The Ultimate Answer to Kings

I’m sitting here being lazy and waiting for things to warm up a bit before I put it in gear, killing time by watching a video on my phone. D&L told me on Monday that they might go to town this morning, so I wasn’t surprised to get a text. I don’t want to go to town today, so I texted back to say so and gave it no more thought.

But Torso Boy knows the sound the phone makes for an incoming text, and that the sound usually gets me off my ass and sometimes even results in a Jeep ride. So he considers incoming communication relevant to himself as well. 🙂

And they’ve been having a party. Saw tracks in the yard – Torso Boy smelled them first, which added spice to his regular morning ‘let’s go have a shit’ walky. Then I took a nice hour’s walk through the boonie, and fresh tracks were everywhere I looked.

I’ve got to refurbish the game camera, figure out why it’s become so lackluster and insensitive, get it reset and put it back out at the waterer.

Thought I’d give Torso Boy a little break from his boiled chicken & rice this morning, since I spaced on cooking more rice yesterday and what was left in the container was a little funky and we’re trying to solve intestinal problems, not install them. So I opened one of the two cans of locally-available soft food and gave him half. I expected him to dive right in. Instead he checked it out, took a few licks, and…

Are You F’ing Kidding Me. Little Bear would have ingested that with sufficient authority as to turn the bowl convex.

And I know it’s entirely my fault, that I’ve just spoiled him rotten and now I’m going to have to pay the price of convincing him that people food is for people and dog food is for dogs, and he’s a dog.

I know this, because this is what I had for supper last night…

…and you can believe he was all over me during the entire process, wanting his share. Which he didn’t get.

I’m paying for my sins. Unfortunately for him, I’m used to that sort of thing. So I’m going to win this.

I want to see how long it takes before somebody starts warning of a global rock shortage.

Good luck with that…

I LOLed and stole it from somewhere on the tubes…

Out on my walky this morning I saw something welcome…

Lots of very fresh mule deer tracks. Things have been very sparse around the Gulch lately; I’m not even flushing many rabbits and the coyotes are shitting juniper berries. But this morning there were lots of nice mulie tracks in the moist sand.

And something else, too, right among them…

…and at first I thought, wow, that’s way bigger than your average coyote. (I should have planted a boot print there for comparison but forgot) I got excited: Wolf? Maybe another feral dog pack? Continue reading →

This is Serenity, the old trailer that’s been my reloading shack for all this decade. I used to spend a lot of time there because I used to shoot my pistol a lot more than I do now. I wrecked my right shoulder 3 years ago and it’s been a long time healing. It was the better part of a year before I could even hold a .44 out straight, and working a press for any length of time was kind of an ordeal.

Now I’ve been getting the itch again, and again I’m relearning that OMFG COMMERCIAL AMMO IS STUPID EXPENSIVE! I can’t afford to shoot that stuff for practice, which means getting back into the reloading habit.

Unfortunately… Continue reading →

I just got back from helping D&L unload a full pallet of wood pellets into their garage…

…and as always it makes me question the value of wood pellets as heating fuel.

I get that pellets can let a stove run for hours on one load. I get that there’s less mess and labor than with cut wood. I don’t get where pellets offer any particular advantage over propane.

A pellet stove needs electricity to work – absolutely won’t function without it. When you live off-grid, there are going to be times when electricity is something of a luxury. Your basic home heating should not require electricity.

Even out here where services are often of … suspect quality, I know of three places that will trundle out to the boonies to sell you propane if you have one of those big tanks. There is no reliable supply of decent quality wood pellets. Oh, yeah: It turns out that pellet quality is variable between manufacturers, and makes a big difference in how well your stove runs. So when D&L can score a pallet-load of the good stuff, they run to nail it down.

D&L’s house is huge and has tons of thermal mass beyond number: they can’t afford to let it get cold the way I do nightly. In a really cold spell they go through sixty pounds – one and a half of those sacks – daily. So that big row of 40-pound pellet sacks might not be much more than a month’s supply. Leading to the last item in my list of “why do people use pellets:” It’s by far the most expensive option.

Lots of people use pellets around here – not so much in the actual boonies, but lots of townies do. There must be some advantage. I surely don’t know what it is.

Yes, Uncle Murphy visited D&L’s house this morning.

D&L have a big (YUGE) house with a big electrical system and an even bigger appetite for electricity. One gloomy day, and their batteries were done. No problem: That’s why they also have a massive, state of the art propane-fueled generator that starts up automatically…

Except when it doesn’t…

And so neighbor D, whom I may have mentioned recently had a stroke, was out trying to figure out why their faithful-for-six-years generator wouldn’t start. Wouldn’t even crank. If his brain were physically hitting on all cylinders he wouldn’t have needed any help from the likes of me, it was pretty obvious.

