The Ultimate Answer to Kings

I sat down to write this magnificently significant and meaningful post last night which would have transformed your life in so many positive ways, it’s just tragic that I couldn’t connect and now I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say. Life is full of these little first world problems when you’re me.

I assumed the issue would clear up by morning because it usually does but this morning my signal is actually worse, booster and all. So I’m currently sitting on a juniper log in my woodlot at the top of Ian’s ridge, thumbing this post out on my phone just to say hi. Any typos are me refusing to squint at the screen in the sun enough to edit.

I shall now attempt to add a photo to prove that Tobie and I took our morning walkie on Ian’s property. Probably ruin the whole thing because I can’t edit the file size down…

I have a neighbor who’s going through a round of chemo. She started losing her (beautiful long) hair, and so decided to beat chemistry to the punch by buzzing it down to the scalp like I do.

This had both positive and negative unintended consequences, on the hottest week of the year so far. It’s easy to cool yourself off with a wet washcloth, for one. The other can sneak up on you and make you suffer for days. She didn’t want to wear the stereotypical ‘cancer patient’ scarf and I didn’t blame her; actually I think she has a very handsomely-shaped skull*. But speaking from long experience with male pattern baldness I strongly suggested she keep it covered in the sun except for very brief exposures, because see the post title.

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*She expected me to be shocked this morning by the change in her appearance. I told her I’d been around the block more than that, and anyway I found the effect kind of attractive on her.

…things can get awfully aggravating.

I bake bread every five days or so, and my recipe makes two standard-sized loaves. I have no complaints with the taste and consistency of my recipe, which I’ve made so often that by now I do it on autopilot. In fact after all this time any slightest change creates quite a disturbance in the force.

And I’ve been contemplating experimenting with a very serious change, because the one complaint I have always had with my recipe is the paltry way it rises. I want higher loaves, and for quite some time it has seemed to me that there was one suspiciously simple way to get that: Don’t divide the bake into two loaves.

That was almost certainly going to turn out to be a bad idea, and I hate waste. But in summer I usually don’t get through the second loaf before it molds anyway. So this morning I decided to give that a try.

Like I said, disturbance in the force. I had already automatically rolled out the dough and cut it in half when I remembered that I wasn’t going to do that. Even kneading it back together meant that loaf wasn’t going to be so great, slices would probably break in half, but I went ahead anyway. Had to time the bake carefully, assuming that one big loaf wasn’t going to bake exactly like two regular loaves always do.

And…

Not a complete success, obviously. Seems like it wants the dough a bit wetter than I usually make it. Also not a complete failure: It didn’t fall like a soufflé, which I half expected.

The proof is in the cutting, and when I let the loaf cool…

…except for the aforementioned ‘you shouldn’t have cut it in half first,’ which I predicted, it seems just fine. Made a sandwich: Works just fine.

Should have been doing this all along. I’m an idiot.

It’s grassfire season, as even a glance at the horizon would tell anybody.

We in the Gulch aren’t in danger from wildfires, for fairly obvious reasons. You can’t throw a stone without hitting a lightning-struck juniper, and here and there you can come upon the charred remains of a dead one that got struck and burned right down. But those fires never spread, because dirt don’t burn.

Which doesn’t mean we’re not affected by wildfires. Seems like we’re downwind of all of them, and that affects more than just air quality. Lately, on this ‘100 degrees every damned day’ week we’ve been having, I’ve been using more than the usual electricity on fans to move the hot air around, and at first I thought that was why my indicated voltage was staying so low.

My charge controller normally goes into float by 10 am on a sunny day, but lately that hasn’t been happening. I look out and see sharp shadows, I don’t worry about how much haze is really obscuring the sun and so weakening my solar panels but it is a factor whether I see it or not.

Which is why, in my opinion which is admittedly formed in quite limited and specialized circumstances, solar electric power didn’t become really practical for the hoi polloi desert hermit until the advent of cheap Chinese solar panels, which American manufacturers would argue destroyed the (their, that is) market. Because the only really practical way to make solar work under all circumstances, including high demand/constricted supply, is to oversupply your system. The extensive charts of 20 years ago where you carefully added up all your electrical draws, performed arcane eldritch calculations, bent down, turned around and gave the sun a wink and so arrived at the precise minimum necessary amount of solar panel wattage become obsolete when you can afford to just throw a whole great big bunch of watts at the problem. Through slow accretion over time even a penniless hermit can do that, because people are prone to actually throw old solar panels away, incredible as that would have sounded 20 years ago in the era of elaborate tracking racks desperately trying to squeeze the last watt of generating power out of an expensively inadequate panel array over the course of a day.

And that’s important, because even when there’s not a cloud in the sky you never know what air quality is really doing to your generating power. I’m living in the future, baby. It’s Fallout IRL and I feel fine.

If you’d asked me at the beginning of this week, “If it were all going to fall apart tomorrow, what panicked preparations would you take,” I would only have been able to think of one: I’d do something about all those empty propane bottles.

And now I have!

Tobie helped.

