The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Get a load of this bullshit…

Why, that makes me want to take my AK and…Okay, actually it doesn’t. Did piss me off a bit, though.

The comments are precious and almost give me a little more faith in humanity, and perhaps (almost, not entirely) in Twitterers.

h/t to a comment at Claire’s place.

I hoped to have more done by now, but I’m not feeling as well as yesterday. I think this unexpected heat wave is starting to drain my precious bodily givashit. Anyway all the pieces are cut and sanded…

LB and I got a fairly late start, compared to what I’d planned… Continue reading →

Possibly because, still being uninsulated, it’s nice and cool at night…

…but he can’t decide which part he likes best. Sometimes he’s in the corner, sometimes by the door. He can’t have that spot there, that’s where my bed is going.

Yeah, he’s spreading dog hair everywhere, and no, I’ll never keep it out of the floor finish. This is his house too; it’s inevitable and I won’t worry about it.

Okay, while feeding chickens I remembered another chore I’d really wanted to finish this week…

I’ve tended these batteries at TC’s place for the past two years, but “tended” mostly meant “checked that they were still there, and that rats weren’t chewing the cables.” They were charged by the solar power system but the only load on them was what it took to run the inverter, which must have been negligible. Now and then I’d pry off the caps to see that they weren’t losing electrolyte in any unexpectedly great quantities but they didn’t really require much “tending.”

Now of course they’ll be powering a house and barn, and I expect that to change. I want to know how much distilled water I need to keep around for monthly maintenance of 24 of these things – my own 4 do go through distilled water – and so I want to start at zero by topping all of them off even though none are low.

Then I came back to the Lair and finished cleaning out the bedroom of all the tools, materials and assorted crap that has accumulated in there since I opened it to the main cabin. Continue reading →

With a hearty “F*ck Google,” Phil is off to his new WordPress platform. Blogroll updated.

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.