The Ultimate Answer to Kings

In his defense he was provoked.

There’s a heavy-duty carabiner on the end of Tobie’s heavy-duty rope, so that I can clip it to a heavy-duty loop of braided 550 cord that I slide over my heavy-duty belt – all against the moment when Tobie decides to launch after something while my attention is elsewhere.

It doesn’t happen often – Tobie is a lot less impulsive about such things, or maybe a lot less ecumenical about what he’ll surrender to his impulses over, than Little Bear was. THAT was a dog who needed a heavy-duty walking leash, that I didn’t ever dare take my hand off. But still – when Tobie does give in to the temptation to launch after something, he does it right. And this isn’t the first belt he’s broken.

The first time, he broke the plastic stiffener that’s sewn between nylon layers. I bought a more expensive version of the same idea: This time the stiffener held up but the ratchet teeth broke off. I had a hell of a time getting the belt off my pants. Now that I’m on Social Security I’m going to try the real thing, forgetting the chinese knockoffs. I like this style of belt but the cheap copies are the weak point in my “no you can’t chase that elk” strategy.

Yes, it was an elk. They’re suddenly all around us. Tobie went nuts yesterday over something I couldn’t see, and when I went outside with my rifle to save the day he had just been baying at an innocent elk in the wash. This morning when we got to the road at the top of the ridge there were tracks everywhere so I knew they were around and should have been paying more attention: One broke cover and Tobie saw it before I did. I was looking elsewhere and not holding the leash. Expensive mistake.

Terrapod asked…

Hey Joel, how is that Carhart winter coat holding up? Is it time for a new one yet?

My nice Redneck Cartier coat came to me in January 2017 after a rather convoluted drama, and I was delighted with it. This isn’t Minnesota and I’m retired from 8-5 work so even though it’s eight years old next month…

…it’s still in fine shape. A little faded from washing, a little frayed around the cuffs, but that just means I’ve loved it till it’s a little real. Not in need of replacement. And it’s coincidental that I should have seen Terrapod’s question this morning, because…

This very morning it got taken out of the closet for more than autumn inspection for the first time this winter.

I love this coat, and it’s the first real big-boy Carhartt coat I ever owned, made possible by a generous donation (by Terrapod, if I remember correctly), and the story of how I ended up with this particular one is, as previously implied, a little involved. Terrapod sent me one for Christmas 2016, and it arrived at my maildrop in the Big City just in time to miss the care package delivery so I didn’t get it here at the Gulch. But by wild coincidence that was the first time in six years I was going to the city to visit with Landlady so the coat was there when I got there. The coat was one of those tan jobs with the corduroy collar and quilted lining, size large, and it fit me like a tent. I really wanted this coat but looked up at Landlady and she just shook her head sadly.

Well, no problem, Terrapod had thoughtfully included the Tractor Supply receipt and those stores are all over this state, so a couple of days later I went to a Tractor Supply in hope of making an exchange. Unfortunately this particular city resides in a region where “winter” is just a way of saying “less hot,” and the store didn’t stock coats at all. Lots of Carhartt merch, but no actual coats. Now I was really bummed.

But on the way home at the end of the week, our route took us through the big town about 50 miles from the Gulch, which is in the upper part of the state at about 7000 feet and does contain a Tractor Supply, which surely stocked Carhartt coats. We stopped at the store on the way through.

It was the first week in January and very cold, snowy, windy. I struggled out with my coat still in its bag, clutching the receipt. I’m the poster boy for social awkwardness and had kind of been hoping Landlady would handle the ‘talking to strangers’ phase but she elected to stay in the warm car. Nevertheless the people in the store were very friendly and quite willing to let me exchange the too-big coat for whatever I could find on their rack. Ha! I should have been warned by “whatever I could find on the rack.” It was the week after Christmas after all. The racks were terminally picked-over.

I found some size large coats that were too big, some size medium coats that were too small, a few oddballs in obnoxious colors I didn’t want. And one single black chore coat with a sherpa lining that fit me like it was bespoke at Kingsman Tailors. The only thing that could possibly have improved it was if it came in green. I snatched it immediately: They logged the exchange at the counter and that was that.

And I’ve taken very good care of it ever since.

Two mornings ago Tobie woke me, very excited, to announce that something extremely important was happening outdoors and that I should get up immediately and let him out to investigate, defend against and/or consume, as the situation may demand. I told him to shut up and come back when it was light enough to see, then went back to sleep.

