t really bend my left wrist very well, which gives me trouble carrying a rifle on a hunt for any length of time. That’s why I really like that vertical grip front handguard. I put it on the WASR years ago but now I wanted it back. That would have been a very simple proposition except for that Ultimak rail, which fastens very firmly to the barrel and complicates matters. Ended up having to strip the WASR right down and though I’ve put the operation off, yesterday’s Day Without Internet was the perfect time…

Taking the straight handguard off the WUG was much simpler. Got them both back together, and now the WUG is back to being the Lair’s official wall gun. Except soon I hope it’ll have its own red dot.

😉 Yeah, that look. That’s the look I probably had on my own face yesterday afternoon when it finally sank in that there would be no more Internet for me until whatever capricious and enigmatic thing that had happened, unhappened.

I’ve been using this iPhone Landlady gave me as my hotspot and only connection to the outer world since September. Most of the time it works fine. Every evening the connection slows down and gets wonky, it’s almost always perfectly fine early morning and during the day. But yesterday afternoon around one it just completely lost connection.

Long-time readers know that this is far from the first time I’ve had troubles like this. But it’s been a long time, and for a short time I was bereft. Then I relaxed and went off to do something else for a while.

But I wondered about the nature of the problem. The laptop connected to the hotspot with no problem. But the signal strength indicator on the phone firmly read “No Service.” Perhaps Mormon terrorists had dynamited the one-and-only cell tower in one of their Return to Nature spasms? Probably not. That tower is located in a town where “The Internet is down” is actually a phrase. It really was time to just relax to the inevitable. For this, I have no Plan B and really can’t imagine what Plan B would look like. I’m done with satellite dishes, that’s for sure.

I even brought the iPhone up to the top of the ridge, to give LB his evening walky and check the level in the water tank. While at the top of the ladder…

…which was as high as I could go without traveling miles to the top of a mesa, I took off my gloves, pulled the phone out from under the layers, and checked to see if there was any signal. And there was! But it was unusably weak even there. Down in my hollow the phone could find no signal at all.

The good news is I’ve been really frustrated for weeks by the fact that I own a Barbara Tuchman book I’ve never read but couldn’t read it, because it seems that after the flu mental acuity and attention span are the last things to return. But yesterday I could really get into it. Sometimes between seven and nine in the evening the signal returned strong, but I didn’t care anymore. I got halfway through the book last night. 🙂

Storm passed sometime late yesterday. It wasn’t much of a storm but there was lots of wind and the outdoor temp never got above freezing. Not even Rhode Island Reds wanted out in it. Then of course the clouds cleared at dusk and it got cold.

Not record cold, not by 30 degrees, but plenty cold. Low teens at the pickup, probably single digits in the open. Cold enough that the snow squeaks and pops under your boots, and your nostrils freeze.

In Michigan I thought nothing of nights like that except how much of a hassle it would be to scrape off the windshield. The only thing that changed was that I might pop out to the driveway to let the car warm up while I brewed a second cup. Say what you will about Michigan, people have been living through winters there for a long time and they know how to build houses. Your gas bills go up in winter, but your toes won’t turn black.

Hope you possess those construction skills when you build your own place out away from the grid. I did not. It took a long time to get here, with many a false step and many a cold night along the way. And I don’t promise there will ever come a time when I grow so blasé about the Secret Lair’s incremental improvements that I don’t get almost misty-eyed about them on mornings like this.

Slept like a baby. 🙂

A regular reader says he keeps getting a “Invalid request signature or no blog id supplied” error message. I know we’re still having the issue with the page failing to update automatically sometimes, but I’m unaware of any other issues involving comments.

Is anybody else having problems?

ETA: Got the following email just now…

Hi Joel.

Just another data point. I tried to comment, and mine didn’t show up,
even after refreshing the page. uBlockOrigin says 4 things blocked on the
page, but the comment form appears to work and send stuff back to the
server. I didn’t see any messages about signature errors or Blog ID.

FWIW, you aren’t the only one:
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/commenting-26

Yeah, not very helpful. Unfortunately, I’m not longer a WordPress weenie.
There’s so much JavaScript at play, that tracking stuff like this down
can get tedious pretty quickly.
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/invalid-request-signature-in-comments-box-since-update/

Looks as if you (and others) have been hit by something that started
happening a couple years ago.

Good luck with it.

Best,
[REDACTED]

The outdoor pickup on my cool digital indoor/outdoor thermometer still says it’s a mere 27^o – in fact it hasn’t changed in several hours – but I’m telling you the US Congress has turned down the thermostat to punish us for electing Trump and now the nation is locked in an ice age. I didn’t know they could do that, and am not convinced it’s a good thing. With the wind chill, I estimate it’s approximately -7000^o out there.

Went out briefly to tend the ladies in the Fortress of Attitude, who are completely freaked out and refusing to leave the coop, and came in so cold I went full kit before venturing outside again…

Got that mad bomber hat in late autumn, as the last bit of clothing I needed to survive Frozen Earth caused by a government shutdown, tried it on for size and then literally never put it on my head again before this morning because it’s instant overheat. This morning it was none too warm as I cleaned off the solar panels – pointlessly, since there’s no sun – and took Little Bear for a most sincerely abbreviated walky. Came back to the Lair with my five remaining toes frozen, because I forgot about that nice Sorel boot S&L gave me last year…

You may be sure I’ll be wearing it next time, though. Still have to get my frozen ass over to Landlady’s at some point. Glad I replaced the Jeep battery last summer, it can get reluctant to start when things get this cold.

The Lair, however, is almost uncomfortably toasty now. So Uncle Joel’s still not bitching about winter. Very much.

…and the California speech police immediately try to turn it into a buzz kill. Figures.

Marijuana Industry to Customers: Stop using the word ‘pot’

The [pothead] image deeply bothers the marijuana industry, which is telling the public — sometimes gently, sometimes curtly — that they should use the word cannabis. That’s the scientific name for the plant from which marijuana is derived.

Many retailers also are marketing marijuana as a health and wellness drug even though recreational sales will soon dwarf those of medical marijuana.

“People are taking a more sophisticated approach to using cannabis, especially in using the right dosing,” Coggan said. “We don’t want people to think of it as negative.”

Stupid is as stupid does, Cheech. Earn a better rep if you want one, don’t try to mandate it.

Not a lot, maybe an inch or two but it’s hard to tell because there was so much wind. The thermometer says it’s only 27^o outside but the inside temperature says I’d better bundle up for chores ’cause it’s windy. No problem.

I know I repeat this a lot, but it’s important: Happy I finally got over the worst of my chimney fire phobia. 🙂