The Ultimate Answer to Kings

We have some weather yesterday and today and the ‘pooter won’t connect. Gotta get off my thumb and research those cell signal booster thingies because this is getting old.

If it demonstrates my desire to blog at all, at this moment I’m standing on a ridgetop in windy 30-degree weather in spitting rain thumbing this out on my smartphone. Correcting many typos, maybe not all. Hope this is the stupidest thing I do today…

I do love me some Dolly Parton. And somehow I never heard this song before.

I am familiar with the Gospel story, and always kind of related to the part about Peter. He really believed in himself, and in his faith in what Jesus had taught him. In fact he was kind of loudmouthed about it. But when it came to the immediate threat of death he denied Jesus to his face. And his shame broke his heart.

Imagine how it would feel to learn that your original faith had been right all along, and that the one you had betrayed forgave you without reservation.

What wouldn’t you do then?

Hat tip to Borepatch.

If you borrow a vacuum cleaner from a neighbor so as finally to get all the dog hair out of the bedroom rug that your broom won’t touch…

…and have to keep moving rifles so you can clean in the corners.

It’s got problems that will need adjustment. It’s pressing on a sensitive spot in much the same way the test socket did, but not as badly and that turned out to be easily fixed the first time. I’m still in a frustrating place between padding it too loose here and too tight there, but that will almost certainly prove workable – I’ve played this game before. Right now its only real virtues are that it’s a little longer than its predecessor, which hopefully will address some long-standing back problems, and it’s certainly a lot less ragged and threadbare.

But I don’t think the prosthetist and I are done with each other quite yet. To those who helped with the financing, many thanks.

If this tree – which I was told is self-pollinating – were ever going to fruit, this would be the year.

I’m not going to hold my breath. But that would be cool.

Seriously. It’s hard to get good spam these days…

I went to a prosthetics shop to pick up my new leg, and was issued a face mask.

Just saying.

Wow, I remember shoving Torso Boy over on the bed at about eight but I’d be lying if I claimed to remember my head hitting the pillow. Woke around four and again around six feeling much better.

And now I’m all dressed up and waiting for the time to go, but as usual I feel naked. For many years now I’ve been in the habit of wearing a comical amount of stuff on my belt: Multitool, flashlight, speedloaders, knife, revolver and an ironically large ring of keys. I don’t tone it down for weekly trips to town, just throw an overshirt on over it. But the big town about 50 miles away is a little more straitlaced – I’d normally go IWB – and the prosthetics joint in particular is owned by a huge national chain that has no sense of humor about guns and involves a certain amount of pants-dropping. So it is necessary to trim some body weight…

That’s it. That’s all you get, Joel.

Thank heaven for the man-purse! 😉

Because what they don’t know, they can’t complain about.

The first such in nearly four years. There’s this thing called ‘phantom pain.’ Happens when you’ve had a major limb ripped off, with lots of nifty nerve damage. I remember when I was still in the hospital – this was back in 1972 – and the surgeon told me it’s just torn nerve endings making up shit because the extremity they’re supposed to transmit pain signals from isn’t there any more, and it’ll go away.

That was – quick arithmetic – damn near fifty years ago. Still waiting for it to go away. In fairness it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be. But last night it decided to make up for some lost time, I guess. I woke up at 1:30 by the bedside clock and I never did get back to sleep. It’s like being stabbed in the side of my foot, right out through the top, over and over every thirty seconds or so. And there isn’t any foot. Try sleeping through that.

Normally doesn’t last more than an hour or two but this time it finally faded around eight in the morning. I’m not as young as I used to be. Once I thought nothing of going a night or two without sleep but that was then. I was in a very bad mood all morning.

Big day tomorrow, I have to go to the big town about 50 miles away and get – and pay for – my new leg. Also other errands while I’m there. Some idiot backed into D&L’s truck in a parking lot and broke their tail light housing, and I’ve got an envelope full of money to get a new one at the Dodge dealership. Hope to score some frozen chicken breasts for TB at Wally World. Stressful. Tried to take an afternoon nap but never really slept – I’m just not a napper. It’s seven in the evening as I type this and I’m a zombie. Going to bed soon, hoping to catch up.

