The Ultimate Answer to Kings

…as a gang of plumbers came and went. The terminal objective was to install a water pressure pump at Ian’s place. The enabling objectives were numerous and included putting in this underground ‘vault’ to contain all the pieces…

…oh, and also draining the water tank.

Lovely.

So I spent a couple of days washing with bottled water and crapping into a bucket. Which didn’t actually bother me at all since I expect things like that from time to time. I keep 5-gallon jugs of water just in case, and I have a Plan B chair. But still it was kind of amusing that I was just thinking the other day about how it might be time to retire the blog because it’s less and less about the adventure of roughing it out alone in the boonies and more about an old man quietly living in a cabin with a Corgi.

And anyway it was instructive in that I finally got to note the minimum pressure indicated when the pipe up to the top of the ridge is full of water but there’s no tankful of water to pressurize it…

On a full tank that pressure is 18.5 to a touch over 20 PSI, apparently depending on temperature for some reason I haven’t quite figured out. And as Big Brother theorized a couple of years ago, that means that a big enough gauge will warn you when the tank is unexpectedly going empty. I had already kind of confirmed that it was so but this is the first time I was able to measure empty-tank pressure.

Also when you get some water back into the tank, the first thing you need to do is flush the plumbing because…

Iron oxide and calcium. Lots of iron oxide and calcium.

And my part of the project is a lot less done than I anticipated. I had promised to bring electricity to the surface from the underground powershed. I did that and it emerged about 35 feet from the new vault. The plumber’s idea of that was somewhat different from mine: He wants electricity to the vault. That means I have to ditch a bunch of conduit, fortunately not too deep. And it turns out that today I got the conduit free…

…because Neighbor D had 3 long sticks of 1″ PVC that have been gathering dust and in the way in his barn for over a decade and he wanted them gone. So now I’ll fill them with Romex and bury them. I want to take this opportunity to put an outlet up on top of the cave which means I need a junction box. I wasn’t able to get one locally but Landlady said she’d bring one up from the city this weekend.

Kid, you’re taking me back to the sixties. It’s embarrassing as hell.

Yeah – we were full of shit back then too. Some of us grew out of it. Others became politicians. But you don’t get to build your little utopia on other people’s backs.

I’ve never been happier to be a desert hermit than I am today.

Okay, so yesterday I rode the bike to town, really and no cheating, 23 mile round trip. Took the slightly shorter but hilly way to the county road and the long slightly less hilly way home from it.

There was no special reason to do it but a round trip to town has become the White Whale of having the ebike: I’ve done every part of the trip several times now, carefully measuring mileage and estimating power use and how hard it is on the bike and my ass, but I had never just done the whole thing. And now I have, and …

…the bike finds it no problem at all as long as I don’t go nuts treating it like a motorcycle. I have to do my part with the pedals, and especially I have to work getting it up hills. Keep the power assist off the high setting except when it’s super steep and your leg(s) is/are giving out, don’t think the throttle is going to do all the work, and I can easily believe this thing will routinely go 40 miles on flat pavement. I went 23 miles on hilly dirt roads almost exclusively and used about 60% of the battery power as far as I can tell from the not very precise power bar.

Also, ow my ass. That aspect alone was worth putting a couple of hundred miles on the bike before getting expeditiony.

Anyway – since I had no particular reason to be in town on Sunday morning I decided to treat myself with something I’ve thought of many times but never have leisure to do: I went into the little town’s one tiny breakfast diner to have somebody else cook me breakfast. And because I haven’t done that in … hell, over a decade … I went full Mr. Suburban Man and got the big one. You know, the one inevitably named The Rancher or something like that, with 3 kinds of meat, 2 kinds of bread, big pile of potatoes and 3 eggs. When I was younger and seriously worked for a living I used to destroy one of those 2-3 times a week and ask for more toast.

This time it became an ordeal by food. I was determined to get through it even though I knew right away I’d wasted money on a mistake, but I ended up leaving food on the table and riding a bicycle home in the wind with a painfully distended stomach.

I can’t eat the way I used to. Probably a good thing.

But for the record the bike has finally done the one big thing I’ve talked about for the last ten months, all in one go, and had no trouble with it at all.

…and about time, too.

The Leghorns will be two years old in August and this is their first molt. So I guess they’re due a vacation while they grow new feathers. A hen can’t make eggs and feathers at the same time, at least not on any industrial scale.

