The Ultimate Answer to Kings

I finally got a few consecutive hours of sunlight yesterday, and when I checked the tank it was clearly filling. Which eased my greatest fear – that the well pump would fail during its extended downtime – but didn’t answer why I still had zero pressure at the kitchen sink.

The yard faucet, the lowest outlet in the Lair’s water system, persisted in doing nothing but drip. This morning I even took the faucet off the pipe, thinking it had maybe clogged with scale the way my hot water system did last year. No joy. So I figured it was probably just air plugging the very long poly pipe between the tank and the yard, and I needed to stand there outside for as long as it took till it started to spit air and water. And calcium and iron oxide, of course.

This afternoon was pleasant enough that I was able to do that, if by standing around I mean finish all the little steps like putting hose clamps on either side of the new shut-off valve and making an access cover for the valve…

…all of which was going to take some time anyway. Tobie had a very nice time basking in the shade and keeping me company. And just about the time I started to worry, the faucet did in fact start spitting air and red water. I let it fill the bucket a couple of times and then hooked up the yard hose, already strung downhill…

…and let it go until the water ran clear.

I finished up, put my tools away, and then went inside to find nice pressure on the sink gauge, a lovely fully-functional toilet tank, and nothing but trickles coming from the sink faucet, which I’d left open all afternoon. Bother. I wondered about that until I saw all the brown water stains in the sink. That faucet has a rather aggressive aerator which does tend to clog up from time to time. Just a little goop in the water would go a long way to plugging the faucet. So I turned the valve off and unscrewed the aerator … and the pressurized water kind of blew up in my face in a comical manner. But once we got that straightened out, the Lair had complete running water again.

April is a problematic month for the comfort of an old guy doing strenuous chores outdoors. It might work out great. It might do the other thing. Lately it’s been cold and windy and I was beginning to think I should have waited before turning off the well pump and gradually using up the water in the tank at the top of the ridge until sometime in May. But yesterday we finally achieved emptiness…

…and it was actually kind of a nice day. Sunny, not particularly cold or windy. So I grabbed my tools, lay down in the dirt and installed the new shut-off valve in the feed line from the tank to the yard…

I finished fairly early in the day, in hope that if I turned the well pump back on I might have at least toilet-worthy pressure before sundown.

It did not work out that way – the one disadvantage of a solar-powered low-flow pump with no battery backup – and so it was necessary to go full redneck…

And of course just to put the cherry on top, I woke this morning to heavy overcast.

I checked the well pump during the morning walkie and no, it ain’t running. Maybe it will later. Maybe not till Wednesday. Meanwhile I’m glad I have lots of water bottles because it might be a while before the sink works again. The shower is definitely going to take a while.

🙂 Tobie had kind of a rough evening. He normally checks out after the evening walkie and I don’t hear much from him till morning but he just couldn’t get comfortable. His bed wasn’t right and he was crashing all around the cabin and acting put upon. Finally well after dark he gave up and laid down to actually sleep on the new bed but he wanted it firmly understood that this was under protest.

By morning he was fine with it and by afternoon…

…no longer an issue.

It’s supposed to top off in the forties today, with the same gale wind as yesterday. Murphy has made an unholy pact with the forces of weather.

Thanks to Generous Reader MM. I picked it up on the way home from the big town about 50 miles away.

Tobie is not completely sold, he’s only lying there because I told him to, but I don’t think it’s going to take long for him to accept it. If push comes to shove…

…I’ll drape the cover of the old one over it till it smells right. I’m glad I took that first picture before giving him his new bone, because at the moment he’s inaugurating it very enthusiastically in a way that will surely void the warranty.

Thanks, MM!

I had to go to Wal-Mart today. For the first time in years.

And it was loud. And there were too many people. And I got through it okay this time, really, didn’t actually hyperventilate at any point, but I was never happier to see my ride home show up.

My back went out again yesterday. While bending over to toss a couple of sticks into the woodstove. Which I was doing because…

…that’s the way yesterday started.

Today, naturally, it’s a gorgeous day. Couldn’t be better! Started out mild, topped out in the mid-sixties, no wind at all. A fact I’d have appreciated more if I could have gone out into it with any pleasure. Instead I’ve been sitting in my too-deep reading chair and making a huge production out of standing up to make tea or go to the can.

It gradually occurred to me this evening that I’d be more comfortable in the desk chair, which is higher and has arms I’m not afraid to push against. I can in fact get out of this chair without pain, so this is where I’m spending the evening. Whadaya think: Master and Commander or The Northman?

Oh, speaking of being a broken-down geezer: The Social Security thing actually happened! With no trouble at all. Starts in May, I’m told. I naturally assumed that because my life isn’t exactly conventional in any domestic or financial sense there’d be some all-consuming problem at some point but it seems the SSA isn’t the DMV.

