The Ultimate Answer to Kings

The running gag of the early part of the lockdown was toilet paper. Then it was any sort of baking supplies. Flour has come back, sort of. But if you need sugar you’d better take out a loan – and don’t look for it in a dollar store.

I had to cut the hummingbirds off early, because they damn near ran my sugar bucket dry. I can buy it – don’t tell them but I did – but not in the crappy little town nearest where I live. And at damn near a dollar a pound I’m not feeding it to birds.

Yeast is still at a premium, too – but I had so much yeast stored at the beginning of the year I was able to share with neighbors.

Always makes me a little sad when the days get shorter. This hasn’t been a great summer for me but normally I much prefer summer, heat and glare and all.

I was able to scrape out all the old thinset under the tiles I replaced on the kitchen/woodstove side of the Lair with scrapers and chisels. No fun, but doable. But what I mixed on the door side was somehow made of sterner stuff…

…as in a chisel barely touches it. If I hoped to finish scraping out the old thinset within the exhaustion range of a stiff old man, I had to do something I really didn’t want to do…

I’m barely more than half done with this part of the job and the entire (hopefully only the main room of the) cabin is thickly covered with mortar dust I’ll be cleaning up for probably the rest of the month.

Roughly ten seconds into the job I channeled my inner Zelda and rummaged around the tool side of the powershed for my respirator…

Hating life at present, but slowly gettin’er done.

Struggling CNN Just Starts Stealing Headlines From The Babylon Bee

There’s an overall word for that and I have spent fifteen minutes or more trying to remember what it is. Annoying.

Anyway – A few weeks ago I had to put on my Joel the Sexton hat after burying Laddy, to make the pedestal for his headstone.

Talked to Landlady over the weekend about the precise wording, and in the course of that conversation she asked me to make a couple more pedestals while I was refreshed on the technique. So Monday I brought home some concrete, and yesterday and today I did exactly that.

Yesterday afternoon I began the process of replacing some of the more crumbled floor tiles in the Secret Lair…

I have to do that to about a third of the overall floorspace and I learned, not to my surprise, that replacing tile is a hell of a lot harder than laying it in the first place. The thinset may not have adhered especially well to the tiles, but it is grimly determined to remain bonded to the cement board backer.

I can picture Big Brother rolling his eyes as he reads this part, since he offered to finance the vinyl plank floor I could have simply laid over the tiles. And I agree that’s the way to go, and next year for sure. I didn’t have any trouble with the work of overlaying the floor – hell, it’s less work than what I’m doing now – but there were opportunity costs I just never got around to paying. Short version, obtaining the flooring just got too complicated and this summer has gotten away from me. I really haven’t accomplished very much during my traditional building season.

Update on the Jeep’s rear window: The parts are ordered! And so in a couple of weeks the Jeep should have a fully functional window for the first time in at least two years. Also coming is yet another indoor latch for the driver door, because rolling down your window to open the door in a snowstorm is an unpleasant hassle.

Most important election EVER!!!

What’s wrong with this picture?

I was bashing through the wash yesterday, in a bit of a hurry because I was late to meet with D&L for the Monday morning water run, when the rattletrap the 19-year-old Jeep has become suddenly got quite a lot louder.

And then I was later still as I did some off-road surgery to take the rear window off before it fell off. Knowing I had to haul some heavy stuff back to the Lair later, I left the window on the bank of the wash till I returned. Danger of it being stolen in the interim: Approximately zero.

The window itself is undamaged but I’ve been a little worried about something like this happening for some time. The gasket that latches the window closed against the tailgate has been broken for a couple of years now, making the window impossible to secure.

Eventually one of the pot metal hinges just fatigued apart. Fortunately it’s fixable: Various commenters have clued me into online sources of Jeep parts, and it’s clearly time to stop procrastinating about refurbishing the Jeep’s rear bits. Winter is Coming. So I’ll get on that today. Should have done it yesterday but yesterday got kind of wonky.

