The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Yesterday afternoon it finally warmed up after a few seasonably cool days and some snow. It was Sunday, Landlady had returned to self-quarantining in the city and nobody was likely to call. I stripped down and had a much-needed sink bath.

And I was not yet entirely clothed when I got a text:

Hi Joel
Just noticed a white van taking stuff out of the shed at [TC] place??

And I pulled on my BDUs and boots and my .44, and Torso Boy and I headed out in the Jeep to see what was going on at TC’s place. Almost time for afternoon chicken chores anyway.

It turned out to be nothing bad – good, actually, a nice older lady who’s in the process of buying the place. TC died a few years ago and everything there has been bleaching alone in the sun ever since. Might even get some hauling gigs out of it. But the irony of the situation did occur to me, as it always does. How did I, the sketchy cop-hating loner, end up becoming the neighborhood’s cop?

I was away from the ‘pooter this weekend, sorry. Came back this morning to post the entry below and catch up on comments, seeing one that read in part…

Just don’t pretend you are some kind of self-sufficient hermit living in the desert, because you’re not. Every time you need something you post it on your blog, and… WHAT DO YOU KNOW… it appears.

Try it without handouts and let us know how it goes.

I don’t dispute that at all and – for the record – explicitly never have. In fact I have always been extremely careful about too enthusiastically patting myself on the back lest I dislocate a shoulder, and specifically avoid ever applying the term “self-sufficient” to myself specifically because I consider it an unrealistic and even undesirable goal. I stated that most explicitly here, and invite you to read the whole thing because despite it being almost 10 years old a lot of it still holds up…

At this point I would go off on a long, self-congratulatory riff about my rugged individualism – except that there are people who will read this and know better. That self-sufficiency thing again. I’d never get away with claiming it for myself because without the kind assistance of others I’d be working a counter somewhere and happy for the work.

Let’s take a look at that Secret Lair I’m so proud of. M supplied the land, and the water, and the transport for virtually all the lumber, and a huge chunk of the labor in framing, sheathing and roofing it. Landlady and Claire provided the place I’ve lived while building it. Sure, I’ve tried to pay back in kind but self-sufficient? Hardly.

And yes it’s true that in the past five years my standard of living has improved dramatically, due to regular help from Big Brother and also Patreon and care package supporters to me personally and to this blog. I used to live on $30/week and now it’s more like $300/month. I never hid that, any more than I hid the fact that from 2009 through 2015 I lived on shit-shoveling and grunt work gigs, often detailed on the blog. Since 2015 the cabin is much improved, as are my clothing, food and weapons. I’ve also droned on at length about how when I need something it does have a habit of turning up. Search the blog for the word synchronicity, if you have a lot of time on your hands.

I’m not speaking with rancor, I’m just saying – I never claimed differently.

…and you can’t bear to part with the corpse.

Several years ago I inherited maybe half a dozen pairs of baggy canvas jeans from a neighbor. They were already in the “popping mysterious holes for no apparently rational reason” phase of their decline. I only wore them in winter, and when they popped new mysterious holes I patched them. Some of them, I patched a lot.

Behold my favorite – and most-patched – pair of winter pants…

This winter multiple pairs of winter pants had simply had enough and began doing worse than just adding holes, and it was time to do the unthinkable – I actually bought new pants. Some are so new they’re not even out of the package and won’t be until November. But while I have officially replaced my winter pants, I couldn’t actually bring myself to, you know, throw the old ones away. Yeah, that’s right. I’m that obnoxious grandfather who won’t shut up about “the depression.”

Anyway – I finally found a way to assuage my sense of guilt. I needed a new roll bag for my revised and expanded Jeep tool kit, and so…

I think I can let go now. A piece of it will literally always be with me.

Landlady came up this morning with care packages!

Longtime Reader CH sent something that caused one of my sins to be remembered…

…a whole bunch of .44 Magnum brass, which reminded me that in the Fall I moved all my reloading stuff to that new bench I built early last year and then never set it up. Need to look for a plastic shelving unit at the hardware because that’s what held me up – and this new ammo crisis and the advent of Spring will hopefully get me off my lazy ass and get reloading again. I stopped when I racked up my shoulder but that was years ago and only inertia stops me now.

I think Terrapod sent this…

…and you might be thinking, as I did for a moment, “Why is somebody sending me one shock absorber?” But that enclosed sticker clued me in to what it is, and believe it or not…

…yeah. I could maybe kinda sorta use that. In fact it might the last element in fixing what was for a while an alarming case of death wobble on pavement, which rarely bugs me because the Jeep so rarely sees pavement, but still. That was almost telepathic.

