The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Should have named him Dozer.

So this morning I finally took myself and a few tools and one very eager puppy back to finish repairing the paper target rack…

…while Tobie went immediately back to his self-imposed chore. Points for determination: That bush must die. Continue reading →

Oh, boy. Here’s another thing to dislike about a wet monsoon – even though it hasn’t even been all that wet this week. Something that’s blooming or pollinating or whatever has my nose running like a river. Hard to get anything done…

…also hard to get any sleep, which feeds into the ‘not getting anything done’ issue. Which may have something to do with the lack of posting. Posting requires thinking, which I haven’t been doing a lot of this week.

Tobie, on the other hand…

…is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning, which explains why his bed is in the kitchen. Tobie isn’t an overcaffeinated hell puppy by any means but he is a big puppy and big puppies get the zoomies. His version of the zoomies, since he can’t really run as fast or far as he’d probably like, involves grabbing things in his jaws and flinging them with great force.

So no matter how tired Uncle Joel may be this morning, the long morning walkie from which we just returned was not negotiable.

I wanted to work on that target stand this morning while it was cool, but further work required the Jeep and the Jeep hasn’t been in the wash for over a month. My driveway apron washed away early and there’s no point getting Neighbor L to come out with his backhoe and re-dig it until after Monsoon. So this morning I drove to Landlady’s place for morning chicken chores, then hung a right at the wash crossing and tried to drive through the wash to the rifle range.

I say tried…

Having walked the wash several times since the floods I knew that one rocky spot had gotten better and one had gotten substantially worse, like maybe impassible. This isn’t my first rodeo and I do have an old and worn but still capable jacked-up Jeep, so “passible” is relative in my favor. I could do this, I just needed to figure out how.

As usual the trick is to plot the least impassible route through the rock field and then remove as many tire-wreckers as possible from that route and figure out how to weave around the ones that you can’t remove. Simple. Not always easy, but doable and rather pleasant in the cool early morning if your back isn’t hurting.

Then to the range.

I removed the crossbars and chicken wire from the target stand, then dug up the silt until I could move the most displaced vertical post…

Then did the same to a much lesser extent to the other post and replaced the upper crossbar.

It was at this point that I realized I had forgotten to bring a roll of wire to reconnect the chicken wire to the crossbars, and anyway it was getting hot and sweaty so I called a halt for the morning. But there’s less than half an hour’s work left to do and the range will be fully back in function.

So during the big storms of a few weeks ago a piece of the rifle range backstop’s caprock…

…came down to visit the paper target stand…

…and knocked it pretty definitely out of plumb.

I had other worries at the time, frankly haven’t been doing any pleasure shooting anyway, and didn’t expect a visit from Ian where the range would at least need to look presentable for his videos. So there the matter sat until this morning. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I was at first somewhat at sea as to how I was going to fix it, but… Continue reading →

Happened to go to town yesterday morning, filled my empty kitchen propane bottle and one of the little ones that fuel the water heater at Ian’s place. L wanted a stop at the local drug store, and I went in – from a morbid sort of post-apocalypse curiosity – to gaze upon the clean, empty expanse of the only ammo counter in town.

And to my surprise…

…it wasn’t completely empty.

A lady at this store has told me that they get what little ammo they get on Tuesdays, and since I almost exclusively come to town on Mondays I’ve always had a slightly unrealistic view of whether this store has moved any ammo at all since the start of last year’s dry spell. According to her they always got a little trickle. Never a lot, and it’s always gone long before I get there, but things were never entirely as bleak as they always seemed to me on Monday morning.

This Friday shows a growing supply, obviously not gone within hours of their arrival. Ammo selection was spotty – they had no 7.62 Commie and of course no .44, so I was out of luck – and some of the prices were still way inflated. Like, their one box of 9mm was selling for almost a dollar a round, getting into .44 Special territory.

I was surprised at the variety of .223 and 5.56 they had…

And the price of the low-end 5.56 is only a little above what they charged in the halcyon days before lockdowns and smoldering cities.

I assume the box stores in the cities are doing better yet. With luck I won’t find out for myself for years. But I may have a look at what the ammo sites are doing, if only for educational purposes. I already know reloading supplies haven’t significantly come back.

There was nothing I enjoyed less, nothing I couldn’t so easily find reasons to put off or avoid. And of all the painting chores in the world, is there anything more tedious than…

…railings?

But during the Lair’s first paint job in 2015 I noticed to my surprise that I was kind of having fun. I even found myself doing things I had actually sworn off ever doing again, like buying and using cutting brushes so the trim would look good. Seriously, that incident had me peering into a mirror and demanding, “Who are you and what have you done with me?”

