The Ultimate Answer to Kings

I’m a 63-year-old hermit. 63 isn’t that old, it’s the new 40, I’m told. But I’ve got a lot of collision damage, and I don’t generally hop out of bed full of vim, vigor and vitality. Most mornings it’s more like slowly shaking the remaining parts of the skeleton into place while administering strong doses of medicinal coffee.

So! When I wake up and stretch, and rather than grabbing a pillow and rolling right back over the first question on my mind is “Okay, what’s the first thing?” I know it might be a good day.

I was thinking specifically about the addition. Yesterday I was kind of lazy and didn’t finish the tasks I’d set for myself, but this morning I’d really like to work on the floor. I have a plan.

But that’s not the first thing. It’s baking day.

It’s 5am, there’s a hint of light over the eastern ridgetop. Days are definitely getting shorter, but it’s a comfortable mid-sixties inside the Lair. The past several days have been unusually hot and I sure don’t want to run the oven in the afternoon. So bread is the first thing.

Then dog and chickens. Then the floor. Onward!

I had a thought last night, while checking battery voltage. You may recall the Lair’s powershed has essentially two separate battery banks at the moment, and only a single indoor voltage monitor. It’s connected to the 12v line, so I can directly monitor only the batteries connected to the 12v lighting. That’s not all that useful, I’m back to hiking out to the powershed every morning with a voltmeter.

I could fix the problem easily, any time I’m ready to trench yet another conduit out to the powershed. Right now there’s just too much other stuff on my plate. And last night I got to thinking, why doesn’t anybody make a wireless voltmeter for remote monitoring? You can walk into any hardware and buy a wireless thermometer for $20, but unless I’m just using the wrong keywords there’s no such thing as a wireless voltmeter on all of Amazon.

Does that seem right to you?

Many more virgin sacrifices than Obama administration, anonymous sources report.

After destroying the Texas coast and the city of Houston with Hurricane Harvey, purchased from Russia with funds laundered from the Republican National Committee, President Trump is here shown personally drowning little old ladies in their nursing home. “Their ancestors were illegal aliens,” anonymous sources report he shouted during the horrific atrocity.

Cajun Navy to Texas: “We got your six.”

One year after the Cajun Navy fleet deployed to pluck stranded families from the flood waters that overwhelmed southeast Louisiana, the volunteer rescuers are mobilizing again. The Cajun Navy is blasting social media with messages for help as neighbors in Texas face the same devastating flooding.

Everything’s cut, but the last couple by the door aren’t nailed down because I had a little oopsie…

🙁 I believe that’s what’s known in the carpentry trade as “piss poor planning.”

Fortunately I can make a hardware run tomorrow. And having gotten this bit under my belt, the bedroom proper will actually be quite simple. It came out 10′ 7″ long so I can alternate 8′ “planks” and then cut the smaller lengths to fit and stagger the seams.

My cuts aren’t all perfectly straight – you try holding a full sheet of plywood against a table saw fence all by yourself, if you get it perfectly straight I’ll stand there and applaud – but not half as bad as I feared. A little wood filler here and there and nobody will be the wiser. And anyway, as I said to somebody offline, this ain’t Donald Trump’s penthouse we’re talking about. You ought to see some of the carpentry in the original part of the cabin.

Neighbor S came over and re-did everything I did on Landlady’s batteries day before yesterday, bigger.

Now, check this out: With this many batteries it’s nearly impossible to keep from blocking at least some filler caps with stiff cables. Let me wave my PhD in procrastination and assure you that anything that tends to make a tedious job more difficult than it needs to be will cause that tedious job to get put off with the slightest – or no – provocation. And topping-off is not a job that should be put off, especially with these golfcart batteries that don’t have big reservoirs like the RS batteries do. They really need to be tended monthly, faithfully.

Here Neighbor S has managed to lay out 24 batteries in 3 8-battery strings for 48 volts, without blocking a single filler cap with a cable. There’s a bit of a tight squeeze on the middle one, all the way at the far end there, but you can still get at it with a filler jug. That shows thoughtful work, that does. Series-parallel battery banks are often a pain in the ass to service, because of all the crisscrossing cables.

I borrowed Neighbor S’s table saw and set it up next to the bench under the eave of Landlady’s barn.

I have five sheets of nice clear plywood that have been stored in the barn since all the building materials for the bedroom addition were delivered in May. The plan, which Landlady got from surfing Pinterest, involves cutting plywood into 9″ plank-like shapes, sanding the corners slightly, and laying them down over tarpaper to pretend they’re a plank floor.

Honestly I’ve been very unhappy with the tile floor I so laboriously laid down last September; the tiles are cold in winter, which I expected, but they’re also slippery as hell and surprisingly fragile – several are already broken. So I’m looking for a floor that’s a little more in tune with the Joel-ness of the cabin. Frankly I toyed with the idea of just laying down some plywood, but Landlady gave me That Look so I ceased my wrongthink.

The next task, just completed, was to borrow Neighbor D’s palm sander. I should have enough material for some moderate goofs, so I’m going to practice the technique by doing the closet floor first.

