The Ultimate Answer to Kings

I would never say (out loud) something stupid like “problem solved.” I will say that things on the connection front are very snappy at present, and the iPhone displays an unheard-of three bars.

Installing a signal booster is as simple as screwing some coax into some boxes and plugging it in; easily within my technical capabilities. There’s just one little complication…

That’s the part of the job that took by far the most time and skull sweat. I really hate roofs – but at least as roofs go, the bedroom addition is so dead simple even I can do it.

Pro-tip: When you’re alone in the desert, ladders are not your friend. I personally know a guy whose desert hermit career was abruptly ended by a ladder that slid out from under him for absolutely no good reason except Murphy’s a malicious little bastard. Therefore:

Handle. Lag bolts. 1/2″ nylon rope. Just saying. The only thing better than confidence is a good basis for confidence. And if it looks stupid but works, it’s not stupid. I must add in honesty that while the handle was my idea, it didn’t immediately occur to me that tying the ladder to the handle was a good idea. That came from a reader a few years ago.

Anyway…

My objective on the roof turned out about as difficult as I feared: Screwing the outside antenna to the wall was simplicity itself, given the convenient bracket provided. But I wanted it as high and outside as possible without contacting the 2X6s of the corner frame. In that last caveat, I f… no, let me rephrase. Success treacherously eluded me.

So I had to go up the loft and do something a bit … not found in the construction tradebooks.

The alternative was drilling a second 1/2″ hole in my exterior wall, and I’d have gone further than I did to avoid that.

And in the end…

A little sweaty routing of coax, made easy by that convenient loft railing, nailing of a few strategic insulated staples, a bit of screwing together and plugging in, and we’re done! And early results show an improvement I’m tempted to call massive. Thanks, BB and friends!

Extra TUAK life points if you know what this is…

Seriously, we’ll see. But it can’t possibly hurt – Landlady has one of these at her cabin, which is also not line of sight to any cell tower, and the difference is night and day. Ian’s place is literally a Faraday cage, but with his booster plugged in my phone works better inside his place than it usually does inside mine. So while I don’t think my signal strength will rival most of yours at any time, maybe it’ll make those “no service” hours a little farther between.

I already have it strung out and plugged in and things are working well. But sometimes things actually do work well, so that doesn’t prove anything. In the morning I’m mounting the outside antenna to the exterior wall. Stay tuned.

A year or two I bought two new plastic gas cans – the government-approved kind with the nozzle you need three hands to operate…

…and one of them already leaks so bad at the gasket that, trying to gas the Jeep this morning, I ended up pouring the fuel out of it and into an old one before I could get the fuel into the Jeep and not all over me and the ground.

Starting Friday I have a week-long back-and-forth gig, and it involves going to the top of S&T’s mesa so I need the Jeep, can’t take the bike up their driveway. So I really wanted to start the week with full cans but that newish can just wasn’t working out. So I went to Landlady’s barn and pulled an old one out of storage.

Those old ones are at least 15 years old and have been in storage for – I don’t know – several years. But if they weren’t still working at the time I would never have stored them – they’ve just had so many inflation cycles that the bottoms go round and they won’t stay upright in the truck.

But all the way home from town I smelled gasoline, and when I got back to D&L’s place I found that the one I’d grabbed from storage had developed a seeping crack.

So I emptied it into the Jeep, and it went into the “to the dump” pile. Bother. I have to find a source for better gas cans.

Indoor running hot water has proven a much bigger technical challenge than we ever anticipated. Other neighbors with bigger budgets have done it so we know what’s needed. But there’s a reason I still have to heat water for dishwashing and bathe out of a bucket after all these years.

You can simply rig up a conventional water heater. It’s relatively easy to do. The fact that we’ve done it three times so far and all three failed within a year gave us a clue that there’s more to success than that.

The core problem is how hard the well water is. The Total Dissolved Solids measured at my kitchen faucet are 836 parts per million. Average townie tap water measures far less than half that. A typical water heater contains a lot of orifices, and the well water here just sees an orifice as a leak to be repaired. And that doesn’t even mention its corrosive effect on any iron plumbing. With untreated water no heater will ever last long.

That means that before we can heat water for showers we need a water softener. And before we can have a water softener we need water pressure far higher than gravity permits. So the “Let’s build a shower” project has been … complex. But cracking it was Landlady’s self-assigned project for 2020.

