First good heat wave of the season…

…and everybody agrees it’s not supposed to happen in early June. But the weather does what it does, and anybody who tries to predict it is taking a sucker’s bet.

Yesterday it hit triple digits for the first time this year…

…which is no big thing for the low desert, but this is the high desert. Which is supposed to be more reasonable about these things. Still, it does what it does.

This morning I had some things I had to get done, because there are some other things that need to get done this afternoon. The boys and I drove past to assess damage to Ian’s gloriously-improvised metallic target stand…

…because over the weekend we were blazing away at it with an 8mm automatic rifle, which almost always does damage requiring Uncle Joel to climb the scaffold. The plates are bulletproof; the chains, not so much.

Stuck the boys in Gitmo, then hurried through my shit-shoveling because I’ve got some saw work to do. This past weekend we worked on hardening the Gitmo fence in preparation for its conversion to a big chicken coop. And we were discussing what to do about roosts inside the dog chicken house. And I made one of those impulsive suggestions that always result in more work: I use juniper branches in my chicken house, and they love it. So why not find some little dead junipers and sort of sculpt them till they only have horizontal branches? Landlady liked the idea, but I had to hurry and get it done because my chainsaw is going into the shop this afternoon and might not be back for months.

First, find a suitable dead bush. Drag it out in the open where you don’t have to worry about rocks and saw teeth…

Then cut away everything that doesn’t look like a chicken roost. Leave enough of the trunk so it can be easily buried in the dirt to stand upright…

Then find another one and do it again. We’ll call it Redneck Chic. I kinda like the effect, and they’ll certainly work, but Landlady has to pass on them before I actually mount them in the chicken house.

With my other hand, I decided to use this fiercely sunny period to conduct a little experiment. Landlady’s got this old dorm fridge in the barn, just sitting there collecting mold. I decided to see what happens when you connect a small fridge to my electrical system – this being the only time of the year when I really miss refrigeration.

There’s no place inside the Lair to put a refrigerator, except maybe the shower tub and I didn’t have the foresight to run an outlet in the bathroom. There’s no place outside the lair that’s out of the sun 24/7. So this experiment called for a quicky awning. Sweartagod, if I’d known how much use I was going to get out of that camo sunshade when I made it 10+ years ago, I’d have made two.

The one thing I already know for sure is that the solar panels will keep up with the additional load. But it’s definitely a load. I’m very interested to see if the batteries hit float at all today. And what their state of charge looks like in the morning.

UPDATE: Unplugged the little fridge at 2:30, will return it to Landlady’s barn tomorrow. Experiment complete. Not a failure: An experiment does not fail just because it doesn’t return the results you want. But my system can’t run this fridge and still be sure of fully charging the batteries. Since this fridge is only rated at 1.1 amps, that probably means it can’t run any fridge.