I sometimes fear that Stephen King’s cogwork may have chipped a tooth or two, here and there…

But we have been informed that he doesn’t like Trump, and is therefore righteous and virtuous.

Hey! We have that in common! Now if only he’d block me from ever having to see one of his clown movies, and virtuously redistribute some of his wealth in this direction, we’d be in harmony on all the important issues of the day. 🙂

I got stalled on the addition’s electrical work because I just flat ran out of wire. With last weekend’s care packages I could finally bring it to an end with the last lamps…

A couple of years ago Big Brother sent me four of these 12 volt exterior LEDs, thinking they’d be useful for yard lighting. They’re not very bright; I used two of them just to illuminate the 8X8 powershed and it’s none too bright inside. But I think they’ll do for the chicken yard, which is pretty close to the back door. Be nice if I can check on the chickens in the evening without a flashlight in my mouth, y’know? I planned this from the moment it was definite the cabin would have a back door, because checking on chicken alarms after dark is kind of a pain. At a minimum these should illuminate the rear landing, I suppose.

Can hardly wait for dark, so I can aim them and see how much light I really have to play with.

If so, best wishes and I hope you’re bugged out or battened down. The forecasts have grown increasingly shrill over the past 24 hours, and today’s the day.

Be safe out there.

Okay, today’s the day. No more putting it off, Joel. Go get’em.

Somewhere in the desert is a prefab shed with a bunch of six-volt batteries. Those batteries are now Landlady’s property, which means they’re in the wrong place.

Since there are lots of these batteries, I’m going to haul only eight at a time.

The simplest way to get these first eight out from underfoot is to put them where they belong. Continue reading →

From Landlady…

Famed ESPN racist Robert Lee having been removed from announcing a University of Virginia football game, and his infamous WHITE horse Traveler having been banned from the USC games he has opened for 57 years, it has been decided that all stone buildings should immediately be pulled down, since it is self-evidently clear that stone walls are racist.

ETA: In fairness, the progs didn’t invent this sort of nonsense. And anticommunists got laughed at for it.

How’s this for a masterpiece of the carpentry arts, which took a whole seven minutes to knock together. Yeah, it’s a partial wall because light and heat and ventilation. It’ll be vented on the bottom, too.

I cut the 2X4s at Landlady’s place yesterday, because her inverter will run my circular saw. And then as soon as it was up I saw that I needed a couple of nailers for drywall, which I could easily knock out with the cordless saw because who cares, only to recall…

…that only yesterday I trailered all the spare lumber to the barn because I wanted to clear the woodshed for painting. So I guess I’ll cut those this afternoon when I go check on Ghost and the chickens.

Which also reminds me that I should start schlepping batteries around. Nice day for it, and I’ve already done laundry and as much construction as I’m probably gonna get done today.

It’s Monsoon season, which is a pain in the ass. It’s also pretty necessary, because this is the time of year when we get the bulk of our moisture. There’s rain and snow in winter and spring, but now’s the time we get our big gully busters.

Still. Mud. Flash floods. Never being sure the roads will be passable from one hour to the next. Kind of a pain in the ass. Good thing there’s all these flowers.

That’s my yard, between the driveway and the wash, in the afternoon light. Millions of tiny yellow, white and purple flowers everywhere. Continue reading →

Because anyone who can be described as a traveler must be racist.

Hey, why not?

Traveler, USC’s mascot, comes under scrutiny for having a name similar to Robert E. Lee’s horse

When Richard Saukko galloped his chalk-white Arabian horse named Traveler around the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum almost 56 years ago, it was supposed to be a one-time stunt.

Instead, the brief performance before USC kicked off its season against Georgia Tech turned into one of college football’s iconic traditions. A succession of white horses named Traveler have followed — Traveler IX debuts this fall — trotting out of the tunnel as “Conquest” plays and the costumed Trojan warrior atop the horse waves a sword. But during a rally earlier this week to show solidarity in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, Va., a USC campus group linked the name to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, whose favorite horse was Traveller.

At the rally, according to the student newspaper the Daily Trojan, Saphia Jackson, co-director of the USC Black Student Assembly, asked students not to be quiet, and reminded that “white supremacy hits close to home” and referenced the name of the Trojans mascot.

Sigh.

I don’t want to be niggardly in my condemnation of racism, but probably more than one white horse has been named Traveler. Also, there’s no evidence that the Traveler ever owned a slave, or even had an opinion about the practice.

Once in a blue moon a chicken will do something at least vaguely suggestive of learning ability. It’s virtually always food-related.

I started breakfast and noticed that my remaining bread is about to go moldy, which settled the question of whether this should be a baking day. Meanwhile the chickens, who had already been fed, were raising cain outside as if they were being deprived of something. From the way they stacked up in the corner when I opened the back door, they were expecting a bread treat. It’s possible I’ve been overindulging them – the new back door does make tossing treats easier than before.

So I opened the door and tossed a piece of bread to the far side of the chicken yard, and three of the four hens made a mad dash for it. The fourth remained exactly where she was, and the second chunk landed at her feet. She grabbed it and ran, with three hens in hot pursuit. 🙂

Might come in handy someday…

Hey, Little Bear! I’ve got a new trick for you to learn…

h/t to Carl.