The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Senator Schumer, I roll my eyes in your general direction.

Bring a chart to Thanksgiving dinner to bash GOP tax plan, Schumer says

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told his Twitter followers Tuesday to prepare for tax politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table, and then he took a shot at Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

The New York Democrat instructed his followers to bring a chart from a left-leaning think tank on the Republican tax plan to their holiday dinner in case a relative “tells you the Republican tax bill helps the middle class.”

I’ve actually been invited to a sort-of Thanksgiving lunch/dinner tomorrow, accepted with thanks, and I don’t expect GOP tax policy to come up in conversation. But in the unlikely event that it does, I’ll just have to muddle along somehow without Schumer’s dumbass chart.

Do as you will, but if you were looking for advice I’d advise you to leave the politics to the Internet and enjoy your holiday.

“I have no idea what his politics were, and I find that endearing even though his music was insipid like unto the Archies.”

RIP, I suppose.

But it was too late. She’d already been diversified.

h/t

Uh, This Flat Earther’s Homemade Manned Rocket Launch Does Not Sound Totally Advisable

I’ve launched several rockets in the Mojave, and assisted with many more. Great fun. If someone had suggested that I build a big one and climb in for the flight, I’d have told them to get stuffed. Nobody ever did, because I don’t willingly associate with morons.

According to the AP, Hughes says he expects his new rocket to hurl him through the skies above the Mojave Desert ghost town of Amboy at up to 500 miles per hour for roughly one mile, attaining a peak altitude of 1,800 feet before it deploys two parachutes.

Sheeit. I’ve done twice as much, and my rockets came back to me…well, ahem, mostly.

…and that’s how I know never to get into any rocket I could build.

Too bad about this idiot, though.

Hughes is a proponent of the Flat Earth theory; the Research Flat Earth group is his main sponsor. Hughes does not “believe in science,” which he told the AP has “no difference” from science fiction.

“I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust,” he added. “But that’s not science, that’s just a formula. There’s no difference between science and science fiction.”

Uh huh. If you say so. Rest in peace.

Flat earth. (snicker) Everybody knows the earth is hollow. Where else could the reptilians live?

h/t to Big Brother

Guys, yesterday’s post was just blathering in lieu of something better to write about, it wasn’t intended as a complaint or a bleg.

Appreciate the thought, though. I got the following email from the Gulch’s high-power New York CFO:

You currently have $88 in [bank account], and another $145 coming over in the next day or so. You got a couple big donations yesterday, 100 from [redacted] and 50 from a [also redacted].

…apparently in an effort to make sure I don’t fade away from hunger. 🙂

Okay – see, here I’ll go ahead and mention a problem with being a hermit without an eight-to-fiver. One of the biggest problems I faced when I walked away from my last “job” was the voice in my head that said, “Congrats! Now you’re a bum.” (Sorry, this got long) Continue reading →

…I’m reduced to showing you a picture of my lunch.

To make money you have to spend money – I have another dog-and-horse-feeding gig on the other side of the plateau coming up in two weeks, which means I’ll need lots of gasoline, and this morning I had ten bucks folding money to my name. No possibility of a cash infusion for … two weeks. I’m sensing an oncoming problem.

So I went to the Emergency Money Stash…

Awright! There’s enough coins already rolled to fill every Jerry can and possibly even a propane bottle. I’m cool.

So naturally I spent half my folding money on a package of pork chops. I hardly ever do that, almost all my meat comes from cans but sometimes I crave cooked muscle tissue in slab form. And I suppose I could go out and kill something when I get like that, but honestly the only wild game that I can actually find regularly is cottontails, and they’re not worth the massive trouble in my opinion. What very little meat is under all that fluffy fur is pretty much tasteless. I’ve tried. So yeah. Local market was selling pork chops, and I brought home a package. Sue me. I’m a spendthrift.

A generous reader sent me a bunch of packages of instant mashed potatoes, which I don’t actually use often but I do use them on special occasions like Pork Chops. Cook the chops in a nice quick gravy made from an elderly can of cream of mushroom soup, and we’ve got an unusually loverly lunch.

LB says…

Okay, LB didn’t really say anything. He just lay there and looked put-upon until he got his.

And at his actual dinner time there’s enough for special treats, so he’s making out like a big black hairy burglar today.

And good news! When I got home, broke but topped off on drinking water, I learned that my last regular monthly paying gig, which I had thought had faded away, is still active – or rather active again. So that’s a monthly cash infusion I was learning to live without, that I don’t have to live without at least just yet. A good thing to celebrate, and a good way to celebrate it. Huzzah!