D is very good about maintenance. He’s positively neurotic about maintenance. No way the thing failed because it wasn’t being maintained. But the turnkey installation came with a small, sealed, maintenance-proof battery – over six years ago. It’s kept charged automatically with solar power. So the battery worked absolutely perfectly – until it didn’t. And when it didn’t, nothing worked. No warning.

As I said, normally D would have worked this out for himself without problem but he’s recovering from literal brain damage. So I came over and helped disconnect the battery. I didn’t have any way of load-testing the battery but all the fuses were good and the symptom (tickticktick) said bad battery. I admitted the battery might not be the problem, but anyway it was due so they wouldn’t lose anything by replacing it. The alternative, since I am not competent to figure out what else might be wrong with the complicated starting circuitry, was an expensive service call that at best would happen sometime next week. I left all the wires connected to the appropriate battery bolts so D shouldn’t need me to install the new one – but of course made clear they were very welcome to call me any time.

We had a lot of rain yesterday, and a YUGE storm last night. D&L took their Jeep through the mud to town for a new battery.

Just got the text: The generator works fine now.

In an intellectual sort of way I know that Blackberry has been around since (around) the last century. I’ve always associated it with self-important middle managers in cufflinks and suspenders, strutting around the cubicle farm talking into the air so we’d all know how ever so they are. Frankly, unless we’re discussing the actual fruit, “blackberry” is one of those words to which I have an immediate unfavorable reaction for no better reason than the above.

But late winter/early spring 2019 I started looking for ways to listen to documentaries or podcasts or whatever while hiking, and nothing was working for me. The phone’s speaker was too faint, an exterior speaker was too clunky, earbuds blocked out everything but the phone plus the cord was always tangling on things. Just before going to the Big City in June I experimentally ordered this thing…

…and damned if I don’t use it every day. It was super cheap, allows me to still hear what’s going on around me, the talky bit folds up out of the way so I don’t look like I’m playing Geezer Team Six all the time, the battery life is phenomenal, and in the unlikely event that the phone rings while I’m using it I can answer the damned thing with a single button push instead of digging the phone out of a pocket and fiddling with a bunch of uncooperative wires.

As it happens, D&L are having a bit of a generator crisis this morning and have called me twice – I’m leaving for their place in half an hour – and I was walking around listening to Ian’s monthly Q&A which I always enjoy. Prior to the headset, repeated (increasingly urgent) phone calls while I’m trying to follow a lengthy video would have been a real pain in my geriatric ass – but now one button push pauses the video and answers the phone. You can have your conversation and go back to the vid without a lot of hassle.

Here’s another way the Secret Lair has entered the last half of the twentieth century, with enthusiastic adoption of a form of technology I once turned my nose up at. 🙂

ETA: I spent the first para going on about Blackberries when the word I should have used was Bluetooth. You know: Those obnoxious blue earpieces that were all the rage among middle managers around the turn of the century.

D&L said Monday they were going Wednesday to the biggish town about 35 miles away. They also said it was supposed to be thunderstorms all morning.

I tagged along for the Safeway. They were right about the rain.

Oh for god’s sake where’s the “unsubscribe” key?

Sorry, there’s really nothing going on right now. Take care of chickens, tend batteries, bake bread, go for long walks. Nothing you haven’t seen a hundred times before.

As I’ve said many times before, I used to fill in the gaps with quacking about politics or news stories but I got tired of writing those several months ago – to be honest I’ve largely stopped even reading the news; has that guy in the white house been thrown out yet? I didn’t even turn the ‘pooter on yesterday.

Here are some pictures I took this morning…big files… Continue reading →

Any Leghorn hen who happens to be sitting on eggs will object if I reach under her to take them. Some just run away and squawk, and some will peck as hard as they can. But they can’t peck hard enough to do damage and seldom even enough to hurt – as former dinosaurs they’re really kind of sad.

Or that was my opinion before this afternoon’s chicken chores…

This is the first time any hen ever managed to actually draw blood on me. I was impressed.

I did in fact LOL.

I got the driver door inside latch handle fixed back in July but the guy couldn’t really get it working right because the hinges are bent and the upper one is cracked to where straightening it might just break it. I’ve grown so used to reaching out the window and opening with the (much more robust) outside handle that it took this cold snap to remind me to finish fixing the door. And to fix the door I need to replace the hinges.

