The Ultimate Answer to Kings

It’s probably three weeks to a month before I break down and set up the woodstove, because I kind of hate the woodstove. But it’s time for…

…my beloved bedroom heater.

First I had to uncover the outside vent…

I never used to have to cover the vent, until I added a handrail to the porch stairs. Approximately 20 minutes after I did that, though, I got my first mouse nest inside the bedroom heater’s firebox. And since I wasn’t expecting that, it was in quite a mature state – complete with babies – when I did find it. And I didn’t know, at the time, how to clean out the firebox so it was a massive disaster at the time though the long-term fallout was learning more about how my heater worked, which came in handy later, and also learning that I have to cover the vent as soon as I put the heater to bed for the warm season. I actually made a hardware cloth cage for the vent but never found a good way to mount it, so I just wrap it with plastic and duct tape – and check that cover periodically. So far it’s never been bothered.

With the cover unwrapped…

…I proceed to the biggest hassle of the procedure: Getting the damned pilot light to catch fire. This used to be a much (much much) bigger deal than it is now because for the first few years the gas plumbing was kind of ad hoc and never permanently pressurized. Getting the air out of it through that tiny orifice was unbelievably time consuming. Like, 45 minutes to an hour. Now it still doesn’t light *right* up but I don’t have to bring a magazine to read while I wait.

Takes a while for the dust burnoff to stop stinking up the cabin, but once it’s done I’ve got my winter cozy spot ready.

I’ve had some business I needed to do in town on a business day for two weeks. The weather socked in for several days: I tried getting out on Thursday but the road was so muddy I didn’t want to do that to the bike. Today was the day.

First step is to put the bike rack on the Jeep…

…which immediately hit a snag because the hitch pin was missing.

Okay that’s bad but not necessarily a show stopper. More than once I’ve laid the pin and its locking key on the bumper and forgotten to put them back in the hitch, right? So they shook loose on the long bumpy driveway between Ian’s place, where I store the bike and the rack, and my place. I’ll find it.

So I went on a long hilly walk, all the way down, and didn’t find any hardware. On the way back I got to wondering, “Could I have put the damned thing on the trailer ball fitting instead of where it belongs?” And that was such a stupid idea, it would have been such a stupid thing to do, that I almost didn’t check to answer the question.

Haven’t put much mileage on the bike this year, on account of how puny I felt for most of the summer. This might be the last ride to town – it’s gonna turn cold soon.

Still, I did just barely pass 1600 on the odometer, so 150ish miles without really trying.

Two mornings ago I woke up a little chilly, even though I was sleeping in a hoody under a quilt…

And thought, okay, maybe it’s time to fire up the bedroom heater.

But then I looked at the forecast, which says this little cold snap is just a blip, and decided to give it another week.

It is about time to decommission my hillbilly water heater for the winter, though.

…because even on sunny days it’s not doing much. I could get more time out of it by closing the glass cover on the heat exchanger box, but once you do that it’s damn near impossible to open again and not really worth the bother. My only question is whether I just turn off the water pressure, or do what I did last autumn and pull the hoses out of the box, disconnect them and lay them on a hillside to drain. That’s not much work but putting them back together and into the box in the spring is a pain in the ass. I probably will though, because if I just leave it for a couple of years the scaling inside the hoses makes the whole thing pretty much useless all season.

When D&L replaced their wood pellet heater with a propane burner last month, they were left with about 20 sacks of pellets in stock and nothing to do with them but let them keep taking up garage space. Happily they were able to find a buyer, who came and got them last week…

…which opened up a whole corner of their big garage for other uses. She moved her smoking spot there, and now there’s all this room in what used to be a pretty cramped spot. Yet another unmentioned disadvantage of pellet stoves: You’ve got to stock a lot of fuel and it absolutely positively must never get wet. Which takes up a lot of indoor space.

Finally…

Late last year the upper on one of my winter boots cracked away from the sole, which wasn’t really bad news. They were comfortable and warm enough in most weathers but too low for slogging through snow. So I finally had an excuse to replace them. Hurray for materialism!

I have a pair of gloves that I really like. I bought them over a year ago. Wear them all the time. I’ve got other gloves I only wear on particular occasions but these are the gloves I’ll stuff in my cargo pocket just in case I want a pair of gloves. The right index finger is about to push through and I know I’m just going to cut the tip of that finger off the glove and keep wearing them. Got it?

