The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Hee…

We hopefully have some plumbing work gonna be done at Ian’s place this summer but it got complicated right away when it turned out the incoming water pipe wasn’t big enough to allow a pressure pump. Laying new pipe will be relatively straightforward but it will be necessary to dig very deep down on the side of the dome to get the new pipe inside. People keep asking me, “Do you know where we should dig,” and I keep gesturing vaguely and saying “Around here somewhere.”

But one thing I am supposed to know about is where the tank end of the pipe is, and particularly where the shut-off valve is. Unfortunately I have moved a lot of dirt back and forth in that area since the last time I had to deal with that valve – it was probably buried deep, the marker got kicked away long ago, and I had only a vague notion of something that is certainly going to be needed.

Well, it’s a beautiful day to dig, I figured. I didn’t really know what I was getting into. Continue reading →

I’d have substituted “cop” for “government” – we know the government would do it if it could – but otherwise, a fair point.

h/t

I was out on my morning walky when I got a text from D&L:

Making a kamikaze run to Safeway for meat. Try to get home by noon. Do you need to go? Meat restrictions in place or I would offer to pick up for you.

And I kicked the ground and replied,

Dammit, I’d love to but have to pass, no cash right now. Let me know if you get delayed and I’ll feed horses.

A few hours later L telephoned and said ‘Meat restrictions weren’t as bad as we’d been led to believe. Come on over when you can, I have some for you as a pre-payment for helping with the tractor on Friday.” We had a problem last week and they had to order a new coolant drain, which came in today and looks like it’s going to be a PITA to install. I’d already agreed to come help when it was time, and now that’s scheduled for Friday morning before it gets hot.

TB and I had some running around to do anyway so we went over to D&L’s and look what they brought us!

That was really nice, they didn’t have to do that. I’m already so far upside down on karma points with those two I’ll never catch up as it is.

TB will probably get the lion’s share of these nice chicken breasts, but…

He’s gonna have to share. After all, I did all the work. 🙂

Because I need one bad but I’m utterly confused at the variety available on Amazon. Prices range from around $150 to $1K and they all make the same claims.

The heat exchanger box for the (still proposed) water heater will fit on the exposed rack left over on the solar panel ground mount, as I expected. I took that picture at about quarter to ten and there’s still some shadow on the solar panels, which isn’t great. But the rack will work as expected. Of course the rack ends need to be supported and I’ll need to do some modification to that drainage berm but I knew that.

In terms of how much hose the box will hold: I hoped to be able to conduct a very simple experiment this morning but that didn’t go so well… Continue reading →

Nine bucks a pop for … what brand is that? I’ve never seen that before.

A couple of evenings ago I sat on the porch in the shady breeze, watching the hummingbirds squabble while I cleaned primer pockets and seated primers in two hundred sized and tumbled pistol cases…

Pleasant and comfortable way to end the day.

This morning I took a more third-world approach to (trying to) pull some cast bullets from some loads that hadn’t worked out so well, and…

…gave up after about 25 rounds. Pulling jacketed bullets is simple enough; cast bullets range anywhere from annoyingly difficult to effectively impossible. Screw it, those loads can’t hit diddly but they’ll do for holster drills. And they’re an excuse to shoot up a whole load of ammo in one session, which I’m normally loath to do because of the expense.

…I did what any good person would do. I kept my mouth shut.”

…even though I already knew that de Blasio’s “rat on your neighbor” policy was the epitome of stupidity, being in the actual situation made the awfulness of it more visceral.

There I am, smoking my cigarette, watching this makeshift hairdresser’s busy scissors and I realized I had been deputized by my mayor to mess up his whole deal. It’s not an authority I want, and even just knowing I have it makes me very uncomfortable. The good news is that apparently the hotline Hizzoner set up has mostly been used to mock the policy, not to tattle on fellow citizens, but it’s still disturbing and dystopian.

Good read. Hat tip to Alert Reader SS.

I’ll use almost any excuse to procrastinate before crawling around under the cabin. When I was a kid crawlspaces didn’t bother me but I’m high-mid-sixties now and the part with the plumbing is really low. You are sincerely belly-crawling all the way.