And this morning found me using up the last of that gallon I bought for the wellhouse’s first coat to slap a fresh coat on … porch railings. By any objective standard there’s nothing worse than porch railings and it wasn’t absolutely necessary. Yet there I was, freshening up the paint on cabin frills.

Hindsight can be a harsh judge. I spent my whole life, juvenile and adult, doing what other people said they wanted or what I thought other people wanted. I was frequently wrong about that last thing and only managed to make matters worse, ever more frustrated and confused, over and over for decades. I never understood other people at all because – in the gradual clarity of hindsight – I regarded other people as situations to be handled. It took 15 years alone in the desert finally doing what I wanted to do with myself to realize the truth: A good deal of my serial failures to fit in with and please the people around me was that I … really never gave much of a damn about most of them at all.

Maybe that’s a damning judgement of me as a person, I’m not qualified to say. I’ve often mused that I may have missed outright sociopathy by not very much. But I told myself that I did try. It just seemed as if my relationships invariably boiled down to what I was supposed to be doing for them. And in fairness to me, I was repaid in insincere promises with monotonous regularity. I did other peoples’ work for other peoples’ purposes, and I was so invested in whatever ‘being a good person’ was supposed to look like that I had a hard time admitting that I hated every second of it. No surprise, in hindsight, that I often did a rather poor job.

The Secret Lair was something completely different, completely unique in my experience. It started in concept as a knock-together shack built from salvage, a quick and dirty place to crash out of the weather. I needed something better than a small and slowly dissolving RV but didn’t have the talent, experience or resources to do a proper job of building a real cabin, or so I told myself at first. But the project gradually became ever more elaborate as it simultaneously became the first labor of love in my whole life to date. I only gradually realized what I was really doing: At last building a thing that was just for me. And for the first time, I began to really care about it.

Not only that, I liked working on it. And I still do.

If we get a wet monsoon, the cliffroses bloom again. And right now they’re going nuts.

Cliffroses aren’t roses at all but they have a heavy sweet scent that reminds me of many years ago when I raised damask roses in Michigan. My wife liked scents but was allergic to pretty much everything, so I learned how to use damask roses to make rose water for her. Of course after I’d done that she decided she didn’t really like scents all that much, but that’s just the way the story goes when you’re me. I still like the flowers even if the scent is kind of cloying.

…but with the cheapest exterior paint available costing around $35/gallon, I really couldn’t afford to. Ian and I recently came to a sort of agreement about that, which freed me up to do more necessary maintenance.

So I hit it early before things got hot, so that I could spend however long it took to do a really good job of the first coat.

Tobie was dubious about these non-routine doings…

…but mostly went along with the joke without causing any trouble. And after nearly two hours of pounding paint into some damned weather-worn plywood…

First coat achieved. Yeah, leave me to my own devices with a paintbrush and you’re going to get green.

It doesn’t really matter that much: The only thing the building originally existed to do was support the solar panel and keep a small weathertight charge controller box even further out of the weather, so you could say we went to a lot of construction trouble just to house generations of packrats. But it turned out to be convenient some years ago when I modified the interior to support a pulley for solo pump R&R.

And now it finally – like, for the first time in 12 years – got a fresh coat of paint.

Yesterday morning I drove to D&L’s to meet them for the Monday morning water run. Got up my hill, and then all of a sudden the throttle didn’t work. Didn’t freak out about it, this has happened before, I just stopped the Jeep, turned the engine off…

…and then opened the hood and cleaned the big messy rat nest off the top of the engine. Some bits of wood had worked their way into the throttle linkage.

Could be worse: This time the nest stopped me from opening the throttle. Last time’s nest stopped me from closing it. Much worse. And then there was that time a rat ate through some of my fuel injector leads…

Anyway: This morning Tobie and I went for our morning walk early, for the cool.

Had a nice rainstorm last evening and sometime overnight the wash ran. This is the difference between running and flooding: Running stays in the channel, doesn’t tear shit up, is over fairly quickly and after a few hours or less the crossings are passible again. With flooding, the other things happen.

I can’t recall what this plant is…

…but they’re everywhere this time of year. And with the wet monsoon they’re really flourishing. Pretty flowers that open in the evening and close when the sun hits them.

And now it’s baking day. 🙂

The usual practice is to look out the kitchen window to the SE and you can see what the weather’s going to be this afternoon. A wet monsoon removes that bit of predictability; you never know what direction a storm cell will come from, and you never know where it will go.

So yesterday around four I’m starting to think I should head over to Ian’s to take a shower, right? And with Tobie needing his supper and walkie in about an hour, this always gets complicated. Basically wait for dinnertime, then take him for his walkie on a route that ends up at Ian’s. Shower and head home. I looked out the kitchen window to the SE and this seemed like a workable plan. Shouldn’t have waited.

