The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Landlady has been Uncle Joel’s Internet Angel for several-going-on-many years now, and this week she introduced me to the Magic Elf Box…

A genuine pre-owned iPhone 6, baby. I hereby decree that henceforth you can’t be a privacy-obsessed hermit without lugging a smartphone around.

I’m, um, still learning to use it…

What does this button do? Oh.

You know you’re a manly man when people send you gifts like this…

Nylon rope! This stuff is expensive.

It’s been a busy couple of days, so I haven’t taken the time to uncoil this and see how long it really is. But good nylon rope is like gold. This won’t get left on some hillside, that’s what cheap rope is for. This is going in the Jeep kit, so it’ll be around when I need it.

Hey, you wanna know what a four-inch tow strap looks like? Dude: Continue reading →

I haven’t gotten one of these in years! Here’s the old Nigerian Letter brought to “a Company in Europe” under the title, “Are You Ready to Participate?” (spelling, grammar and spacing original.)

Dear Sir,

My name is Ana.What I have may be of interest to you, because it is a business proposal that will benefit you.

I have worked for a Company in Europe for some years now.The main reason I am writing to you is based on the fact that the Company has been Bankrupt and Liquidated for a few years now and the Company has been Ordered to pay off all outstanding Creditors what the Company owes them.

To this effect I thought that perhaps we could both reach an understanding as regards presenting you as one of the Creditors of an outstanding payment of USD$33,625,100,00 Million United States dollars by making available to you all the necessary details/documentation to back up your claims which i would be facilitating myself by the doing the ground work,to ensure you get paid as soon as possible.

The money would be splitted (60% to me and 40% to you )and you can invest this money on a profitable business managed by you while some of the profit can be used to support charities.

If you are interested kindly get back to me on my private email ( redacted )for further full details and way forward.

Best Regards,

Ms.Ana

Sure! I’d be delighted to enter into an embezzlement plot with a total stranger who emailed me out of the blue for no apparent reason. Can’t wait! How much of my personal information do you need to make the transfer?

And yet I’ve heard that people actually do fall for this … transparent con.

It occurred to me this afternoon that I’ve never actually owned a bed in my life.

Oh, I’ve owned a mattress. Probably several, over the years. I’ve slept in a bed or two that belonged to somebody else, one time for decades. But I have never actually possessed an actual bed that could actually be described as an actual piece of furniture. Headboard. Footboard. Needs paint or varnish or something from time to time. Not because I’m some poor tortured puppy, just because I used to move a lot.

But I’m done moving, if all goes well. And today…

Yeah, I know. It’s a kid’s bed. I’ll paint it a less girlish color before setting it up for real. And the size is actually perfect. If I’m sleeping alone, I can quite happily do so on a cot. A single mattress is luxury. The whole bedroom was designed around the dimensions of that piece of furniture. The only thing like it I’ve ever owned.

I brought it to the Lair and set it up so Landlady, Ian and Ian’s Mom could see my new shiny. And somebody suggested that I ought to run an electrical outlet to the closet wall behind the nightstand, just in case.

Good idea, I thought. And since in care packages* a couple of people sent me a whole bunch of Romex remainders…

… as soon as my guests left, I proceeded to do exactly that. 🙂

—
*Yes, a care package post is coming. I’ve got all the pics transferred to the ‘pooter, but it’s been a busy day and they take a while to write up.

…don’t be there when it hits.

Got an email from Big Brother, who has spent by far the majority of his life in southern Florida and has sat through a hurricane or two…

I’ve been doing storm stuff for two days now, trying to stay ahead of everybody else. I topped off everything with gas yesterday at an available gas pump, and today I laugh at huge gas lines. Now to bug out ahead of the crowd!

This evening I will be off to install [MIL]’s storm shutters, and then [Wife] and I are free to bug out at will. We have been talking about a trip to her home town in NC, and suddenly it seems like the time has come.