Thanks to Landlady, I got my iPhone back fixed! And now I can go back to photographing everything in sight, because the past six weeks or so have taught me that it’s really AirDrop I miss. The iPhone is much much more compatible with the MacBook than the tablet when it comes to transferring pix.

And look what a certain long-haired YouTube celebrity sent me to help keep coyotes and other antifascist parasites at bay!

Because a desert hermit who can’t exactly call 911 to check out that noise in the hedges really can’t have too much AK ammo.

Not that ‘not enough’ was really a problem,…

…but there’s no such thing as ‘too much.’

It’s September 10. Three days ago I spent the afternoon naked due to an unseasonable heat wave. This morning it’s 37^o and I’m wrapped in layers and typing through gloves.

I took a picture of the cool digital indoor/outdoor thermometer my brother sent me a few years ago – but then decided naw, they don’t need that. I figured a way to get photos from the tablet to the laptop but you have to really want to do it. The procedure includes but is not necessarily limited to:

1) Take the picture (easy part)
2) Learn or recall the arcane procedure for copying the file to the SD card
3) Remember to actually do that before removing the card from the tablet, which consists of:
a) Turn tablet off
b) Open cardholder cover
c) Pry cardholder out of tablet
d) Desperately search for the SD and SIM cards which took a bad hop under the kitchen counter, because they’re thoughtfully placed on the bottom of the cardholder
e) Insert SD card into adapter
f) Insert adapter into Laptop
g) Open Finder and attempt to find picture files
h) Swear luridly as you discover that you forgot Steps 2 and 3
i) Typist is bored now

While I was going through all that yesterday morning a little ditty started going through my mind. It went something like this…

I want my iPhone back
Gotta have my iPhone back
I miss it oh so much
Can’t live without its touch…

…to the tune of this parody song from 1965, which I haven’t actually heard since sometime in the early ’70’s.

And that got me to thinking about that parody song, which I probably haven’t actually thought of since sometime in the early ’70’s, which caused me to look it up on Youtube because of course it’s there, all old songs are, and I listened to it and decided that it was probably a lot funnier when I was a teenager. Possibly because harmlessly transgressive things tend to be funnier to teenagers but also because the things parodied in the song are ancient even to me. I’m old enough to have heard dead teenager songs on the radio but a little too young to have appreciated them, which is to say I was too young to drive when the fad was current. Say “dead teenager song” to an actual teenager today and you’ll probably get reactions ranging from blank to mildly alarmed.

Type that phrase into a search engine if you have a lot of time on your hands.

Anyway, that excursion into ancient history got me to thinking about cultural references in general, which are often a sore point to me because I made a life of missing (and of course now more than ever miss) pop culture stuff as it went by. I was never socially plugged in at any point in my life, and it shows whenever I watch Deadpool or some other movie that leans heavily on phrases or references to things everybody knows about. What the hell is ‘dubstep,’ anyway?

This oddly sudden cold snap has me thinking of getting my generator out of mothballs a month early for wood cutting, because the woodshed is way more than half empty and we’re overdue for a cold winter. But that’s yet another topic and I’ll stop now. My fingers are tingling.

When I ran into Neighbor L yesterday morning she said there was a ‘90% chance’ of rain forecast for yesterday. There being not a cloud in the sky visible through all the secondhand smoke I had my doubts. But the day was windy and unsettled and only a moron seriously tries to predict the weather around here, especially during winter and monsoon. So I was surprised but not flabbergasted when, for literally the first time all spring and summer…

…it actually rained! Water fell from the sky before my very eyes.

And not just a sprinkling to settle the dust, either. Look at the drainage ditch! My porch gutter is doing something besides bleaching in the sun!

The serious rain began at about ten minutes to six, so technically it was during the day rather than evening and my stated prediction was false – but I was only going with the safe odds. It’s monsoon and rain has been predicted before. So far only a little thunder and sometimes a brief sprinkle. This is the first real rain since winter. The cattlemen gave up on grazing their herd here early last month, which is one blessing of a drought.

