The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Four elderly batteries turn out not to be enough to run Ian’s system. It would boot up but not stay running for more than a short time, and this morning I finally figured out how to display the error message…

“Low AC output voltage” can only be caused by low DC input, and that’s that. My brilliant improvisation did not work.

Or at least not well enough. The system seems to cycle on and off to the point where so far my frozen stuff hasn’t begun to thaw, which it certainly would have by now if the freezer were simply unplugged. So there’s that. May need to bring out the generator if I want to wash clothes, and that’s going to be an interesting adventure since I’ll have to run power to the washer AND the pressure pump at the same time. Good thing that back in 2020 I impulsively made a way to provide alternative power to the pump, huh? Powering the water heater isn’t strictly necessary for clothes washing but it would be if I wanted to use the shower. And then there’s the question of what the water softener will do without power…

Yeah – I’ll bet not one of these batteries would pass a load test.

Sorry. Life kind of came at me from all sides this week but I think I have a good grip on it now. Could be wrong. Continue reading →

Woodcutting season is officially closed.

I have put away the power tools, raked up my mess and hauled it to the burn barrel.

I’m not entirely comfortable with what I’ve put up, but winters in the high desert are episodic: If I don’t have enough wood to get through till April there’ll be plenty of warning. No law says I can’t cut more in February or whenever.

For right now, I’m reminded of the old cliché I spout so often: It ain’t the years, it’s the miles and the collision damage. And right now I’m feeling mine. Maybe I’ll get more ambitious when my shoulders heal back up. Don’t bet the farm on it, but maybe.

From day one, Tobie decided that my bedroom made him very uncomfortable. Little Bear liked it. Torso Boy liked it – and in fact insisted on sleeping in the bed. Tobie finds it repellent.

I expected him to get over it, maybe even decide he wanted to sleep there at night. He’s perfectly welcome to, I always leave the door a little open for him, but nope. So far this is as far as he has consented to unbend on the issue…

When I turn on the light to get dressed, he’ll come in to keep me company – or maybe just to keep me on task because the first pee and breakfast are on the line. As soon as I go bipedal and vertical, he turns around and leaves. The only other times he’ll enter the room are to shoot guilt rays at me through the window when I leave without him, and to hide from the vacuum cleaner.

Our window of September-like weather may be ending. But if so it’s doing it in a rather polite manner. Woke up to high 20’s.

Got a lovely view of the late crescent moon and (Venus, I think) while accompanying Tobie out for an early pee. But the phone wasn’t up to the snapshot. Continue reading →

…and once I got it stacked it didn’t come to nearly enough.

So I have a bunch of other juniper chunks stacked elsewhere; it was cut green but has been curing for four years or more and should be fine. I brought back a little bit and cut it, and it looks cured clear through. The acid test of that, of course, is a fire in the woodstove – but I haven’t actually lit the stove yet. I really don’t want to end up with a tier of fireproof wood in the shed, but this weather won’t last forever and I need to finish cutting and stacking wood. Unless it’s a very mild winter, which happens but is not the way to bet, I don’t have nearly enough put away for the whole season.

Since this hasn’t gotten complicated enough yet, I got an email from Ian yesterday wanting me to edit another Headspace manuscript. This one is on handheld railguns and appears to be geeky in the extreme, which means it will take all my attention to do my job right. Plus the file is huge and so far I haven’t even been able to download a copy. So part of me says I should just put the generator and saw back under cover until I get these outside issues sorted, and part of me wants the world to go away while I sort out my firewood woes.

On November 6, 2006, Uncle Joel first moved fulltime into the Gulch. I don’t really keep anniversaries and this date usually slips by me unnoticed but I did happen to catch it this year. It’s been a helluva ride but overall it’s looking like a success!

D is officially out of the hospital – he got moved to a nursing facility yesterday.

I’m surprised at the speed of that, because he had a bunch of related problems in addition to all the broken bones. An old cardiac problem cropped up, and he punctured a lung. Also, they couldn’t/didn’t repair the smashed clavicle. He’s not on crutches yet. But he left the hospital as soon as the tubes were out. Change of policy since my own hospital days, I guess…

Neighbor L wanted to go to town today at noon, and that gave me about 3 hours to get a start on one of the juniper stacks laying around the yard. Trouble is…

I forgot how dirty that stuff is to cut.

