The Ultimate Answer to Kings

It’s Shit-Shoveling Monday. Three days worth of manure to clean up, plus I finally have the Jeep and the trailer together in the same place and the manure pile is totally out of control, so I expect to be shoveling a lot of manure today. I’m blasting through my firewood and want to cut more. Sunny with temps supposed to be mid-forties and snow and cold forecasted for later in the week, so if it isn’t too windy this needs to be a good work day. I’ve got a lot to do, is what I’m saying. Plus there’s a trip to town in there somewhere, which I can’t miss because I need to go to the feed store and I’m almost out of drinking water. Busy day. No time for bullshit.

Then at eight D called and said they wanted to go to town at nine. That shuffled my schedule around a bit, but wasn’t a big surprise. Got breakfast dealt with, got the boys squared away, loaded up my water bottles, drove to the top of the ridge and hitched up the trailer, headed for D&L’s. The radio was cranking, my head was muffled in a hood, I wasn’t really in condition yellow and should have been because then when I got to the first real turn I’d have known that the Jeep wasn’t going to want to slow down. I hit the brakes and it felt like the engine was fighting them. Looked at the tach: The engine was fighting them! It wasn’t dropping to idle!

Got stopped, put the trans in Park, and the RPM topped 3000. This seems not quite right. Hit the switch, climbed out in the cold. Raised the hood.
For the record, it seems an old sock full of moth balls is not an effective pack rat repellant.
In fact I’d go so far as to say all I did was donate nesting material.
The past several nights have been fairly cold, down in the low teens, and somebody was looking for shelter. And he brought toys.
Including a bunch of small rocks, for reasons surpassing my understanding. One of them found its way under the throttle linkage and stuck the engine at damn near WOT.
Well, I was going to town anyway. I came home with weapons. Either by poison or trap, I don’t care which, that rat has slept its last automotive night. Uncle Joel is going to war.

We’re in the middle of our traditional late-December cold snap here but for once I’m not going to complain. First, really industrial-grade cold involves clear skies and after the extended gloom that graced most of the month I’ll take clear sky any way I can get it. Second, I’ve finally gotten the hang of heating with wood (This being my fourth winter in the Lair, it’s about time) and in about an hour I’ll be complaining that it’s too warm. So under the circumstances, whining about winter seems inappropriate.

Nothing else is going on that needs reportage, though, so there it is. My oven is still broke (and when I get around to taking some pix I’ve got a story about my efforts at remediation that will make you glad you live there and not here) and so yesterday I took my bread pans over to Ian’s – and found that Ian’s oven and mine have totally different notions of what comprises 350^o so it’s a damn good thing I decided to stick around while baking or I’d have a couple of lumps of coal too late for Christmas. But other than that I’m just sittin’ and readin’, which is pretty boring to write about so I’ll spare you.

More later, maybe.

Had some snow in the evening and overnight, nothing folks up north would consider worth mentioning. Temps in the teens.

Though – just so you don’t think I’ve given up bitching about winter – it is mornings like this that remind me of one design flaw for which I never got around to finding a fix. Because of the Lair’s location down in this hollow, tight to the crotch of a complicated ridge, even though the solar panels are set as high as I could practically put them it’s already fairly late in the morning before they get enough sun for the snow to melt off. Ten o’clock now and it’s only just starting. And their height – the bottom edges of the panels are ten feet high – makes the old ‘tape a sqeegee to a pole’ trick problematic. So far I’ve always gotten away with moderation and patience, but one day we’ll have snowfall like we got in ’08 and I’ll wish I’d been more proactive.

…as if millions of gunbloggers suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

I fear something terrible has happened.

That awful gun control PSA has been pulled from Youtube. Jeez, what are we supposed to gas about now?

I did not know this.

[The NORAD sleigh-tracking thing] started in 1955, with a misprint in a Colorado Springs newspaper and a call to Col. Harry Shoup’s secret hotline at the Continental Air Defense Command, now known as NORAD.

“This was the ’50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.

The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”

Remember those halcyon days of innocence when all we had to worry about was global thermonuclear war? Me, neither.

Enjoy your holiday, guys!

The Perceived Carry Decoy.It’s not a gun. It’s not a toy gun. It’s the rear end of a toy gun stuck to what looks like a holster. All the tactical disadvantages of open carry with none of the protection.

