The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Quite some time ago somebody, I think Big Brother, sent me a few packages of DIY pizza…

…and as pizza, especially for a single guy old enough not to be able to inhale an entire pizza in an afternoon, it has its limitations. I opened a box last week, made one pizza, and could barely finish it. The remainder stood around rather longer than was quite proper waiting for me to finish the package.

Today I finally decided that the box wasn’t going to get finished – at least not as designed. But I couldn’t let that open half-can of ground beef go to waste, and there was this package of perfectly good ready-mix pizza dough. And you know what I’ve never successfully made?

Meat pie! And it turns out, as expected, pizza dough is perfect while bread dough is not.

Yum! Needs some brown gravy, though. I’ll do that when I eat the rest this evening or tomorrow.

So maybe I should bend a principle and vote Trump after all. If only to wipe that look off Don Lemon’s face…

Somebody ought to tell these very smart people that this is not how you persuade others to your point of view.

I don’t even always mind people disagreeing with me when they’re in a position to enforce their opinions with cops and courts, because I don’t know everything and I’m not really all that smart.

But I do object to someone displaying absolute ignorance, at length, in confident and scholarly tones – to the audible mirth of his better-informed audience – learning nothing from what should be an utterly humiliating experience, and then casting votes locking his idiocy into enforceable law. Enforceable, let us not forget, with the very guns he claims to be saving his victims from.

This goes on too long but I urge your patient endurance: This is one of your rulers, your clear moral better, cheerfully and obliviously telling you what’s good for you and how you’re going to get it good and hard despite his not knowing one single thing about the subject.

h/t

I literally don’t recall a prettier day than we had yesterday…

Nary a cloud in the sky and shirtsleeve temps by noon. A day so nice I opened the windows for a few hours and aired out the cabin for the first time in months. So nice I took enough of an afternoon walkie to leave my stump raw and sore for the whole evening. So nice that I was tempted to hubris, as with yesterday’s unfortunate temptation of fate and even…

…brought my ebike out of storage to air up the tires, take a few turns around Ian’s place and check the battery. As if that could make any sense at any point in January.

So naturally…

I woke to the sound of rain on the bedroom’s metal roof, and of sepulchral laughter.

Just when the mud was mostly dry…

It wasn’t a surprise, I was actually a little surprised that it didn’t happen yesterday. Yesterday I filled two empty propane bottles which brought me up to entirely topped off – except for the one on the bedroom heater that was due to suck empty…

…which it did sometime overnight or this morning…

But that’s okay. When I first started using the bedroom addition winter before last it quickly became clear that A) I definitely wasn’t going to save that heater for “emergency” super-cold night use, despite any insincere promises to that effect made by Frugal Joel, and B) I definitely needed to acquire at least two bottles per station. I can’t just pop into town any time I want, and even if I could propane costs money. Have enough bottles that you can fill them as money and opportunity present themselves, so that every empty isn’t a big crisis. When I only used propane in the kitchen stove I could get along with a couple of bottles but now…

…the former chicken yard has pretty much been taken over by propane storage. 🙂 I’ve got six to eight more weeks of winter before the night temps stop dipping below freezing, and honestly I could easily coast through that without even filling any more bottles. So at least on that front, Uncle Murphy can kiss my ass.

Got the text from D&L right on schedule, and while they wended their way through drying mud with a ton of wood pellets in their truck bed I came down through the wash and unlocked their gate.

Before:

Pellets are a popular heating fuel around here but not so much in the boonies, for fairly obvious reasons. And D&L’s huge earthbag-and-strawbale extravaganza uses a lot of them, so they have to buy’em by the pallet-load.

After!

And I’m richer by a pallet. Pellets, pallets, whatever. Waste not, want not. 🙂

You heat your house in your way, and I’ll heat mine in my way.

Last few days the cell signal has been extraordinarily bad down here in my hollow. I expected better yesterday because the weather cleared up so nicely but it was not to be. So I was mildly surprised to find a good signal when I tried to move photos this morning after my walkie.

This time of year I make a game of noting exactly when the sun clears the ridge through my kitchen window. A tiny bit earlier every day, which is a good thing.

