The Ultimate Answer to Kings

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.

Baking day! And while waiting for the bread dough to finish its first rise I went outside and serviced the generator in preparation for wood cutting which will get under way as soon as I get a round tuit. But until then at least I know the generator will start.

Put my dough in a bread pan for the second rising: 15 minutes and then another 15 while the oven warms up…

…and all the time I was watching the sky, because the oven requires many amps and the clouds rolled in just as I needed to fire it up. In fact a storm cell parked itself above the cabin and started booming just to upset Tobie …

…and my batteries.

Well, it’s not that bad – I’ve run the oven in much worse. But after all I did just test run the generator for the first time in months. May as well test run the battery charger…

…for the first time since early February, I think. Whatever. Everything still works great.

Though I’m thinking of building the generator its own stand outside the powershed. Not that it matters, especially – it’s just that parking it in the doorway every time I want to use it to charge batteries seems like more improvisation than I like to admit to. 😉

Not long ago a commenter said that (paraphrased, since I’m too lazy to go look for the actual comment) there are Youtubers who post videos about this cool remote retreat they’re building while carefully avoiding the angle that shows the subdivision it’s right next to, and that Joel doesn’t do that.

Whatever my faults, that is true. Not every word I’ve ever written about my personal life is 100%, shall we say unshaded, and plenty of things that happen here don’t make it into the blog. I’m a very private person, and frankly there are times when even making what amounts to a lifestyle blog doesn’t really mesh very well with my own way of thinking. But the Lair is, in fact, as far off grid as I found it practical to get while still avoiding northern winters.

And I love it very much, and sometimes can’t resist the temptation to show it off. So here’s the Lair in as much of its setting as I can show while standing in one place. Had to make a special trip to take these pics, and haul out some of that cool camera gear a Generous Reader donated a couple of years ago.

Pics below the fold… Continue reading →

Ever look at a pop-up ad and wonder “what the hell are they trying to sell me?” You might be a boomer.

With the exception of the wireless earphones which are helpfully labeled, I don’t recognize a single item on that ad. And that’s a thread so common with Temu.com ads that I can only assume it’s deliberate. But damned if I’m curious or credulous enough to actually click on one of those ads – I’d never be rid of them, and probably inadvertently “subscribe” to an email list as well.

I’m fairly sure this is one of those things where if I pointed to it and asked any teenager “what is that thing?” – and if I could tear said teenager’s eyes away from his/her/whatever smartphone long enough to acknowledge the question, he/she/whatever would know all about it.

I’ll bet my grandparents’ generation found me as pointlessly perplexing as I find this one.

DIY infrastructure comes with irritants large and small. Sometimes it’s the things that go only a little wrong that can get your day off to a bad start. Example…

That is the outlet to the Lair’s sink drain. It empties into the ditch that drains the biggish gulley behind the Lair. Inside that gulley, among other things, are two big ash deposits that sometimes decide to calve off big chunks of ash mud – the very worst mud I’ve ever personally encountered. That mud, now the consistency of thick oil, flows into the ditch and clogs as much as it can: Sometimes it fills the whole ditch but certainly you want to give that little sink drain a check because otherwise you’re going to get a nasty surprise next time you try to wash dishes. Capiche?

Boy, after an almost completely dry week it clouded up and rained like a sonuvagun briefly this afternoon. Started with hail. Filled the gullies real quick, so no surprise that the wash ran a little. About 20 minutes after it stopped I happened to be up at the wash before the bend and found out that it had rained a little over the plateau, too…

…because I happened to get there just as the run-off from the canyons reached that point.

It never amounted to a lot…

I think that was about the peak of the flow. And then a few hours later…

…it was down to a trickle.

This hasn’t been a particularly wet or difficult Monsoon, which I always appreciate in monsoons. Of course that means things get dry over the course of the year. But I notice we’re getting set for a pretty good autumn in terms of flowers blooming.

I’ll never learn.