Kind of irritating to go to the trouble of raising them, though, when you’re reduced to buying eggs in town while they’re on their little sabbatical.

While fiddling around with chickens this morning I noticed Landlady’s automatic water pump was automatically pumping water.

This is the first time since the installation I’ve caught it doing that. Probably just making up for one-way valve seepage or something. Nice to confirm that it works from time to time.

And while I was out and around this morning, and before it got hot, I started another promised chore…

Up on the fill dirt above the edge of Ian’s powershed. I need to run a power cord out of the shed and up to the surface, so it can be extended up to the new pressure pump when/if that gets installed this summer. I haven’t heard anything about that project but last I heard it was ongoing, and shouldn’t have put off commencing my part of it so long. Now it’s getting hot – it hit 103^o yesterday before storm cells came through.

Anyway, the first and only really strenuous part of the chore is finding the powershed wall through all that dirt. It’s deeper than I expected. But once I get the hole extended far enough I’ll push a hole saw through the header and then run conduit and cable to the surface.

Apparently, at least.

That new mainspring came, and there was suddenly no time to lose.

As simple as all those videos made it out to be. And it had a dramatic effect on the effort it took to crank the hammer back, and the subsequent DA trigger pull.

My light-hammer range queen became half exercise machine, at least by comparison. But…

It sure pops caps now. Fifty rounds of my worst fired without a single failure.

All that reading and video-watching about spring-swapping, and nobody ever seemed to want to make the springs heavier. And I think I get that – when the Model 69 was unreliable with reloads it still shot commercial ammo fine. And oh goodness was it ever a treat for making tiny groups in targets. That’s probably going to be harder now, but it’s all a matter of priorities. I don’t need a target gun, I need an EDC in a place where every now and then you really do need to shoot something. And I’ll trade a light trigger for 100% reliability with all ammo every time. So what my gun needed was to go back to something like it probably had when it was stock.

And anyway – if I really want to shoot targets, once I’ve strained my thumb cocking the hammer the single-action pull is as scary as ever at 2 to 2 1/2 pounds.

Ah, summer in the desert. It never quite hit 3 figures yesterday but didn’t miss it by much, and in the usual pre-monsoon manner never gave us that cooling evening breeze. So at about 10 I gave up, shut off the fans and laid down, not really expecting to sleep. No sooner had I done that second thing than the bedroom got not only hot – it was already all of that – but also quite stuffy so that there seemed at first nothing to do but sweat and wish this damned Corgi didn’t insist on full-contact sleeping.

At last a bit of sense seeped through, and…

…it occurred to me that a) the Lair is equipped with a proper electrical system, not the free sample of one it had when I first occupied the place in 2011, b) that 12-volt ceiling fan doesn’t actually pull all that much juice even at full speed, and c) it has a REMOTE CONTROL, with VARIABLE SPEED, the lowest of which is really quite quiet, hardly seems to pull any juice at all and in such a small room performs admirably in moving air around conducive to SLEEPING.

Old habits die hard, and one of the first habits I developed in several years of inadequate solar power systems was don’t run electrical appliances at night. I’m still trying to free myself of that iron rule. I ran the fan on low virtually throughout the night and it pulls so little juice that the starting voltage was actually a little higher than normal – which makes no logical sense but I only report the news, I don’t interpret it.

ETA: I actually possess a box fan, currently stored in Landlady’s barn, which I’m going to bring home from afternoon chicken chores and put in the bedroom window to pull in some of that much cooler evening air before retiring. Wish I’d thought of that yesterday. Summer has arrived.

Sheesh – I spent most of yesterday just sitting around. I roused myself to do my baking in the morning before it got too hot…

…but the rest of the time I basically sat on my ass. I’m tempted to grasp as an excuse guess that the weird weather had something to do with it; it’s been acting more like Monsoon than late Spring/early Summer for nearly the past week, and afternoons we’ve been getting storm cells with thunder, scant but enthusiastic rain, unpredictable wind gusts and the changes in pressure they herald. The desert likes its drama.