Day before yesterday the mud hit its worst; I had trouble getting the Jeep up Landlady’s driveway and it’s been a long time since that happened. In fact I basically slid sideways all the way back down till I got to the sand in the wash. Fortunately there’s not much to hit.

But we’ve had 1.5 sunny days since then and today’s supposed to be as nice – in fact we’re forecast to have quite a few days of sun – so I can fantasize that this extended period of sink-to-your-ankles mud will finally come to an end. Or at least a middle. With the clear nights the mud is freezing again, so I can take my morning walkie without fear of disappearing underground like in an old Tarzan movie…

…and it’s really really nice to be able to get out of the cabin for a while.

I hit the chicken chores then looped around off the road, coming home just as the sun was starting to melt the frost on the roof panels.

The sun did the batteries a world of good yesterday though they didn’t fully recharge. Today should see that done. I’ve just been sitting around getting barn sour for the better part of a week; it’s really nice to see some sun again.

Yesterday I had a winter treat; S&L invited me to bring a towel and use their shower – lots of hot water! My first townie shower since the end of June. And today if things go according to plan I’ll go over to D&L’s and help unload a pallet of wood pellets into their garage. So things might be getting a bit more social, at least briefly.

Seriously, I haven’t seen the mud this bad since maybe monsoon 2013. I genuinely didn’t think I would successfully get up Landlady’s driveway for morning chicken chores. It appears to have rained all night, which was not forecast so we’re in extra innings now, and the mud didn’t freeze overnight, and I wish I could show you the Jeep.

Torso Boy got stuck a couple of evenings ago, and that must be an alarming experience for a short-legged dog because it had an immediate effect on his preferred habits. Seriously, we were out for the evening poop when he found a patch of especially well-soaked ash and his paws disappeared into it. A longer-legged dog could have just pulled them free and reached for better footing but he found that difficult at first. He managed it himself just before I gave up on the situation and waded in to the rescue but since then he has refused to visit his habitual dumping ground. I can hardly blame him – this morning it was so bad he went out for the morning walky and just squatted on the ground next to the porch – he hasn’t done that since that bout of pancreatitis last summer. He’s just thoroughly sick of wading in mud and I’m not in a position to criticize.

My nice new batteries are down to 12 point two something volts, as low as I’ve ever seen them; this is the third straight day without a taste of sun. It’s supposedly going to change tomorrow, but then it was supposedly going to change today. Tomorrow I may actually have to run the generator to charge the house batteries; that has never happened since the solar upgrades started to bite.

How long does it take for seasonal affective disorder to kick in?

Rained all night, the forecast promises rain all day – and I do mean all day. I suppose if I were still counting blessings I’d accept the trade-off of very mild temperatures – it was almost 40^o when I got up at 5, I actively burned wood for less than an hour and that only to acknowledge that I’m getting old(er).

Honestly I have no idea how much water we’ve had fall here this winter, since probably less than half of it has come down as snow. It’s been a wet one, and the mud is so ubiquitous I’ve stopped using the upper part of my driveway almost entirely and on those rare and brief periods when I’ve bothered walking I’ve had to come up with alternate routes away from the cabin to avoid persistent bogs. Seriously. The desert has forgotten it’s supposed to be arid – if this is Greta Thunberg’s doing I’m going to track the annoying little tweener down wherever she hides and piss on her shoes.

I’d show you a picture I took of a problem with the drip edge on the porch roof, but the cell signal has been so poor the past few days that I can’t even transfer it to the ‘pooter much less upload it to the site. I’m not even sure this bit of text will really post. You know it’s getting bad when I of all people fret about roof flashing – but it’s not as though there’s anything else to do. I’m getting as barn sour this winter from the rain and mud as I was last winter from the cold, wind and high snow.

I could blame my sparse posting on poor signal quality and the excuse would be somewhat true – but mostly it’s because I spend almost all my daylight hours sitting in a chair and watching movies I’ve already seen or reading books I’ve already read and that’s not exactly scintillating blog fodder. When I take a picture I can’t post it. Uncle Joel’s becoming a grouchy old man who can’t wait for spring.

Heh…

Reporters expressed their grief and condolences as the violence they hyped has so far failed to materialize.

