When BB and I put a roof over the new front porch in 2019, at midsummer it became clear that I had one small problem. An hour before sundown, on the hottest days of the year when you’re really most likely to be out there with a cool one, the sun comes out from over the cabin and blasts right into your eyes. So I made a sunshade out of a piece of apparently immortal landscape fabric I had lying around and that pretty much fixed the problem. So it goes up sometime in May and usually comes down sometime in September, except that…
…it has the knock-on benefit of breaking up raindrops from rain squalls that come out of the north and smash right into the front bedroom window which, being salvage, has always leaked like a sieve. So I leave it up till the summer rain stops. This year it barely rained at all until late September, and kept it up till halfway through October. But I have to take it down before winter because I very much doubt it would support much of a snow load and I don’t want to ruin it. It came down today.
Also today…
I put my hillbilly water heater to bed for the season.
Pulled the hoses out of the heat exchange box, took them apart, and draped them over a juniper and down a slope to keep them empty so they don’t expand/contract and break loose all the scale that builds up inside and clogs the whole thing up. And that means…
…the new yard hydrant is in winter mode! And it’s not going to freeze and break at the very first cold snap like the old yard upright did last year – and most other years before that. Right? Right? Because it’s freezeproof. Right? (sob)
Finally! Uncle Joel succumbed to the siren call of materialism. Again. It got a bit nippy overnight, so I went out to the tin shed where I keep my seasonal stuff away from the mice and rats, and got out the winter blanket.
It’s just an old Navy blanket I bought at a surplus store – I dunno – well over 20 years ago, and it goes over the light all-year quilt that Landlady made for me several years ago, and along with the bedroom heater it sets me up. And I always liked it that way before. Kind of cozy. Except this year I thought, ‘y’know what? I kind of want some pattern there instead.’ So…
I actually BOUGHT A BLANKET I DIDN’T NEED. I’m a bad penniless hermit. But I like the way it looks better than the plain grey. Maybe it’s a sign of age, I don’t know.
Wanting to change things up is entirely OK.
Good for you, Joel!
When I was in the USN, I covered the grey blanket with a quilt that my grandmother and great-grandmother made by hand for me. The benefits of that were much greater than the color and warmth–it was a piece of home. Yes, I still have it.
It’s okay to be domesticated. I won’t tell anyone…wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
I love the blanket. It gives the place class.
I have three of those standpipes that try to freeze up over winter. Haven’t broken any, but when you want them to work and they don’t it’s a pain. When it’s cold and they get used, some ice builds up on the inside of the pipe. If you’re lucky, it only clogs the standpipe. If not, they break.
What I’m doing now is wrapping the aboveground section of the pipe in that black foam pipe insulation sold at the home centers. It gives a bit of extra useful temp range, and seems to keep the below-ground section from freezing. Still, I try not to use the standpipe when it’s below freezing, especially when it’s frick’n cold.
The home centers should carry such. I got mine at Home Desperate. The adhesive used to join the long seem sucks rocks, so cable ties hole it together. The current set is a few years old, so it’s fairly immune to UV from the sun. (I’m at 4000′.)
When I was a kid, there were a lot of surplus Navy blankets in the rural homes with somewhat limited heating arrangements . . . like the only real heat came from the wood-burning kitchen range and perhaps a similar heater in the living room. Upstairs bedroom heat was a matter of convection up the stairway.
We didn’t live in the country, but I had a Navy blanket anyway because Dad tended to turn the thermostat down at bedtime.