Appears to have rained off and on during the night, too. I’d be interested to hear what the actual rainfall was, except nobody measures that at or near the Gulch. Probably we just finally got lucky and were under one of the small wandering storm cells we normally see watering the horizon.

…and to keep its second-hand smoke to itself.

I mean I thought they were all into social distancing and stuff.

This guy is molotov cocktailing wrong – but at least he knows he can convalesce as the nation’s most popular meme for the next week or two – or anyway until the next political murder, which will be any minute now.

I’m not ignoring you, at least not as much as it seems. It’s just that every time I go near a computer the cell signal falls to nothing. Seriously, most times I can’t even check email lately. And that with hardly a drop of rain.

Anyway, here’s some mule deer at the watering station…

Upload 83 jpegs, make the gif, download the gif, upload the gif … that’s more than my data stream has been capable of for days. There was a lot more on the memory card but this is as much as I dared try.

Yesterday I got a chance to visit the Palace of Food, the Safeway in the biggish town about 35 miles away.

I get such a kick out of that place – nice to be reminded from time to time that quiet people still live prosperously no matter what the news might imply. Portland might be on fire but most people don’t actually give Portland much thought.

For serious food storage I much prefer cans; a freezer full of meat for your bad-time preps only guarantees a power failure. But that doesn’t mean a freezer full of meat isn’t nice, if it’s within your resources. It didn’t used to be within mine.

Speaking of nice…

How’s this for irony: A little over a month ago I bunged up my right shoulder again, quite out of the blue. Unlike in the past I didn’t even do anything to deserve it, I was just hauling on a barrel of chicken pellets and the joint came out of socket. So pain, very ouch and it got me to worrying; maybe this ‘getting old’ business has downsides.

And then cue irony: Only a day or two later I stupidly sliced my left index finger right on the side you don’t realize how much you use until you cut the blessed thing to the bone. Gaping wound, blood everywhere, I no longer had a single fully functional hand. Ended up tying the Jeep driver door open because just opening it hurt so much. Now, I was a mechanic for a long time and used to get cuts and burns and gouges on my hands all the time. Used to joke that the ability to heal quickly was a necessity of the trade. “Don’t bleed on the customer’s car” is one of those unwritten rules they don’t mention at tech school.

In light of the way my skeleton seems to be falling apart I worried that maybe a deep cut like this one would take its time healing or even go bad. Needn’t have worried; two weeks later it’s only another scar. Lately I’ll take my blessings wherever I can find them.

Two days late, but this morning was Battery Day…

One of these days lithium batteries will get good enough/cheap enough for use by non-rich mundanes like myself but in the meantime I really prefer lead/acid: Not in spite of but because they require at least monthly maintenance. There’s no such thing as a maintenance-free battery bank no matter what anybody’s selling, and scheduling a day for topping off reservoirs also gives you a chance to look for loose connections and corrosion and such. There’s no such thing as ‘maintenance-free,’ but without a schedule it’s easy to get lulled into sloth which absolutely will bite you in the ass. In the worst way, at the worst time. Murphy’s Law is a warning, not a council of despair.

Speaking of things going wrong: The cell signal has been really bad lately, and it comes and goes capriciously. I didn’t think I’d be able to load those pics, then suddenly everything was great, and right now I can’t even get a preview. Which means I can hit the Publish button but have no way to know when/whether this will actually be published. Monsoon without the rain; great.

From the “People throw away the damndest things” department, I give you…

…the closest to “cute” we’ve come so far. 🙂

Excellent timing: The last of the scrounged deck chairs had just about finished falling apart. The old table, knocked together out of scraps two years ago, will likely now complete its journey to the woodshed.

August wasn’t a banner month for me to begin with, injuries always drop a bomb on my schedule, and the past two weeks have been kind of rough. What happened with Laddie depressed me more and longer than I expected; frankly I’m not normally a very sentimental person. I’ve been sitting around bingewatching old TV shows on a harddrive, and not even kicking myself over wasted time. I’m keeping up with the dailies, you know; there aren’t roaches in the dirty dishes or anything but beyond that I haven’t been much use. Gotta pull myself out of this hole.