So I go to Amazon to buy another pair of gloves just like this one. And I look at the price and realize I must have bought the original pair in a fit of drunken madness…

…and it’s not like I can’t afford to replace these very useful gloves but they’re stupid expensive compared to the ones on a rack at Ace Hardware that I’ll buy for half as much and hate because they don’t fit right and I won’t wear them. And now the indecision is holding up an amazon order for such frivolities as a package of long underwear and a new toilet brush. And probably will till the end of the week when I sigh and decide not to buy the gloves. This is the inside of my brain.

Tobie’s had a longtime relationship with his Kong since the day he came home from the shelter. It didn’t always go super well.

These days he mostly ignores it, not being as toy-obsessed as when he was a puppy. But it does still serve as an efficient peanut butter delivery system, and sometimes he brings it to me – I’m pretty sure specifically for that purpose.

It’s raining cats and dogs. The weekly water run has been postponed till Monday.

It was only sprinkling when Tobie and I went out for the morning walkie. Started seriously raining when we were pretty far from the cabin. No thunder, so Tobie was all “La di da di da, this is really interesting. Let’s stay out and enjoy it, Uncle Joel.” Could have wrung his neck. Was soaked by the time we got home. Tobie never even felt it, of course. Just so many new scents to explore. Now I’m still wet and the cabin smells like wet dog. Back to my book, I guess.

Finally, a chance to get rid of that old washer.

And with it, a whole bunch of other stuff. Happy I was forced to clean out the powershed Sunday. Excellent timing. So I loaded the Jeep trailer,…

…then transferred it to D&L’s truck at their place. Loaded the truck and trailer with their garbage…

…and drove to the landfill. Emptied the garbage at the landfill, then drove to the boneyard to dump the washing machine. I always worry about the process of getting the trailer from the Jeep to their big truck – I think this is the third time we’ve done it in many years – but it always goes pretty smoothly.

Got my annual Paratus Day package from Commander Zero…

The Ian thing has become a running joke between CZ and me: The only cool thing about me is that I know Gun Jesus.

CZ never contents himself with an annual card, no. He always sends a generous prepping-related gift. This year it was a nifty little MOLLE med pouch,

stuffed with…

150 rounds of .44 Special! .44 Spec is not my carry ammo anymore but it’s still the best fodder for my only extreme-sentimental-value handgun – and it’s absurdly expensive and virtually a unicorn caliber out here at the ragged end of the supply chain. So thanks, CZ! and Happy Paratus Day!

I had two little chores I wanted to knock out this morning. Tobie and I would be out anyway because I had to go to S&L’s to feed their chickens and cat so I threw some things in the back of the Jeep…

…and drove out to Ian’s rifle range.

Ian’s range consists of two racks I made from an old oil tank stand back in ’18. Longtime readers will remember I was very pleased with myself back then. There’s been some tweaking on it since then but the two racks are still there even though they don’t get much use these days. Ian stopped coming up so often, then stopped coming up at all, and for the past several months I haven’t been shooting anything but pistols and I have my own range for that. Problem is that talus behind the plate rack consists of volcanic ash which makes the worst mud I ever saw and flows like syrup when wet. So every now and then I have to go there with a shovel and dig out the bottom plates.

Doesn’t take very long.

Then there’s this one big bush that’s been in the way of the driveway to Ian’s Cave ever since the big washout a few years ago that cost him 10 or 15 feet of front yard to the wash that runs in front of the cave. There’s not quite enough room for the Jeep and the bush but I’ve been forbidden to remove the bush. So I just trim it every now and then.

And that’s when the morning gradually started to go to hell on me. I noted that the chainsaw’s battery was nearly flat. No problem. I came home and went to where I thought I’d left the charger, and it wasn’t there. I looked in the second place I thought it would be and it didn’t seem to be there either but in truth the shelf in my powershed was such an unholy mess I could have been wrong about that.

A little backstory…

My powershed is – not my proudest achievement.

In my defense it was a falling-down shed that somebody else paid me to remove, being unspecific as to what I did with the parts. This was in 2012, just when I was needing a shed for my own inverter, batteries and charge controller so I knocked it down and inexpertly but quickly put it back together where it is now. And I’ve sort of lived with it ever since. There’s room for my tools and fasteners and such – and roughly half the rats in Eastern Arizona. There’s one shelf that’s always a real embarrassment. In April my older brothers came to visit and I wanted to show them how my power system had evolved – but I really didn’t want them to see the inside of that shed. So it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that the chainsaw’s charger was on that shelf somewhere but just buried in debris since I hadn’t used it in almost a year.

