The Ultimate Answer to Kings

No joy on the game camera overnight. It did catch me outside leaving a message at quarter to six this morning…

I haven’t got the bladder capacity to visit the whole area in one go – but I do have an orange juice bottle and I’m not afraid to use it. Old men generally have to get up a couple of times in the middle of the night, no point letting it go to waste.

This is the second time a coyote has left me a gift on the driveway in almost the same spot…

This close to the cabin…

It’s happening in the middle of the night so there’s not much I can do but express an opinion about the practice. But I’m going to relocate the game camera to cover that area, see if I can at least get a look and a time.

Hah! That got you to click, didn’t it?

An absolutely gorgeous morning, still and even warm! To the point where even a long sleeve shirt got to be too much during the morning walkie. After which we went to Ian’s Cave to finish a load of laundry, and while the machine was running I finished gathering up and cleaning the traps from this past summer’s war on mice. Which, for once, I won*. But at a cost…

Literally, like it cost me money. This is, I believe, the largest collection of new and fully functional mousetraps I’ve ever owned – and they were all deployed all over the cave, and nearly every one of them has at least one kill marked on its fuselage.

Then there was what used to be one of my favorite chores, and is now an exercise in painful physical therapy…

…then home for tea and doggie treats.

Speaking of pain, I’ve recently acquired yet another joint brace. Over the past five years I’ve acquired quite a collection. During 2018’s chronic back pain a Generous Reader sent me my first back brace: I was skeptical but it turned out to be exactly what I needed. So earlier this year when my right knee went south I procrastinated less about getting a knee brace – which to my surprise fixed the problem instantly. A day with the brace on and I might not need it again for weeks. Don’t ask me why.

So this time I thought I’d try a shoulder brace…

I didn’t really see how this was going to help but I didn’t understand it the first two times either. This one isn’t the instant fix the others were, but it does ease the pain marginally more than it increases my overall discomfort, so I guess I’ll keep using it for a while.

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*Special circumstances. A permanent win against mice is normally not possible but Ian’s Cave is normally impenetrable. I just failed to notice a new entrance point until at least one nest was well established inside. After I fixed that screen it was just a matter of hunger driving them to the traps till they were gone. Call me Joel the Baby-Killer. Ar.

Leslie Fish, The Freedom of the Snow

A fact I frequently forget.

I happened to be working behind the Lair this morning when the sun glancing off the solar panels on the ground mount showed me that the dust had actually gotten quite thick on the glass due to their owner being a lazy absentminded old coot. Happily…

…the solution was readily at hand.

Not complicated – Just hose them off. You’d actually find that a little easier than I do due to one issue – not really a problem…

My water pressure is provided entirely by gravity. No water pump, no pressure tank, no expensive complicated failure points. Also not a whole hell of a lot in the way of water pressure – the highest it’s ever registered on the kitchen sink’s big goofy pressure gauge is 19 psi and that’s rare. It’s enough, and I love the system’s simplicity. I was happy to take advantage of that very convenient hill: According to a handheld GPS gadget I borrowed one time the water tank is 50 feet above ground level at the Lair. That low pressure (and the extremely hard well water) is, for complicated reasons, why I can’t have hot running water but I’m used to that. Ought to be, I moved in late 2011 and have been getting along without it for five years longer than that.

But – getting back to the point briefly – I do have enough for a hose nozzle to wash dust off a solar panel. Now, before it gets cold and I put the hose in storage…

…I need to set up the ladder and do the same thing to the roof panels, which are probably at least as dusty.

Hey, I’ve been putting off wood cutting while my shoulder heals, but today I got a great windfall…

The local food market is finally replacing all its old perennially-broken coolers, and outside the door was a big pile of pallets marked “free.” I got five smallish ones, which is all that would fit in D&L’s truck bed between the toolbox and the water. And I found to my happy surprise that I had no trouble moving them, which means it’s time to get off my ass and start doing something about my mostly-empty woodshed.

Here at Joel’s Gulch, this never happens.

Both for reasons of geography and of finance, obviously. And yet somehow I end up being flush with ammo. Maybe not “Hamas called, and the paragliders can’t make it till 4:30” flush, but for my rifles I’m good enough for normal purposes and a bit beyond. In fact, that’s true for every caliber except that of the gun I actually carry and shoot daily. Naturally, this is entirely due to my own poor planning. I broke the Cardinal Law of used car shopping: Don’t Fall In Love. Like I always do.

