The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Hi. Innumerate Joel here. Okay, so I had other things on my mind after getting home yesterday and couldn’t successfully complete a simple arithmetic equation. I expected (wild-ass guess) the leg to come in at an estimated $10,000 simply because that’s a nice round and completely absurd number. I spaced on the fact that the total bill is almost twice that, which in the clear light of morning makes a co-pay that’s only 150% of the original estimate sound almost reasonable by comparison.

And here it is!

Can you guess which is the new one?

The plan is to walk around on it for a week, then go back to town for any needed adjustments before it gets sent for the final socket to be made. Except that the real socket will probably be black carbon fiber, it won’t look greatly different than this.

That’s the good news. The bad news…

Somehow or other 20% of a little less than $20,000 comes to just under $3000 rather than the 2 grand I anticipated. Fortunately, thanks to kind contributors I can still handle it. Though it sharply smarts, it’s not the omigod disaster it would otherwise have been. Thanks, guys!

Yesterday was baking day. Around noon Torso Boy wanted out to pee, and we both alerted to a couple of dogs barking in the direction of Landlady’s place where no dog has any business being – and incidentally where we keep the chickens.

I had just started my dough on its first rise and had a few minutes, so I took my rifle overland to the other side of the horseshoe bend in the wash where I could glass the land in that direction. The dogs were still going at it but now it seemed they weren’t near Landlady’s but possibly farther up the ridge in the direction of SurvivalDave’s place. I couldn’t see anything but heard them clearly until they abruptly stopped barking. Continue reading →

This is my only burn barrel…

…2/3 of a barrel, anyway, and I scavenged it a few years ago from the county dump. Oil drum burn barrels don’t last forever and they’re like gold around here: I can’t believe how hard they are to find in a place where so many people burn trash. Sweartogod I could make a fortune on a truckload of old oil drums.

Be that as it may, this one still works but it’s past its halfway mark and I’ve been thinking of how to arrange an alternative. Landlady once had a plan for a permanent trash furnace made of concrete blocks and that might work; I know just how I’d build it but I don’t have the materials. What I do have is a bunch of scrap hardware cloth and some old stock fencing, so this afternoon I cobbled together this…

…and I have doubts as to its longevity. But trying and failing won’t cost anything of great value, and at least it’s lighter than an oil drum which will make dumping it easier.

First week of March, and the temp got into the seventies! It almost did it yesterday but with a punishing wind; today it’s a joy to work outdoors.

…and I think, “Okay, that’s weird but it’s probably just somebody trying to cheer themselves through a Michigan winter without taking a blowdryer into the bathtub.” Still, if I looked out my window during my Mr. Suburban Man period and saw that, I’d watch that neighbor closely for all the rest of the time.

But then in looking for a decent non-Twitter version of the video … I discover that it’s not just one weirdo with a unicorn costume. It’s a thing.

And that is deeply disturbing.

So I came down the ridge on the east side of the Lair this morning at about eight ayem after spending an hour on a very pleasant morning walky. Came into sight of the Lair and was reminded of something Landlady said last weekend…

She called my cabin “cute.” Cute!

I ask you…

Well actually…yeah, I guess. Maybe a little.

…when you come home from helping neighbors unload a pallet-load of sacks and say to your dog, “Okay. Break’s over, let’s get back to work.”

I have a shot at a better mattress that a neighbor wants rid of. No box spring, though, so I needed a sheet of plywood. Happens I have one sheet of siding I’ve had squirreled away in Landlady’s barn since 2017, and it’ll work.

Problem is, I forgot that the bedframe is kind of … improvised, and ended up screwed together a bit narrower at the foot than at the head because otherwise the headboard wouldn’t work. Naturally before I cut the plywood I only measured at the head. So rather than drag the whole thing back outside to re-cut it I spent twice as long improvising some more. Finally got it together.

Busy day, by my standards. I did Landlady’s batteries and still plan to do Ian’s but couldn’t go into his Faraday cage of a cave until I got my call from D&L who were coming home with wood pellets. So I worked on the bed until they called, and now I’ve finished that and put my tools away and I’m going to grab my battery-filling pitcher and head for Ian’s.

…and I know at least a few commenters have gotten their posts dumped to the spam locker recently, because I saw them recently and approved them. But that’s only because the sheer volume of gibberish automatically shoveled into the spam locker was briefly reduced.

Alas…

…the volume has ramped back up, and I woke to 30 new pages of spam this morning. Too much to wade through. So if you post a comment to the blog and it vanishes, my apologies but I probably won’t see it. Consider removing links and trying again, because I really do love the comments.

Thank these guys…

…and I was surprised to learn that the plan was for me to take it home and walk around on it for a week.

