The Ultimate Answer to Kings

This kid combines the chewing fetish of a typical puppy with the chewing ability of a … well, a combine.

Today, the little sonovabitch wrecked his own harness.

While he was wearing it.

I actually expected to be able to fix the damage in a few minutes, because one thing I have a lot of is webbing in various widths…

But unfortunately it turned out I had completely run myself out of slide fittings in 1 1/2″. There’s a drug store in town with lots of crafty stuff and I’m hoping to pick up what I need in the morning. In the meantime…

…he gets to wear his puppy harness, which even let all the way out is almost-but-not-quite choking him.

Serves him right, says I.

I’ve been actually thinking about getting him a more substantial harness anyway, and this was incentive to pull the trigger on the purchase. So in about a week the repaired one will become his plan B harness.

Next to the wash there’s this one – not a butte, not a mesa, I guess I’d go no more exalted than an erosion feature – that is very pretty in first autumn light. I’ve been meaning to come out here at daybreak for weeks, and pretty much missed the best of the seasonal light. But this morning I was determined to give it a shot.

I set up a little too early and immediately wished I’d dressed more warmly. In November the days warm up very quickly after daybreak but can start rather nippy.

That may be the most meta photograph in the history of the blog, right there.

Anyway. I waited, and waited, and then… Continue reading →

…when they’re forced on you.

Yesterday’s experiment with D doing the mid-day horse feeding went so well he decided he’d also take over the 6am feeding. As you can imagine, I begged and pleaded for him to have a change of heart*.

And I went to bed last night a bit early, as I’ve been doing lately, fully intending to stay in bed for as long in the morning as I freaking wanted to. This turned out to be 6:30 and would have been longer except starting around 5 Tobie kept coming in to see if I was done laying about. “Are you getting up?” “Are you getting up now?” And then around 6:30 he just declared, “Okay, look. You’re either getting up or showing me how to work the food bucket.”

I found this funny because I normally get up around five anyway and think nothing of it. And what with Tobie’s obvious needs I even usually go right into action. Adding a quick fifteen minute trip to the neighbors’ to the routine isn’t that much of a burden. But being required to do it every single goddam day without fail or falter kind of is for some reason and I’m happy to be done with it.

Apparently the 6am feeding went so well that D decided it was time to catch up with all the barn disorder horses can cause in three weeks, all in one morning session. I arrived at 8:30 to find him sweeping out the second of the two stalls, with elaborate plans to fix misarranged floor pads and clean up the hay room. This tired him out quickly and I suggested it might not be completely necessary to get everything done in a single session, particularly since overdoing it might set back his recovery. But it’s good to see him recovering so well.

No new news about L’s recovery, and no news isn’t necessarily good news but I can hope. Best case is she stays symptom-free and gets released as soon as she tests negative, which optimistically might be sometime next week.

—
*I did not do this at all.

He figures he still can’t haul the muck wagon around the corrals but he ought to be able to do at least some of the feeding. So I’m skipping the 11am feeding this morning and will meet him at 4. If he can do the feeding while I handle the mucking out, that will speed things up some. And it means I don’t have to go there for about six and a half hours in the middle of the day, which will help my own chores. I still have wood to cut.

We’re already splitting the pellet stove cleaning: I do everything that requires kneeling, and he hauls pellets and scrapes out the fire tray. That speeds my indoor chore a lot. It’s going to be quite a while before either he or L will be able to kneel in front of that stove so I’ll be doing that, at least, for the foreseeable future.

My neighbors D&L took the covid thing really seriously, as I may have mentioned. They masked religiously and stopped attending neighborhood get-togethers, got the vaccine as soon as humanly possible and still masked and distanced themselves. At one point D even tried rocking the two-mask look, but I guess that was a step too far even for him because he dropped that pretty quickly but he still puts on an N95 every time he steps out of his truck in the little town nearest where we live.

I kind of understand their concern: The disease seemed to only really harm the old and already sick and they’ve both been in and out of hospitals quite a lot in the past few years what with strokes and cancer and various injuries. Through all that, the only thing that ever seemed to truly bother either of them was the prospect of catching ‘the covid.’ About 3 weeks ago L fell and broke her hip, got ambulanced out to a hospital, then upon her release went into a rehab center so strict about covid that they wouldn’t even let her in until she proved she was vaccinated and that doesn’t allow any family visits for fear of infection.

And after all that, guess who’s got Covid-19.

Happily she never got any serious symptoms, only had any symptoms at all for a day or two, and now (cue further irony) she’s being treated with all that stuff the television newsreaders told her were ridiculous right wing propaganda. But she’s stuck there till she tests negative for the virus and we’re not sure when that’s gonna be.