I ended up cleaning up the shelf, hauling a bunch of stuff out of the shed, and sweeping up a few cubic feet of rat shit and nesting material which took over an hour…

…and never did find the charger I was looking for. Then, in despair, I happened to look to my right and there it was, safely and neatly on the wall where I’d hung it from a nail to keep it out of the debris.

Very slightly covered by some wires and ropes.

Oh, well. The shelf needed cleaning. And a bunch of stuff that no longer needed storing will be going to the dump in a week or two, so the timing wasn’t bad.

The kitchen stove I got back in early ’21 forced me to re-think how I use the oven because the oven igniter is such an amazing electricity hog. But the other side of that coin is that the lack of a 24/7 pilot light saved me an amazing amount of propane – far more than I would have guessed. So I need to haul around big propane bottles for the kitchen stove a lot less often than I used to. And when I do…

I’ve got wheels to put it on now. Which, given the state of my knees – and my shoulders – and my general state of health over the summer – is a very lucky piece of scrounging.

Funny thing is: When Neighbor D offered to give me this old wagon as a trade for helping her assemble her new one, I thought she was making a very bad trade. Her new one is smaller and flimsier. I thought she’d end up wanting her old wagon back but I was very wrong. She hasn’t stopped singing its praises. Her new smaller wagon lets her wheel water bottles right through the house and up to the pantry where she stores them, where before we needed to either carry them through or wheel them all the way around the (large) house. So she knew what she was doing.

When you put a jacket over the hoodie you slept in to take Tobie for the morning walkie, and by the time you get back you’re down to a t-shirt on your back and carrying a bunch of textiles.

To address the absence of posts: Yeah, I’ve been mentally absent. I’ve been doing very little, to be honest. Just keeping up with chores and reading books. It’s been that kind of summer: I spent a couple of months with some sort of ailment that sapped me of all energy, got very little done – happily I didn’t have any major summer projects planned anyway – and now even though I’m not really feeling bad and I’m eating I’m stuck in a habitual loop of “Let me finish this so I can go back to my book.” I’m seriously spending too much time chairbound. Nothing is happening, certainly nothing worth writing about. Most days I forget there even is a blog, and it used to be the center of my notional social life. I have become a hermit in fact. Trying to get over it. Sorry.

I had a small annoyance the other day that would have been a major disaster a few years ago…

I was making bread…

I scraped the bottom of my Plan A flour bucket, so I dragged the Plan B bucket out from the remote corner it’s been hiding in for months, only to find…

Dammit! Bug infestation. That’s not supposed to happen. It’s not supposed to be able to happen. That’s what those expensive spin-on lids are for. Maybe there were already larvae in the flour.

Once upon a time this would have been an economic disaster. Flour is not cheap. I’d have spent hours sifting 30 pounds of flour, and just calling what got through the sifter protein enrichment. Now I’ll skim the surface and if I find bugs below it I’ll dump the whole bucketload rather than deal with it. Happily…

Hello. I’m Joel. Of course I had a plan C squirreled away off-site. Ian’s place, which we spent so very much effort building and burying in 2009-2010, may never have become his residence but it makes one hell of a bug-and-rodent-proof highly resistant storage facility.

And yesterday was Senior Day at the Palace of Food, so I got another big sack to replace the one I opened the day before. It all works out. On the way back I stopped by the post office to get a sack of dog food that Big Brother had sent me, and also…

…this mystery care package from Generous Reader Terrapod, which turned out to contain spare headlamps for the Jeep. Thanks, T!

Yeah, I know I’ve promised before to get off my thumb about updating the blog and this is the longest dark period since the last time I had actual technical difficulties. Sorry. There’s just not much going on right now. I’ll try to do better.

We almost never get morning storms. And this year’s monsoon has been an almost total bust but things have gotten a little more dramatic lately. This morning I woke just in time for a big flash just outside my bedroom window and when Tobie and I went outside for a first pee there was this big scary storm rolling in from the SW. Tobie has not been loving life.

I went back out with my phone to try and capture the lightning flashes and kept being just the tiniest bit too late, but…

That glow in the cloud isn’t sunlight or moonlight. Big scary thunderstorm right at five ayem, just as the eastern sky was getting light enough to see.