This’ll give you some idea of how out of it I’ve been: I installed this new bypass regulator on the kitchen propane weeks ago and kept catching whiffs of propane. To ignore the smell of propane is to break one of those Rules That Must Not Be Broken but I had tested the joints and fittings with soapy water when I put it together and saw no leaks, so I only worried about it on those rare occasions when I was doing something useful outside and caught the scent. Then I forgot it again.

Turns out one of my brand-new hoses was defective and venting expensive dangerous gas, and I found the leak almost by accident. Gotta order another 2-foot hose before I can use both of the big propane bottles that don’t really fit the bedroom regulator very well.

Maybe I’ve just subconsciously decided I’m emotionally done with this summer: I wouldn’t normally give winter preps a thought for at least another month. I like summer and dislike winter – but this summer has turned into a suckfest so one of the voices decided it was time to start gathering firewood. In the course of every day I look out for chances to scrounge old lumber to cut up in the autumn; some seasons it can make quite a pile. This summer not so much but there was still some, and this morning out of the blue I hauled out the chopsaw and cut it to stove lengths.

That naturally got me to thinking about my axe and hatchet, both of which needed edges.

If I don’t get out of my funk pretty quick I’ll find myself fixing the woodshed’s stone floor and pulling pallets apart. Too early in the season for that but I can no longer ignore how poorly written and acted a lot of Babylon 5 dialog really is.

Murphy’s Law of Social Trend Integration clearly states “When Joel joins a fad, the fad burned out days or weeks ago.”

So yesterday I actually bought one of those dumbass masks that have been all the rage for the past few months.

That should put an end to this nonsense. You’re welcome.

Actually I’ve noticed a swiftly waning willingness on the part of the residents of the crappy little town nearest where I live to wear the damned things even though all the signs are still on all the doors. Hard to take the signs seriously when even the people behind the counters are obscenely baring their faces in public.

Okay, enter caveats: I have a paper right here showing that his mother and father were as married as dogs ever get so ‘bastard’ is wrong in every sense. And he was a Corgi officially christened “Sweet’n Soft’n Squishy,’ so lovable was pretty much baked into the product. But my experience with Corgis consists rather sparsely of Laddie and a whole bunch of Youtube videos, and by the standards of a Youtube Corgi Laddie was not an unusually lovable Corgi. He was a serious little man most of the time, normally much more concerned with making sure quotidian necessities like meals and walkies happened on (precise) schedule than with being goofy or seeing how far he could get his tongue out of his mouth.

Nevertheless he’s been dead for over a week and I just now almost teared up from recalling that it won’t be necessary to put dog biscuits on the dollar store shopping list. So, pretty lovable.

Alternate title: All I Did was Suggest Improvements.

I don’t need this shit right now – I just got the loveliest email in response to the post below. I get the impression this is a person who pitched something in the past and didn’t like the reply or lack of same but I really don’t know. He/she alludes to something specific but without enough information for me to figure out specifically what. Sorry, you’ll have to click for embiggenment but perhaps someone can lead me to enlightenment…

This person seems to have been offended by a particular post he/she didn’t appreciate, presumably one in which I mocked a spam email. Unfortunately the word “Spam” appears so frequently on TUAK in a completely unrelated context that all I can do is wish I’d gotten around to using tags so I have no way of tracking down what this person is going on about. If anybody knows, please feel free to loan me a clue.

But it’s nice to know he/she cares, I guess.

Allow me to state the official TUAK policy on Things Joel Says. Maybe I should put it in a blurb on the sidebar:

I’m not here to offend anybody and within reason I try not to. But this is my blog, not yours, and only I get to dictate its contents. If you are offended you’re welcome to say so – maybe I’ll even take a lesson but I doubt it – and you’re not required to come here or read the contents. Thank you.

Specific to this incident, here’s an addendum:

I am not required to sell shit for other people and in fact have a policy of not doing so.