Surprisingly, the situation still obtained when I finally did get up and took him outside for a first pee. Across the wash, maybe 150 yards from the porch, the ground rises to a mud-flat with lots of brush and then to a bare rocky slope that steepens but never quite becomes a cliff, rising about 50 feet before it flattens out again. Up that slope there used to be a regular game trail, and it wasn’t unusual to see elk climbing it in single file. But starting nine years ago when the cattle took over, elk became rarer and finally disappeared entirely.

Elk are well camouflaged and my eyesight is going so even though Tobie stood on the driveway and pointed them out to me I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary at first: but then some of them saw us or caught our scent and started pronking up the slope, so that their motion was undeniable even to my eyes. I saw four of them and there were probably more. Welcome back! Ironic since just lately I’ve seen a small gang of cattle back in the general area.

Then this morning I found small hoofprints that could pretty much only have been made by a mule deer, which I also haven’t seen around here in a few years.

The native ungulates don’t seem to like sharing space with cattle, for reasons I don’t understand. Hard to imagine that the cattle would bother them, with the possible exception of the breed bulls. When they’re around they’re not shy about using the cattle’s waterer, but never when the cattle are around.

…and unless you give me some warning my everyday rig is, you know, gonna be what I wear every day…

But I didn’t know we were going into town. So I got stuck trying to tuck a low-rise holster under a hoodie that pretty much stops at the waist.

We were just supposed to go to the dump today.

No big deal. And no reason to put on townie clothes.

Didn’t know till we were done that L had errands she wanted to run in town. And while we were there I should take the time to get some more eggs.

In this particular town it really doesn’t matter. You see people walking around with open sidearms all the time. But since the law that forbade concealed carry changed over ten years ago I got into the habit of covering my gun just because I don’t like attention, positive or negative. And now here I was buying eggs with my Arex hanging out. It was kind of irritating. If I’d known we were going to town I’d have worn something with a longer hem, is all.

On the way home I reflected on the nice sunny warm day, and decided to break a(nother) personal rule.

If I could get home while the sun was still beating on Ian’s solar panels, I was going to chase the pressure pump’s effect on the batteries and have maybe the last shower of the year.

Gad, I love that shower. You really don’t know what a blessing the simple shower is till you’ve gone a decade or two without one.

…I had to find a source for new cutting chains before I could convert that pile of juniper in my yard into firewood. Oh, I sharpened the one chain but it never went particularly well and I was spending more time filing than cutting. I went to the saw shop in the crappy little town nearest where I live, and that’s when the other shoe fell concerning my off-brand electric chainsaw. “Oh, we don’t stock that size chain. Don’t think anybody does.”

So I went online. I hate buying stuff with sizes online. But to my utter amazement…

…when my two new chains finally arrived yesterday, they fit the bar! Which meant I could finally finish that part of winter woodcutting.

People, I had One Cut Left before I was completely done with the chainsaw. One! But…

Don’t get me wrong, I was happy to get that far toward done. But still. Murphy was snickering over my shoulder.

Now I have to split all that stuff in the wheelbarrow. Then…

…break out the Sawzall to knock those pallets apart, and…

Chop what’s left into stove lengths with the table saw. I’m really pushing the firewood thing this year: Normally I’m done with this before November. But I’ve been feeling like an old man for the past couple of months, and letting small setbacks stop me.

Tobie helped…

Even since he was a puppy he’s been such a good boy about just hanging out and amusing himself while I work in the yard. He doesn’t need constant validation, he just wants to be where I’m doing stuff.

Hey, I saw something cool in the sky yesterday while I was taking in the laundry.

Two suns! I expect there was a bunch of ice crystals in that cloud that the light was reflecting from. I don’t remember ever seeing that before.

Another ton of wood pellets at D&L’s place.

Unlike other times I had to take prior precautions to make sure I had two functional legs for this one. The knee is feeling better but this wasn’t the time to indulge in a 10-mile hike or something equally stupid, because…

L can get them off the pallet and onto the tailgate but of the three of us I’m the only one who can still haul 50 bags from the truck to the pile.

And in the end…

…I got some nice hardwood for the woodstove.

Which makes it hard to get your chores done, to say nothing of explaining all those truncated walkies to Tobie the Peripatetic Mutt. But…

…my right knee, which is my only intact knee, started going south on me about a year and a half ago. Just an annoyance until this past week when I got out of bed and couldn’t even fully flex it. I expected to have trouble with the left one when I got old, it was put back together from little pieces. Ironically it’s fine. It’s just the stump that keeps fraying at the end.