Backstory: At the beginning of last winter I thought I had finally worked out my plumbing insulation issues for good and all. Apparently an enterprising pack rat thought it was nice, too. Either found or chewed an entrance over one of the sheets of rigid foam I’d bolted between the joists, clearly chewed it bigger, then moved in above the batting.

Oh, he probably thought he’d finally scored that split-level in the ‘burbs his wife had been on him about all those years. And he’d have been right, but – being a packrat – he just had to get hoardy. Continue reading →

I’ve upgraded my tools every chance I could over 14 years of gulching, that quest having been helped a lot by the various incremental upgrades in my electrical system. Today I was able to knock out in less than an hour a chore/ordeal I really used to dread: Drilling holes in a new burn barrel.

Using the old saw buck as a stand, I scratched 12 24″ lines and then measured and punched locations for four holes per line. Then using a proper drill motor the Lair’s inverter can comfortably run and one of those nice new sharp bits a Generous Reader sent me two years ago, I quickly drilled 48 holes…

…and there we are. Job finished before the day even got hot.

I sincerely hope that with the addition of that new lid, which previous barrels have conspicuously lacked, I won’t have to do this again for quite a long time.

Because wind.

Even when the wind doesn’t knock it down, which it does daily, I’ve got ashes all over everything downwind. Colossal hassle.

So I had to ask around, but there actually is a guy in the little town nearest where I live who had some oil drums for sale. He had six on Wednesday, three when I went there with D&L this afternoon, and now he’s got two so I think I got lucky on the timing.

And this one’s got a lid, and none of the other drums I’ve used for fire barrels did, which is probably why they rotted out where the ashes met the rain water. I’m hoping this one will last more than a couple of years.

In the morning I drill a bunch of tedious holes.

The afternoon wind is still blowing strong, but at least it’s warm.

High eighties, to be more precise.

Hardly a cloud in the sky. Winter is over!

Yes, yes, Murphy. I know. Six inches of snow tomorrow for sure. Whatever. It’s May. May is my very favorite month.

Neighbor D’s horse Bud is old and has been on various pain therapies for as long as I’ve known him. It’s gotten insupportably expensive and D&L mentioned on Monday that they were arranging for euthanasia.

Then yesterday when I passed their place I noticed them out on a part of their property where nobody ever goes, and Scott the Road Guy was also there with his backhoe. I’m not super observant when it comes to other people’s stuff but I did draw an unhappy conclusion from the confluence of those facts.

Yesterday afternoon Neighbor L texted me asking if I would come over this morning to help D with “some tractor work.” I drew a not very pleasant picture of what that work might entail, but when I showed up this morning Bud was still alive and as well as usual in his usual run and D only wanted help changing oil and replacing filters on their little IH tractor.

Took me a while to work up the nerve to ask the obvious question, what was Scott doing on their place with a backhoe? L got a sad look and said, “a grave.” D&L’s little tractor has dug graves for any number of dogs and at least one cremated human but a horse requires a hole of greater magnitude. And unfortunately getting the horse into the hole will also require hired heavy machinery, so the whole matter needs organization.

h/t

Rode the bike to town yesterday. Very small, spotty town in the rural southwest that arose for no good reason I ever learned and has been slowly dying in sections like a juniper since probably before I was born. And as for the “shutdown” rules…

People still pay attention to all those lines taped on the floors but I notice the makeshift face masks are mostly gone.

The only retail outlets still closed are the thrift store and a probably doomed storefront gym that just opened before the shutdown.

Both restaurants were doing brisk business at their drive-throughs, as was the only liquor store.

A little coffee shop that (to my great surprise) did really well when it opened a couple of years ago but that closed immediately after the shutdown is taking this opportunity to do a lot of construction and is apparently expanding as a restaurant into an adjoining building – but it’s still closed.

The auto parts store is “open” again but you have to call ahead and the manager will meet you at the door with your purchase.

The Subway sandwich shop, which was closed for a couple of weeks, compromised by leaving the eat-in booths closed and asking people to wait outside if there’s more than six people in line.

And there are sneeze shields everywhere, which probably isn’t a bad thing anyway.