So back in February something got stuck in the Jeep’s transmission valve body. Drive was Drive and so was Neutral, Reverse was Neutral and Park was some moving gear, possibly reverse, locked by the parking pawl. I spent the next several months carefully never getting myself into any situation requiring a reverse gear, and life went on.

Then early last month, the problem magically fixed itself. That was about five weeks ago, and I never trusted it. Never. I used reverse but always tested before I committed the Jeep to see if it was there – and I always prefer to back into parking spots anyway, because of course I do. I’m paranoid. Anyway. I never trusted the “fixed” problem. Until this morning.

I got a call from a neighbor who needed to run her well pump but had some generator problem…

Could I come over and look it over? Sure, I said. I’m just sitting around, and Tobie wouldn’t mind a Jeep ride. (as soon as he heard those words, Tobie resolved to give me no further peace until we did that thing.)

I drove over to her place, thinking all the while how I should park the Jeep. Normally I turn around a little bit from the house, because if I go all the way up the drive I won’t be able to get out without Reverse. But reverse has been working fine, right? And sooner or later I need to start trusting it. Right?

Uh huh. I got to the homestead and JUST PASSED my turnaround spot when like an idiot I stopped the Jeep to test whether reverse was there. IDIOT! THE VERY FIRST TIME I DID THAT! And guess what. I ended up needing her help to push the Jeep backward until I could turn it around. Idiot!

Well, the generator problem turned out to be very minor: We got her squared away and I drove home without incident, but…

…the Jeep will no longer back into its space.

When I first contemplated moving to the boonies for realsies in the mid-oughts there were all manner of weird things I could mentally picture myself doing for fun and profit. Some that I really did end up doing never crossed my mind at all. Example:

The morning perimeter pee, in which I walk around to all points of the Lair’s perimeter where coyotes definitely have or conceivably might enter, and, to the full extent of my bladder’s capacity and with nightly resort to an orange juice bottle, piss on them.

It’s been a long time since I took the time to do this. I neglected the chore and now the coyotes are growing rude and upsetting Tobie in the middle of the night. I find his loud nocturnal rampages very annoying but he’s doing what he’s supposed to – it’s really me who’s been falling down on the job. (sigh)

Just my little way of saying that I’m a large carnivorous predator whom you have offended. Everything in this circle is mine: You can have everything else. It sounds utterly stupid but it literally speaks their language and does usually work.

Oy, the things people with horses get up to…

I like horses, normally, but a horse that gets in the habit of pissing where it lives is the foulest creature I’ve ever encountered. Gallons of the stuff, all deposited in the same place, turns ordinary dirt into stinking muck. And there’s nothing for it but to haul it out and replace it with new every now and then or the whole barn will be unbearable.

This morning D&L wanted to pull the mats out of Coal’s corral, clean up the foulness as much as possible, put the mats back where they belong and then cut a new and better ditch for the piss to drain outside. And neither of them are really strong enough anymore to carry any of that out, so guess how I spent my morning.

Tobie was very excited at the prospect of a Jeep ride…

…less so when I leashed him to the rear bumper and left him alone in the shade of the barn. I came out with a wheelbarrow of muck and found him sitting back in the Jeep as if willing it to move. So I brought him into the barn…

…and I want it stated for the record that he was such a good boy. He doesn’t get social occasions very often and they used to excite him so much he could get dangerous to be near. But the last two times, including this morning, he has really been on his best behavior: Just digging being a part of what people are doing but staying scrupulously out of the way. I really think he might be maturing at last.

Now if I could convince him to come straight back after a rabbit chase, I’d stop worrying about him quite so much. But he failed his recent chance to prove himself on that score pretty solidly.

…would break my budget if it weren’t for Big Brother.

I have always been open to the possibility that, however blessed I’ve been since moving to the Gulch, I am cursed in one respect: I seem doomed never to have a dog that lives to be 10 years old.

