The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Right at the moment I’m looking at an almost cloudless sky. My charge controller hit float sometime around ten and it’s still there, so the batteries are getting a very nice and well-deserved soak.

Which is good, because holy cow here it comes again…

The funny thing is, the storm is supposed to roll in this evening and supposedly overnight temps are going to stay in the forties. Which I’ll believe when I see it, though I certainly do believe we’ll have rain. Followed by, you guessed it, more rain. By the weather site I use, this is supposed to continue through Thursday.

So if all this is accurate, expect the “Joel only posts to bitch about the weather” thing to continue for the foreseeable future. I was going to celebrate the return of the sun with a movie tonight, but think I’ll just play it cagey and not do that instead.

Almost certainly someone will take offense.

What would happen if monks under a vow of silence decided to put on a Christmas pageant…

A couple of Christmas presents from past years have proven worth their weight in Gor-tex in the past several days. People gave me these things for extreme cold, which we get only rarely, and I stashed them with my heavy parka that I don’t even wear once most years. But driving around between chores in winter on what amounts to a four-wheel motorcycle will change your mind about how warm to dress in a big hurry. 🙂

So thanks again to Claire for the Mad Bomber hat…

…and to Neighbor J for the snowmobile gloves, so thick you have to take them off to turn the ignition key, but the only thing I can wear on my hands while driving that don’t allow frostbite.

(For the record, I typed the bulk of this over at Ian’s place – because he’s got juice. Only logged on to post it when my battery voltage got back into the happy zone. Now I’m going to turn everything back off and let the batteries soak while they can. Just saying hi.)

It’s been wet. It’s been soggy, not for days but weeks. I have literally never seen it like this in eight years. Keep waiting for the yucca to die and be replaced by ferns. I left my clean stump socks out to dry for two days, and every morning they were soggy all over again. A week ago we got ten solid hours of rain, the clay was soaked deep, and it still hasn’t dried on the road. Unheard of.

Woke up at 2 this morning and saw moon shadow on my blanket. Haven’t seen that for a while – I scrunched up against the loft’s little window and could see the moon and a star, just a little hazy, almost sharp. I didn’t get excited about it, the sky has played me enough mean jokes lately. But I noted it, and then went back to sleep.

Live with any solar power system, especially a little one with no backup generator, and you’ll become a connoisseur of sunshine. Got out of bed and there was fog, like there’s been the past three or four days. But above the fog was a hint of blue, not the usual gray. Went out to give the chickens their food and water, looked up, and saw a contrail. Normally they leave me cold, but this one was a pretty sight. Continue reading →

Actually it’s closer to noon on the ninth. The fire is still burning, not because it’s particularly cold – it’s nearly 43 out right now – but because it’s so damned damp. My stump socks are out mildewing on the line, they may never dry. I think the sun will never shine again. Doing more laundry is clearly out of the question, I may end up having to string a line indoors.

Seriously, if the Cat in the Hat shows up I’m gonna invite him in with a smile.

How bored am I? I’m so bored I actually tried to read a Patricia Cornwell crime paperback. I was 77 pages into it before finally conceding I still didn’t even know what it was about. So I went up the ridge to the reloading shack…

I size and prime my pistol brass all in a bunch just so I don’t have it lying around in several states of prep, but tend to load the ammo as I need it, fifty at a time. Because bulk reloading is boring and there are always other, better things to do. Except this morning there just wasn’t. So I loaded every case I had. Now I’m ready for the apocalypse. Which will probably be boring.

This has been going on forever.

Maybe the clouds will break up later. They did yesterday afternoon, briefly. A little. I shouldn’t even be on the ‘pooter now. Bored!

Somebody asked me one time, “Do you ever get bored?” And I answered cheerfully, truthfully, “No. Never.”

But today I’m bored.

So bored.

Will the sun never come back? Will the mud never dry? I don’t remember the last time it did this to me. Cold, sure. But …

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Our old odd Uncle Joel is getting stranger than ever, now he’s posting pictures of shit.
Well it’s not what it is that caught my eye, for clearly ’tis nought but a turd. And it’s not even where it came from, which is unmistakably the south end of a northbound coyote. No, what got my attention was where I found it, which is inside the big horse enclosure – a place where coyotes should not be permitted to venture. Not ‘way out in back, either. This was right near the shelters.

I’ve mentioned before that the coyotes have been unusually intrusive just lately. Everybody around here has noticed it. And I told Neighbor J where I’d found it, and he considered it as significant as I did if not more. And when I got back from my errand to town, of which more in a bit, he told me that while I’d been gone a coyote had started singing close to the fence in the murky daylight and he just up and emptied his little Ruger .38 at it to be mean – at which point it shut right the hell up.