(This turned into another wall of words – sorry. More below the fold…) Continue reading →

Sorry about that. Nothing new is wrong, I’ve just been cocooning in the Lair licking my wounds. Shoulder’s improving, though – to the point where this morning I did this…

Rode all the way to town and back, more or less just because. Time will tell if this was a useful exercise in physical therapy or a dreadful mistake. I’ve only recently been able to get both hands on the handlebars at all and I was interested to see how it went. By the time I got back my shoulder was sore – both shoulders were, honestly – but I’m hoping it was due to useful stretching rather than further muscle strain.

A Generous Reader left me two bottles of OTC pain pills in my mail drop and I’ll be seeing whether they do any good in the next hour or so. 😉

When Big Brother and I finished the porch roof in Spring 2019 and I could comfortably sit outside on warm evenings, flying bugs permitting, I quickly learned that long before the solstice the evening sun peeks out from around the cabin and directly into my eyes until it gets low enough to filter through my little juniper grove. I thought about it all that summer, then in Spring of 2020 I did something about it…

…with some landscape cloth I had scavenged from somewhere. Worked pretty well, too – I had to fiddle with the hooks and finally replace one with a screw eye before it stopped blowing the grommets off the hooks every time the wind blew, but other than that it served its purpose and one other purpose as well that I hadn’t considered…

The front bedroom window came from a salvage yard, and I learned the first time the storm wind came from the north that it leaks like a sieve. That was an occasional problem until I put up the sun shade, which breaks the heavy rain into bitty bits of rain that the window can handle. So even if I’m not planning to spend evenings out on the porch I leave the shade up until Monsoon is good and gone. But this morning I figured it was time to take it down – although it’s more useful than expected for the rain I doubt it would appreciate a snow load.

And speaking of that front window…

…which, as I mentioned, leaks a lot, I finally put out the cash I needed to seal it with shrink plastic. I’ve wanted to do that basically every winter since the addition went up in 2017 and window kits are cheap – but the heat gun you need to shrink the plastic isn’t, and until now I couldn’t bring my cheap-ass self to spend the money. But now I’ve got the tool, so we’ll see how much difference it makes to heating the bedroom. I’m guessing it’ll be noticeable.

On the Jeep front…

I think I know the problem. I can’t fix it, but so far whenever it recurs I’ve been able to treat it and get reverse working again. There’s been a fluid pressure problem for several years, making it hard for the transmission to stay in gear when the system is cold and the Jeep is trying to go uphill. I told the shop guys about it before the half-assed rebuild, and of course they ignored me. They replaced the broken drivetrain parts and no doubt rebuilt the clutch packs but otherwise clearly didn’t do much of anything else. Anyway, there’s something sticking in the valve body and it’s apparently because there’s not enough system pressure to unstick it. But I’ve found that if I brake torque the engine in Park – which when the transmission is acting up is stuck in some rolling gear – the problem corrects itself. The problem has recurred twice since the transmission magically fixed itself a month or two ago, and both times I’ve been able to get it back to normal just by doing that. So for now at least, I have reverse whenever I want it. Don’t trust it to keep working, of course, because I already fell for that once.

Pearls Before Swine

…where the day starts out almost frosty and warms up through the morning, plus even if it’s still kind of chilly outdoors…

…the sun warms all surfaces including skin. All of which means you’re constantly putting on and taking off warm clothing until things even out. In my case this generally means a trail of textiles between where I live and where I’m working that day.

I was working outdoors and got to feeling warm, so I was down to a longsleeve t-shirt before I was done. Then I came inside, shortly began feeling cold, so I put layers back on – which signaled to Tobie…

…that I must be planning to go outside again, and he wasn’t going to miss this chance to help like he did last time. In fact I’m just planning to sit around till about 11:30 when I’m supposed to meet D&L for the monthly trip to the Palace of Food, so Tobie’s kind of missing out coming and going.

Things kind of came to a head yesterday – I ached all over and was either coming down with the flu or all those bruises were just then making themselves fully known. To say I was a genuine grumpy old man would be an understatement – all I wanted was to sit in a chair and be left alone but life goes on…

Laundry, for example, had to happen. Carrying the basket up the hill was doable, running the machine was no problem. But did you ever try to hang laundry with one arm? It’s like there’s this invisible and unusually sadistic physical therapist standing behind you – “Go ahead and lift, you know you can do it…” And just for extra Murphy Was Here points there was this obnoxious strong wind – for only yesterday – blowing it all right in my face so I had to go around – and of course I planted the poles right at the edge of that one convenient patch of smooth and level ground which makes working from the other side of the clotheslines a real pain.

Came home and my puppy wasn’t delighted with me for going off to do laundry without him…

“Play with me, Uncle Joel!”