Maybe they’re making it up, but I’m not…

PCD understands that not everyone is comfortable with owning an actual firearm. But why should those feelings affect your personal safety? Now they no longer have to. With the launch of Perceived Carry Decoys, you may now give off the appearance that you are toting serious heat, while in actuality you have nothing more than a one piece device attached to your hip that is as harmless as a cell phone.

“PCD” is of course anti-gun. The homepage has a link to some ‘sensible gun law’ site with lots of faux statistics. What point they’re trying to make with the actual product, I refuse to speculate.

H/T to Unc.

Ian is spending the week at his property, and – being Ian – brought fun things for his collection. I was hauling scrap lumber for a neighbor and made a quick side trip to the cabin to drop off Little Bear, intending to go right back for another trailer load. But driving past the rifle range in the wash I encountered this long-haired fellow with a rifle, and thought he might need assistance. So I was a bit late returning.

I am, I’m happy to say.

Up thirty degrees inside since getting vertical. As opposed to seven degrees outside since the sun came up. Still have to go out shit-shoveling, plus I’ve got a trash-hauling errand, but I’m hoping to let the horseshit melt out of the ice first or what’s the point? As of Monday the mud still hadn’t entirely dried in Avalon’s pen. Call me overfastidious: While I don’t mind shoveling shit, I do object to chiseling it.

Ye Olde Vogelzang is rumbling cheerfully in the corner. LORD I’m happy to have finally (mostly) shaken off my chimney-fire phobia that plagued me for the past two winters…

…though the downside is that I’m plowing through my stovewood. No worries, though: There’s a most satisfying stock of pallets waiting to be cut up. A couple of brush-cutting gigs in summer left me with an oversupply of juniper, and to tell the truth I’ll be happy to see the back of it.

The past two days have been tolerably cold but intolerably windy, and yesterday was mostly spent hiding indoors. I took time out to tend chickens and break my oven, but other than that I was sitting by the fire. The wind stopped in the evening and today dawned still as death, which is good because I’ve got to move some plywood later. And the sun! Oh, the sun is back and Uncle Joel is happy to trade it for the unseasonable warmth we had through most of December. 🙂

Hope you guys are doing as well.

The lair has an old Gaffers & Sattler apartment stove, piped for propane and absolutely perfect for this application. I bring in propane in little portable bottles since the delivery guy couldn’t possibly get in or out of the hollow and I couldn’t pay for it if he could.

The stovetop works great. But the past two winters, the oven refused to light whenever the temperature went below freezing, which of course is often. I determined that the propane pressure regulator, which was parked outdoors, was to blame because in low temp the pressure clearly dropped. The top burners could still work, but the oven pilot couldn’t sufficiently heat the thermocouple.

I still think I was right about that. For the record.

Anyway, yesterday in town I argued the local propane guy, Al (I can’t do that because) The Propane Guy, into making me a new hose that would permit me to bring the pressure regulator inside the cabin where it’s warm. This seemed like a grand idea. At the time.

This morning I installed the new hose. Hooked everything back up, opened the propane bottle, lit the oven pilot, cranked the oven valve, and…

See that bottom blue flame? That’s aimed directly at the thermocouple. It’s nice and strong.
That horizontal thing under the pilot that’s held by the setscrew is the thermocouple. Which is definitely getting hot. And I think bumping the stove around while I diddled with hoses has caused it to no longer function. At least I’ve seen water heaters act like this. The oven won’t light at all now. That thermocouple has been bathed in flame for 45 minutes as I write this sentence, and no burner is hap’nin.

I’m screwed. G&S went out of business more than 40 years ago, and my craigslist-fu is not strong. Lack of an oven is going to make it very difficult to bake.

“You sleep with your mouth open, you know.”

“And I know where. As you will soon know.”

A comment a few posts down got me thinking about this, which I had never previously considered. It will either seem to you like an idea whose time has come or the most nauseating thing you’ve ever heard of. Possibly it will depend on where you were raised. Remember, an open mind is not always an empty one.

Chicken Fried Spam Recipe

Except for the hot sauce, the batter recipe is more-or-less exactly what I sometime fry chicken parts in and it’s delicious. Guess that’s why it’s called “chicken fried.” But chicken isn’t a strong-tasting meat, and fried Spam is, so I don’t know whether I’d like it. But sooner or later I will be driven to try it.