But whatever – I woke up this morning determined not to have another day like that. And it’s funny the rabbit holes your mind can fall down…first thing in the morning I like to watch Ian’s video-of-the-day, which this morning was on the French FR-F1 sniper rifle. He included a link to another video on the same rifle – literally the same individual rifle from Ian’s collection – from 9 Hole Reviews which is a channel that specializes in evaluating rifles through expert long range shooting. And that guy got to talking about GIGN, the French antiterrorism secret squirrels you did not want gunning for you back when they were making their name in the ’70’s. And that, since I’m a budding young revolver guy these days, got me to thinking about the MR73 which is a French .357 Magnum and allegedly one of the best, most accurate and durable revolvers in the world and which also used to be a signature GIGN gun.

And that got me to wondering… Continue reading →

Everything was fine from waking up until I got a text from S proclaiming it laundry day. Sorting through my dirty clothes I realized I had no idea where my wallet was. Coming on the heels of yesterday’s trip to town, this was not good.

I looked all over the place – that is, everywhere I could think to look. I have a long, long history of absently setting important things in oddball places and not seeing them again for days/weeks/months/ever. But of course at first the most likely thought was “I lost it in town, every dollar I owned is gone forever and I should be cancelling my bank card right f’ing now.” Except I would certainly find my wallet approximately six picoseconds after I did that last thing.

I checked every pocket. I went through the just-sorted laundry again. I thought through (incompletely, it turns out) all my moves upon getting home yesterday. In the course of that I went up into the storage loft, because that’s where most of the groceries went. Didn’t find my wallet but I did find…

Are you kidding me? My first thought was that at last a large and now dangerously caffeinated rat had found its way into the loft. It never happened before but that doesn’t make it impossible. But why hit a coffee can right next to a bunch of untouched bagged lentils? Why isn’t there any other damage? For that matter why aren’t there any scratches on the coffee can or lid? This doesn’t look like it was torn apart – it kind of looks like it exploded.

As far as I can tell, that’s exactly what happened. It came from a low-altitude area to a high-altitude area – the Lair – and we’ve had some weather lately. I think it really just popped its seal. That has happened before, but never enough to blow the lid right off the can.

This wasn’t helping me find my damned wallet. I dropped off my laundry then drove to S&L’s and asked permission to search their truck’s back seat. Nothing. From S&L’s I had gone directly to Ian’s place to put some stuff in his refrigerator. Absolutely no reason to believe I’d somehow dropped the wallet there but that was the next step in retracing so I went there. No wallet, of course but there is a compressor, hose and impact wrench. Yesterday I replaced every lug nut on the Jeep except one, and I stopped because that one threatened to do the thing I most feared. So I fired up Ian’s compressor, and shortly afterward I came back to beat that last lug nut off with an impact wrench and socket. And sure enough…

I rounded off the nut. Three wheels are fixed and one is officially screwed. I can’t get a nut splitter into that little space so there’s nothing to do but sit down with a hammer and cold chisel. That will surely ruin the stud, of course, but at least I’ll be able to remove the wheel at need. And studs aren’t really hard to replace; I’ve done it in a parking lot before.

This was sufficiently bad news to complete the ruination of my morning, except then as if in compensation I had what almost amounted to a vision: I clearly pictured myself emptying my pockets yesterday at the kitchen counter, just before taking off my good going-to-town pants. In one pocket was a dollar bill and some coins. I saw myself straighten out that bill and put it … in my wallet, which like an idiot I then put on the shelf on the wall right next to the box where I keep loose coins. The shelf where that wallet never goes. I had indeed absently set the damned thing some oddball place where I’d never have accidentally encountered it until the next time I had to deal with loose change – which, given that every dollar to my name was in that wallet, wouldn’t have been for a while.

That was sufficiently good news to almost compensate for the knowledge of what fixing the Jeep is going to put me through, so I went back to Ian’s powershed and did something I’ve put off for a week: Loaded myself back up to 100 rounds of practice ammo. I very much hope in another week or so I’ll be able to replace the .44’s mainspring, and I want ammo to confirm or deny the repair.

Never seems to fail: A windfall comes at just the right time to fill a need.

There’s another, “glass half empty” way of looking at that, but whatever. The Jeep had a problem, it highlighted a couple of glaring weaknesses in my preps I knew about but had ignored, and now those weaknesses are addressed. And also I’m broke again.

Also also: Ever notice how you run out of favorite ‘nice to have’ groceries all at the same time? But also somewhere in that pile of bags is 15 new lug nuts, which when they (hopefully without giving me a big hassle) replace the inadequate nuts currently on the Jeep will help me with tire problems in the boondocks – which are rare but not theoretical: They used to be a fairly regular occurrence when the Jeep’s tires were paper-thin and scrounged.