That ATV cover I was bragging about earlier wasn’t much help this morning, as the water condensed and froze on every damn thing. The quad didn’t want to start but I got it putting and drove it to shit-shoveling. And then when I went to leave, the damned thing betrayed me and wouldn’t start for nothing. And right about then I got a call from D&L wanting to go to town right then and there, so I pulled off the old damaged coil wire and caught a ride with them.

Bought a couple feet of wire from the CarQuest, hiked back to J&H’s, and screwed it into the coil. Took out the spark plug, connected it to the new wire and turned the starter over and lo there was spark so that either fixed the problem or spark wasn’t the problem to begin with – which I did not believe. Hooked everything back up, and the quad started up instantly. So I went and tended Landlady’s chickens and just now came home.

I swear I don’t think this mud is ever gonna dry, nor will I ever again see the sun. Climate Change has come to the desert and will surely kill us all. But at least that much went right today.

When I rolled out of the sack this morning the moon was bright and clear, and the sky appeared nearly cloudless. Finally the air began to brighten, and…
Frozen fog at the moment, everything’s covered with a fine layer of ice. Though I’m fairly sure it’s going to warm up.

Which brings me to today’s Hermitting Tip: When you’re driving open cockpit, as I currently am, Get A Cover.
I swiped this one off the bigger quad, which doesn’t need it and may never. But even without snow, I’m glad I did. It too is covered with ice at the moment.

From InRange.tv, The Battle at Dragoon Springs.

…and I’m happy to say my moratorium on fire paranoia seems to be holding.

Whenever I get the pang, I just clean the stovepipe again. Why not? It’s designed to be easy to take down. This time last winter I was doing it at neurotic intervals, like every three or four days, and even then I couldn’t bring myself to build a really warm fire. Now I just pack it with kindling and let’er rip, and it doesn’t make my heartrate spike. Makes for a much more pleasant morning.

I visited “my” Paypal account last night for the first time in weeks, since things have been slow, and found that I had missed a couple of donations. Thanks, unnamed benefactors!

Things have also been slow on the blog, I know, and not just because of the ratio of blue sky to electrical power. Apologies: The Jeep’s breakdown has disrupted things about as badly as I ever feared, and I’m spending too much time and mental energy scrambling through workarounds. And frankly it has affected my mood. You don’t notice how many issues can be solved with “load the boys into the Jeep” until you can’t do that anymore. I have wheels of a sort with that small quad, which is at least keeping the strain off my knees and stump and was ever so timely. But it’s not a permanent solution because it doesn’t belong to me and not an adequate solution because it gives me exactly the cargo capacity of the milk crate I zip-tied to the tiny rear rack.

Hopefully today I’ll finally get that scan tool, which may at least narrow the field of what’s wrong with the damn Jeep. The check engine light tells me it’s in the powertrain control system somewhere, but that’s a wide field and not definitive at all: The ECM would interpret a busted timing gear as a problem with the cam sensor, I suspect. In the old days it would’ve. So, still waiting.

Almost certainly I’ll need to bite the bullet and convince somebody to help me tow the Jeep out through the wash. Neighbors are skeptical about that, but I’m certain it can be done. I’ve hauled worse loads through the sand on five cylinders. And one nice thing about all the rain: Right at the moment the sand is unusually firm for this time of year. But the next turn in the weather is likely to make the job a real ordeal, so I need to get it on.

Then there’s the question of paying for it, but some donations have at least made that vaguely feasible. For which, my many thanks. I woke this morning with it on my mind, thinking that the days of being nickled and dimed to death are over: I’m being 500 dollared to death. With the money I’ve spent on repairs this year, I could have easily finished the cabin siding. That’s kind of depressing when I dwell on it.

And last night he was really getting on my nerves. The Secret Lair has a single comfy chair, and after lights-out it belongs to Ghost. But with everybody sequestered indoors as the weather continued (day after day) as if Hillary had condemned me to it as punishment for my gender, Ghost became more and more demanding. He can curl up on LB’s dog bed, give me the big brown eyes and whine at me for hours – and what he wants is for me to get up and give him “his” chair*.

I wasn’t in the best of moods myself. Last night I finished my ninth paperback in something like a week. I used to do that shit all the time, but these days I more often have something resembling a life. Not lately, though. So he got yelled at. “You’re staring at me! Stop staring at me!” He could have the damn chair when I went up the ladder to bed. Which, at last, I gave up and did. Screw it.

So of course this morning I woke up long before dawn. The Lair is always cold on winter mornings and I object to freezing in the dark, which is why I prefer going to bed later in winter. But I don’t always get what I want. Here I was, awake.