That was three and a half hours ago and Tobie has only just calmed down enough to eat breakfast.

A few weeks ago Neighbor L (of S&L, not D&L) mentioned that one of her old hens, a Leghorn that no longer lays eggs but is still around because L is too softhearted to off chickens that don’t do their duty, has reassigned her own gender. Physically, not just psychologically: She’s not just crowing, she grew a big comb. And Tuesday I got to see – and hear – it for myself.

I’d heard of this but it’s the first time I’ve seen it for myself.

I’m officially a geezer. I bought a washing machine I couldn’t figure out how to use at first.

I accidentally burned the manual for my new washer with the box – and had an awful few moments when I couldn’t even figure out how to turn it on. Then later I came back and found a bright red light. Bright red lights are bad. Turned out it just meant the lid was locked while the spin cycle was going which isn’t even a new thing. But still. Why would you make non-instinctive controls? It’s a washing machine, not a space shuttle. When I push the button marked “START” I expect the damned thing to start.

I got worried about Tobie.

When he was a pup he was an eating machine. I expected that to back off when he reached maturity, and it did. Then it kept right on backing off. This year I’ve had some sort of health concern where I stopped wanting to eat – and I noticed that Tobie started eating one (small!) meal a day at about the same time – and not even always that. I didn’t worry about it at first but he’s gotten positively gaunt. I wonder if he isn’t just working off my cues? Uncle Joel isn’t eating so I won’t too? Anyway, I’ve been changing his diet to get him to take in more food and it seems to be working. Did the same thing with myself, TBH.

And finally…

Because the water is so hard, this is the only place I ever lived where I felt called upon to stock spares for my toilet. I seriously don’t know how many times I’ve replaced all the plastic bits in the tank. Just did it again this morning. Now I have to remember to buy a new kit and stash it behind the toilet for next time.

Neighbor L talked all last winter about replacing her pellet stove with propane – and then she really did it!

Normally this would be none of my business but she bought pellets by the ton, and they all had to be unloaded and stacked. When they first started doing it there were three of us and that was going on 15 years ago. Now it’s the two of us and we’re not younger. Plus that pellet stove took a lot of maintenance. I mean a really startling amount of maintenance, or it behaved badly. Too complex, too expensive, too fuel-hungry. I’m very happy to see it go away.

The first thing I noticed about my new porch fridge is that it’s very low to the ground. Like, an ergonomic nightmare. So…

…this morning I knocked together a stand for it.

Naturally I didn’t get the legs exactly right, so it rocks. I’ll cut some shims later, no problem. I’m still not actually using the fridge, because my batteries don’t need the abuse. But soon I’ll have a larger bank of new batteries, and then I won’t worry about it. As it is it would probably be fine, I’m just a worrier.

Yesterday I spent half the day at the big town about 50 miles away, most of that time spent hanging around a Lowe’s waiting for my ride to return. As mentioned yesterday I brought back a dorm fridge but the main reason for the trip…

…was this. Three years ago I got a second-hand washer from a neighbor, and everybody knows that when you get somebody else’s castoff washer you’re just buying time. They had some reason for wanting to expensively replace that machine, and it was probably a good one. Happily, that one got me through to a point where replacing it with a new machine was financially possible, if still something of a logistical challenge. So that happened yesterday, and then this morning I started hauling the old machine out of Ian’s Cave. Now the utility closet where the washer goes is as far back in the cave as it is physically possible to go: Not only all the way to the rear but all the way down a semicircular corridor made narrow by a bunch of storage shelves so working the old machine out of its space was a time-consuming and persnickety task. And I was mostly done with it when I heard a (my?) dog make a very uncharacteristic yipping noise. I went right up to the front, where I had left the door open, and instead of Tobie I found…

…her. Yes, a small very female doberman. Friendly as can be toward me – not so much toward Tobie, who as far as I could tell was just trying to be friendly.