First and most expensive: Artificially increase water pressure. This turned into an independent clusterfark because [reference previous whining about local contractors]. There were all sorts of side issues – it unexpectedly became a neighborhood project, but we did eventually succeed. And repair some resulting water damage along the way…

Anyway – that made a water softener possible. Landlady knocked that out of the park all by herself in only two visits. (Recall that each visit requires approx. 10 hours drive time, so time on target is limited and effort expended is almost ridiculous for the results achieved per trip.) The water softener functions and consumes salt, currently to no measurable purpose.

Anyway anyway – this past weekend was to kick off but almost certainly not complete the water heater installation: The thing all this summer’s effort was about.

And when we got it out of the box, it turned out we were going to accomplish almost nothing. Because…

Some idiot had dropped it and then sold it anyway – and Landlady drove it all the way from the Big City without having any way of knowing that.

There was discussion about using it anyway – but there’s a lot of stuff in that little housing, and much of it involves burning gas, and we don’t have any way of telling how much if any of the innards are damaged. So we boxed it up and she spent a lot of time on the phone to Home Depot.

We did get some preliminary work done in preparation for mounting the heater, but all in all it was something of a let-down.

Yeah, it’s a piece of crap.

Found an open circuit, repaired it, got it working again…

…and it’s probably good for the season. But yeah, that was good advice about shopping for a new switch. The obvious open circuit was only part of the problem. I also have to research how to get the switch off the handle, because there’s a safety button I can’t figure how to remove. But for the moment the saw is working again.

…you’re not allowed to hoard MY FOOD.

This is a portion of a secondary food hoard at an undisclosed offsite location.

This is a random partially-expended tea stash, stored with a secondary food hoard at an undisclosed offsite location.

These are tiny piles of white rice, stored inside a random partially-expended tea stash, stored with a secondary food hoard at an undisclosed offsite location. I started finding these little piles under/inside nearly everything I picked up in the structure.

One of these is the trap that murdered the mouse that was stashing tiny piles of white rice, stored inside a random partially-expended tea stash, stored with a secondary food hoard at an undisclosed offsite location.

Thus endeth the lesson: Thou Shalt Not Screw With Uncle Joel’s Stash.

So I got a card – and a kind gift – from Commander Zero…

…and I still suspect he’s making this up. But I’m wrong a lot, and anyway I do appreciate the thought.

That’s all I got cut to stove lengths today. I intended more and in fact was raring to go and had lots of wood left to be cut. But I had to quit…

…because the switch on my chopsaw packed up. I can probably fix it – I got it free from a neighbor because of the switch, and I’ve already fixed it once so I’m hopeful. And even if I can’t I’m not out of business; a couple of years ago I inherited another from my dad. But it’s a much nicer saw and I’d rather not use it out at the woodlot unless I have to.

In any case, in the end I was happy to have stopped where I did, because…

…the final step is always hard on my back. Load the stove lengths into a wheelbarrow…

…and stack them as neatly as possible. This isn’t physically difficult at all, but a lot of it is done while constantly bent over. I did at least remember to put my brace on before the pain began, and though I’m currently a little sore I don’t feel at all damaged.

This is what the rats have done to my nice stone woodshed floor over the past 3 years. Needless to say my hopes for keeping them out of the back of the woodshed with hardware cloth didn’t entirely work out but believe it or not it could have been a lot worse. They mostly confined their actual damage to the second-to-last tier and even that didn’t actually ruin much wood. So it’s tolerable and I won’t go to a lot of extra hassle to change things – and I’m going to concede that there’s not much point going to the immense PITA it would be to fix the stone floor at this point. So… Continue reading →

Within the roughly 4 mile² area I consider the Gulch proper, we have some new neighbors. I’m not going to get into their particulars because I don’t think they’d like that but they have two unique features about them: Their living arrangement is … rustic in the extreme – I genuinely don’t know how they plan to cope with winter – and they raise goats. Quite a few goats, in fact, and they seem to subsist largely on goat meat and milk. To the extent that, when I went to visit, this was their guest gift:

I’ve never gone out of my way to encounter goat milk, not being much a milk drinker. I found this a little thick, a little strong-tasting but not unpleasant. But it would take me longer to drink a quart of it than it’s likely to last in my cooler so I did the only other thing with it I could think of. I made pancakes.

And since my recipe is adapted to a much more watery substrate using milk powder, these came out kind of weird. The batter was way too thick, for one thing. But they weren’t bad. Not outstandingly better than usual, either, to be honest. I may have to beg off next time, when I return the jar.

Doomscrolling and doomsurfing are new terms referring to the tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing. Many people are finding themselves reading continuously bad news about COVID-19 without the ability to stop or step back.