I went out on the porch with Tobie and there was a massive and angry stormfront barreling down from the north. I mean this was ‘wipe Joel and all his works off the face of the earth’ massive and angry. ‘Nice walk with Tobie and then take a shower’ became ‘get Tobie’s ass out here for the minimum essential walkie and then rush home to close all the windows and pray for mercy from the storm gods.’

He wondered what I was in such a hurry about until the wind gusts started and lightning flashed all along the northern horizon. Then he stopped playing grab-ass happy puppy games and got with the program of ‘let’s go home right f’ing now.’

Wind gusts became just lots and lots of wind. There was a veritable sandstorm over the wash, clifftop-high. Really destructive-looking lightning. I closed all the windows, turned on the fans, then started pacing between views to choose the form of our destructor: Would we be killed by wind, lightning or flood? For the record I do have a Plan B for apocalyptic storm, and I was seriously thinking maybe I should exercise it while there was still time.

Then the rain started … and then the rain stopped as the whole show passed to the east leaving us completely unscathed. Fakeout scare! Real funny.

And this morning there were hardly any tracks left in the (dry) sand of the wash – but not because of any flood. Windstorm, not rainstorm.

This summer has presented me with the very unusual and unexpected question…

…at what point do you harvest a pear tree? I brought this one inside to leave in a bowl for a week and see if it softens up at all, just to get some idea of how ripe/unripe they currently are.

Landlady came up last night with some unexpected packages! I was only expecting a couple of sacks of dog food, courtesy of Big Brother…

This brand of dog food is an indulgence on my part: Longtime readers know that I’ve had a problem getting dogs to live a long time for various reasons. I don’t know that diet has been a problem, but at least in Little Bear’s case I kind of suspect it was a factor. I bought a sack of this stuff when I first brought Tobie home, for the unscientific reason that D&L have two old dogs that have eaten it all their lives. Alas I was appalled at the price, which was not sustainable. Big Brother has kindly offered to help with that, hence a care package of two sacks.

BB has been regularly sending food for some time, actually… Continue reading →

And this is why I live in the SW desert, and not in southern Florida. Normally it’s dry; very dry. I like very dry.

Right now, not quite so much.

55% humidity indoors. All my twisted joints and broken bones hurt. I’m hobbling around like an old man. I can barely type with my left hand, which has lost all its fine motor skills. And what the hell is with that smiley face and “OK?” What’s this little electronic traitor got to smile about? Huh?

It didn’t even rain very much last night, and…

…look at the top of that Jeep. Won’t dry off till direct sun finds it. If direct sun finds it.

That’s the other thing: I don’t even bother looking at the forecast anymore. All it ever tells me is that there’s a good chance of afternoon rain. Or morning rain. It might be brief and gentle, like last night. It might make me change all my long-term plans, like three weeks ago. Or it might not rain at all. Stay tuned, Americans.

That’s the single thing I liked about southern California: It didn’t even really have weather as such, most of the time. Here, the weather likes its drama. And in principle I consider that a good thing, as it’s one of the factors that cause tourists and gentrifiers to slide right on by and leave us alone: It’s like most of them can’t even see us, and so a hermit can mostly be left in peace. I like that.

In practice, of course, I don’t like unpleasant weather any more than the tourists and gentrifiers. I’m just prepared to put up with it as part of the cost of living here. And for all my whinging and moaning, I really like living here.

I went with D&L to the Palace of Food yesterday morning and couldn’t help notice that…

…the normally rather sere landscape is looking awfully green and growy this month.

I recognize the need for wet seasons in dry country but (obviously or I wouldn’t live here) part of me never grew up. I don’t like rain, I don’t like having to worry about whether I’m on the right side of a dry wash at any given moment of the day, I don’t like fretting over leaks and flash flood damage. I really despise mud.

But I do like flowers. And right now my yard, which is normally covered with dirt…

…looks like it died and went to the Cotswolds.

I don’t know what this plant is. The flowers look like daisies, though I doubt that’s what they are.

They produce zillions of seeds which can apparently lie dormant for years waiting for a really good soak. A few new plants sprout every year but rarely more than a few. The last time my yard looked like this was eight years ago, when we had a really obnoxiously wet monsoon and all of a sudden all these chest-high plants grew with incredible speed and I had a field of waving daisie-like flowers.

And now they’re showing up everywhere. They’re kind of underfoot. But I like them.

…by method #NoneOfTheAbove.

Sometimes I’m not the most … observant person.

Exhibit A: a frost-free sillcock, slightly damaged, which attaches to its supply pipe with…

…a female threaded fitting. And what does that tell us about the pipe it’s no longer attached to?