Sigh.

This, I think, is just because it got a little cold overnight. It rained all yesterday afternoon and at least some overnight, so snow first thing in the morning is not a surprise. It’s supposed to rain all day, once it warms up a bit. I very much doubt we’ll get any accumulation. Just more slop.

Right. So back in late December we learned to our displeasure that the plumbers hired to install a whole bunch of water equipment at Ian’s Cave had taken it upon themselves to remove my shut-off valve from the tank at the top of the ridge. This meant that I couldn’t fix the relatively simple leak at the Lair’s yard faucet until I drained the whole freaking tank.

I turned the water pump off a couple of weeks ago and have slowly been using up the contents since, hoping that an empty tank will coincide with workable weather. March is not really known for its predictable weather here – April’s not a lot better, but one can usually get some work done. No problem – I’ve gone whole winters without running water. Can’t do a thing with the actual plumbing until the tank’s empty. Tobie and I checked the tank this morning and it’s well over half empty so we’re getting there.

Now, if it were only a matter of a split faucet the actual repair would be simplicity itself. I’d even be tempted to try it with pressure in the pipe. But it’s not that simple. At a minimum I need a new shut-off valve, which may as well be put at the logical place at the Lair itself. And a spreading circle of wet ground around the pipe told me that the faucet wasn’t the only thing that split during that cold snap. Probably I was going to have to replace the upright. Which means digging the whole thing up. Again.

And it’s a nice warm day with nothing else scheduled, so it’s time to start digging.

As soon as I cleared a little dirt from the upright I confirmed that the PVC is indeed split. If I have to do the whole thing I’m really tempted to just put in one of those “freezeproof” hydrants at last. But those things cost the world and aren’t actually freezeproof at all – in fact they seem like fairly constant maintenance items to my neighbors, while I haven’t had that much trouble with my cheap expedient PVC-wrapped-with-black-insulation. Y’know – before now, anyway.

I have the new shut-off valve and a new cover. I have everything I need to replace the faucet and pipe. So it’s just a matter of finishing the chore of digging it all up while gradually draining the tank. Then another hour or two of muddy labor and I’ll be good till something happens again. Last time I dug it all up was five years ago to the month. That was the time both shut-off gate valves failed at the same time. Replaced them with expensive ball valves, one of which apparently went home with the plumbers.

Two whole days of it, if the forecast is correct. Yesterday I washed a big load of laundry and got it out on the line for some serious sunshine…

…and then I finished off all the dirty stuff this morning, and although the sun is gradually disappearing under misty clouds it looks like the weather will hold long enough to dry it.

No guarantees going into the weekend, it’s supposed to get sloppy again for at least a couple of days. BUT!

I saw my first…chickadee? English Sparrow? There was some dispute about what kind of bird this is last year. Anyway – the birds that always nest in front of the local food store every Spring are coming back! I always look for them, and now a few have arrived.

So we’re at least provisionally saved. Winter may not have ended but it will end in the foreseeable future.

Every morning for the past three. Never warms up past the mid-forties. It’s still coming down as I type this, so…

I don’t know how much we got this morning, I’m going with something over an inch which makes this the biggest snowfall of this new sloppy spell.

I’ve burned substantially more wood this month than I did in February. Which is not the way it’s supposed to work. I know I call March ‘the month that breaks your heart’ but this year I want to call it ‘the month that makes you want to wring its neck.’

Cool and very windy today. Early snow, then all day it’s been sometimes sunny and sometimes threatening rain. But always with the wind. I’ve had to burn the woodstove 3 times, which meant I needed to clean out the ashes but…

…first I had to empty the little bucket of cool ashes, because some of what came out of the stove would still be glowing red. And when I went to do that, I remembered that the big ash bucket was pretty much full and I kept forgetting about it. Dammit…

When I started living at the Lair in 2011 I dug a pit for ashes. That filled up pretty quick, and since then I’ve been dumping them into a heap at the edge of a little gully near the wash. Very important that nothing hot goes there. And you never know how long ashes will stay hot in the bucket, so definitely empty it first. But the problem today was that the wind is gusting to 25 mph all day, even down in my little hollow, right in my face if I stand at the top and pour out the bucket. That wasn’t going to work. So I ended up carrying the bucket down into the gully just so the wind would be blowing away from me.

Maybe that’ll teach me to stop forgetting about the damned ash bucket till the last moment. Probably not – never has before.

Today was supposed to be sunny and warmish until evening, when we’re due for another 3 days of sloppy weather. Neighbor L has been after me for the past two weeks to help service their generator but we kept having to push it back on account of weather. This morning dawned cloudy and a little raw but what the hell. Let’s get this off the list before Neighbor D blows a cranial artery.