I’ll also take this opportunity to thank everybody who signed up for the TUAK Patreon account, which made up for half of what I thought I’d lost from that caretaking gig. Between the two that’s $75 a month I can count on for flour and fuel. Thanks very much! I do appreciate it.

Nineteen degrees outside and falling. Woke at six to a lovely cool bedroom, thermometer says 53 which is perfect sleeping weather without having to pile the blankets a foot high. That new space heater works perfectly.

Couldn’t say the same for the main cabin, though far from freezing it seemed shivery compared to the addition. But I expected that, took all winter precautions. I laid the season’s first fire in the woodstove yesterday afternoon, fired it up while I heated water for the first cup of the morning…

The kindling is enough to get the dust burning off the top of the stovepipe, a smell I still hate after all these years but that’s life. Once the kindling is well-involved I stack on some hardwood billets from those pallets I cut, and soon the cabin will be toasty throughout. I must say, though, I’ll probably spend this whole winter exclaiming monotonously over how much I love that thermostat.

Should have gone out and taken the picture a few minutes earlier, when the hollow was still completely in shadow. This time of year is the only time you can get that shot, with the cliff on the far side of the wash brightly lit while everything in the foreground is still dark. Nearing the winter solstice the Lair’s interior gets direct sun later and later in the morning, bottoming out at 7:45 right at the solstice. By then everything around me is well lit if the sun’s out, but the cabin stays in shadow till the last moment. Then I can have fun through the cold part of winter watching the mornings get earlier and earlier.

This morning, for the first time, we got some genuine frost. Chicken water didn’t freeze, but that’s coming…

If the nighttime temp is really going into the teens, I’ll be bringing the waterer indoors for the first time. And lighting the fire for the first time, too, tomorrow morning.

I knew the weather was going to change, because yesterday we had a scary afternoon windstorm. Things flying around the yard, wind moaning around the building corners – I was really glad I’d seen to the powershed roof, I can tell you. Afternoon windstorm often brings a change in weather, and it did. Our unseasonable warm spell is over.

For once I’m not completely unhappy about that. I’m as ready for winter as I’ve ever been since moving here except in the matter of the pantry. I’ve quite a shopping list of canned goods written down and waiting for my next cash infusion, but at this point that’s just neurosis. I’ve been over that and won’t bore you with it again, but I am going to stock up on canned fruit and veggies at the first opportunity, just so I can know I have it.

Hey, I noticed this morning that Harry Flashman said something nice about TUAK and me:

Joel’s Gulch. Joel and his dog live in the Southwestern Desert. He is a past master at using what’s to hand to make a sustainable habitat in that environment. He’s very good at innovation, and his blog is very interesting.

Thanks for the link. TUAK hasn’t really been very interesting lately, I fear, since I’m slowing down for the winter here lately. Since spring it’s been work work work around here, and I can look back on the warm season’s accomplishments with no particular shame but I’d rather be sitting in a chair reading a book – and now I’ve got a lovely place to do it and have been, rather to the neglect of the blog. Sorry about that, though I don’t promise any immediate change. 🙂 It’s coming on winter, when sitting around with a cup of tea is the only sensible course.

h/t

…is privileged people acting sanctimonious when the rules momentarily become convenient and other privileged people go under the bus.

The news has been full of rich’n’famous people dealing with accusations, often decades old, about things they’ve been doing with their hands and tongues and wangs. Perhaps you’ve noticed. People who’ve been working right next to the miscreants or their victims are shocked! They had no idea! Sure.

I keep trying to come up with jokes about it and they keep falling flat before I’ve finished writing them down, because it’s just all so tiresome – people have been pushing social limits about sex since the invention of la différence, people have been getting caught at it for about that long, and the infractions have been greeted with outrage or shrugs according to the style of the moment. I myself, while never anything remotely like a magnet to women, can think of at least two youthful indiscretions involving places my hands didn’t belong under the circumstances, that would have me very worried if I were currently in Hollywood or congress. Is it wrong? Yeah. Sure it is. It’s also human nature. Did your hands wander? Bad. Did you return them to your own lap when asked to? Tough shit, your political enemies (and former friends, apparently) will still crucify you if they can, or hand the executioner the nails if it will provide a moment’s advantage.

Personally I find the odor of sanctity harder to take than the (often quite tame) misbehavior. People’s Exhibit One, from someone who hasn’t been accused (yet):

McConnell, R-KY: “As with all credible allegations of sexual harassment or assault I believe the Ethics Committee should review the matter. I hope the Democratic Leader will join me on this. Regardless of party, harassment and assault are completely unacceptable – in the workplace or anywhere else.”