ETA: Oh, I’ll go ahead and get it over with…

Avalon: He’s doing it again! Three times a week like clockwork, and all he ever does is say hello and take all my manure. He could at least ask. And have you ever seen such an obsession? I agree my manure is very fine indeed, but there are other things in life.
Comet: It’s so sad to watch. I’ve offered to share my alfalfa with him. Every time he comes over while I’m eating, I throw some on the ground for him to share. You’ve seen it. And he never joins me in so much as a mouthful. Just starts in forking up manure like he can’t get enough. The hangovers must be awesome.
Avalon: Well, you can’t say I haven’t tried. Several times today alone I’ve stood in his path, trying to intervene. But will he stop? The way he waves his arms at me and shouts! So rude! I suppose you must simply let some people go until they’ve hit bottom. But a manure fixation? Please.

Comet: It is kinda kinky. Perhaps a good gelding would help?

Avalon: (snicker) It did wonders for you, you bad boy.

So yesterday I received a care package from Generous Reader N, which contained many things including a roll of 3M outdoor tread tape…

…presumably because I’ve bitched about how the wooden (and rather steep) stairs in front of the Lair can get slick in winter, right?

And I cast my eyes upon it, and my very first thought was…

…because I’ve always wanted to try that. Hell, the 1911 isn’t even my EDC pistol anymore, but it has worn those Hogue grips since sometime in the last century (I got over the drawer-full-of-1911-grips thing in the ’80’s) and for all that time the slick front part of the grip, whatever it’s called, has always bugged me. I always wanted to try grip tape there, but wouldn’t stand the cost of a whole roll just for that.

So that’s just what I did, before even eating breakfast. Which will include delicious fried Spam.

H/T to Bob Owens.

Had a couple of care packages from readers today. One of a box of military-grade peanut brittle, upon which I’m currently gorging. Probably make myself sick again.

Another, much more complex…
Don’t even know where to start. There’s some seriously useful stuff in here, and I’m grateful for all the thought that went into it.

Also – to the person who sent me the $5 for the solar power e-booklet – you know how close that came to going straight into the burn barrel? You send me an envelope with a return address that starts “From the Law Offices of” … well…

How likely is that to contain good news? 🙂

Also – This is the solstice, the darkest day. From here, it may still get colder but it can only get brighter. Live with a tiny little solar power system in a shadowy hollow, and you find out that really means something. On to the equinox!

And I just had to look at that title for a minute after I typed it there. “I went to a party” is not a sentence I ever expected to write again, non-fictionally. But I digress.

Maybe this sort of thing is common in neighborhoods, it’s the first I ever saw one. It happened in four different places. We had drinks & snacks at D&L’s. Then everybody trooped over to Darrel the Former Cop’s for salad (and drinks,) then to S&L’s for dinner (and drinks,) then to Landlady’s for dessert (no drinks.) There were like ten people involved, which is basically everybody in the extended gulch, the only absentee being Ian. (D talks about “our valley,” which is as good a description of the neighborhood as I could come up with since it’s bordered by high ridges surrounding the lower ridges containing Ian’s and Landlady’s places.)

Much talking, much food. I got a little overwhelmed by all the people and noise, though I know all these people, but the food was my undoing. And I was being carefully moderate, too, didn’t pig out or anything. I did have seconds on the ham, but hey, I’m only human. Everything was fine internally until that skinny little slice of teramisu and I stopped right there, but it was too late. Up half the night and then up again early with an upset stomach that still hasn’t completely eased. Really, truly not used to rich food anymore.

As I laid awake, I thought about how wrong the original plan went – how almost completely wrong – and how it ironically turned out so well in the end. Continue reading →

Which explains why there’s not the slightest evidence of their existence, despite decades of search.

Why Superintelligent Machines Are Probably the Dominant Lifeforms in the Universe

How can they “probably” be the dominant lifeform of anything, when the whole article is blueskying a scenario with roughly the likelihood of Ringworld?

I’d bet this Susan Schneider is a big global warming believer. Can’t imagine why that seems so likely.

Just guessing, but it’s manufactured in Portland, right? C’mon, I’ll bet it was Portland.

Yeah, baby. Now if only it’ll stay this way for a while.

Cold? Yer damn tootin’ it’s cold. But I consider myself blessed that I’ve finally shaken off my morbid fear of chimney fire enough that the inside of the Lair is nice and warm, so I can shake my ass at the hoarfrost and get on with life.

ETA:

With all the moisture we’ve had, the frost gets really thick when it freezes out of the atmosphere on clear-sky nights. But a touch of sun dissolves it, as the Gulch remembers it’s supposed to be a desert and not a frickin’ embryonic rain forest.