English is usually kind of a pithy, prosaic language, aside from some of its bizarre grammatical and spelling rules. But once in a while somebody comes up with a coining worthy of the romance languages.

And on more or less the same theme, here’s TUAK’s quote of the day…

H/T to Our Lady of Snark, of course.

At first sight I was prepared to take this picture seriously.

NBA Players Wear Special Lace Collars To Honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg

You guys stay safe. This old man’s never going out there again.

When I got ready to move into the Secret Lair about nine years ago, planning to heat it with wood, I looked around at all the dead juniper everywhere and saw an embarrassment of riches – I really thought I had that part nailed. Because, as has so often been the case, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

And what I didn’t know was a) as firewood goes, juniper is lousy firewood. It’s generally very porous, the pores are full of dirt, and it never burns very hot. Also b) my free woodstove was very poorly suited for the purpose – in hindsight I really think it was designed to use forced air – and between it, the 8-inch stovepipe and the juniper it was a terrifying chimney fire waiting to happen. Because it produced smoldering, smoky, relatively cool fires that may as well have been designed to deposit creosote rather than, you know, heat my cabin.

So I got a new boxwood stove near the start of my second winter in residence, and gradually began my tradition of collecting old pallets and scrap wood through the summer. Can’t say I don’t burn any juniper, because of course I do and anyway the stove and pipe are more squared away than they were at first, but to the greatest extent possible I burn old lumber. And that’s why my principal woodcutting tools are a Sawzall and chopsaw and my chainsaw hasn’t been out of mothballs in years.

Cutting up pallets for firewood turned out to involve more of a learning curve than I expected – there are right ways and wrong ways – but I think I’m getting it. Today I did eight in a little over an hour.

This is the biggest and most complete of the morning. It was the sixth of the day and the blade was getting worn so it was also the most time-consuming. I decided to see just how long each took, with my improved tools and technique…

And reducing it to that pile on the table took me a little under eight minutes. I changed the blade and the next one went much quicker.

Speaking of blades, other than gasoline that’s my only monetary outlay. They do wear out rather quickly and unlike chainsaw chains you can’t sharpen them. I wouldn’t go near a pallet with a chainsaw, though – too many nails. Chains are far more expensive than recip saw blades, which are designed to cut nails.

And that’s the pile at the end of today’s session. More like it – and after it goes through the chopsaw it’ll make more than I really want to stack in one go anyway. Stacking turns out to be the hardest part on my back.

But I probably won’t cut it up tomorrow because first I have to give some attention to the woodshed floor, which has been largely undermined by rats in the past three years. Turns out my hardware cloth/sand/stone floor rather did the opposite of keeping the rats out. Some found it quite inviting.

And as much easier as the woodcutting has gotten in the past few years, I’m still a stiff old man and I won’t say it isn’t a workout…

Anyway, now that that and the chicken chores are done, I need to wash up and start baking bread.

And technology is my friend.

Unlike yesterday the Honda started cold with one gentle pull on the starter and whirred happily as soon as I opened the choke.

And this thing…

Being unfamiliar with the prosumer or professional grades of power tools I often don’t know what I’m missing. The only thing I can find to dislike about this saw is the old-fashioned blade attachment. The motor is far more powerful than either of my other saws and doesn’t all the time act like she’s givin’ all she’s got but she just canna take any more, cap’n. The bearings actually seem to work; I put in an hour on it and it never got particularly hot. And for efficiency…

As long as I can keep the blade from digging into wood it peels a pallet like a banana. I’m putting in much less work; I was barely at the woodlot an hour this morning and dismantled five pallets. My normal routine is to run the Sawzall for a day and then run the chopsaw for a day, mostly because dismantling pallets is so much work. But I may go ahead and knock out a whole stack of pallets before I bring out the chopsaw and cut the pieces to stove lengths.

Five pallets don’t make a very impressive pile of wood and I could have kept going; everything was working fine. But I’m not in a hurry and thought it best to sort of feel out how my joints are going to deal with it this year; I’ve had years where I pushed it and then had to work with an aching back. It’s early in the season and there’s no point straining anything that isn’t already strained.

So I was just cleaning dust off my game camera before putting it back out at the watering station, right? And…

…my finger went right through the badly-fogged plastic that covers what I take to be the light sensor. Might explain why it hasn’t been working so well lately. UV for the win.

I’ve had a lot of fun with this one, and it did last a few years. But I’m open to suggestions for a better model than the Browning.

It’s been a couple of days over a month since I lost Laddie, and life has pretty much gone back to normal. New, dogless normal. At least I’m no longer grumping in my chair all day and drinking too much at night. I can look back and say, “that was an unusually bad day and night” without some flavor of meltdown.