I’ve mentioned before that over the years D&L worked out rather rigidly what was D’s maintenance territory and what was L’s. The generator falls firmly in D’s court but he’s still laid up. L had never done it before and of course neither had I, so there was some fumbling over this particular engine’s peculiarities. But we figured it out.

L grew up on an actual farm which makes her much more genuine country than me, and of course I was a dealership mechanic so changing oil and filters wasn’t really that much of a stretch once we figured out what was where.

Get it buttoned up and tested, and we’re done here.

Tobie is shaping up to be such a good boy. He’s gotten to where I can trust him to sit in the Jeep and enjoy the view without worrying about what parts of Jeep will no longer be attached when I return. Always makes me smile, remembering how much he hated Jeep rides at first.

The new chicks are in at the feed store!

And Tobie did not like it, not one little bit.

Showing every sign of stress short of pissing himself, he stayed close to make sure Uncle Joel was safe. And that was when the hail started pounding on the bedroom roof. And such a hailstorm!

Of course it all promptly melted because it just wouldn’t be right if we didn’t have lots of mud to track into the cabin. This can stop now. It’s all right, I’m done.

Only one person pointed out that Uncle Joel can’t read a calendar, causing the 2024 Spring Equinox to occur twice this year. I was testing you. This time I mean it.

The space between the false and true equinoxes has been suspiciously winterlike. Cold, windy and wet. And I need some sun.

Yesterday I had to wash some gelsocks despite having no practical way to dry them. I put them out in the wind yesterday then rushed over to get them off the line (just) before the rain started again. As I type this there’s a hint of sun and not a lot of wind, so I’ll put some out on the railing for a bit. Probably pick them out of the mud later.

But it is now officially Spring. Rejoicing shall commence. As soon as the weather seems to notice. The forecast for our next real sunny day has been pushed back to Thursday, and I think the weatherman is lying to keep my morale up.

It’s a little small for the purpose anyway, I guess. He would lie in it, under orders and under protest…

…but he got right back up the minute I turned around. And when I gave up and put the old one back in the corner…

…he immediately flopped down on it. Tobie does not like it when I screw with his sleeping arrangements. So getting him a replacement of the same sort is already in progress.

And Tobie has always really loved his bed, a gift from Generous Reader MM.

Alas – he has a habit of being kind of hard on the things he loves. Not as destructive as during his Hell Puppy phase, but still…

He has a Plan B big bed, a gift from another reader at about the same time, which has spent the last almost 3 years stashed in Ian’s Cave. I think it’s time to bring it over and see if he finds it acceptable because this afternoon his principal bed went from grody and a bit torn to positively ragged in the space of one badly-chosen heave.

He seemed kind of embarrassed over having done it. Which is more remorse than he ever showed toward all those destroyed chair cushions back in the day…

According to the forecast the next sighting of the sun has been pushed back to Tuesday, which is not good news. Ian’s batteries are suffering and I’ve turned off his pressure pump and refrigerator. There’s something wrong there, probably in the settings: It’s not charging the batteries right, even though it did for quite a while. Pity: I could use a shower.

Yesterday it started raining hard around 2:30 and didn’t stop all the rest of the day. According to the rain gauge, which I don’t trust, we got a hair less than an inch of rain which is a lot for one day here. All the snow is gone and the mud is deep.

This morning’s walkie greeted me with this…

Fog. Yuck. No wonder my stump and joints hurt.

On the way home I could smell woodsmoke coming from the cabin, still way out of sight. That’s rare but I’ve been burning a lot of juniper lately to take the load off my supply of pallet- and lumber-based firewood. I put up a lot of juniper last autumn. Got home, stirred up the coals and threw a couple of 2X4 chunks on the stove…

Even the pine ones burn hotter – and a lot cleaner – than juniper. Days like this are kind of a pain, now that the bedroom heater isn’t working. On a normal winter day I burn the woodstove to take the chill off, then let the sun coming through the big south window do the rest. Shirtsleeve temperatures by noon, with a nice bonus that the bedroom reading chair…

…is always in a nice comfy zone. But depending on the woodstove alone, during an overcast spell, is feast or famine. The cabin is too small to need a constant fire and anyway the stove is too small to sustain one without tending it every 20 minutes or so. So it’s build a fire, let it heat up the cabin and then go out, wait for it to get cold again, then build another fire. Or, once you’re sick of doing that, just put on your coat. It’s not like it’s really all that cold right now. 15 years ago I wouldn’t have considered wasting fuel on weather that won’t even freeze water but these bones are getting old. I turn 70 next month and anyway it ain’t the years, it’s the mileage and the collision damage.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to my book.