ETA: Meant to add that, unlike the last time the price of gasoline skyrocketed, so far at least locally the price of propane hasn’t mirrored it. Mid-grade gasoline is selling for about $3.50 here at the moment but I only paid $2.57/gallon for the propane and that’s not significantly higher than it was before the new administration improved things. So I beat the inevitable inflation.

I mean he’s gone from panicked to resigned, which is pretty good progress in less than a month. He’ll get in on his own now – with sometimes quite a bit of prompting. He hasn’t tried to jump out lately. He’s making progress.

He seems to have overcome his digestive issues. He has been introduced to the sublime pleasures of peanut butter…

…and found them good. Torso Boy was a terrible disappointment to me in that one regard. A dog that doesn’t like peanut butter? Sad.

We’re making progress. I think I kind of rushed getting him off the leash. When he learned that there really wasn’t any way for me to control him once he was out of reach, he decided that meant I stopped getting a vote where he goes outdoors – and that’s not how this is going to work. So we’re going to need sessions with the trick collar, and unfortunately the receiver on the set a Generous Reader sent me doesn’t want to charge up. So I’ve got another coming with the next mail drop, but until then he’s stuck on the leash again.

Other than that, he’s settling in nicely! He’s got such a great disposition, and unlike TB’s first year here he really seems to like me. Which, since he’s definitely still a puppy, can get a bit irritating when he decides it’s playtime.

Sometimes the stars align to do something unseasonable. This is the Secret Lair’s current propane situation…

In mid-June on possibly the hottest week of the year – by far the hottest to date – two full reserve bottles hardly constitutes a propane emergency. In fact except for that empty kitchen bottle I would not normally be giving propane a single thought. But I just got paid for that editing job, so I’m flush with cash that’s worth a little less every day, and I have five empty bottles that should ideally be full of propane which seems to go up in price every day. Seasonally speaking I should ignore the situation but logistically it’s time to make like a citizen of Zimbabwe and turn money into commodities as quickly as humanly possible.

And tomorrow that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Neighbor D wants to go to town for some stuff, and has agreed to help me with a truly epic propane run.

Seriously.

From appearances, it Kong-fued his ass halfway across the cabin and took his bed away from him. Slippery rug didn’t help…

Ian just sent me a funny…

Oh, brother.

So on our afternoon walkie, Tobie got his first clean shot at a rabbit. He blasted off after it, and having no choice I let him run without making a fuss. Young as he is and in this heat, I didn’t expect him to run far and he didn’t. I found a rock to sit on and called him, and after about five minutes he came back quite happy with himself. I’ve always said it’s okay to chase, it’s just real important that you come straight back when you’re done. And he did, so he got praised for that*.

Then we went out for our last quick walkie of the evening, and Tobie faded around a tree and disappeared like he’d learned to vanish. First time he ever got away with that. Several minutes later I found out why: He came back down the gully behind the cabin but didn’t want to approach me – or let me approach him – for fear I’d take his big juicy rat away from him.

I had the same problem with Little Bear, except his taste was exclusively for rabbit. So I let Tobie keep his distance until he finished his meal, and then he trotted back to me and the cabin quite happily as if nothing had ever happened.

I’m expecting big smelly puddles on the rug again by the morning. Sigh.

Morning ETA: Nope, prediction failed. Dog biscuits give him the squirts, but a nice fresh rat sits just fine. Oh, he’s going to fit right in around here.

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*If I can just get him into the habit of coming straight back after a run, I’ll settle for that. Little Bear got the lifetime leash because he could never learn to reliably come back.

Sometimes you gotta ask yourself: How much is too much?

Because I think live steam is too much.

And I don’t believe the plumbing, which is basically good-quality garden hose, is really going to keep putting up with it.

But in fairness it’s saving time and propane while it lasts.

Tobie is a happy dog! He got a helluva lot of presents in this care package drop.

A new big bed!

Far too big for the original 200 sq. ft. cabin, but we’ll work that out. I was afraid this was going to be an expensive bust, not because there’s anything wrong with the bed – it’s obviously an improvement. It’s just that the perversity of the universe tends to a maximum, so I naturally expected Tobie to be an asshole about accepting it. Instead he stepped right in and said, ‘yeah, away with the old. This is my bed now.’ Continue reading →

In the morning we usually go down the wash for our walkie, in a more-or-less straight line from the driveway.

At that point it’s an interesting semantic question as to whether it’s a wash or a canyon. Tomato tomahto. In either case, Tobie has learned that he can climb the walls.

And yesterday he discovered a new, fun game, which he spent a good part of this morning’s walkie perfecting…

You charge up a talus slope, as high as you can go before losing traction…

Then turn around and slide back down in a great avalanche of clay and ash…

…with points scored for how much belly contact and drift you can get without rolling over.

I imagine a rulebook is in process, with a system of competing teams and leagues. When he gets major city contracts for stadium construction we’ll all die rich.

I don’t mind that so much but I do wish he’d stop sticking his damned snout into every snag and under every rock…

Yes I know he’s only sniffing out rats and there’s no danger to anyone but the rats, and they don’t get a vote. But I’m paranoid about rattlesnakes.