My problem with LB is I never know what he’s going to do around strangers. Today he arbitrarily decided to kick the ass of a former friend.

It’s a big week, with Landlady, Ian, and Ian’s mom up for a visit. Ian’s mom has this ultimately cool dog named Basie, a sort of Pyrenees/Sasquach mix. He was one of the Lair’s first visitors, as it happens. He and LB have met before and LB always seemed to enjoy his company, in a somewhat subservient way. Basie has clearly spent his life used to being the biggest and most dominant dog in any social setting, and other dogs just accepted that. He’s actually bigger than LB, and you won’t meet many dogs bigger than LB.

But he’s not young any more, and this morning LB (after greeting Ian’s mom most happily) took one look at Basie and went for blood. Or – well, no. He went for submission, teeth bared. He shoved Basie right off the steep slope in front of Landlady’s house, came back with an insufferable smirk and a mouthful of fur, and then as if to leave no doubt as to the message he was attempting to convey, took a massive piss on Landlady’s porch.

And after that, they seemed to get along just fine.

So I made a water-and-gasoline run yesterday, to the little town nearest the Gulch, and on the way back I spilled a respectable portion of my weekly gas ration. The reason was not hard to see…

(Parenthetic aside: People have suggested for years that I start tagging posts, and it’s situations like this that make me wish I had done so years ago. These Jerry cans have quite a history by now, but I’m too lazy to go back through the archives and dig up the links.) When we began the Jerry can saga, Big Brother had sent me three of them to replace my long-suffering and terminally worn-out plastic jugs. What followed was totally not his fault; I’d put these cans on my wish list, imagining they’d be a big improvement over plastic.

The main lesson to be drawn from what came next is that you can’t spend $25 on a Jerry can and then expect to bang it around like you’re a Wehrmacht mechanic. These cans are better than nothing, don’t get me wrong, but I’m babying them along.

The first thing that happened was the unhappy knowledge that they’re not vented at all, thank you government regulation, which meant not only that it took a subjective month to empty a (heavy!) can into the Jeep, but also that if you left them even marginally in the sun you’d get expansion and contraction nearly as bad as a plastic jug suffers – except a plastic jug can survive it. So I built a cover for my garbage-and-gas-can corral, and became religious about never leaving them in the sun.

The other thing I did, based on suggestions in comments, was drill a scary hole in all the cans and retrofit a plastic vent. These vents are totally not designed for this application, so each had to be gooped into submission with Seal-All.

So yeah – yesterday the first of those seals failed me in transit. A post-mortem revealed that nothing I had done to the can had gone wrong: It was another quality issue. The sealant bonded to the paint just fine, but it turned out the paint isn’t bonded to the metal in any meaningful way. So the paint – and the sealant – lifted off the metal, and gasoline ran freely down the side of the can all the way home.

Should have sandpapered the paint off first. Got it. This one fixed, I’ll wait patiently for the other two to fail in turn.

Here’s another example of that synchronicity I’m always on about.

The new bedroom already has a bed and nightstand coming (allegedly needs painting first.) I have closet racks and furniture already. But I noticed as soon as it was built that the west front corner of the bedroom is a very pleasant place to sit and read, and determined that somewhere I have to score a comfortable chair for that corner. I also noticed that we’re a little short on furniture stores around here. I was just thinking about that this morning, in fact. I figured something would turn up.

And then today, out of the blue, without any discussion of that sort in their presence, Neighbors D&L decided they wanted rid of this…

I need to store it elsewhere till the room is finished, so it was probably kind of dumb to go ahead and bring it home and set it up. But I wanted to try it on, so to speak.

In fact I think I see a book that wants reading…

If you store long-term food, I’m sure you’re familiar with the Gamma Seal line of spin-on bucket lids. They seal airtight, and until today I assumed they’d last forever. Pricy, but worth it.

Noticed the line in the center of this one, didn’t realize it was an open crack until some flour got wet in a bucket that was supposed to be sealed.