Duh. I reached into the big hole in the wall and confirmed that, indeed, the end of the pipe has male threads. And my first thought was, “wow, I’ll never get a Sharkbite on that.”

My second thought, of course, was “I’m going to feel really stupid if a simple threaded cap ends all this sturm und drang.”

It’s getting late in the day and I haven’t tested it for seepage under full pump pressure yet, but … yeah. Joel feels kinda stupid.

The top of my toolbox is always a mess: I really don’t have enough storage space, and what space I do have is poorly maintained. But I wasn’t expecting the extra-added mess I found today when I went into the powershed to cut some tubing…

“Yeesh! Whazzat?”

Oh. Big snake chose the top of my toolbox to shed its skin. No idea why.

Probably a bull snake, they’re most common. And harmless to me but not to the rats that infest the powershed, so they’re always welcome. But this one did kind of take liberties with my hospitality. 🙂

At quarter to eight in the morning I’ve wrenched my back, soaked my boots, worked up a muck sweat that keeps fogging my glasses, lost my temper at my dog, gotten a jackhammer chisel so wedged between concrete and rebar I thought I might need to buy Neighbor S a new one … and provisionally succeeded in corking the leak after almost two weeks.

There were some monumental water leaks one house in Michigan used to spring that I’ve probably edited out of my memory, so this might not be the most difficult-to-get-to leak I’ve ever encountered. But it’s the hardest I remember.

And I have no idea what the guy who installed this particular pipe was thinking at the time. Ian and I built this basic structure together but he alone was responsible for plumbing and electricity – and twelve years ago he was no more a plumber or electrician than I was.

So anyway: This morning I finally succeeded in breaking a big-enough-for-a-fist hole in the far side of the wall, and …Well, ma’am, I found your problem…

This is the only external use of copper I’ve found at Ian’s Cave and it came as a complete surprise. I don’t currently have any way to permanently fix it. That freeze split has obviously been there at least five months, maybe years. The broken fitting might be why the leak became evident or it might be a jackhammer casualty. Don’t know.

What I did know was…

… I wasn’t expecting copper. I was prepared to cork up a leaking flexible pipe. If it had turned out to be PVC, I could have dealt with that. But even if I had a pipe cap there’s no way I could braze one onto a copper pipe way back in that hole. While water’s pouring out. And no, the plumbers who performed last year’s upgrade did not see fit to replace the main shut-off valve they removed in the process.

There was no evident way to fix this the right way. Whatever that might be. So…I went mountain man.

Baton (yes, I know) a little piece of firewood to a square cross section and then whittle it to a long gradual point, then jam it in the pipe and twist until water stops pissing out.

Sigh.

And this is the mess I have to deal with today…

It’s a disaster area – but it’s not currently leaking. So I have that going for me while I figure out how to do a permanent fix. Suggestions? And nobody say “just braze a cap on it.”

And in pursuit of that goal, this morning I took a reader’s advice and knocked together an a-frame to take the weight of the jackhammer.

And that helped a lot: I got quite a bit done before I ran out of steam. I’ll take another shot at it this afternoon when the shadow’s in my favor.

The hammer pretty clearly isn’t designed for working horizontally: You really have to lean into it to get the hammer to beat on the chisel. And even then the blade usually slides off what you’re trying to cut, and…

It’s still frustrating, but the a-frame helps a great deal. Still not sure what I’m going to find when I get past the concrete – and whether I’m going to be able to do anything about it. The well company that re-worked the plumbing last summer apparently neglected to provide a main shut-off valve, so when I find the leak it’s gonna come a gusher and I still don’t know if there’ll be room to work on it. Can’t dig it up, it must be ten feet down in loose sand. Last year I had to dig less than 2 feet to run some conduit up from the powershed, and that was memorably too much like work.

…and I was going to celebrate by riding the ebike up there in the morning, but…

…Tobie insisted that the job required a dog. I worked so hard to get him to accept the Jeep that now I seldom have the heart to tell him no.

But I did sneak off by myself for the afternoon and very last run across the plateau and up the mesa…

…and of course there was no way the bike could help with that last part, so one more long hike to say hi (and also goodbye) to the dogs and then…

(sigh) all the slippery way back down to where I left the bike. It’s been almost two years since Big Brother sent me the RadRover and it has proven much more useful than I feared. But it still has limitations on hills.

And even though I haven’t been using it much in the past couple of weeks, what with the Monsoon wiping out all the dirt roads…

…we still passed 700 miles on the way home yesterday.

Tobie and I were taking a nice long morning walkie in the wash downstream from the Lair, when an annoying buzzing began.