John Prine died.

Of “complications from COVID-19,” which is trendy but pretty meaningless. You could also say he died of complications from several bouts of cancer, too. I’ve been expecting this one.

He pretty much held title to my theme song during the period when I was plotting to leave California and head for the desert. I’d have added a couple of verses…

And a cool oldie from back when I was a teenager, though I confess I first heard the John Denver cover. This is way better. It’s the reason I spent years thinking of him as more or less in the same genre as Pete Seeger, though as far as I know nothing could be further from the truth.

When you get to a certain age…

This post has taken nearly an hour to compose and I don’t even know if it’ll show up on the blog. Gonna be one of those days, bandwidth-wise.

Given how many batteries I’ve had to deal with over the years, and how much I’ve bitched about contact corrosion, I never did a little study and let chemistry work for me. No, I was always the guy disconnecting cables and using abrasives. Which, in fairness to younger me, is how we did it in the auto shops.

Ian’s batteries have never given me a lot of problem but the main positive connection, which is the one on the upper right in the photo, has in the past few months positively bloomed with corrosion. Figures, since it was the hardest to get to in the box.

So this afternoon I suited and gloved up, grabbed an old toothbrush, mixed a bowl of baking soda and water, and went to war. I should have taken a ‘before’ picture: It was a short war. That method works great.

Which is good, because there’s about 20 connections on Landlady’s 24 smaller batteries that are turning green again and will shortly get the same treatment.

Just arrived…

Truth is I’ve been concerned that I might still be missing emails since the great email shutdown of a couple of months ago. Volume is still way off from there. But since I don’t use Microsoft anything, I wouldn’t expect the matter to concern them. So I guess I won’t be clicking the link.

😀 I was out yesterday on the regular Monday morning water run, and saw a lot more masks in the crappy little town nearest where I live than I did the week before. This being cowboy country, a lot of them were just bandit bandannas.

There are a few unfortunate traditions that have sprung up here at the gulch – I couldn’t tell you why, it’s no choice of ours, it’s just Murphy being Murphy. Among these is we only seem to go to the county dump on really really windy days.

Over the winter a bunch of garbage piled up here at the Secret Lair, that old mattress spring sending me over the point where I can just piggyback on other peoples’ dump runs which is what I usually do. It became necessary to actually take the Jeep and trailer to the dump, which involved convoying with D&L’s big Dodge truck. To keep it legal, Neighbor D insisted on driving the Jeep on the public parts which ended up more or less traumatizing him because of the noise, lousy ride, idiosyncratic shifter (damn you, LB), noise, lack of inside door handle, squirmy steering, and noise. I never saw anyone turn control of a vehicle over to someone else faster in my life. The Jeep is, well, rather worn-in.

None of this would have been a problem except that as it happened we chose a very windy day even by the standards of Spring, which can be very windy indeed. And dump day is just extra special when the wind throws every bit of loose garbage and all the stench back in your face no matter what.

I’ll say one thing for whoever chose this dump’s location – I couldn’t have picked a more godforsaken and otherwise useless place to put it and remained on the planet. It’s basically a moonscape with barely a weed in sight for miles and miles.

And I’m not qualified to comment on how well it’s run but it’s certainly enthusiastically run. Nothing stays above ground here long and they’re always digging and filling new fields of garbage. It’s a large county in terms of square mileage but it only contains like 2.5 smallish towns and lots of outlying homesteads. Considering the huge amount of garbage it collects, I really can’t imagine how more heavily populated places cope with it.

But on top of the wind and the stench and with that big dozer constantly stirring everything up – you can barely see the dozer in the pic for all the particulates it’s throwing into the air – I never come here without seriously needing a bath afterward. It’s basically hell, and I hope the workers are well paid.