The right one got operated on twice: Once to install a big metal spike through my shinbone, then again to remove the spike when it worked its way out and wrecked the cartilage in the knee. I had trouble with the knee for a while in my twenties, then it seemed to heal. Part of getting old is finding out that all that self-congratulation for your healing ability was just waiting to bite you in the ego.

So I’ve been sitting a lot, and taking a lot of ibuprofen and slathering the joint with menthol-smelling goo. It’s not as bad as it was, but I don’t think it’s really going to get better. Maybe next year’s building project will be adding a lame-old-man ramp to the porch.

I think this is as long as I’ve ever gone without posting when the blog was actually working: Sorry about that, just haven’t been in a very talkative mood – besides which nothing special has really been going on. But I have at least been keeping up with the daily stuff, if sometimes only minimally. This morning dawned pleasant, so I caught up with some laundry…

…and that’s probably all the excitement there’ll be for the day.

It’s kinda funny that my most constant seasonal cue is that tree, right across the street from the water vending station Neighbor L and I go to every week.

I guess because there’s nothing better to do while waiting for water bottles to fill than look at the trees. I don’t have much in the way of trees where I live. And that one won’t raise my spirits for another six months or so, when it buds out again.

Speaking of winter…

I reached another milestone this morning, with mild fingertip frostburn for the first time. Picked the wrong gloves.

Speaking of trips to town…

Tobie has become completely spoiled with Jeep rides. He’s plenty old enough and plenty smart enough to know that he never gets a ride when I load the water bottles into the Jeep, and he never used to give me a hard time about it. He just goes to his bed and shoots Guilt Rays at me till I’m gone. But this morning he apparently figured that since Jeep rides have been so abundant lately it was worth a try. Imagine that imploring stare while his hindquarters oscillate so hard you expect them to unscrew from his frontquarters. Alas, Tobie, I’m an old hand at this by now. You can make me feel guilty, but you can’t make me change my mind. You’re not gonna die.

And the last harbinger of winter…

…these damned things. And the poor battered tailgate of my poor worn-out Jeep, which couldn’t take a mild knock from a rolling propane bottle. Shouldn’t have loaded it like that.

Nice sunny day, though. Might hit sixty. So it’s not quite winter yet.

In the Spring my redneck water heater’s hoses were so full of loose scale I couldn’t get any pressure out of the spigot at all. Took forever to clear it all out. I swore that this time I’d take the whole thing down, drain the hoses and leave them on a slope for the winter. Doesn’t take long.

So for the record I did that this time. Putting it all back together will take much longer – but I’d almost certainly have to do it anyway, so this way I at least save the effort of clearing out the inside of the hoses.

This sort of thing has happened before but not for a long time…

The dough basically doesn’t rise in the bowl or the bread pan at all. Stuck with the option of throwing it away or baking it and seeing what will happen I elect to waste some time and propane, and this is the result. Would have been better off not baking it.

What did I do wrong? Probably I absently failed to include some ingredient. Nothing came to mind but I was a little hung over at the time. Anyway: This was useless so it fed the birds and I tried again…

Happily it was a bright sunny day so it didn’t hit my batteries at all. And this one came out fine. Exactly the same recipe. Sometimes life is an adventure, if by adventure I mean sometimes I screw things up for no apparent reason.

Keeping me company while I took laundry off the line…

He’s not always so dignified. Last Sunday at a get-together on SurvivalDave’s deck he met two ladies he doesn’t see often – and we’ve never met a female human he wouldn’t immediately abandon me for. He got so excited that at one point he had to leave the deck and throw up. He did at least have the dignity not to do it on the ladies.

When I picked the fruit in August I had a lot of trouble with the tall vertical branches in the middle, so I determined that before winter I’d prune them off. I hesitated, of course, because that’s a pretty major operation on a tree I don’t want to hurt.

But I think it’ll be more manageable next time the tree fruits.

Tobie had his dinner and immediately began harassing me for his evening walkie. No problem; beautiful day, can’t wait. We got to the top of the climb on the beaten path between the Lair and Ian’s Cave. The moon was just coming up over the eastern hills and it was perfect. I had to have a picture of that. A few minutes later and the light would be all wrong. Of course all I had with me was my phone and that wasn’t up to the job…

Okay, I’ve gotta go home right frickin’ now and get a proper camera. Tobie, no lover of landscape photography, hadn’t yet begun the main business of the evening walkie and wasn’t about to speed things up just for me. He has his own ideas about aesthetics: A proper poop must involve exactly the right setting, the right mood. You can’t rush art, Uncle Joel. He tested and rejected four or five widely-spaced poop spots – toward the end I swear he was just doing it to annoy me.