I’ve had the hummingbird feeder out for maybe two weeks now. It started getting business right away but so far not a lot – in fact I wish it’d pick up and finish that first jar because the inside really needs a scrub it didn’t when I first hung it out. Anyway, the few hummers I have right now are more interested in mating behavior than sitting around tanking up on sugar water, so any bird that tries to settle on a perch is virtually guaranteed to get strafed within seconds as the males all vie for Hottest 2-Gram Bigshot at the Gulch.

This guy, on the other hand…

I sat out on the porch for hours yesterday evening, the first time it was warm enough to do so, and for the most part this wasp did not move. It just hung like that with its head shoved as far into a crack as it could get it. Occasionally it would briefly stagger around the outside of the jar as if looking for somebody to bug for drink money. Then it went back to jamming its head into the feeder.

I’m not at all sure it made it home safely. It wasn’t in any condition to fly.

I confess I don’t need the assurance and inspiration that comes from watching celebrity quarantine videos, and so have never actually seen one. But I hear that it’s really moving when hyper rich people show you their coping mechanisms. Like, people say it moves you to want to burn their mansions down around them.

In other inspiring news:

Inspiring: Celebrities Spell Out ‘We’re All In This Together’ With Their Yachts

I tried to get a picture of her but she wouldn’t cooperate, and anyway you’ve probably seen a brown bird. Picture a small brown bird with a slight crest and you’re there.

But she got busy right away…

So undoubtedly she’s already well on the way to producing this year’s crop of little Phoebes.

This is her third year in a row nesting in exactly the same spot. I know I said I was going to deepen her shelf for her and it would be extremely simple to do, but frankly she seems to find that spot so satisfactory I’m reluctant to screw with it in any way – I mean, who knows why a bird does anything? She might just really prefer narrow windy ledges and putting up a ‘better’ one might scare her away.

We’ve had a few days designed to fool me into believing Spring has finally come – in fact today was t-shirt weather right out of bed. And a good thing because I have a perfect way to spend a gorgeous morning – doing an electrical job in the very back of Ian’s Cave, which is black as black can be when the inverter’s turned off and pretty much the same temperature year-round.

But I have the perfect tool for that, which I don’t get enough chances to use. I’m really not much of a headlamp person but sometimes nothing else will do and a nice one is very good to have.

And every time I take it off its peg, I think kindly about the person who donated it even though I can’t recall who it was.

On the way out I finally took the opportunity to measure that blank spot on my ground mount’s rack. And wouldn’t you know – it’s perfectly suited to that heat exchanger box like it was designed for that purpose and no other. One more excuse bites the dust, though I’m not 100% it’ll bear the weight as distributed.

I got well into my electrical job when I realized I should have brought the cordless drill. Had to walk back to the Lair to get it, and on the way I met this brainless fellow denizen…

…who just stared at me like he had no idea what a person was for. And I said to him aloud – and this is not the first time I’ve had this onesided conversation,

“Hello, there. Please don’t let me interrupt your pleasant morning, I’m only this area’s apex predator. Yes, I eat creatures exactly like you, almost daily, so you probably shouldn’t just stand there insolently staring. Seriously, I could – if you’ll excuse the expression – blow your head clean off at this range and I’m thinking about it. Really. I’ve been practicing.”

It’s true, too.

“Good thing for you the trailer tire is immediately downrange at this moment.

“Well, don’t let me bother you. Have a nice day.”

I got the drill kit, headed back to the Cave, and soon enough realized I had two recycled duplexes and a switch but no way to bolt them to their boxes. That meant I had to go all the way to Landlady’s barn, where all the surplus electrical and plumbing bits are kept. Nice day for a walk but I have more jobs in mind than this, only have so much energy in a day and really didn’t want to use it all up walking back and forth. Also didn’t want to go back to the Lair and hassle with the Jeep.

Good thing I store the ebike in Ian’s cave. 🙂 My life contains perfect moments.

Beautiful day to spend half an hour out of the cave, and I didn’t even have to make up an excuse!

Finished up. No sparks, no unexpected oh shit moments. On simple things, after going on fifteen years of fending for myself I often actually know what I’m doing.

And I finally got a chance to seriously use that tool tote Neighbor D and I made several weeks ago!

So, good day so far. Except that it has taken forever to compose this and I won’t be sure it’ll post until it does.