Really? When did this start? Because unless this is very recent Senate policy, McConnell should maybe call it the “Except For Ted Rule.” Because (do correct me if I’m wrong) I believe Mitch McConnell was in the senate at the same time Ted Kennedy was and this iron rule never seemed to be mentioned back then. And Kennedy just had the highest profile, he was hardly the only one.

So forgive an old man, please, if I fail to be shocked by Franken’s adolescent vulgarity or McConnell’s new-found sanctimony. They’re both perfectly welcome to visit the underside of the bus and I hope they lose everything – but for reasons other than where they’ve been keeping their hands and other body parts.

She’s much larger in person, let me tell you. She’s Maya (not actually shown in the photo,) a 12-year-old blind and deaf and really cranky Shih Tzu who has never liked me.

Normally she puts up with me after a lot of barking and growling, but I went in there when L was on a day trip to take Maya for a walky, which involved a leash, which involved me actually touching Maya when her person wasn’t around, which Maya wasn’t prepared to countenance in the least.

Honestly, I wouldn’t have thought she could open that tiny mouth wide enough to insert a human hand. I wouldn’t have thought those bitsy little teeth would break skin. Wrong and wrong. She turned like a snake and got me on the hand, and when I failed to learn my lesson and tried again she got me on the other hand.

That’s never happened to me before.

She got put on her leash, and we went for her walky, because I don’t take shit from purse dogs. But damned if she didn’t take her revenge for the indignity.

Regular readers know I’m addicted to one import from cities far, far away…

Trader Joe’s house blend, only whole bean need apply. Normally we keep around three cans in stock here, but with one thing or another we’re down to a single unopened can. Landlady’s bringing another but that’s not for three weeks. It’s time to either open the last can, or…

Hm. Well.

Okay. I pride myself on how carefully I rotate my food stock, but I have to admit that Plan B can (marked “emergency use only”) has been on the shelf a long time. In fact…

er, um…okay, it’s good that we’ve managed, through the continuing generosity of Landlady, to fend off the emergency this long. I put up that single can of store-brand ground coffee against a St. Famine’s Day that never really came. The vacuum seal is intact, it’s probably, er, “fine.” but four years past the best-by date is not a good sign to find on a can of coffee, which unlike canned corn has a definitely finite shelf life.

Ah, well. The sacrifices we must make in the name of inventory management…

Of course the big question, not yet answered, was never “Do I want a space heater with a thermostat?” Duh. Of course I do.

I also want a silent VTOL and the power of invisibility, but I can’t have them. The question of whether I can have a full-time heater, even only used at night, is still open. Because the space heater uses a pilot light, and the pilot light uses propane, and propane uses…

I first lit the pilot on September 23ish, and really meant to let it run that propane bottle dry just to see how long it took. Couldn’t quite bring myself to do that due to plumbing issues – I didn’t want to turn my back on a furnace with a rubber hose. But I can say that today I swapped out propane bottles on the space heater for the first time and it really only heated the bedroom for a couple hours each on a few mornings. It’s not appalling propane consumption but it’s looking about as significant as I feared.

The original design spec was to use it only on truly cold nights, and not as a crutch to get away from the woodstove. Of course being human I have every intention of pushing that second thing as far as possible: The Lair has improved to the point where the only thing I still really dislike about winter, other than unavoidable traction issues, is that first shivery hour in the morning before the fire in the woodstove lets me take my coat off. That’s obviously most acute on mornings after single-digit nights but it’s not exclusive to them. Also, frankly, lighting the pilot in a cold firebox is a real time-consuming pain in the ass.

But anyway, we’re still experimenting to learn how quickly how much usage uses up a propane bottle. Unfortunately right now it’s looking like “pretty damned quick.”

Oh, yeah. That’s what I’ve been missing all these years.

This was the first really frosty morning in a couple of weeks, as winter probes our defenses for weaknesses. I’ve learned a new life lesson: If you want your shelter to be well insulated, hire a consultant from Minnesota who thinks insulation is really important. The addition’s floor needs work, since it needs insulation and skirting, but the walls are fine. Much better, in general, than the main cabin walls.

So though I could tell it had turned a bit cold overnight, the bedroom outside my blankets wasn’t terribly chilly. The bedside thermometer said 54^o. The thermostat was on but turned to minimum and the heater had never kicked on. So I just reached out, flicked the lever on my primitive little thermostat, and rolled over to snooze for half an hour. When I finally went boots-on it was closer to 60^o and I could pull on my jeans without that cold shock on an old man’s shanks.