“Nobody has so much as fired a shot. This is an unbelievable tragedy,” said one teary-eyed MSNBC reporter, clearly caught up in the anguish of the moment. “It’s tragic that we live in a country where reporters who are just minding their own business trying to push a narrative can have everything ripped away from them in an instant when protesters refuse to shoot at people.”

It really is remarkable – the newsies spent all last week hyping this annual-though-currently-topical rally as the second coming of the KKK. Some feds even busted a couple of race baiters on cue just to give the thing some gravitas. And then the ungrateful gun-hugging hayseeds just show up, wave signs, listen to speeches and go home without shooting anybody. Sheesh – this must be a dark day at MSNBC, CNN, NPR et al…

Thursday’s rain was predicted but it wasn’t predicted to go on all day and night. It wasn’t even cold but I lit the morning fire just to dry out the interior. I planned on just hanging around the Lair and nursing my back, which I kind of messed up (again) hauling rocks and sand the day before. Then around mid-morning L phoned to say D was apparently having another TIA and she was taking him to the hospital. (sidebar: whoever she spoke to at the hospital was insistent about sending an EMT and clearly didn’t understand the situation at all. People have tried to get ambulances out here before – not the best solution if the patient can get into a 4X4.)

Anyway, of course I assured them I’d take care of the animals which of course I did. It turned out (apparently, I mean who really knows) to be a transitory thing, maybe a shot across his bow in terms of blood pressure though I know he’s really been watching his pressure and it has slowly been coming down, plus in his experience as well as mine “blood pressure medicine” often comes with side-effects worse than the condition it’s supposed to treat. But this is really concerning; he’s been doing really well and apparently on the way to full recovery but now I’m worried we’re just going to have to get used to living on a knife edge.

Anyway, yesterday (and today) my back still hurts and there hasn’t been anything cheery to blog about. It’s just sort of midwinter.

I’m having email trouble again, and have had for a couple of weeks now. I can’t get any incoming, apparently everyone who tries to send mail gets a bounce telling them that my inbox is full. You know me and computer stuff; so far I haven’t figured it out. Sorry but for now I’m in an email-free zone.

Okay, so here’s the situation…

Torso Boy, like any old man*, is a creature of habit. He has designated one spot in the whole world in which a Corgi may take a dump, and he abides by that decision with grim consistency. He simply refuses to shit anywhere else. Normally that’s just fine; it’s a good logical spot, convenient but out of the way and near the ashpit which makes cleanup easy.

Problem is, this has been a wet winter so far. It has been a consistently muddy winter, and that one spot…

…is just the worst for mud. (more below the fold, because there are quite a few photos) Continue reading →

Or maybe making the best of a bad situation, I dunno.

A few years back the float switch in the water tank failed, and characteristically it was quite a while before I noticed. During that time the tank overflowed any time the sun shined and it made a bit of a mess – to say nothing of wasting masses of water, a practice to which I object.

I jumped to the – logical in context – conclusion that the fault probably lay with the part that’s exposed to all that very corrosive water, and replaced the float. This turned out to do nothing, which moved the culprit over to the charge controller in the wellhouse…

…and I’m not competent to diagnose that nor in a position to replace it. But one thing the controller does have which proved very useful in the circumstance is a simple on/off toggle that bypasses all the nonsense.

At first I went into first-world-problem mode, grousing about having to stop at the top of the ridge from time to time and turn the pump on manually, and dreaming up schemes to replace the controller – even though I can’t be certain it’s really at fault.

Then, gradually, reality set in: Every problem I’ve ever had with the water tank level has snuck up on me, because I always depended on the technology to keep the tank full and over the years the tech has found quite an impressive variety of ways to let me down. Seriously, it has become a longish list; the system never seems to fail in the same way twice.

But the symptom that makes me aware of the situation is always exactly the same…

I never used to notice until that thing went dry.

So I propped that section of ladder on a couple of half blocks and – over months – finally developed the habit of stopping by once a week or so, climbing the ladder and looking inside to see what was what.

And you know? …okay, no, it still let me down last winter and I never quite nailed down why though I’m guessing it was a freezing thing with the one-way valve. It happened quick. So not perfect.