Considering that rehab center staff gave her the disease – that’s apparently been firmly established – we’re also not sure who’s paying for the extended confinement and treatment. She was originally supposed to come home today.

So I’ll do it a bit late.

Every time I come up on some calendar milestone, even if it doesn’t really matter that much to me, I mean to mention it on the blog because that’s just what you’re supposed to do when you have a blog. And every time, it comes and goes and I forget to do my duty.

For example: five days ago, on November sixth, I passed exactly 15 years full time residence in the Gulch. Cue balloons and party poppers.

There, I did it.

I thought I had a 2-gallon reserve can which turned out to be empty because I forgot that the chainsaw also uses gasoline. Then the Monday morning water run got set back to Tuesday which wasn’t good news at all. All the back-and-forth had blown through my gas and there I was, engine gonna flame out at any moment.

I made it – but I’m glad there weren’t any more hills involved than there were, or I wouldn’t have.

I’m going to pour virtually all this into the Jeep between now and the next trip to town, and then fill them up again, because I’m burning a lot more gas than the monthly plan normally calls for. D’s been giving me gas money; I just need to be more diligent about spending it.

My quotidian chores have lately taken up so much time in small bites over the whole daytime period that I’m kind of having to push a bit to get my seasonal chores done.

These guys…

I negotiated the 6am-7pm five-visit schedule down to four visits from six to four, because that 7pm visit was really getting to me: By 7 I’m normally watching a movie or reading a book with my gut wrapped around an adult beverage. I give the horses their evening hay just before leaving from the 4pm feed and cleanup and they can save it for nighttime if they want, they’re both adults. Even so, whatever I’m doing through the day I have to stay mindful of the clock, because every day at certain times I have to drop what I’m doing and go do horse stuff a mile away even if only for a few minutes. Kind of messes with your day. Continue reading →

Eight ayem I had to be at S&L’s, leaving in time to be at D&L’s in time for corral and pellet stove cleaning at 8:30. I started the Jeep, put it in reverse, and was definitely dragging something through the dirt…

Oh, for god’s sake. I just got the Jeep working again.

I had no dreaming clue why the shock decided to part company with the Jeep, but I did know I was in a hurry. Situations like this are why, among all the other junk I haul around on my person every day…

…I always carry a hank of 550 cord.

I go do my chores, then when I’m back at the Lair I pull my poncho liner out of the kit in the back of the Jeep, lay it out under the rear, and go looking for what the shock absorber had objected to. Probably a bolt came loose? Why, after years? Don’t know.

But of course it couldn’t be that simple…

Broke the head off a mounting bolt, leaving the rest stuck in place. Best guess is I broke it off week before last when I was bashing around the wilderness trying to catch that ambulance. And of course I couldn’t get it out with locking pliers, which means I really don’t have any way to get it out.

My expensive aftermarket shock absorber was beaten to death, so I took it the rest of the way off.

I really thought I’d dodged a trip to the shop, but it looks like not.

I’ve been playing with my new camera off and on in what passes for my spare time, which is to say not as much as I’d prefer. Of course I don’t leave it in the Jeep, obviously because I’d need a Pelican case to keep it out of the dust, so I often get caught with photographic opportunities and no good camera.

Not really convinced the Olympus could have done justice to this particular opportunity anyway. We’re nearly to the new moon, it was a cloudless sunrise and I was at D&L’s gate at 5:30 or quarter to six. I looked to the east, and…

How cool is that?

Unfortunately there’s only so much an iPhone can do with it…

…and as I said the Olympus isn’t that much better in low-light situations. Maybe if I mounted it on a tripod and cranked the exposure. You don’t get a perfect crescent and star with just that aurora of sunlight over the hills every month. But the objective of the exercise was to feed horses and get back home to my coffee, so no.

He’s been sitting in that chair reading a book for two hours, and…

…I’m seriously considering chewing up another pair of his gloves because even getting yelled at would be preferable to sitting around all afternoon.

For one thing I don’t have a doorbell…

h/t to JP

I get human-type passengers so seldom – and would so hesitate to invite somebody civilized to put his/her ass on that seat anyway – that I’m thinking seriously of just pulling it out and laying down some old carpet. Except then Tobie couldn’t see out the windshield.

Kind of his own fault anyway. Well, that and a couple of other generations of dogs…

Some jobs are either super easy/barely an inconvenience or impossible, depending entirely on whether you have the part you need. Thanks to Generous Reader Terrapod I suddenly had a whole package of them, so…

…the Jeep once again has a six-cylinder engine.

And since this isn’t the first time this has happened to me, I’m happy about that ‘whole package of them’ thing.