And the stars were out! The remains of the full moon were clear and sharp! The clouds had departed overnight! Kinda cold, but hey, it’s December. It does that. And Ghost acts like he shed seven years overnight. So now that it has warmed up a bit we’re all going for a walky, just to blow off some accumulated steam. It’ll probably cloud up again this afternoon, so we’ll enjoy a cloudless sky while it lasts.

—
*Yeah, he was mad about the new chair. But I laid his old blanket on the seat of the new one and he promptly forgot all about the issue. Now I think he prefers this one – or maybe it was just the weather.

And we’re back to heavy overcast. After Thursday’s all-day rain, the roads are soaked so heavily the caliche is still soupy in places. I was supposed to meet my weekender neighbor S to get some composted manure for his yard, but he (wisely) seems to have called his trip off. Somebody drove past his place, though, and the road between him and Landlady is chewed up as I’ve rarely seen it. Somebody barely got out with his vehicle. I took that little quad there, and on the way back it felt like it was raining big globs of mud. Those idiotic fenders basically do nothing: The machine would be better if I took a Sawzall to them.

The forecast is starting to equivocate: It was supposed to be clear and cold for days starting tomorrow, but has changed since. Looks like it’s more clouds, “chance of rain/snow.” Bother. I wonder if it’s possible to get Seasonal Affective Disorder after just a week? Maybe people with solar power are more susceptible.

Do not watch the following video. I’m serious. I am totally not responsible for any damage that comes to you from watching the following video. You have been warned.

After I have betrayed the revolution and set myself up as president-for-life, I am going to assign an elite team of my secret police to track down and punish every single person involved with this video.

How…how to unsee this?

So a few days ago I saw an item on a sidebar somewhere about a “black stormtrooper controversy.”

And I was all like…

…because I couldn’t decide if the racial outrage clique would be upset that there was a black stormtrooper, or that there was only one. Y’know? It could go either way.

But I got distracted by a squirrel or something shiny and didn’t click on the link. I remember resolving to do so if I ever saw the link again, because damn.

And now, some days later, it turns out there was … sort of … a black stormtrooper controversy. Except that there wasn’t. Or something. Or so it says here.

What we have here is a prime example of a fascinating Internet phenomenon: the preemptive denunciation of a controversy that doesn’t exist.

So that was worth getting my full power back, just to learn that. I think.

But as with all such things, what’s really funny is that it seemed perfectly plausible to me that somebody would be outraged over something having to do with the black stormtrooper. Assuming, you know, that he’s actually a stormtrooper and not this episode’s take on Luke Skywalker. Which in turn would probably outrage somebody, because Luke was kind of a schlemiel.

Five days of no more than peek-a-boo sun, capped off with a day that would have been at home on a bad day in the Pacific Northwet. Yesterday my input voltage did not exceed 12.2 volts, except for one period after 3 when it briefly stopped raining and the voltage increased to 12.5. I don’t remember a day like that ever in the desert, and after such a long gloomy period I like to think we’ve tested this little vestpocket solar power system as well as it will ever be tested. And it so exceeded my expectations.

Yesterday, counting my blessings that I had gotten Big Brother’s 12-volt lighting system installed less than a week before, I just switched the inverter right off and left it off until this afternoon. And this morning before sunrise I was still reading 12.0 volts. At no time during this whole cloudy period, using care and moderation, did I ever even stress the system.

And yesterday during the gloomy rainy nasty afternoon I was baking cookies and thinking about Frederick, the generous soul who donated the money for the two new batteries I installed last winter after my scrounged pair gave up the ghost. I’ve been careful to take good care of those batteries in the hope that they’ll give me several years’ good service, and this past week they took good care of me. Not even down 50%, though they hadn’t seen even a momentary full charge for three days! I was impressed. That’s nearly 200% of the service performance I expected out of two batteries, two panels, and some scavenged RV parts. I understand from a recent Claire post that Frederick’s wife is having a time adjusting to life without him. I never met either of them and rather doubt that she reads this little blog, but if she does I’d like her to know that her husband’s so-timely gift keeps on giving, and I haven’t forgotten him here.

And it rained nonstop from 5 this morning till about 3:30. Indicated voltage never got above 12.2, and although I’m very pleased with the way the system is handling all this I’m still getting off the ‘pooter right now.

Other than that, and that Ghost is extremely displeased with my weather mismanagement, all is perfectly well. At least it’s quite warm for December – so far. That might be changing too, since it’s cooler now than it was before dawn.

Anyway, just wanted to check in and say hi. Spells like this are why I rarely throw a paperback away, ’cause I’m just sittin’ and readin’.