In Little Bear’s case there was some speculation that poor diet could possibly have contributed to his lack of longevity – I don’t know, personally I think it was mostly the well water but poor health rarely only has one cause – and so when I got Tobie in May ’21 I decided to give more thought to diet. I was strictly thinking empirically, since I don’t know anything about canine dietary requirements, but D&L raised two dogs from puppyhood to old age on a diet of Taste of the Wild so it couldn’t have been actively toxic, right? So before leaving town that afternoon I stopped at the big pet store and bought a sack of this stuff – and the price at the counter floored me, it left me stone broke. No way this was sustainable, especially (looking over my shoulder at where somebody’s napping on the cool floor) considering how big Tobie was projected to and actually did get. He’s not “look at that mutant dog” big like Little Bear, not even full-size German Shepherd big, but he’s still pretty big and he has a proportional appetite. This was going to be a more expensive project than I could afford.

Happily, as in so many things, Big Brother bailed me out. Every six weeks like clockwork, a big box containing a sack of Taste of the Wild appears at the post office. That almost completely covers Tobie’s food budget, not counting eggs and treats which don’t cost a lot. “Almost” means that every now and then, say once or at most twice a year, I have to get one of these at the feed store in town to maintain that “at least one spare sack” cushion that my neurotic food hoarding instinct demands. 🙂

Stolen from Wendy McElroy.

This time it was 3am. Tobie went on a veritable rampage, charging from window to window snarling horribly. Never heard him snarl before except during play. He wasn’t playing early this morning – in fact he was so serious I decided to see for myself what if anything was up.

So I put on my leg and went out on the porch with my rifle. A few years ago I upgraded to something that could mount a weapon light by some means less redneck than duct tape, and then I researched and acquired the brightest light I could (with some difficulty) afford. This is my “bump in the night” gun, and this wasn’t the first time I’d taken it outside in the dark ready to bump back.

Before I left the cabin I did hear coyotes howling again, and this was almost certainly what had gotten Tobie so stirred up. That being the case, the chances of any actual encounter were pretty much nil but that didn’t mean I didn’t have a round in the chamber. I’ve been wrong before, and I actively strive to ensure to the best of my poor ability that my last words aren’t “Oh shit.”

The moon is almost in the last quarter but it was high and bright in the cloudless sky. I didn’t need a light to see my way around, but that’s not what the gunlight is for. I lit up the front and side yards from the safety of the porch, and seeing nothing I went down the stairs and shined the slopes around the cabin and the approach to the wash. I saw nothing, which did not surprise me. Didn’t really doubt that there had indeed been something there: Tobie may overreact but he doesn’t lie to me about anything but food and who tipped over the trashcan.

This morning at first light we worked the perimeter together, and as if to say he told me so he pointed out one new pile of coyote scat after another around the far part of the driveway. Nothing closer than that, but they really did come out of the brushline and into the killzone, probably heading for the hills as soon as I opened the door. Not the first time and they did no harm, but I do consider it rude.

Tobie takes perimeter defense very seriously, especially in the middle of the night, and seems genuinely perplexed as to how I can just sleep through all those critters that creep so brazenly around outside his open window. Being stuck inside his only weapon is noise, and he gets it free so why not use it.

Tobie barking in the middle of the night is such a common thing that I mostly sleep through that, too. But last night at 1 AM he became convinced that all hands needed to be on deck. Unable to deal with the calamity so dreadfully unfolding all around him by barking at it, he came into the bedroom and began barking directly at me.

That got me up, of course, and here we ran into the problem that, due to foolish behavior as a young man, I have tinnitus so bad that the ringing is the only high-pitched noise I’m ever capable of hearing. So at first I accepted the possibility that Tobie’s concerns weren’t as unfounded as usual. I sat up and listened hard, and finally could barely make out what was probably very very loud to Tobie: a bunch of coyotes were saluting the sky in unusual numbers and unusually close to the cabin.