But I don’t buy much online, outside of Amazon. What is a good parts outlet I can use to get new door hinges for a Wrangler?

Fired up the ‘pooter this morning for basically the first time in two days, to find an email from longtime reader Mutti with a link…

A SWAT team destroyed a Greenwood Village family’s home. Now, a federal appeals court says police don’t have to pay for the damage.

During a 19-hour SWAT operation in 2015, police tore out nearly every window of Leo Lech’s Greenwood Village home and reduced much of the interior to rubble.

In some spots, the damage was so severe the wooden frame of the house was exposed. But the city won’t have to pay for any of the damage its officers caused, even though Lech had no connection to the shoplifting suspect who chose his home as a hideaway from pursuing police, according to a Tuesday ruling by a federal appeals court.

Yeah, the damage shown in the photos published with the news article is pretty horrific. The short version of the story is that the cops basically tore down an innocent family’s house to catch a shoplifter.

Regular readers know that Uncle Joel loves to hate brutal police tactics and their effect on innocent people and society as a whole. But of course the story has a long version…

On June 3, 2015, SWAT officers swarmed the Lechs’ home on South Alton Street in Greenwood Village looking for Robert Seacat. Aurora officers tried to contact Seacat earlier that day for alleged shoplifting, but the man fled and randomly chose the Lechs’ home as his hideout. Seacat also had multiple felony arrest warrants, Haas Davidson said.

For five hours, officers tried to persuade Seacat to surrender. Seacat fired at least one round at police cars outside the home and multiple rounds after officers entered the home.

Aaaand that’s when the cops sent one of Obama’s armored cars through the front door and went all Blitzkrieg, property damage be damned. I’m surprised Seacat survived to be arrested.

Okay, from time immemorial American cops have taken an extremely dim view of being shot at. Even I can hardly blame them for that. In a nutshell, if you take a shot at a cop you have just ordained yourself a very bad day if they can possibly arrange it. And with the help of all the military equipment even tiny police departments in tiny American hamlets found themselves gifted in the past couple of decades, the cops can dish out a very bad day indeed – and often will. Officer Friendly doesn’t work here anymore if he ever did.

I know where I stand on the question of whether extreme police tactics are a net good or evil. But here’s an extreme example of damage that, the State would certainly argue, wasn’t really the responsibility of the police.

Here’s the scenario: The police are quite correctly chasing a multiple felon, a needle-using druggie, for a minor crime. The criminal holes up in an innocent family’s house – that’s not a minor crime – and with the knowledge that he didn’t fool the cops he takes a potshot at them. For the better part of the day the cops try to talk him out of the house but he ain’t moving. The cops go Rambo on his ass. Question: Who’s really responsible for this situation?

The offended family is understandably upset about the essential destruction of their house, and so would I be – they’re innocent victims. They want somebody to pay for the damage, and there’s no point trying to sue Robert Seacat. There’s talk of going to the Supreme Court to get the city to pay up – the family has already lost in court twice. But the city wouldn’t be paying the family, the taxpayers would. And they’re innocent, too.

Maybe I’m just getting old. I can’t believe I’m saying this. But I’m leaning toward “shit happens.”

Typed while wearing my heaviest coat…

Didn’t quite hit single digits at the temp sensor hanging from the porch’s roof. Didn’t miss it by much.

If the forecast is correct, and it’s been spot on so far, today should end up warmer than yesterday and then things will warm back up to seasonal over the weekend. I’ve got to get out in the cold early to give the chickens some liquid water and put their waterers out in the sun, and also check to make sure Landlady’s plumbing survived. But first I’ll flog the Lair’s woodstove for a while. Didn’t actually get that cold in the Lair overnight – back in the pre-propane days indoor temps in the 20’s weren’t that unusual – but it’s a matter of acclimation and right now low 40’s seems cold to me.

Sheesh…

There’s nothing unusual about nighttime temps in the high teens – but not this early in the season. And tonight’s supposed to do something extraordinary…

Single digits in October! This is good, it’ll test my new plumbing insulation while there’s still mild weather ahead to fix any deficiencies. Better the pipes freeze now than in December.

Or so I’ll tell myself. Either way, the bedroom heater keeps things nice and cool rather than huddle-under-the-blankets cold, and this morning I stoked the woodstove too much and the main cabin got oppressively hot. At the moment I’m typing this in a t-shirt, which is an abomination unto the woodshed. But the fire has burned down and the indoor temp will shortly become more reasonable.

h/t