So far it has the only flowers around – it’s still early in the season for Spring flowers – but it’s flowering more enthusiastically than I’ve ever seen it. Nights have been very mild with no hard freezes and none forecast for the next week.

Such a pretty day yesterday, with hardly any wind, and I got a lot of clean-up work done in the yard. Among which, I pulled away the fencing so I could remove the dead rosemary and all the blown-in tumbleweeds, mulch it with well-composted chicken shit and rotted straw, then slowly pour four big buckets of water over the lot. Then rearranged the fence before any cattle noticed.

It’ll never bear fruit, but it’s the most successful* of all the fruit trees we tried several years ago and I like it.

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* Loosely defining ‘successful’ as still alive.

Pretty day except for the wind so I don’t know what the problem is, but I apparently won’t be posting today.

We went to the Safeway in the biggish little town about 35 miles away this morning, and…

…people are taking this “distancing” thing seriously. First time I’ve felt happily comfortable in a public place since I don’t remember when.

Also, just an FYI because I’m not actually endorsing the product, if you’re upset over the hand sanitizer shortage and happen to have access to a feed or livestock store…

This is what Neighbor L is using. Just passing it on, I don’t know if it’s any good.

It’s doing quite well so far. 🙂

I hate that it always blooms in March, because the chance of a hard freeze before the buds mature is – well, pretty much definite. Not that there’s any danger that the poor thing will ever fruit anyway. Looking at it, if you live in a more fecund area of the earth you’d have a hard time believing that this tiny ‘tree’ is closer to ten years old than five. But every year it grows a little more.

Needs a good pruning. Alas I never learned how to properly prune a tree.

If you’re rigging a solar-powered electrical system for an off-grid home, it has become entirely practical to use lighting that bypasses the need for an inverter. In fact it’s so seamless as to almost be a problem; I have 12-volt DC and 120-volt AC LED bulbs that all fit the same socket, and some of the Chinese ones aren’t even labeled. So I have to carefully label the spares I have in storage.

This 12-volt residential LED business is relatively new. I went with all AC lighting when I first wired the cabin because the only DC lighting I was familiar with was automotive. And even then, as late as 2009, I had to go with CFLs because anything LED was out of my league.

Since then non-dimmable LEDs have come way down in price. The one big promise we were made 10-15 years ago was incredible longevity, and so far that has not been my experience. Your typical screw-in LED ‘bulb’…

…doesn’t have any better overall longevity than an old-fashioned incandescent. So you do have to stock spares. But LEDs are a helluva lot easier to live with than CFLs and lately the prices are bearable.

CFLs use roughly half the power of comparable incandescents, and LEDs use about half the power of comparable CFLs, which makes LEDs the only way to go for a small solar power outfit. And if you really want to get stingy with your power output, dimmable LEDs are your friend.

The real price difference these days is between dimmable and non-dimmable, so you have to choose your application. If you’ll never want to dim that light, spending the money there doesn’t make sense. All the lighting in the bedroom addition is 12 volt LED but this is the only dimmable one, a gift from Big Brother 3 years ago for the new bedside…

…and you can clearly see the obsessively professional manner in which I installed the dimming rheostat. This light has seen three winters and two summers so far, still works great, and more and more the rheostat is irrelevant because I virtually always keep it cranked low – just bright enough to light up that corner without blinding me first thing in the morning.

To my shock I frequently don’t even bother turning it off during the day and normally that would be a sin against the power system. Yesterday morning I noted the early-morning battery readout with no load at all. It was getting light but there wasn’t any push yet from the solar panels…

…and then I turned the light on…

…and it – eventually – had the following startling effect on battery voltage…

Actually at first there was no effect at all. In terms of power usage, when turned way down the thing is practically free.

In fact using it is so painfree that, as I said, it has lulled me into bad habits since I often don’t bother turning it off during the day, and even though it’s cranked way down that’s probably bad for its longevity. It’s a really nice little lamp and I don’t know what it would cost to replace.