But statistically I’m still in a much better position to catch a problem before it leaves me without running water if I just behave as if the pump isn’t supposed to run automatically.

Beautiful day. Truly glorious, could hardly be better. I took a nice long morning walky, starting out with a light overshirt that ended up knotted around my waist – first shirtsleeves day in maybe two months, very unusual for January.

Of course the snow is melting so I’m paying for my pleasure with mud, but I’ll take it. The forecast says more snow in a couple of days but for today I’m enjoying the sun.

We definitely are sharing the place with cattle again, alas – and on the road next to new cattle prints I saw some really big canine ones…

That’s way too big for any coyote I ever saw; they tend to have rather small paws, at least around here. I’m not familiar with wolf tracks, it’s probably dog but they usually show more prominent clawmarks…

More than 3 inches front to rear. That’s getting near Little Bear territory, a quite big dog. There are rumors of strays around lately. Ferals can be more troublesome than wolves or coyotes or cats, because they’re not naturally afraid of people and sometimes downright hostile…

I…guess I can understand why this would be a big deal in the UK. But why the hell is every American news site covering it blow by blow? I’m pretty sure it’s not possible to care less about these two people than I always have – but now I’m developing an active antipathy that wasn’t formerly present…

Excuse the shot; by the time you dig out the phone, light it up, punch in the PIN, select for camera, the cattle – which have already spotted you and are running away – are just about out of sight…

And these aren’t any strays; they were glossy and fat and knew exactly where they were going, and I later saw them at the waterer. There were also fresh truck tracks at the watering station from just before the new snow, so I have cattle in my life again. Oh joy. I think it’s time to put Torso Boy back on the leash until I see how he behaves…

It’s been a wet winter so far and this was forecast, so I was dismayed but not surprised to wake to…

Yesterday was overcast all day without a break so the batteries are already starting at a disadvantage…

I don’t know if the sun plans to shine at all today but it sure shows no sign of it, so no cheating. Today we need every foot of solar panel we’ve got.

In fact I’m trying to talk myself out of taking the squeegee with me on morning chores and visit some older neighbors, just to be a boy scout…

It’s Thursday morning and I just got a call from D&L confirming they’re going to the big(gish) town about 35 miles away for D’s regular doctor appointment. This means:

A) I need to go feed their horses a little before noon, and

B) There are a few hours when I can practice with my pistol with a fair degree of assurance that nobody will complain about the noise.

So I rummage around in my ammo drawer, empty the pistol and speedloaders and fill them with reloads, and just as I’m getting ready to grab my ears and head out to the target I get a load of what’s laying on my desk…

That’s three entirely different – wildly different – sorts of ammunition, all for the same gun. Bottom to top: Very light .44 Special cowboy action loads, maybe 240 grain lead; mildly hot 225 grain Hornady Super ‘Splody FTX .44 Magnum; VERY hot 300 grain hardcast flatnose bear loads, painful on both ends of the gun, use only in damage-acceptable situations.

And that’s what I carry on normal days, for situations ranging from damn-that-stupid-jackrabbit to oh-my-god-a-bear. All for the same gun. 🙂 Can’t do that with a Glock.

Or should I say my back started hurting the other day, since it started as soon as I got out of bed day before yesterday and I didn’t do anything to deserve it. As usual I can stand or lie down comfortably enough but sitting (and walking) is painful and getting out of a chair can be a torment.

Today’s not nearly as bad, which is also normal so I expect it’ll go away as mysteriously as it came. I expect it comes from going on fifty years of walking funny, and I’ve had worse. Anyway, I haven’t spent any time at all sitting at the computer, which is of course why you haven’t heard from me not that there was anything upbuilding to say.

I missed a couple of beautiful days, too, which is too bad because today it’s all overcast. They keep pushing the snow forecast back, though: It was supposed to snow today but now they say tomorrow. Might or might not. We’re almost halfway through the three months I think of as winter proper here in the high desert, and so far it’s been quite mild in temperature but rather wet. I don’t really mind the cold, having gotten used to it by now and having a warm cabin I can retreat to but the mud gets me down sometimes.