…and while I’ve noted with pleasure that solar panels aren’t useless in cloudy weather, still they’re not at their best. So it’s time to reduce my ‘pooter time. I’ll probably be back later.

My year and a half in a small-engine shop left me with complete contempt for crappy little Chinese engines, but this one seems to have survived its misuse quite well. It was reluctant to start in the 25-degree morning, but in hindsight even that may be because I haven’t yet located the choke lever among the confusing controls. The battery held a good charge overnight, which was my big question. Once warmed up, the engine ran great. I took it to shit-shoveling this morning and the gearbox is still crisp, the clutch is fine. Except for a metric buttload of missing bolts and some problem with the brakelight switch the whole thing works perfectly.

The big one…well, it’s got good spark and the battery might be salvageable. It shows clear signs of having been worked on by a frustrated teenager and the filter box was full of water, which is never a good sign, but I see no clear sign of corrosion. The choke cable was chingered up and at first I thought it was frozen but it turned out to just be that teenager: Now as far as I can tell the valve is opening and closing freely. I let the fuel line run for a bit in hopes of draining off any water in the tank and really ought to drain the whole thing but don’t have any to replace it with at the moment. I ran the battery low and only got it to hit a couple of times, but it did hit a couple of times so all is not lost. Still, I think I’m gonna end up taking the carb apart this afternoon to see what’s what.

When I was Mr. Suburban Man, I learned never to walk into a Home Depot without extremely good reason and a shopping list – preferably after leaving my credit cards at home. Because I was like that annoying kid watching the commercials they played between Saturday morning cartoons on TV: “I want that!”

This is one of the two major reasons I hardly ever buy anything at Amazon. Because if I have any money in the bank at all, it’s already spent but I’m always afflicted with “I could buy that!”

This past weekend I needed a scan tool for the Jeep. Went to the one local auto parts store, which didn’t sell one. So I had to go on-line, debit card in hand. But if I’m definitely going to buy anything on Amazon, there are a couple of other things that have been hanging fire in my cart and none of them are really luxuries! Seriously! I’m talking about things like long underwear and a hoodie that’s made of something besides holes, y’know? Oh, and a proper cartridge priming tool, but I’ve wanted one of those forever and it really really would speed things up. And a reloading manual published in this century – or at least the final quarter of last century. I actually use my (and Ian’s) reloading gear for daily shooting, it’s not a toy. Mostly. And I sorted the cart out but didn’t pull the trigger because I need to get explicit permission to use one of my available local delivery addresses, and that’s always a mistake because…

Because I woke up this morning thinking “Electronic earmuffs!” Because I’ve had mine for a decade, and they were cheap to begin with, and the single working side is going to stop working any time, and they’re sooo useful, and…

…and the next thing I know the cart is well above $100 before shipping, and Sensible Joel elbows me aside and starts deleting items, the bastard, because That Money’s For The Jeep.

I hate that guy.

Had breakfast with my weekender neighbors S&L this morning. And in the course of the conversation, S asked me “Are you interested in a project?”

I should always back away slowly. Sometimes I even do.


It seems somebody dumped on him gave him these two ATVs, neither of which were running at the time. Both have clearly been rode hard and put up wet – repeatedly. And having very limited access to parts, I really don’t see how much use I’m going to be. But the carrot is that if I can get both running I can keep the big one. And right now alternate transport seems attractive. No idea how long it’ll take to get the Jeep running or how much it’ll cost, and in the meantime I need to be able to move things like propane bottles and garbage. That big one could tow the Jeep trailer, if I didn’t load it too heavily.

And it turns out there’s nothing much wrong with the little one, though it’s just a crappy Chinese toy. I charged the battery and got it running without much fuss. The carb needed a little tweaking, but mostly what I think the engine needs is fresh gas and clean oil and to be run for an hour. I made the mistake of running it up the access road from the Gulch, stalled it at the intersection, and then learned the battery hadn’t taken enough charge to start the engine. Fortunately there’s enough of a grade right there that I was able to restart it by rolling it downhill, saving me from a half-mile push. So the battery may be toast.

On the big one, I’m pretty sure the battery IS toast. So far I can’t even turn it over to check for spark. I’ve left it on the charger and we’ll see what happens tomorrow.

I’m not in too deep. S is coming back next weekend and we’ve already got a date to use his trailer on a load of composted manure, so if I’ve decided it ain’t happening we can bring them back to his place then. Right now they’re kind of, er, taking up Ian’s yard because he’s got a bigger electrical system than I do and he’s not at the bottom of a hollow that requires a functioning ATV just to leave. 🙂