Zoom in.

A friend is generously making a long road trip to help me with the final phase of addition construction, which is insulation and drywall.

This summer’s construction has gone much more smoothly than normal for a Gulch project. I’m so much more used to scrounging for a long time to supply much smaller projects. This time I just bought almost all the materials, which is kind of cheating. I’ve been troubled by all the money I’ve spent this summer, thousands of dollars, and that lately I spent too much on paint which wasn’t in the budget at all. Now we’re coming to the end, and I have money in hand enough for either the drywall or the insulation but not both. I’ve had promises of contributions from two very generous and reliable contributors, but money takes time and I’m out of time. I’m either ready to roar in three weeks or I can wait till somebody else happens by to help me hang a ceiling. I had in mind doing this part of the cabin right before moving in for a change, just so I could say I had done that.

That’s been on my mind for a couple of weeks. Time slid by and the problem was not resolving itself.

So today we were trading emails so my friend could make sure he had everything he needed. I outlined my insulation needs, not yet resolved, and he said, “I got that covered, I’ll just bring it along.”

And just like that, the problem went away.

I shouldn’t have worried. Synchronicity is like the red count-down display in a bad action movie; it always waits till the last second. 🙂

Finishing the woodshed was really the big bad thing I wanted done this morning, though it was clear this also needed to be a baking day if I wanted to keep eating bread. So I got a late start on that, which I’ll pay for in the sweltering afternoon…

It just went in the oven while I was uploading that picture. It’s already 92^o indoors, and this won’t help. But maybe we’ll get a nice storm front to blow cool wind around, like yesterday afternoon. Only a little rain, but big black scary clouds and lots of lovely wind. Happened yesterday, could happen today.

For all this I’m really just putting off the inevitable. I need to cut a piece of scrap to close off the passage between the cabin proper and the addition, then ball up and stain the new bedroom floor. I keep telling myself I can’t really ruin it. Not entirely. But it’s something I’ve never done, and I’m procrastinating.

Irony, thy abode is Silicon Valley. Brad knocks it out of the park, go read.

The Days of Macintosh are Over

If you wanted to distill Google’s badthink-banning policy down to one line, there you have it. “A garden of pure ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths.”

I always used to say, If you want a cup of cream and sugar, make yourself a cup of cream and sugar. Don’t spoil good coffee with it.

Got a couple of nice links from the Mother of Snarks yesterday morning, creating that coveted phenomenon known in the gunblogosphere as a Tamalanche…

Tam’s good for the humility, she is.

Nice to see you, Tam. Drop by any time.

It’s been baking in the sun unpainted for most of four months while I concentrated on the addition. Always intended to paint it green, just didn’t get to it.

It’s further from green than ever this morning, but that’ll just be incentive to do it right. I expended a gallon of Kilz I’ve had squirreled away for a couple of years, because it needed a primer coat. I’m not exactly overloaded with green paint at the moment and there are still cabin surfaces that need a second coat. This construction stuff is expensive; I need more paint, but I need drywall and insulation more and only hope I have cash enough to get it.

The primer reminded me how much I hate hate hate working with oil-based paint. Shoulda worn gloves. Even if I had paint remover I wouldn’t douse my hands in it. And I refused to even consider priming the woodshed till I’d acquired a disposable brush and roller cover, because I ain’t cleaning them.

Next chore:

Before I started painting I washed my flour buckets and left them in the sun to dry. When I get to the cloth Bluebird sacks in my long-term stash, filling the buckets becomes rather more of a chore than it used to be…

Because I give the empties to Neighbor L, who makes dish towels out of them. She also grades me on how carefully I cut the thread-and-not-the-cloth when I open them.

Seriously, it’s gotten to where I’m happier when I can buy paper 5-pound bags of Gold Medal from the dollar store. Nobody cares how painstakingly I open those.