Something I never get tired of pointing out is the difference in attitude that coyotes show toward SW desert hermits and Massachusetts suburbanites. A suburbanite walking her poodle in the vicinity of 3 or 4 coyotes is in some danger: A hermit sleeping in the midst of – well, probably thousands – of coyotes will sleep in peace unless his damned dog wakes him up. That’s simply because coyotes are smart and don’t want to die, so they only attack known safe targets. That suburban lady can’t or won’t fight back: The hermit will kill any misbehaving coyote on sight. The coyotes know that, and I have never in 17 years of living smack in the middle of Coyote Central been threatened by a coyote. My chickens have, a few times, and indeed the only coyote I ever actually shot, more than 10 years ago, was apparently vectoring in on my new chicken flock.

My point is, I sleep peacefully when the coyotes yip at the moon. Tobie is not as sanguine, probably never will be, and he was actually rather put out with me when my only reaction to learning the situation was to growl, “Tobie, go lay down,” and lay back down myself, pulled up my blanket and turned my face to the wall. Knowing better than to argue, he actually obeyed and I didn’t hear from him again till morning.

More and more, offgrid battery tech is moving toward batteries that don’t require topping off the electrolyte levels. Some day maybe lithium battery prices will come down to where penniless desert hermits can afford them – preferably without depopulating Africa or something – and on that day I’ll rejoice. Until that day I’ll probably stick with lead/acid golf cart batteries as the affordable – and really quite adequate – choice.

And I have to say, personally I prefer a battery that forces me to do monthly PM because it’s not just electrolyte levels that can go wrong with your batteries. Corrosion is a thing. Connectors can come loose for no apparent reason. Mice can build nests in the box. Shit happens – and when it happens to your batteries it will bring expensive and stressful things into your life. A “maintenance-free” battery encourages sloth, and that’s not called a deadly sin for no reason.

It’s September first, and I always try to do my battery rounds on the first of every month. Several years ago this was a big deal because I was caretaker for properties scattered all over the Gulch and some of them had really big battery banks. Now it’s just my and Ian’s places, but the principle is the same: Periodic Maintenance is good. Continue reading →

Momentarily flush, I ordered some replacement supplies from Amazon. Normally I would wait to pick up the box until the regular weekly water run but it’s a pretty morning and I wanted a bike ride.

This, I knew before I arrived, was going to put to the test a question I’ve had since I replaced the panniers in the Spring…

What if I’ve got a big box to haul, and no cargo rack to haul it on? That new bag, full of things I would not be comfortable leaving home, takes up the whole rack.

However it is easily removeable, as are the panniers. So Plan A was to remove it and one of the panniers, put the bag in the remaining pannier and lash the removed pannier on the rack under the box. This worked…

…not even a little bit. First try I didn’t make it out of the parking lot. I re-adjusted the box, tried again, and again didn’t get very far. And here I ran into an unexpected problem: I was in a town and there were people all around, very awkwardly placed, and Uncle Murphy decided to have a laugh at my expense. With the box falling off the bike I swung very slowly onto a side street followed closely by a car, only to have the car take the same turn. I tried to stop on the apron of a driveway to let the car pass me, only to have the same car want use of that very driveway. I believe he probably heard my yell of “Oh, come on!” All this time a big cardboard box was busily trying to fall off the bike, with me just as busily trying to prevent that while still somewhat controlling the bike.

Then all the time I was embarrassedly trying to rearrange the load, cars kept going by like I was some sort of circus sideshow. At home I could have done the whole thing nude without anybody being the wiser: Here, I seemed doomed to be an object of others’ entertainment.

I did get the load properly mounted…

Turned out the trick was to leave both panniers on and just let them get squished a little by the box. It gave me no more trouble all the way home.

And now – (Cue the “2 is 1, etc” theme…)

…among other things I have a nice new pair of SPARE boots! The ones I bought in Spring of last year are still in fair shape, the soles just now starting to think about going smooth, but the right one always pinched my meat foot so I got this pair half a size bigger and it’s much more comfortable even before breaking in. Always seems like quite an extravagance to buy new boots: I really procrastinated about buying a pair before the old ones are ragged. But just now it seemed like the right thing to do.