The same package contained a whole set of combination wrenches and some other stuff…

…most of which will also end up permanently in the Jeep, seriously upgrading its complement of tools which have always been a little ad hoc and occasionally embarrassing.

Thanks, guys!

And then I got a completely unexpected package from Ian. Check this out and marvel in frustrated envy…

That, friends and virtual neighbors, is not only a copy of his new book but the fanciest, most limited of limited editions of his new book. I got paid, and pretty handsomely, for being one of its text editors and so of course I possess digital copies of both the text and the galley proofs but a copy of the actual book was not in the agreement; this is just generosity on his part. I’m reluctant to even take it out of its shrink wrap, though of course I’m going to. And then I’ll sew together a nice cover to protect it from the desert dust.

Here’s something I didn’t know about until just now: Look at the attention to detail here…

That’s the included “from the library of” sticker, a nice but mundane touch until you look at the engraving; not only fancy scrollwork but also both sides of – what else – a MAS-36. I wonder who he got to do that?

Thanks, all! Out of the blue, this turned into a significant day.

We’re really wind-testing the panel rack improvements today.

We’re not getting gusts quite of the magnitude that wrecked it last month, and it’s very substantially stronger now so I know intellectually that there’s nothing to worry about. But on such matters I tend to be a worrier, so I prowled around it looking for creaky bits this afternoon. Didn’t find any.

I went back to where I dumped that rotted-rat-infested water, with a mind to toss the carcasses farther downhill with a shovel and then pick up the bucket.

…and there was nothing left of the rats but a tuft of fur.

It’s true that a dead body doesn’t last long when left alone in the desert. I have some experience with that. But I do not have any notion of what sort of scavenger would have found these particular bodies enticing.

Our grave national crisis needs a theme song, don’t you think?

I’ve been a Weird Al fan since I truly don’t remember when but I do have one problem with his videos: Most of the time he’s parodying some forgotten band’s schtick but since I’ve never been much of a pop music consumer I have no idea what the band or the original song is.

I don’t know why everybody says self-quarantine is boring.

Simple steps can make it quite enjoyable.

First, be born a neurotic introvert misfit loner.

Second, spend most of a long life being miserable in various cities, constantly chafing under conditions everybody else seems to think are just fine.

Third, give up on the wisdom everybody has been telling you for decades and deliberately head out to be a penniless desert recluse. What could possibly go wrong?

Then just do that for a couple of decades. Takes a while to get it right.

Profit!

Last couple of times I’ve been in Landlady’s barn I’ve detected a hint of corruption, as when a rat picks an inconvenient place to die.

Found out what it was this morning. Somebody – I won’t mention any names but he might be identified by an unorthodox number of intact limbs – by complete happenstance left a bucket under a leaky spot in the roof over the very wet and rather mild winter. Said bucket filled with water. Said water attracted several rats.

That right there would normally be a good thing, as anything short of bubonic plague that kills rats is normally a good thing. Except somebody didn’t realize the situation had ensued until this morning, when he innocently poured out the bucket. Ever see a packrat swelled to the size of a gopher? The smell was – memorable. I’ll spare you the pictures.

She reads the blog and knew about Torso Boy’s digestive system oopsie…

It seems Wal-Mart’s chicken breast shortage was temporary, so she gave me a few to tide TB over (hopefully) until I can restock. So whether or not he’s happy about it, he’s back on his bland boiled chicken and rice diet.

…when all sporting events have been cancelled…

He’s got a bunch of these.

I was just putting away my going-to-town stuff, and it occurred to me I don’t think I ever mentioned my alltime favorite folder…

Nothing fancy, just a Griptillian I’ve had since sometime in 2002. Bought it in a sporting goods shop in Oakland California, and it was my everyday knife until mid-2008 when I started carrying fixed blades. It’s still my go-to knife for when I dress like a real person.

By my standards it was absurdly expensive – it’s the most or second-most expensive knife I ever bought but time has validated the expense: It hasn’t worn out, it has worn in. That sliding bar makes it what would have been called a gravity knife when I was a kid; you pull the bar back and give the blade a flick, and you don’t need the stud. Locks up nice and tight – as tight now as the first time I opened it – and the action has gotten nothing but smoother over the years though like any folder or automatic it doesn’t much like sand. We’ve got lots of sand here and anyway I carry so much other stuff on my belt that it didn’t make sense to keep using a folder every day.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a folder and can drop a little over a hundred bucks for something you’ll probably use for the rest of your life, I can recommend this one. I gather they’re still made and still popular.

Yeah, just a pancreatitis flare-up, and probably my fault: In hindsight tossing him the skins off those chicken thighs I brought home on Friday was not as cool as he thought it was at the moment.