Two hours in I looked down at myself and was ever so happy I’d changed my clothes for a trip to town. Just enough time, if I hurried, to do that all over again after the very thorough shower. Gad, I love that shower.

And then, just for a small touch of irony…

L wanted me to clear out another pallet from their hay room since they won’t be stocking horse pellets anymore. Just put the Sawzall away, too. I’ll knock it down and chop it up in the morning, then get back to filthy juniper.

It was a little smoky yesterday. In the middle of the night I had to get up and clear my nose about ten times before I could lay back down again, and this morning when I opened the door for Tobie I immediately got a big whiff of grassfire. And later when we went out for our walkie…

…it wasn’t just a little smoky.

It was a lot.

I went to town with Neighbor L this afternoon to get her some hay and she said it’s the result of three separate controlled burns, all sharing the bounty with us at once. Which is generous of them, I think.

I intended to start cutting wood at last yesterday. There was a delay while I figured out what was wrong with the table saw and how to repair it: The gadgetry that raises and lowers the blade and motor had frozen up. Until a couple of years ago I had a nice dry barn to store the saw in but I lost that when Landlady sold her place. Since then I’ve kept it wrapped in a tarp but that obviously didn’t do the job this year. Now after I’m done with woodcutting I need to find a better place because I bought this saw with a windfall in 2019 that’s unlikely to repeat itself and I can’t just let it rust.

Anyway: I was starting to think in terms of Plan B when suddenly, after several hours, the WD40 soaking did its work – so suddenly that it was an “uh oh” moment when I thought I’d just broken some important plastic bit and was out of business – and then suddenly I was in business. But by then it was mid-afternoon and I felt more like walkies and showers than getting covered with sawdust.

So this morning I hit it an hour before noon, after the bread came out of the oven and the sun had had a chance to warm things up.

I’m not making a marathon of it. The next several days are scheduled to be quite nice and the old man’s back doesn’t really like this stuff. Today I only did two of these…

…and then gave it a rest. I’d probably at least finish the lumber pile tomorrow.

And here’s how much difference two wheelbarrow loads make in the woodshed…

Not that much, really. But one good thing about pallet wood is it stacks nice and tight – and although most of it is pine there’s a surprising percentage of hardwood in there. A little goes a long way toward heating the Lair in the morning – it’s only 200 square feet in the main room, after all.

Time to get serious.

Let me just state for the record that I hate winter. In case I forget later.

Due for a cold snap, I reluctantly lit the pilot on the bedroom heater yesterday.

Excellent timing, too – it got down to the low-twenties overnight, and when I woke up the bedroom temperature was … 46^o? Oh, for god’s sake…

I had the same problem early last winter, and found out the problem was with a bad connection in the cheap thermostat. Not going through this again. I could clean the contacts – again – and hope for the best, or go with Plan A:

Two is one, one is none, and they’re not expensive.

And now the bedroom heater works perfectly again. 🙂

Also, Ow my arms.

But that actually is the first and hardest part done: I’m officially out of pallets to break up. Now I need to straighten up the woodshed – probably do that today – and then tomorrow or Tuesday if nothing interferes I’ll start cutting lumber to stovewood length. Once I’m done with that pile of planks I’ll begin on the piles of juniper I have squirreled away. There’s even a big stack of larger juniper wood I got paid to haul off a property in late 2019 – it was freshly-cut then and essentially fireproof but it’s had four years to cure. Might dig into that. First let’s see how far the stacks already in my yard go toward filling the woodshed.

Okay, no more fooling around…

After walkie and laundry I dragged the generator and Sawzall out of the powershed and proceeded to have at that stack of ten pallets leaning against the corner of the Lair.

More or less as expected I didn’t make it very far before I was gasping and whining. This is all I got done in an hour of steady work…

Color Tobie unimpressed but I think I want my shoulder brace back now.

Cutting the pallets apart is always the hard part; they’re really not made to come apart easily. And looking through my notes I see that I always get off to an unimpressive start on the first day. I might knock the rest out this afternoon and tomorrow or it might take all weekend but once I’m through with this phase the woodshed project becomes much less strenuous.

