The Ultimate Answer to Kings

And you’ll go to bed without pudding, every one of you!

All battened down here at the Secret Lair for what promises to be the closest thing to winter drama we’ve had so far. It’s been a very mild winter so far but now we’re getting 50 mph gusts that will blow in cold and at least a little snow, unless it just decides to go ruin somebody else’s day this time. Temperatures haven’t plummeted yet, but they’re predicted to.

It can go ahead and blow. All the outdoor chores are done, the yard is policed up, drinking water’s topped off, propane bottles are swapped out. I used to dread the slow inexorable approach of dramatic weather, but now I do believe I’ll brew a cup of tea and sit by the window to watch the wind blow. 🙂

Temperature peaked at 65^o. In January. Hardly a cloud in the sky, no wind. Far too nice a day to spend indoors, I got quite a few outdoor chores done today. And one quasi-indoor chore…

Starting tomorrow the weather is supposed to go completely to hell, at least by the standards of this so-far drama-free winter. Not as cold as the early December pipe-breaker, but we might even get a very little weekend snow. That would be the very first time it has snowed all winter. Then cold and windy all next week. The space heater’s propane bottle is due to suck dry any second now (19 days!) but I’m swapping it tomorrow whether it does or not.

So the newstalkers all seem to be in a tizzy over whether there’ll be another fake government shutdown. Seems the nation’s newsrooms are still reeling from the last one, and they’re not sure the republic can survive.

What can I say? I’m a sucker for the classics. So please allow me to add my small voice to the debate…

California AG Threatens To Prosecute Private Citizens Who Help ICE Enforce Laws

Weirdness in America. First it’s forbidden, then it’s “tolerated,” finally it’s mandatory.

Speaking at a press conference, Becerra said, “It’s important, given these rumors that are out there, to let people know – more specifically today, employers – that if they voluntarily start giving up information about their employees or access to their employees in ways that contradict our new California laws, they subject themselves to actions by my office.”

But other than that, pretty much, yeah. This.

Back in the ’60s, everyone just knew that by the turn of the new century, we’d all have flying cars.

Instead, we’re telling people not to eat laundry soap.

h/t

…a bullet train between Madero and Fresno (that’s a big 120 miles through the California central valley, a project Leland Stanford could have finished in an afternoon after a few beers) whose price tag is tickling the bottom of eleven billion dollars.

The new calculation takes into account a number of intractable problems encountered by the state rail agency. It raises profoundly difficult questions about how the state will complete what is considered the nation’s largest infrastructure project with the existing funding sources.

This is, as I just can’t repeat often enough, a train between Madero and Fresno, which would seem a relatively simple project in a nation that’s been building big-ass railways since the early 19^th century. You’d think so, but then big projects used to be possible and they aren’t any more. This was originally conceived as the first absurdly remote length of a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and LA, which would involve mountains and stuff and is clearly never going to happen. But tax and bond money will be spent, which means money will be made, which means a lot of people in and connected to the teat of Sacramento will consider the project a success even if not one wheel rolls on one rail ever.

Ah, California. How I don’t miss you.

Which are very common birds around here, and in over eleven years I never gave them much thought. Still don’t.

Every day I swap the mem card on that game camera I mounted at the cattle watering station, and every day I look at dozens of pictures of flickers, alone and in groups, sitting on the tire. Since starting that I was actually driven to learn a little something about Flickers. They’re basically ground-feeding woodpeckers, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. They also flock, which is not very woodpeckerlike behavior but who am I to judge? One day, you might remember, I saw a pic of what looked to me like an immature red-tail hawk, and what I found unusual about the picture is that there were several apparently unconcerned flickers in the same frame. Turns out I was wrong about the species of every one of the birds in the frame. Flickers at rest are not-very-decorative gray birds, and I originally called them black-throated sparrows and was corrected by a reader. But it turns out, a flicker in flight looks completely different. Yesterday afternoon I got a nice picture of one flying away…

…and in flight they’re not gray at all, but quite reddish – and with impressive wingspan for such a small bird. Almost looks like an immature red-tail hawk, if like me you don’t know anything about birds.

Look! It’s a black-coated Geezer!

I’ve brought the camera back to the Lair now, to fiddle with it a bit and then try to find a new location.