Yesterday he was sleepy most of the day, though he perked right up at the mention of a Jeep ride and he was getting up to drink and going out to pee pretty normally throughout. Had a good night, a very light breakfast of canned food (I’ll see if I can score more chicken breast today but not hopeful) and a much more pooplike morning poop.

Three people hit the tip jar and not in trivial ways, and though I appreciate that beyond words I also feel a little bad about it because he would have had to be much sicker than he ever got before I was going to take him to a vet, and I hope you don’t think I was soliciting funds on false premises. Actually I hope you know I wasn’t soliciting funds at all.

In about an hour I have to go to the big town about 50 miles away for my prosthetist appointment, so pray for us sinners. More later.

Going for a ride? Wanna go with!

Kept us both up all night shitting liquid. I doubt it’s his diet this time, though I do note that he just came off his bland boiled chicken & rice less than a week ago when I ran out of chicken to boil*.

He’ll be fasting today, and then we’ll see if he eats kibble. Last October I was in a position to do the “$500 for a blood test, please” veterinarian but not this time – but I wonder what would happen if I crushed up one of these little Loperamide Hydrochloride pills and fed it to him? They’ve been known to dry my ass right up.

—
*Ironically that would make TB an indirect victim of the Kung Flu panic, since he’s been eating out of those 10-pound bags of frozen chicken breast parts no longer to be found at Wal-Mart.

The well water here is super hard, and anything immersed in it eventually becomes encrusted in calcium. It really does a number on the working bits of a toilet, as I long ago learned to my great inconvenience. Even when everybody isn’t freaking out about the plague du jour I can’t just hop in the car and head down to the local hardware any time I want. So if I know I’m going to have problems with a particular part, no matter how far in the future that trouble is likely to pop up, it really behooves me to have a Plan B handy.

When the toilet started leaking recently I was very pleased with myself that I could just amble out to the powershed, bring in my spares, and replace all the leaky bits, no problem. It wasn’t always so, but I do learn.

D&L wanted to go to town this morning, which is not on the usual weekly schedule, because they wanted to stock up on alfalfa pellets for their horses. They’ve been transitioning from hay bales to pellets because their white horse Bud is old and having trouble chewing and not at all because Neighbor D has had two TIAs in less than a year and can’t toss hay bales like he could before.

Anyway…

Getting them loaded is simplicity itself, but…

Unloading is a tad more strenuous. Still way easier than hay bales for a couple of old men, though.

I’ve heard about runs on guns and ammo around the country, and thought I’d report on doings in my little corner of paradise. There’s only one place to buy ammo in the whole little town nearest where I live, and no retail gun outlet at all (which always perplexes me. I guess people just grow used to driving longish distances for lumber and long guns.) Anyway, I was in there (the local drug store) last week and everything in the ammo case was fully stocked, but this morning their stock was showing a bit of strain…

But nothing like some of the impassioned descriptions I’ve read about on the Innertubes.

“In Aesop’s fable about “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” the moral of the story isn’t that the townsfolk should have believed the boy. The moral is that the boy shouldn’t have destroyed his credibility by falsely screaming wolf time and again.”

A dose of skepticism may not be the safest course. But given the current credibility of the news industry, it’s not irrational.

I mean, what are the chances?

Exactly the same count, three Thursdays running.

I mean, it makes sense that Thursday will average a higher count. I currently split chicken chores with the neighbor who actually owns most of the chickens; she does it mon-wed and normally collects and counts in the morning. I normally count in the afternoon, so from Wednesday to Thursday is more like 30 hours. So, yeah. But exactly 16 eggs?

If there are eleven eggs tomorrow I’ll start to worry a bit. Maybe the chickens are plotting something? Chickens normally can’t plot how to safely cross a room. Or so they want us to think…

It started raining right around dark, and apparently rained on and off all night. Then we got this stuff, whatever it is…

It’s been the wettest winter I can recall, but so mild there’s been relatively little snow. And it was so nice all month as to tempt me to hubris. Hah! Tempt, but not persuade. So the woodstove was ready for the weather this morning. And the next several days are supposed to be more of the same but colder, so I guess I’ll bring in more wood for the first time in literally weeks. There’s nothing weird about March lulling you into hope and then crushing your dreams.

I just got a call from Neighbor L, who’s scheduled to go with me to the big town about 50 miles away for my prothesis appointment on Monday. But she just heard that that town got its first reported case of Kung Flu and now she wants assurances that a) the office will even be open, and b) every surface in it is covered with antibiotic substances so thickly that no microscopic lifeform can possibly survive there. And I understand her concerns; they’re both well over 70 and Neighbor D is health-compromised to say the least. So I’ll call at 9 and get that information.