He kept bringing me his Kong to throw, then dropping it as I tried to get a picture just to be an ass about it…

The usual game is I pick it up, tease him with it, then throw it in some random direction and he tries (and usually succeeds) to intercept it before it gets away. But I didn’t want to bend over and pick something up twenty times before he tired of the game. I was already tired of the game, and I get a vote. So eventually…

He went off to play with it by himself. Humph. Uncle Joel is a meany.

The pain is down to almost nothing unless I forget and try to use the shoulder. Had a good night’s sleep last, not so much the night before. Left arm won’t lift by itself but it works fine from the elbow out so I’m not one-finger hunting and pecking like yesterday. Just pick up the left hand with the right one and set it in place on the keyboard. Don’t need the sling anymore. Definitely not as bad as last time.

I must have landed on some rocks because my back and ass are all bruised but I’ll get over that. The arm will take longer – the way this usually works I slowly get mobility back but strength can take quite a lot longer. Like I said, this has become a familiar injury: Every time I take a fall I wreck a shoulder. Which seems weird – I mean I lost half a leg and spent most of my life falling down all the time without cataloguing injuries. Hell, I’m still in my first century, I’m too young for this shit. It was the left one this time, so I have that.

Guess it’s better than breaking a hip. Wouldn’t that be fun: Lay on the ground hoping I’ve got signal and that somebody will answer the phone, then crawl to where they can find me. I’ll pass on that, if it’s all the same to Murphy.

One thing for sure: Building a first-floor bedroom addition was the right choice. Not that I ever really doubted that…

Took a fall yesterday during evening walkie. I have now officially screwed up both shoulders twice.

This doesn’t feel as bad as the last one almost exactly seven years ago which took years to more or less heal. But you couldn’t have convinced me of that last night. Did the morning walkie without the sling and then put it on when we got home because the shoulder really started aching.

Just when I need to be thinking of cutting firewood, too…

A Generous Reader sent me this overnight…

“Well? We going for a ride or what?”

A friend visited the Gulch a few days ago while passing through, and came bearing gifts – among which was a quantity of ground wheat flour and another of wheat berries.

Which means I can go back to adulterating my white bread with some taste for a while.

One cup of wheat flour roughens the texture somewhat and improves the taste substantially in my opinion, without negatively affecting the rise the way trying to bake a whole wheat loaf can (and in my case, invariably does.)

A few years ago Landlady brought up a grain mill which allowed me to start using these two buckets of wheat berries that had been around here for going on fifteen years, and once I learned the proper proportions to use in the dough I really enjoyed the result – Until I ran out, and learned that the price of wheat berries is ridiculously out of my budget, and went back to eating white bread. Now thanks to my generous friend I can enjoy more tasty bread for a while.

I’ve left my game camera on what turned out to be a really unproductive trail for a couple of months. Finally kind of gave up on it and left it running through most of September, and in all that time the only wildlife that showed up was this…

…but in going through almost 3000 pictures this morning I got a kick out of the change in the manager’s sartorial choices between the beginning and the end…

Woke up early and couldn’t sleep. Got up at four. Did all the usual stuff – breakfast, walkie, laundry, more walkie, home, treat, more coffee, read memes on the ‘pooter. That was a while ago.

Somebody’s already bored…

But it’s only eight in the morning.

There never was a first notice, and there won’t be a reply. Nobody in the UK (or anywhere else) owes me money.

I never really understood the economics of how these things work but I guess it’s true what I’ve been told: Some robot sends out a skillion of these things and feeds on the very small percentage of returns, acting on the old but still valid axiom that there’s one born every minute.

I always say I’m going to remember this next year, and every year I forget. In my defense I also forget about Christmas, so what can I say. I’m a hermit.

But Commander Zero – being the person who invented the holiday – always remembers.

And this year he sent me a Paratus gift I’ll remember…

Among some other things that will go into the Jeep kit for a theoretical rainy day, a whole box of Blazer .44 Special! This stuff recently re-appeared on the shelves of the one gun shop within 50 miles of the Lair, but at a price that makes it more of a collector item than shooting ammo. But it remains my favorite commercial ammunition – and in terms of “will definitely go bang every single time” it’s always best to carry your pistol loaded with commercial ammo if you can get it. Not my fault .44 Special has become a unicorn caliber.

Thanks, CZ!

‘Go for a ride in the Jeep.’

I missed the picture where he was pawing at the door, which he never otherwise does. He’ll forgive me for teasing about walkies – nothing special about walkies. But if I say those words in his presence I’d better have the keys in my hand.