So I was at a neighbor’s house this morning, and he asked if I wouldn’t have a look at this old SKS he picked up cheap for his grandson, you know, make sure it works safely before passing it on. I was happy to do that.

And oh, this was one bubba’d-up gun. I mean, I get it: 20 years ago SKSs were ubiquitous and cheap. Had one myself and wish I hadn’t sold it on when I got my AK because a light 10-round semiauto is a lot more handy as a homestead gun than an AK, to be honest. But it’s not … tacticool. And it doesn’t have that great big banana mag. And whoever got his hands on this one just had to have that.

Anyway, I took it back to the Lair, figured out how to get that awful ‘tactical’ stock off the receiver, and…

…well, let’s just say that the mark of the true mall ninja is swapping out stock parts for cool-looking parts without even bothering to clean all the cosmoline out of the working parts. Then shooting it anyway, until the grease in the gas tube gums up the piston good and awful. I imagine its original owner sold it on when it ceased to function, and I hope he (it had to be a he) lost his shirt on the deal. I went through a lot of rags and patches and Ballistol. But I got the piston moving free, and the bore’s in really good shape. Had my doubts about those magazines.

I told my neighbor that it would be better if he could score the original stock and magazine, but to my surprise…

…once I got it cleaned up it ran like a top, even with those removable 30-round mags. I have no personal experience with them but they had a terrible rep 20 years ago. These appear to be more recent manufacture and apparently somebody worked out the bugs. Now I just have to see what I can do with that cheap red dot, which is nowhere near zeroed. Paper targets tomorrow.

Hot water won’t make that leak.

Corrosion might, in the fullness of time. But heat won’t.

D&L have a regular Wednesday doctor visit in the big town about 50 miles away for the next two months or so. Which means I have a regular appointment to feed and deal with the hygiene needs of their horses and dogs.

Since they’re on the road toward town I decided to take the bike, combine chores and go to the hardware store to get some proper galvanized plumbing for the water heater. And if this doesn’t finalize the job I can’t imagine what will. 🙂

Tobie has been doing really good with walkies. Today’s setback was due to poor route choice on my part.

We took what I think of as the long circuit: overland directly to Landlady’s ridge to visit the chickens, then down the far side of the ridge to connect with the dirt roads and take them for the long way home. And for all of the first part of this, Tobie was perfect.

What I’m trying to impart is that he can veer off the path and have a sniff any time he wants, but he has to come back when called and he may not hare off after things that run from him. So far that last thing hasn’t been an issue but this morning I led him into too much temptation.

At one point on the road there’s a house visible. In the house there’s an old lady whom I’ve mentioned before: She’s my physically closest full-time neighbor and I’ve literally never met her. She takes ‘hermit’ to heights of perfection I would find unpleasant. But (so says the jungle telegraph) she’s lately been in poor health and so has been getting lengthy visits from family whether she wants them or not. I know those people have unleashed dogs, because I’ve met them before on the road. So when I saw extra vehicles in front of that house I probably should have reeled Tobie in. Instead I let it play out, and that was a big mistake.

I knew I’d lost him the moment I saw him take the scent.

Sigh. So I followed him through the trees onto private property, and unsurprisingly found him cavorting with two larger, surprised but not unwelcoming dogs. One of the family members was out there with them, and we had a pleasant conversation about dogs before I leashed Tobie up and dragged his protesting torso away from the scene of the crime.

We’ll stick to the wash circuit until the visitors are gone. Really need to get one of those trick collars.

…in hope of correcting last summer’s near-total failure.

The poor-man’s solar water heater is made of a free fiberglass box and a whole bunch of black garden hose. That part seems to work fine. But – mostly for artistic purposes, I suppose – I supplemented all that with PVC running across the roof and down to the spigot. And that part never worked for very long, because the water temperature kept melting the adhesive. And in fact it damn near melted the pipe. And despite further efforts it just went on like that.

Then I suffered a very painful shoulder dislocation which made any further carrying of hot water buckets around moot for a while – and then Laddie got cancer and very unpleasantly died – and I gave up on the project for the season.

But I always intended to take it up again this year, because of course.

The plan, obviously, is to eliminate as much as possible of that PVC. Continue reading →

Somebody knows suppertime is 5:00.

Little Bear had Magnus to teach him and keep him safe when he was a little puppy; Tobie, alas, only has me. And lacking a fenced safe yard to run and play in, and hampered by an overprotective Uncle Joel, Tobie was in danger of spending his life on a leash.

But he has been so remarkably good about not running off after every little movement and scent that he’s mostly off the leash already. Which means he can indulge in every puppy’s favorite game…

Running and playing!

I’ve said it before; the desert is a wonderful place to be a dog, until something kills you.

And I’m determined that, so far as it’s in my power, nothing like that will happen to Tobie.

But the wash is open and relatively safe for a game of “can’t catch me.”

And nobody knows better than me that you can’t bubblewrap the world.

So run and play, little man. Enjoy. But don’t go out of sight.