Hermitage is good, I’ve got no complaints. But I had truly forgotten how much civilization lives in the humble thermostat.

In our last exciting episode we learned that some errant wind gust had tried to take the powershed’s roof off. I found that unacceptable, but had to think a bit as to how I was going to crank the frame back together.

A combination of c-clamp and hammer did the job. I’ll use hurricane straps on the rafters, but needed something more like plates on the header across the front of the building. I didn’t have anything like that. But thanks to all those cut-up pallets I did have billets of rock-hard cured hardwood.

So I cranked the header down as well as I could with the c-clamp, and then ran three of those pre-drilled billets across the inside. As a final step I drilled up from the bottom and screwed in eight 3″ deck screws. That should keep the roof where it belongs.

Post-mortem of the original job indicates that I deserved to lose the roof. If I’d paid to have that frame put up, I’d want to go back in time and fire the contractor. But it’s stronger now.

I was just giving his face a good rub when I noticed something I’ve been waiting for…

Look who’s getting gray on his muzzle!

He was born in early March 2009, so he’s pushing 9 years old. Doesn’t seem so long…

One reason for the morning walkie is to give Little Bear a chance to sniff out local doings. He’s a dog, and they say scent means more to dogs than sight or sound. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know sometimes LB will suddenly veer off from the beaten path and find a spot where something happened of which he clearly does not approve. He’ll get right down and smell the spot, rake the dirt with his claws and give it another good leisurely smell, then at last lift his leg and anoint the spot with what I imagine to be a comment of his own, probably something along the lines of “This is mine, so go away and don’t come back. If I meet you, you’re dead.”

Other than just keeping me company, which would work just as well and more economically with a smaller dog, that’s really LB’s only practical function. He does take coyote sign in his territory personally, I know that for a fact. I know for a fact that coyotes fear him, and that they stay away from the cabin and thus from my chickens. I assume those things are related.

So when LB wants to take a moment and commune with the local wildlife, I indulge him without complaint.

And I don’t even know when it happened.

I happened to be up on a ladder inside the powershed Saturday, doing some unrelated maintenance. I looked at the roof over the door and thought to myself, “Why did I go to all the trouble of filling the holes left by the roofing with expanding foam, when there’s an inch-high gap the whole width of the building right under it?”

The answer, of course, is that there ain’t supposed to be no steenking inch-high gap, there or anywhere. You can’t even see it from the floor, which is probably why I didn’t notice before Saturday. No idea at all when it happened.

Looking to the right, in the direction facing the cabin…

You can see those two “rafters” have come up off their nails. Externally, the screws that bend the roofing over and fasten it to the walls have popped out of their holes.

Must have been a hell of a gust. This wouldn’t be the first utility building in the area to suddenly flip its lid, but it’s embarrassing to see how close it came to happening to me. The powershed is a repurposed pantry shed somebody else hired me to tear down, being non-specific as to what to do with the pieces. At the time I was scrounging more heavily for my materials than I do now. Also I’m a better carpenter than I was then but even when I assembled it in 2012 it was … not my proudest achievement.

Last month I rebuilt the powershed floor and thought I was done for the year. Turns out I also have some fairly serious retrofitting work to do on the roof before the next big gust comes along.

Okay, so Friday I … hung curtains. Yeah. That happened. Shut up.

Reasons for this were entirely practical, basically all the reasons you’d want curtains on a window including, believe it or not, “people looking in.”

Anyway: Having actual storebought curtains on windows freed up the odd expedients I’d been using, including this extremely long thing I snagged from the dollar store, and which I promptly moved to the bedroom door: Continue reading →

Well, let’s face it. You can make anything with 550 cord. I’m currently macrame-ing an evil TUAKmobile with JATO bottles, ejection capsule and quad 20mm autocannon. It’s not going well: Do you know how much Arrest-me Red 550 cord costs? Weaving it in sufficient density to ward off 30-cal rifle ammo has been a challenge, financially if not technically.

But in the meantime I repurposed a disused interior clothesline into curtain holdbacks.

Nice thing about 550 cord, it’s basically indestructible and never seems to wear out. UV doesn’t affect it. Once it uses up its stretch it never needs re-adjustment.

This cord holding up the chickens’ top cover has been under substantial tension for several years with no sign of deterioration. With a snow load that thing gets heavy.

I moved here in 2006 with a 300′ spool that’s nowhere near used up, since the stuff is apparently endlessly reusable.