For the first time in close to 10 years the Jeep even has an official spare tire. There’s no good way to load it in the Jeep, unfortunately: The Jeep does have a tire rack but it’s an amazing pain in the ass and I took it off many years ago. That meant I needed a place to store a brand-new tire and recycled hub out of the weather and out of the way…

A few seconds with a hammer and wrecking bar provided just the place in what used to be the chicken coop, which is still in what is now my propane bottle corral.

And look what I got from Big Brother!

He says the volt and ammeters on that thing don’t work but the temperature gauge still works great. And that’s going to be a big boon to this summer’s water heater project. As are the used hose-to-pipe fittings he included. Some black hoses are coming for that heat exchanger, but have been held up at my mail drop for a couple of weeks.

Y’know, it’s moments in history like this where I watch a bit of news, shake my head, then shrug and get on with my day, thinking “Whatever, I bugged out fifteen years ago.”

“Ladies, let’s have a midnight party at Joel’s place!

“In the morning we can hide in the bushes across the wash and giggle at him swearing at all the pies we laid in his driveway!”

It just takes a long time.

It’ll be two years in August since Torso Boy came to stay with me. He was oh so very clearly a townie dog, and for the first year I was sure he’d never get off the leash. I think the rapidfire change of humans and locations after Mamaliberty died disoriented if not downright traumatized him. He had no useful survival habits at all, he didn’t trust me at all, and except for the part about sleeping all night and most of the day nothing that happens here seems to have had any similarity to how he used to spend his time – at all.

It took quite a while – like, a year – but he gradually came around.

Almost a year after that now – he’s still got me worried about snakes but other than that he’s no longer the suicidally independent little idiot he was when he arrived.

He can run and play during walkies, but never gets out of sight. If I seem to be falling behind he’ll stop and wait before turning that corner. The sole exception is when he gets a whiff of Dharma – when that happens, all bets are off. He hates all other male dogs but I suspect she might be the only female he ever met, caring not a bit that she’s not that into him. So when Landlady’s around, the leash goes on. I’ll be pleasantly shocked if he ever loses that particular bad habit.

He has discovered the sublime pleasures of the Jeep ride. I think he may have been one of those townie dogs who only associate cars with bad things – it took him quite a while to develop any interest in coming along with me when I disappeared in the Jeep. Now he has entered the Little Bear zone, thinking life really isn’t possible without two rides a day.

And he has a happy dance that seems specifically coded to get anything he wants out of an old hermit, so there’s that. He’s a sweetheart.

Ten years ago it was the cause of The Onion’s descent into irrelevancy: Their brand of satire simply couldn’t keep up with everyday real-life absurdity. Now we see that even a better class of satire is clearly doomed. Witness:

Babylon Bee: Shooter Released After Authorities Determine All Victims Died Of COVID

KENTON, WA—A gunman was released from police custody on Thursday after it was determined by experts that the people he had shot were victims of COVID-19 and not his psychotic bloodlust-induced blind-firing rage-spree death-binge through downtown Kenton last week with three AR-15’s, seventeen uzis, and one bazooka and zero clothes on. “Our apologies,” said officers as they unlocked the man’s cuffs and let him walk free, snickering and shaking like a lunatic with drool hanging from his chin.

Real Life: ‘Related to obvious other causes’: Gunshot victims included in Washington coronavirus death tally

Officials in Washington have admitted that gunshot victims are included in the coronavirus death count.

The state’s Department of Health reported about 100 cases of people with the coronavirus or “probable” cases of the COVID-19 virus who died and were included in the total tally of deaths attributed to the pandemic, but officials can’t trace how the patient contracted the virus.
…
“Our dashboard numbers do include any death to a person that has tested positive to COVID-9,” Hutchison said.

Local outlets in the area have reported the numbers then include people who tested positive for the virus but died from other causes, such as gunshot wounds.

I don’t know which death is sadder: The last vestige of hope that you can ever trust any government statement on any subject, or my favorite form of humor.

I got the funniest damn text this morning. Out of the blue, Neighbor L wanted to know if I needed Neighbor D to drive me to town to get more lug nuts for the Jeep. I replied no, I filled my immediate needs yesterday when I biked to town and no special trip is needed.

She came back with (paraphrased) “Are you sure? [D] is going stir crazy.”