At last the deed was done and I rushed him back to the Lair with what he clearly considered indecent haste. Got the Treat Ritual out of the way with very little ceremony and rushed into the closet to grab my small camera body. Never mind the lens, it’s probably already too late!

And it pretty much was: The light was going and the moon had already shrunk.

We’re all on wells, we all built our own electrical and plumbing systems, we’re all on solar power which doesn’t always work even in the desert, none of us knew what we were doing, we all get dry water tanks from time to time. But when you take the path Ian and I did, a dry water tank is a much bigger deal.

There are two possible approaches: A standard 110v pump that moves 6-10 gpm at the cost of massive but periodic amperage, or a 15v low-flow pump that runs near-constantly (in daylight) at low amperage, with a much simpler electrical plant, at the cost of, well, low flow. We built that second thing. And now, ten days after I fixed that check valve that emptied the tank …

…the water tank is nearly but still not entirely full. First snow of the season and some cloudy days didn’t help. But I’m at least now sure I fixed the problem and can stop rationing well water.

Due to a parallel but unrelated problem with Ian’s electrical system…

…it took a long time to catch up with laundry. Ian’s electrical was more or less trouble-free for all the summer, which caused me to forget all the trouble I had with it last winter after replacing his eight worn-out L16s with eight much smaller T105s: The trouble being that his pressure pump is a huge amp draw that can easily suck the batteries down to the system’s cut-off point and there’s not enough sun to counteract the effect.

Even in summer the pressure pump is on a 12/12 timer because it’s just really important that the pump not be allowed to run at night. But even at peak solar input the amp draw from the pump is twice what the panels can bring in, and if the batteries get to 80% charge the whole damned system shuts down. And in winter it takes days to fully recharge them with full sun and minimal drain.

So I have to be careful about the washing machine, showers are right out, and I have to keep the pump turned off most of the time. The fridge is also on a timer, and the daylight schedule has gone to 2 hours on/off which is enough to keep frozen stuff frozen without stressing the batteries. Unless, of course, we get a few gloomy days which throws everything off. Basically, that big pump requires bigger batteries and a better-placed solar panel array than it has or is likely to get.

I could – and might – bring the Honda back over to his place. It’ll run the pump without difficulty as long as that’s all it has to do. But I’m reluctant to do that since I can now use it to keep my own batteries topped off. Basically, this is why all sensible people who live on solar also have capable generators. Even in near ideal conditions, sometimes solar still sucks.

Where are those crying in laughter emojis?

Screenshot

From Commenter Eric, I don’t quite know where…

That’s pretty impressive for November.

We don’t usually go into the teens overnight before December. Everything is working fine, the Lair is insulated against far worse now but I was surprised to get this kind of weather so early in the season. It must be man-made climate change: I’m a convert, the new Trump/Biden/Cheney triumvirate should assume emergency powers immediately to save us all.

Hey, it’s no crazier than anything else going on out there.

The snow finally slackened off around 10:30 and I went outside to clean off the solar panels on the ground mount. Turned out I could’ve stayed indoors…

That’s not supposed to happen. Here’s what the roof-mounted panels were like at the same time…

The ground mount panels are at a steeper angle but so were the old ones and they never spontaneously cleared themselves while it was still cold and grey. Is a puzzlement.

ED NOTE: I wrote this yesterday morning but somehow didn’t post it, and didn’t notice that I hadn’t posted it till just now. The last chapter in my latest water hassle.

A couple of cool wet days. Night before last we got our very first minor snowfall…

And yesterday I scored a new check valve even though the old one cleaned up very nicely…

It would have been a little less unpleasant to wait till this afternoon to install it, since it’s supposed to be sunny and sixty. But since it’s supposed to be sunny – and in fact the clouds cleared out overnight – that means I needed to get this thing wrapped up for maximum sunshine on the pump’s solar panel in hope that useful quantities of water will be deposited into the tank before the clouds roll in again. Which they are supposed to do this evening or tomorrow.

And of course installing an in-line valve where there already had been one isn’t the most daunting task ever devised by the evil mind of men, so it didn’t take long at all. I was just about done with the new/improved insulation…

…when I found I hadn’t brought enough duct tape. Not to despair, though…

I never leave home without duct tape, and buried in the center console was a mostly-depleted roll. Heavily infested with dog hair, of course, but otherwise fully functional.

And now I sit back and see. Tobie and I were just up there on morning walkie and the pump is humming happily to itself. Around noon I’ll see how things are going: Experience shows that a difference probably won’t show up on the sink pressure gauge until the air’s been bled out of 300-odd feet of buried pipe.