Mostly, anyhow…

I was doing some stuff behind the Lair when I saw the glint of a little cartridge case among the pebbles. Reached down to pick it up, perplexed because while there’s nothing strange about finding .22 cases on the ground around the cabin, I don’t even own a 9mm. I picked it up and looked at the headstamp.

Oh.

I don’t own a 9mm Luger. I do own a 9mm Makarov – which I last fired at 2 AM on August 20, a day that shall live in infamy. And for a few moments I flashed back so hard I swear my vision whited out.

Three years ago a VERY Generous Reader sent me my very own Honda generator, new in box, after life changes rendered it irrelevant to the reader’s future plans. I confess I was both excited to receive it and also – almost reluctant.

I’ve never been on the kind of budget where acquiring a machine like a Honda EU2000i could be done casually – or at all, really. I always settled for cheaper sorts of machines and they had a habit of letting me down. The Honda has a very high reputation for reliability and I frankly didn’t want to see it broken. That would probably turn out to be my fault.

So when I mothball the thing, I do it very carefully. And I always take it out of mothballs with some serious trepidation.

Back in December I changed the oil and drained the fuel most thoroughly. The carb bowl has a draincock that makes that easy. So nothing but a rat chewing through a spark plug wire should keep it from starting up again no matter how long it sits. Right? Hell, BB even sent it a dust cover so it doesn’t even get dirty in storage.

Check the oil and see that the aforementioned petcock is tight. Remember to open that valve on the fuel filler cap. Pour in some gas…

…and then feel your heart sink when it doesn’t kick at all after the sixth or seventh pull, even though you spent all morning up to this point telling yourself that it always does this after being dry, it always takes this long for the fuel to get where it needs to go. Because my experience with small gas engines just naturally makes me the result of an unholy mating between Eeyore and Joe Btfsplk. Don’t ask me how they reproduced.

And then when the carb finally starts vaporizing fuel and squirting it into the cylinder, the Honda naturally starts right up and undoubtedly will for all its active season, because it’s a helluva tool. And it has taken an amazing amount of the labor out of scrap wood cutting.

And things should go particularly smoothly this time out, because…

…in July Big Brother sent me this. A genuine Milwaukee Sawzall, freshly lubed and rehabbed. I have a Craftsman recip saw that’s only 2 years old and already coming apart, and I hope confidently expect this machine to work ever so much more reliably – but it can’t work at all without a generator at the woodpile. So now we’re ready to destroy old pallets, chop them into stove lengths, and slowly fill the woodshed.

Autumn isn’t officially here till tomorrow but we do seem to be ramping up for autumn chores here at the Secret Lair.

Both propane stations are locked and loaded, and…

…as of Saturday all the spares are full. This is a state of affairs that only exists during winter, because keeping bottles full is an expensive hassle that only makes sense then.

And for my next trick I think I’m going to take the Honda generator out of mothballs and get ready for woodcutting. I’m going to need a lot this year because I barely cut any the last time and the very mild winter let me get away with it but still depleted the woodshed. This isn’t Minnesota: You never know what winters here are going to do but even at their worst they tend to be episodic. So actually running out of wood wouldn’t be the disaster it might be elsewhere because most times there would be mild enough weather to cut more without real hardship. Nevertheless this is the place Murphy lives and he can be a malicious little bastard. So no excuses on woodcutting this season, I want four full tiers by November.

I mostly dislike having to buy things. I really hate having to buy things twice, but I suppose I did this to myself. I went cheap and shouldn’t have.

When I got this bypass regulator both of the hoses that came with it leaked. So now I’ve gone with what I should have gotten in the first place and it’ll probably be fine.

I needed the longer hoses to fit these #40 bottles which don’t fit well on the bedroom regulator but should relieve me from one of winter’s more irritating hassles: Waking up and trying to make coffee on an icy morning only to find that the stove’s single propane bottle has sucked empty overnight. Really don’t know why it took me so long to get a bypass regulator for the kitchen.

Next step before this chore is done is to cover the regulator and bottles, because they’re right under the Lair’s main drip edge. My old arrangement had a shelf attached to the cabin, which turned out less than ideal. I don’t think it’s going to be a problem though…

I’ve got plenty of scrap plywood I can use to make a cap. Slap a coat of paint on it and call it genius.

And now, having had breakfast, I need to return to this week’s burden and get it out of my life…

Got some thinset yesterday and lost my last excuse not to re-tile that bare spot on the floor.