For the past four or five days we’ve had afternoon clouds and variable weather; sprinkles, wind storms, brushing the edges of what might have been thunderstorms if the weather had thrown the dice differently. But no serious weather except HOT. HOT till the afternoon storm cells brought the breeze, which today hasn’t happened. Today it didn’t even bother to cloud up. LB is suffering on the floor, I’m kind of suffering with my head halfway between the floor and the ceiling. ‘Cause it’s frickin’ HOT. Not Mid-June-Before-The-Monsoon hot, but hot.

Thing is, I just perused the most accurate forecast site I know for this region, and it says Monsoon is essentially over. It’s got a few days marked “Possible Afternoon T-Storm” till the middle of next month, but no “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here” days between now and then. It could be wrong, but for the past few years it’s been mostly right. So I’m thinking Monsoon is mostly over.

Which is really weird, you know? Because we had two back to back record-breaking flash floods, but it never really was all that wet. The really big scary power-system-destroying or cabin-washing-away storms all happened somewhere else this year, somewhere upstream. Screw’em if they can’t take a joke.

Some Monsoons are wet, some are kind of anemic. This one managed to be both at the same time.

This morning is for crawling around, nailing the planks down.

I’ve got a bad knee and a terrible knee: One’s had surgery twice and one was pieced together out of (allegedly) very small pieces. I’m not complaining – Somebody went to a great deal of (well-paid, no doubt) trouble and I’m lucky and pleased to have them both. The terrible one is encased in fiberglass during the day, and rarely a problem. This one open spot used to occasionally let things enter very painfully, until I made a sort of flexible armor out of several layers of Gorilla tape. Now that knee never bothers me.

The other one, though, put up with me crawling around to the tune of maybe as many as 100 finish nails (220 total in the bedroom proper, not counting the closet threshold and that little strip near the interior wall. Yeah. I counted.) and then said, “Y’know, we’re done here.”

Fortunately I keep pads in the Jeep, because you never know when you’ll find yourself kneeling on rocks…

Just needed the one, of course.

Terrible things happen in wild country, most commonly on a micro scale you can step right over without noticing. Last night I was out with Little Bear on his evening walky. He was moving cheerfully down the driveway toward the wash – we were still in the yard – when he literally skidded to a halt on the gravel, executed a graceful 180, and headed for a clump of bush we had already passed. I was looking around not paying enough attention to what had caught his nose, and didn’t see that he had his schnoz down in a possibly dangerous hole.

Now, LB is normally very good about avoiding snakes – I have joked that he fears nothing on four legs except bulls, but he fears everything with two legs or none – so I didn’t expect him to stick his nose into a snake’s fangs. But still, this was poor management on my part. I should have watched what he was doing more carefully. The hole – and his muzzle – was covered with ants. He came up snuffing and shaking his head. He had found something dead in that hole, and the ants resented the intrusion.

He held still while I wiped the ants off his face, and I went back to the hole in time to see a larval rat emerge, also covered with ants and apparently not enjoying its very short life. I assume the mother was dead inside, but the ants weren’t waiting for the baby to die before consuming it.

I walked away pondering Deep Thoughts about how incompatible such scenes – repeated millions of times daily around me, as I know but don’t usually have to witness – are with all the talk about a loving biblical god. There’s a glib theological answer to the question of why there’s evil, suffering and death among mankind, but what did that baby rat’s ancestors do to piss god off? If life is the result of design, as it might well be for all I know, it certainly didn’t have a designer who gave a shit about individual lives.

That was kind of a depressing thought to end the day on. But then I got to thinking, there’s exactly as much hard evidence for the notion of reincarnation as there is for the Genesis story, right? And if we assume reincarnation, then maybe that writhing, suffering rat baby really contained the soul of, say, the late Senator Ted Kennedy. Yeah! Still working his horrible way through karma, from his first long-ago post-death incarnation as a bit of fauna in the gut of a dung beetle, rolling its treasure under the wheel of a moving Somali technical…

It’s mean, but it did kinda cheer me up.