Tobie is approximately 3 years old now. He came home with me in May 2021 at a very roughly estimated age of six months. We have gone through changes – I won’t quite label him a hell puppy but he did have issues, and I’m a grumpy old man with my own issues, mostly involving pain, and I wasn’t always as patient as he needed me to be. Our relationship is a lot less rocky than it sometimes was in ’21 and early ’22, when I never knew from day to day whether I would have as many intact possessions in the evening as I had in the morning.

But he’s approaching maturity – at least physically he seems to have grown as much as he’s going to. Emotionally we may still have bridges to cross but he’s a lot less spazzy than he used to be. We get along better now. Continue reading →

…asking if she needed anything while D is laid up. L is a strong, smart, proud woman but she’s also in a hummingbird’s weight class and (like D) has had serious illness and injuries in the past couple of years. She’s more likely to accept help from me than anyone else, I think, but I really expected her to reply with a polite refusal.

Instead she sent me a list. 😀 Because what she also is, above all really, is orderly – and just because her life is falling apart is no reason for the homestead to do so. So Tobie got a Jeep ride this morning, and I helped her fuel the tractor (and they had worked out this elaborate procedure for raising a 5-gallon jug to the height of the filler tube which told me that D hasn’t actually been able to pick one up for years, probably.) Then she wanted to turn on the water system’s heat tapes, which involves removing a big heavy steel lid from the pump vault and that really is a two-person job.

And last, she wanted help fixing some trim on the horse trailer, which hasn’t moved in a while but will be needed in a couple of weeks because D&L really are fostering out their horses. Arrangements have already been made, quite to my surprise. It has to wait because (get this) one of the two people who run the adoption outfit fell off a horse and is recovering from injuries.

How did our ancestors even survive the age of horse power? The first introduction of alternative transport modes must have come as a huge relief to a lot of people.

My brother has been sending me monthly care packages for several years now. Mostly gifts of canned meat or other things too expensive or just too non-rural for me, like honey or chili sauce but every now and then the box contains something … shall we say whimsical. One time he sent me a Koran, just because he had suddenly acquired one and – I dunno – thought maybe I’d appreciate it more than he did? Don’t remember. This summer, during the hottest month of the year, he gave me a dayglo thermal balaclava I haven’t had opportunity to use just yet.

Anyway – whimsical is nice. This morning I rode to town, found November’s box, and inside there was…

It appears to be basically Spam. Danish Spam. Huh – now I know that exists.

Here’s something new I had to send away for, which kind of pissed me off a little…

This seems to be my year for replacing sink drains. In July I unexpectedly had to replace both of the kitchen sink drains in Ian’s Cave, and that’s when I found out that the single local hardware store only sells cheap plastic ones. Good enough for a sink hardly anyone ever uses, at least as placeholders, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be happy with them in the Lair. So – I had to send Jeff Bezos a buck.

There’s nothing really wrong with the old drain but the strainer has to be screwed down to plug it, and that cross-handle just broke loose from the shaft for no apparent reason leaving me with one plugable sink – ironically the one I don’t usually plug so I had to reverse the way I’ve been washing dishes every day for the past 12 years. An incentive to fix it without my usual procrastination. I’ll go back to procrastinating tomorrow.

Home just now.[Redacted] [D] on chopper to [large city far away.] Left hip broken, 10 ribs on rt side, broken clavical on right. He’s gonna be laid up for at least 8 weeks.

So that happened.

Y’know, D&L sometimes come across as extremely risk-averse but they sure seem to get injured a lot. Gotta say I do admire their stoicism in the face of pain.

I was just sitting around when I got a voice call from Neighbor L: D got dumped, he’s laying on the road, broke his hip and collarbone and who knows what else.

I got to him while she dealt with the horses and called an ambulance. Then when she got back to us I took off to meet the ambulance to guide it in but I was only a little way gone when she called again and said the ambulance had somehow already found them. So I turned around…

The last time this happened the ambulance got hopelessly lost and L lay on their driveway for over two hours, then nobody seemed to know how to do their jobs. This was a more competent crew all around so I just stood there feeling useless till they got D on the gurney and into the truck, at which point I went back to the Lair and made up with Tobie. We’re going to go feed horses in less than an hour, so he’ll get his Jeep ride anyway.

But I think D’s horse-riding days are done. They are if he has any sense, anyway…