Laying hens can either grow feathers or they can lay eggs. So when they’re molting, they tend not to lay eggs.

Except sometimes they try anyway. I found this one laying in the middle of the Big Chickenhouse yesterday morning, having been inadvertently laid by somebody in the course of her other duties. It’s possible she didn’t even notice, it’s so small.

Took it home to feed it to Little Bear, but when I cracked it open…

…there wasn’t any there there.

…is the Progressive thing to do!

Sometimes this game camera I’m still playing with is just frustrating. It hints at things that happened, but fails to take pictures of the damned things. Example:

Here we have a perfectly ordinary picture of a raven on the tire. Nothing else going on, as far as I can see. Note the time stamp.

Now here are three frames taken one minute later. As far as I can see the only differences between these frames, the only reason the camera took them, is a gust of wind blew the bushes around. But look at the tire…

How’d the tire get all wet? Between the raven frame and the next, with a time stamp one minute later, something very splashy happened to the tire. Raven decide to take a bath? Could’ve happened, I guess, but then why no pic of that? Makes me wonder what else I’m missing.

Other than the usual multitudes of deer, the only thing that happened last night that the camera found out of the ordinary was three good pics of a coyote who wasn’t behaving like a kid whose mother caught him buying condoms… Continue reading →

Apparently this just isn’t meant to be. Now my backup email carrier doesn’t like your address. The only way left for me to communicate with you is open letters on the blog, which is rather silly.

Anyway, as I keep trying to tell you except the internet objects, the one at that first link will probably work.

Now with my luck my host server will crash.

Okay, so back in late October while cutting firewood, I sliced up a commercial firelog for use as morning firestarters.

This morning I noticed that I’m running low on slices, and thought I’d give you an impression of what I think of that method of making cheap firestarters.

In a word, eh. It works. You can get four useful chunks out of a slice, but unless you use a finer blade than I did (I used a chop saw) you won’t get as many slices as you hope. The process is very messy, but that’s forgivable. The reality is that whatever volatile these things are soaked with is quite noticeably volatile, and out of their package they quickly dry to the point where they can only be readily lit with a propane torch. Yeah, they’re constructed of flammable materials, but so is wood.

On a budget and if you happen to have a propane torch handy – which I do – it’s better than nothing. But not a lot better. It’s not the equivalent of commercial firestarters.

I’ve been getting over the flu over the past month which means I’ve been as inactive as necessary chores permit. Little Bear has always been kind of a couch potato unless he saw something that needed chasing and he gets more so as he ages, so he didn’t complain much about hanging around the cabin. I’m normally not very active in winter anyway.

But LB’s bowels have gotten kind of bound up, he responds to the laxative powers of a good walky, and I’m feeling a lot better than a week ago. So this beautiful morning we gave the Jeep a miss and headed up the road to take the long way to Landlady’s place to tend the game camera and the chickens.

That’s the utility buildings on Landlady’s ridgetop, on the other side of the wash from the road leading to the Lair. Her house is down on the other side of the ridge and out of sight here. To get to it directly by foot is a simple matter, less than half a mile. But this morning we took the roads, which is at least three times as far. Little Bear was kind of into it for a while, normally he wants to do pretty much anything I want to do, but then he started questioning the wisdom of my choice.

But he’s adaptable, and even if he didn’t appreciate the health benefits of exercise he found plenty of scents that needed examination and reply. Then after we changed the camera mem card and crossed the wash and just as we began to climb Landlady’s ridge, he stopped, looked a little confused and offended, and then took a massive dump in the middle of the road. Mission accomplished, though I’d have preferred a polite detour to the side first.

We finished with the chickens, took the short path home, and he got to have a rest and some treats in his Sumo toy.

A few days before the New Moon…

h/t

😀

Illinois AG candidate robbed at gunpoint in Chicago during campaign photoshoot

No reason to click the link, really, the title says everything – except that he escaped with his soft pink flesh unharmed. Pity – he doesn’t seem to have enjoyed his visit to the gun-free Chicago paradise.

I’ve tried to reply to your email twice and the reply keeps bouncing. Sorry, don’t know what the problem is, don’t want you to think I’m blowing you off.