Regular readers know that Neighbor D had two minor strokes last year and is finding the recovery slow and frustrating. A very capable man, he’s suddenly clumsy, sometimes fumbles his speech and is occasionally a little slow to figure out things he used to be able to do without breaking stride. He’s used to feeling useful, and lately he doesn’t. He’s really not even supposed to drive, though I’ve never seen a problem when he does. A sudden emergency might be a problem.

I thought about it for a minute: That nail-punched tire needs to go to the shop in town. It really wasn’t worth a special trip, but on the other hand dealing with a heavy tire and wheel in the back of the truck is a lot easier if seven or eight 3-gallon water bottles aren’t in the way. No reason not to do it.

So I suggested that and she said she’d see what he thought and get back to me. I think she phrased it such that I was asking him to do it. And then a few minutes later I got another text saying he thought he could break free from his other chores for that.

I drove the Jeep to their place, dismounted the tire…

…and threw it in the back of their pickup, and then we spent a couple of hours going to town to get the Jeep fixed.

And now it is, so that hassle is out of my hair.

Guess we did one another a favor.

…but what the hell. Time, I’ve got.

The Leghorns have always had the very annoying habit of all laying their eggs in one spot as a flock. This causes breakage and hassles like trying to steal a dozen eggs from under a laying hen who’s emitting ear-splitting screeches and stabbing your hand with her beak the whole time. It’s also comical as hell to watch 3 hens literally sitting on one another, with sometimes a line of others waiting their turn. I’ll give them credit for queuing very politely but it makes no sense when there are five other nesting boxes in the chicken house.

Right now their favorite nesting spot is a commercial plastic box Landlady got from somewhere. It’s right next to 3 wooden boxes I made for the Rhode Island Reds, which the Leghorns will sometimes sit in but almost never lay eggs in.

It has been suggested – on what evidence I don’t know, I just heard it somewhere – that maybe the Leghorns don’t like those boxes because they’re too open; maybe they just like smaller spaces. So this morning I woke up with the bright idea of building dividers to make those spaces smaller and more secure …feeling? It’s just a thought.

…which came on the heels of the first practical thought I had upon waking this morning, which was that I left some scrap wood for Ian’s targets in front of Landlady’s barn, we didn’t use it all, and I should cut it up or haul it away before it annoys Landlady. If I brought some plywood and tools to morning chicken chores I could make some partitions really quickly.

They’re just sitting in there. My thought is that the chickens can shove them over to suit themselves, and maybe that will make those boxes more attractive. Probably not, their habit of all laying in the same place probably isn’t predicated on a particular box size since they sometimes all use a bucket or even just an out-of-the-way corner for a while. But we’ll see. It just bugs me, is all.

So I took the bike to town late this morning to get some lug nuts for the Jeep…

…and met some residents on the way out to the road. Continue reading →

Okay, the Jeep’s right front tire picked up a nail. Jacked up that corner and found the nail easily enough and decided to leave it there till I can take the wheel to town for a proper repair next Monday. I could probably repair it in a pinch – I have a tire plug kit but it really only works well on tires worn much thinner than these are – the smart money would bet on me making the problem much worse. A nail hole is too small for the tools to penetrate, I’d basically have to drill it out bigger before I could plug it.

But that’s not the problem I was dreading…

A couple of years ago I paid the local Ministry of Doing Idiotic Things to Customer Vehicles to replace all the Jeep’s worn and mismatched lug nuts. They not only installed the wrong nuts, far too short for the wheels, but then they nailed them down with an impact wrench like they were beating rivets on an ocean liner hull. No lug wrench I possessed could even get a purchase on them. I could just barely get a grip with a conventional socket but possessed no wrench long enough to break the nuts free and would probably just round them off trying. I determined that next time I was forced to take the Jeep to the local shop (always a frustrating experience but not always avoidable) I’d lean on them to break the nuts loose with an impact wrench and replace them with something more appropriate. In the meantime I prayed for no tire troubles, and that strategy worked adequately until yesterday.

The wheel has to come off, preferably at the Secret Lair, and so I had to get creative. I didn’t have much hope but I did have a plan…

…and to my vast surprise a long lever and a very gentle touch worked. The socket didn’t slip off either of the four short nuts. Don’t ask me to explain that fifth one; I have completely forgotten how it got there. But I’m taking it with me when I bicycle to town this afternoon and bringing home a bunch of proper lug nuts now that I know I can get the old ones off.