It was 20 years ago today…

…and also yeah, I’m still alive. Feeling better, actually. But the main reason I laboriously figured out how to log on to my own frickin’ compooter this morning is to celebrate the fact that…

…EXACTLY 20 YEARS AGO TODAY!!!…

I moved into the gulch fulltime. A whole, a rilly rilly WHOLE lot of things have happened since then (Sheesh, among which I’ve apparently lost the ability to type. Any typos on this post are the result of not catching one of hundreds of mistypes.) and it hasn’t always been a barrel of laughs. I mean I had memorable wee-hours sessions of learning just how time-consuming it is to freeze in the dark. But I survived all the improvising and doing without and have arrived at a time when it’s just an old guy living quietly in a comfortable cabin with a big brown dog. Just in time, too, because after last year’s health scare I’ve rather abruptly become a bent old man. But I’m in better shape than I was this time last year, so that’s okay. As I always used to say before it actually became an issue, if your worst problems stem from your having lived long enough to grow old, you don’t have any problems worth the bother of complaint.

Anyway. A couple of things happened this year. Remember how proud I was, back in 2011, of having achieved a REAL FLUSH TOILET? Well, I don’t have that anymore. It was in early Spring of this year that the toilet suddenly backed up in a terminal fashion. Not super hard to diagnose the cause, either, because I popped the cover off the standpipe over the makeshift septic tank and got a ginormous shit-water geyser that actually lasted a measurable number of seconds. Yup: My home-dug leach field gave up the ghost. I knew at the time there wasn’t nearly enough gravel in there. And it was too shallow. And the bushes were growing roots in there like mad. Basically it stopped draining.

And there I was. I’m no longer physically capable of doing the things I did slowly and painfully fifteen years ago so re-digging it myself wasn’t happening. I could actually sort of afford to pay somebody else to do it for me properly – but a neighbor pointed out that a real contractor can’t do it without a building permit, which would raise certain questions, so…no. My sins do have a way of coming to visit from time to time.

Anyway…

…I did this instead. Yup, the Secret Lair took a technological step backward and went to a ‘composting’ terlit. I say ‘composting’ because nothing really ever composts here, it’s too damned dry but still. Believe it or not this has actually solved one last recurring technical problem, because every cold winter I still had to worry about that one pipe that ran across the bottom of the cabin freezing and breaking and depriving me of my toilet. Now it’s not an issue. And with active ventilation provided by a solar-powered gadget originally made for ventilating porta-potties, believe it or not it’s been quite comfortable to live with even through what turned out to be quite a hot summer.

I also replaced the last remnant of the Lair’s 2012 solar power system redo with a new inverter.

I actually felt a little self-indulgent with this one because the old inverter still worked. But it was getting louder and louder. And more and more small appliances won’t recharge with a square-wave inverter. So circumstance persuaded me (I won’t say I was really forced) to replace it with a sine-wave inverter. And as with so many home power components, prices have come way down since I started fiddling with the stuff 16 or 17 years ago. And now my LEDs have stopped acting flaky.

So that’s it, for the benefit of the two or three of you who didn’t take me off your Reminder list. I’m still here, still living quietly, and nothing worth talking about is still going on. No, I’m not reviving the blog. This post has actually proven something of a pain in the ass. I just wanted to celebrate 20 years with the only people in the world likely to care. Stay well.

J

PS: Tobie says hi.

Yeah, that’s his “What? I dindoo nuffin” face. Ask him to look up for the camera and that’s the face you get, every time.