I will store these most carefully. The last time this happened I had to pay the local auto shop to fix it – basically splicing two wires – because I couldn’t find replacement injector connectors anywhere. The guy at the (single) local auto parts store insisted nobody sold them.

Okay, so after the 11am feeding I went down the hill to where I parked the yellow Jeep and put the rear driveshaft back on…

…and Tobie was in the red Jeep and apparently being a very good boy, but it turns out…

…he found something to chew. D really likes his Jeep. Has gone to considerable pains to keep it nice. And Tobie just textured his brake lever.

I’m gonna go find my good groveling pants…

Two old guys on one old guy’s turf are going to rub each other the wrong way sometimes. Case in point, my OCD neighbor D instructing me on how to fill his truck with gas: “When you put the cap back on, remember you have to tighten it at least three clicks.”

“I used to teach the course, D. I even know why you need to do that.”

I’m trying to find a new level of normal; over the past week I’ve devoted so much mental energy to where I’m supposed to be when I’m supposed to be there that I spend too much of my actual down time cocooning in self defense and not getting my own autumn chores done. Good thing I already have more than half a woodshed’s worth of firewood under roof or I’d be in trouble. I still need to finish mortaring up what’s left of that hole in Ian’s retaining wall before it gets too cold, and since it has turned a bit chilly at night here I have another D&L chore to schedule daily…

Their pellet stove is handy and effective for heating a (very!) large house but it’s also excessively complex for off-grid use, in my opinion, and requires fairly complicated daily cleaning.

One thing you really really don’t want to do a few days after knee replacement surgery is get on your knees to sweep out a pellet stove. So I’ve been doing that, right after my 8:30 visit to clean up after horses. If, like today, I have to use the tractor to dispose of manure, that means I’m there for a solid hour rather than the quick in’n’out trips of the other visits.

Then this afternoon D has to go back to town for PT, and I’m hopefully going to pick up my repaired driveshaft, so there goes the afternoon.

Tobie was in an unusually tightly-wound mood this morning, he really wanted to run and play, and I was being a grumpy old man, and I had to damp down my temper before I blew my top at him for things that just aren’t his fault. We stopped for a visit to S&L at eight and I had to exile him back to the Jeep, because he was running around so energetically he was going to break something or hurt somebody. Embarrassing when your boy acts up in public, even when your boy is a big dog.

And goodness, has he grown. Y’know, you don’t see it when you’re with them all day every day. Here’s Tobie with his new harness in mid-June…

His new harness is practically wearing him. And then I took this picture just a minute ago…

Yeah, shoulda named him Stretch. A year old, my ass: He probably wasn’t six months old. He’s been with me since late May and he’s still not marking territory, so the gods alone know how big he’ll end up. And he’s mostly a good boy, or at least good-hearted, but he will get into mischief.

Anyway – the water’s hot so I’ve got to wash dishes, then wait around half an hour till it’s time to go feed horses again.

Ian interviewed an expert on the subject 3 years ago. Very interesting.

Bottom line: That famous accident last week not only could have been avoided, normal every-day movie-set practice would have avoided it.

Good news: Neighbor L seems to have come through her surgery quite well. They’re shipping her right out of the hospital to a – well, ‘nursing home’ is excessively grim, some place where she can get therapy for a week or so before coming home, or that’s the plan I was told. I spoke to her on the telephone yesterday and she seemed astoundingly strong and normal.

But of course this is 2021, and there’s a bureaucratic price to pay: Before they’d do anything as helpful as send her out of the hospital, D had to provide proof that she’s vaccinated, right? Which meant a picture of her vaccine cert. No problem, it was right there on the table, and he had her smartphone. Which he had no more idea how to use than Tobie could use the Large Hadron Collider.

So he handed it to me, and damned if I could figure it out either. It’s an Android, and none of the pictograms meant diddly to me. Fortunately I’ve been messing with pics on an iPhone for years now, so I quickly gave up on his and started over with my own – and that worked just fine. So the blog came in handy.

Extra adventure ensued this morning, because it was time for the Monday morning water run as well as D’s first physical therapy appointment, and we were completely out of designated drivers. So I put on my Good Citizen face and drove him there myself, then filled the water bottles and did my own chores while he was bent and mishandled.

Among those chores was dropping the Jeep’s rearmost driveshaft at the local auto shop to get it a new u-joint and a replacement for the missing shackle bolt. We’re supposed to go back for more PT on Wednesday, and hopefully after that I’ll be able to put the drivetrain back together. Yeah, I could replace the u-joint myself but it’s been 40 years since I did it even with a shop press and the right dies, and I’ve always hated improvising that job.