That plan didn’t work out, unfortunately, because in the course of fitting/adjusting/fitting it became clear that a needed adjustment was going to pretty much require partial reconstruction. So I have to arrange to come back on Tuesday morning – but that should be a short trip, followed by actually walking on the test socket and then somehow getting it back to the big town so the final socket can be made. A more complicated, but much more flexible process than I’m used to.

There’s amazing, and then there’s overwhelming.

Wal-Mart has its uses but I’m far too much the hermit to ever enjoy the experience. Lucky to get in and out without crippling anxiety.

That’s not a policy statement, it’s just that there are always trade-offs. I don’t present myself as an exemplar or even normal.

I get such a kick out of this place…

Neighbor L said she was going to the biggish town about 35 miles away to visit the Safeway and asked if I wanted to tag along. As it happened, I did.

The only food market in the crappy little town nearest where we live is barely first-world and perpetually seems on the slippery slope to its inevitable demise. The only thing it has going for it is isolation. Since I gleefully embrace that isolation I get into a Safeway maybe twice in a typical year and I always have to fight the impulse to stand in the door with my mouth agape, like I just dropped in from some village in Chad.

America: What a country. Land of glorious excess.

It’s like cutting loose an anchor you didn’t know you were dragging.

For the record I’ve known there was a small problem with the way my batteries were connected from the moment I switched on the first appliance.

I have two voltage readouts on the wall of the main cabin: The top one goes to the main battery bank, which powers the inverter. The bottom goes to the secondary bank, two older batteries that – until this morning – powered the cabin’s 12-volt lighting. The problem I mentioned above is that I imagined these two battery banks would be completely independent of one another but since I powered them both through one of my two charge controllers, there was unexpected feedback: A load on one bank showed up on the other.

Until this winter it was an irritation but not really a functional problem. But then an extended gloomy period that put real stress on the batteries affected the way both banks behaved; at least one bank showed signs of damage but it showed up on the readouts of both. Not long ago a second gloomy period stressed the batteries even more, and the problem became more pronounced.

The main bank is four nearly-new T105s which should be able to shrug off that rate of discharge many times in their lives. The secondary bank is 2 much older T105s that have been neglected, sulfated, stored discharged for extended lengths of time and generally the fact that they still work at all is a tribute to their creators. So I had a pretty good idea where the problem lay.

Note that the photo above was taken at about 5:30 this morning. The following photo was taken about 20 minutes ago, say quarter to 11, after I disconnected the secondary bank from the charge controller…

The problem with the secondary bank is worse than I thought, far worse, and the problem has been masked all this time by the feedback that was giving me false voltage readings for both banks. The main bank has been propping up the clearly failing secondary bank. Even when I knew or at least suspected I was getting false information I didn’t know how false until I completely disconnected the banks from one another and had a look that was unbiased by the feedback. In theory I could have harmed my new batteries if I’d let things carry on that way.

“If you come back and find me dead of it, you’re probably in big trouble.”

…and while it was irritating, the timing was impeccable.

Everything went great all the time we were working yesterday morning. Then, just as we were finishing the cleanup, I felt my leg’s socket get unacceptably loose and tell me the contact cement was letting go on that wedge that fell off a while ago.

I knew that repair was temporary, but had hoped to nurse it along until my prosthetist appointment this coming Thursday. But I didn’t fret, because at least in the interim I had acquired more epoxy and so could make a better repair. So I spent a couple of hours sitting around one-legged until the adhesive had a good chance to cure, and now all is as right as it’s ever been.

Landlady is on her way back to the Big City and I won’t see her again for about four weeks. I have a little finish-up work to do on her solar panel rack and it’s baking day, but other than that I plan to take the day off. Tomorrow is supposed to be more brush hauling but I’m dubious: It’s supposed to get 30 degrees colder and rain/snow, so finishing the paying gig might get pushed back a day or two. The part that had an actual deadline is long done.

For the record I ripped off this meme from Landlady, who’s substantially wittier than I am. Not sure if that’s significant in context…

Leave the jacks up till tomorrow morning, then remember to get hers back into her ride before she goes home. I still have to add some lag bolts to seal the deal, but all the hard stuff is done. Good thing too, because I’ve been working – not full-time, but physically working – every day since Monday and I need some sit time.

A veritable gated estate, constructed of the finest materials, accessible to only the finest, best bred, most high-income rat.

No wonder there was so little damage as rats nested in the wood. They didn’t need to.

They could just undermine the floor and nest under the slabs.

I’m gonna need a new plan here…

We were just finishing the clean-up from the morning’s work when I bent over and felt/heard a … ripping sensation.

…and knew I’d lost another old friend. Seven or eight years ago a neighbor was getting rid of a bunch of these canvas jeans, rather heavily used and requiring some patches here and there but fundamentally in good shape and much more appropriate for winter than BDUs. They’ve served me well, but this is the third pair I’ve retired this winter. Guess they’re done, and I’ll come up with something better before next winter.