My neighbors D&L have a very large house, post & beam with strawbale & adobe exterior and earthbag interior walls. I do believe it’s got more thermal mass than Ian’s Cave, which is great in the summer but a surprising liability in winter because you can’t ever afford to let it get cold inside if you aren’t prepared to let it take weeks to warm back up. A couple of years ago they had to be gone for a few days and they actually hired me to come stay in their house, to take care of their animals but mostly…

…to keep their pellet stove running. Which I found kind of ironic, and also supplied quite an education in the advantages and disadvantages of pellet stoves.

Advantages: They’re super efficient. That one stove is their primary source of heat for the bulk of a 4000+ square foot house, and it does its job really well.

Disadvantages: Everything else. First, they require not only fuel but also electricity and lots of it. In town that wouldn’t be a problem but when you’re rolling your own juice that means you need sizable infrastructure just to run the heater, and you’d better hope nothing ever goes seriously wrong with it. You’re always one lightning strike or gloomy spell away from getting cold with no Plan B. I lived for five years in an RV trailer whose heater needed propane and electricity to work, which was connected to a really iffy power system, and I can tell you from experience that that isn’t a good situation to be in.

Of course D&L have a SUPER electrical system, with a big dual-fuel backup generator, so they don’t worry about that. But they paid a lot of cash for the privilege.

Second, the fuel…

…is expensive, and – around here anyway – kind of hard to get. You mustn’t ever let it get wet. And that pellet stove goes through a lot of it. D&L order theirs from the local feed store by the pallet-load, and during full winter they go through one and a half of those sacks every single day. Of course, it’s a big house. Also it turns out that there’s quite a quality difference between various brands of pellet, which leads us to…

Third, they’re complicated to maintain. Pellet stoves have a lot of moving parts, and like a revolver everything has to be working smoothly and freely or nothing will work at all. If your pellets happen to have a lot of grit and crumbles, expect the hopper and auger to gum up and stop the show every so often unless you thoroughly clean the whole damned thing, in each of its many crevices, daily. And maybe even if you do. D&L are very picky about the pellets they buy, and they still sift every bucketful before it goes into the stove. That little vacuum cleaner in the picture above is just for cleaning the stove. They had a lot of stoppages during their learning curve.

The reason all this has been on my mind is that in a year or two when I’m living on SS which will greatly increase my monthly income, I’d kind of like to replace the woodstove in the Lair’s main room with something that’s … not a woodstove. I have come to dearly love the thermostat-controlled propane heater in the bedroom but it doesn’t have the horsepower to heat the whole place. If I could afford the cost of another stove and the fuel to run it, it would be nice not to have to gather and chop wood every year. But I’m pretty much settled in my mind that if I ever do that, the woodstove will be replaced with one that burns propane, not wood pellets.

…are you ever planning to get out of bed? Food bowl’s empty and bladder’s full over here…

…DJT decided to give up on the politics crap and just openly become a supervillain instead.

I mean, if that face isn’t plotting an intricate and horrible revenge right that very moment against all those who have wronged him, I’ve been reading comic books wrong all these years. 😀

And anyway – he’s Donald Trump. He probably already owns a hollowed-out volcano he’s been dying to find a use for.

It has drizzled rain for days now: No accumulation worth measuring but it’s like living inside a mister. I expect ferns.

Just to get outside the cabin for something other than bare necessities I started out on a just for fun bike ride yesterday morning…

…then turned around and went back to the garage because why. No fun to be had when seasonal affective disorder is becoming a topic, is there? May as well huddle indoors. In August. I mean, I could day-drink on the porch but Jimmy Buffet was never a hero of mine.

Don’t know what I’m bitching about: It’s Monsoon after all and this one has mostly been a dud so far at like three and a half inches. It’s just gloomy and I like sun. I’ll remember this with bitter self-contempt in January when I’m hiding from real weather.