Now, I have opinions about domestic dogs being allowed to run loose. Well-founded opinions. But I also strongly believe that your property is your business until you make it my business so I mostly keep my opinions to myself but when your dog shows up on my (or Ian’s) doorstep they’ve just sort of made themselves my business. This was a beautiful, obviously well cared-for and very friendly little dog and I wanted to see to it that she got home safe. But as usual, there was no tag. So I called Neighbor L (of S&L, not D&L) to ask if she knew anybody who owned a small female and from the looks of her recently pregnant Doberman – and as it happens she did. Because another neighbor had recently had this dog and the rest of her pack show up in his yard, and she had gotten involved with getting them home that time too. She contacted the owner, and while complex things went on in the background I was left standing in Ian’s yard with this excited little Dobie on a leash. At about that time another Dobie showed up: This one a big unfixed male. He didn’t want to be my friend but he was clearly concerned that the little female was on the wrong end of a leash held by this strange old beardo. As the morning dragged on it turned out that the runaway pack consisted of the big male, the little female, and their three recently-weaned puppies, all just out for a jaunt. Why she decided to detour into Ian’s Cave, I really don’t know.

Anyway, it seems this isn’t the first time they’ve pulled this, and since the lady who owns them can’t afford to build a proper run it won’t be the last. The dogs weren’t doing any harm but there are dangers to them and now I have to worry even though it’s none of my business.

Let it be said that Tobie was a complete gentleman through the whole thing, though I’m glad I got him back to the cabin before the big male showed up. Also…

My laundry is caught up. An hour behind schedule, but still done.

It is hoped that the electrical system improvements of the past year will make this thing practical. Once the newly-expanded battery bank is in place, which it isn’t yet. Right now we have the worst of all possible worlds, with a cloudy day and a damaged and failing battery bank, and the voltmeter on my wall is telling me I should get my ass out to the porch and unplug the thing. Which is all I wanted to know. But still: The Secret Lair has a refrigerator! Even if I can’t really use it yet. This’ll beat the hell out of a cooler on the woodstove.

When Tobie was a pup fresh from the shelter he had a terrible fear of Jeep rides. He got over it quick but for the first while he wouldn’t stay inside without coercion or bondage. Landlady gave me this cool tie-down that clipped into the unused seatbelt latch of the shotgun seat. It was a light-duty thing but it worked fine for a pup, and he quickly stopped wanting out as he learned that he loved Jeep rides. But he can still be impulsive so I never stopped using it.

This morning I was at a neighbor’s house, returning the pistol mentioned below. The shotgun door was open and Tobie – who loves to meet new people – broke discipline and jumped out of the open door.

I already ordered a new stouter one.

That’s all I wanted to say about that.

I have three old shirts that get the most wear in the hottest part of the desert summer. They’re all old green Dickie workshirts, worn thin, with the sleeves cut off – they got a little too small in the chest and I wear them mostly unbuttoned just to keep the sun off my shoulders. Three of them is barely enough for the laundry rotation, since obviously I sweat a lot outdoors. Indoors too, TBH.

Last week I suddenly found that I had two old green workshirts. It’s a small cabin, there really aren’t a lot of places to lose something the size of a shirt but I looked in them all. Finally decided the only thing that could have happened was it getting blown off the clothesline, in which case it had to be somewhere in the brush and rocks downwind of Ian’s place.

Took me a while – one of the things I like about these shirts is the green blends real well with juniper without obviously being camouflage…

Found it! Good as – well, not new…

A neighbor texted me, asked me to come over, and when I did he handed me a pistol case and asked if I could evaluate it and tell him what’s wrong. He’d only put a few rounds through it and was already deep in buyer’s remorse.

I’m not exactly the world’s greatest expert on the current gun market and told him straight up that I’d never heard of this brand.

A very little research told me it’s a California company, and this model was introduced about 15 years ago. I found some Youtube videos, all about nine years old, all glowing, most of them obvious shills. The only negative they agreed on was that the trigger sucks. Which it really does. But they all claimed the gun – a very low-cost Glock clone – was generally reliable.

Yeah, not this one.

In four magazines, mostly with Fiocchi 124 grain FMJ, my best practice ammo, call it 56 rounds, the gun jammed approximately 50 times. Mostly just failure to go into battery, which is a common new-cheap-gun problem that can be corrected by a thumb on the back of the slide. But some – several, like twice per magazine – really concerning failures to extract. The first problem will usually fix itself if you want to spend more money on ammo than the gun originally retailed for. The second? Kiss of death, as far as I know.

And all this dumbass graffiti…

To paraphrase a character in an old movie, ‘a man who would carry a gun like that would wear flowers to a preacher’s funeral.’

I really can’t believe Front Sight thought slapping their name all over this lemon was a smart thing to do.