The Ultimate Answer to Kings

So today was supposed to be heavy clouds all day, with 1-3 inches of snow in the late afternoon or evening. Instead, it did this…

All day long. It stayed cold, and the wind has really been whipping all day so I have no doubt we’re in for some snow, maybe tonight. But today, when there was not supposed to be a hint of sun all day, sunny all day. Go figure.

When we first went outside this morning there had been overnight rain but the crescent moon and stars were clearly visible almost to every horizon. Looked good, especially considering that yesterday was nonstop gloom.

Heh. Yeah. I didn’t know more clouds were barreling in, and it started snowing the moment we left on the morning walkie. By the time we got to the top of the ridge…

…the snow was starting to stick even though the wind was blowing it all directly into my face.

Snowfall acted more and more like it really meant business as time went by, though happily the wind fell off…

“Tobie, get your nose out of your ass. I’m trying to take a picture here.”

“Don’t give me that look.”

Anyway, by the time we started down the grade and home was in sight…

…home was well on the way to getting buried. My nice heavy black Carhartt coat* was completely white on one side and needed to be beaten free of snow out on the porch…

And now it’s time to get to work on this morning’s repair chore.

At the onset of winter I replaced my ailing bedroom thermostat with the just-in-case spare I bought a few years ago. Which, unfortunately, is identical to the original and turns out to have the same ailment – Electronically it works fine but the electrical contacts apparently have enough resistance that they don’t always operate the actual heater. Naturally, one learns about this only on a cold morning. The problem can (usually) be temporarily corrected by disconnecting the thermostat from the wall and then re-connecting it, which is NOT THE WAY THERMOSTATS ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK. Come on, people, electronics are supposed to be BETTER than old-fashioned mercury switches and bimetal coils, which would outlive the houses they were installed in.

Well, last Friday I took delivery on a[nother] replacement…

Which, upon inspection, unfortunately has the same connectors between the part that screws to the wall and holds the wires and the part with the electronics. So I’m not completely confident this will fix my problem – at least not permanently. But here we are. I’m going to trudge out to the powershed and get my drill now.

—-
*Which I’ve had for seven years as of last month, and except for a little fraying on the cuffs is still in perfect condition – Still not completely over finally having a decent winter coat.

We’re supposed to be in the middle of a week of winter weather. And it is a bit cooler than I would have chosen but otherwise it’s nice. Lots of sun, no wind, an absolute minimum of apocalypse.

I know saying that out loud will probably jinx it. And the weatherman is still saying that tomorrow comes the deluge. But the weatherman said the same thing about today. I won’t curse him for being wrong. I’ll just count my blessings and go for a nice mid-day walkie instead.

And hey, check this out…

My yard spigot has been dripping for most of the winter, ever since the first hard freeze. And it’s leaking in two different languages: The valve gasket is shot, so that without the diverter on the end of the spout it runs as if the valve is open. AND either the valve stem was leaking or the casting itself was cracked. It looked like that second thing but I couldn’t believe it: It was dripping right under the stem so it had to be that, right?

Well, no. After careful examination it turns out the spigot is leaking from the underside of the casting itself. Cracked in the freeze, I guess. Never saw that before. Anyway, a fix would be very cheap and simple – I even bought a replacement spigot – except that THE IDIOT PLUMBERS WHO WORKED ON THE PIPES AROUND THE WATER TANK IN 2020 TOOK IT UPON THEMSELVES TO REMOVE MY SHUT-OFF VALVE. So the only way I can replace the spigot without dumping 2500 gallons of water in my yard is to drain the tank first, something I prefer not to do before the weather warms up. I’ve just been living with the drip, emptying the bucket every day or two – except it recently got twice as bad for no apparent reason. I started to think this wasn’t going to be tolerable till April as planned.

So this morning I looked it over very carefully, and it really looked like the drip was coming from the casting, not the stem. I wrapped a rag around the stem to soak up any leak, and the drip was completely unimpaired. So I did something stupid…

I brought my partial roll of Flex-tape into the cabin, cut off a piece and warmed it up on the bedroom heater till it was good and flexible, right? Then I took it outside and stuck it on the bottom of the spigot.

There was no way this was going to work, right? I mean, come on.

So far it has completely patched the drip. Go figure.

I still have to drain the tank and replace the spigot, obviously. But I’d really rather not do it with the daytime temps in the mid-thirties. I’ve nursed it along since December – maybe I can make it till April.

6:30 in the morning, post-breakfast, and Tobie is agitating for his morning walkie. But the view over the porch railing says it’s not time yet…

It’s February, the days are palpably getting longer and it ought to be plenty light for walking by now, but no. Considering how the wind blew all night long and even now is half a gale gusting to a full gale on the ridgetops, I figured we’re probably in for some weather.

And maybe we are – but forty-five minutes later…

…the clouds were actually looking like they wanted to break up. The forecast says this won’t last, so I don’t know what to think. And in fact experience says you make your plans based on a pessimistic appraisal of what’s going on around you now rather than on what a weatherman a long way away says about a town ten miles away in different terrain.

Yesterday I thought I was going to have to drag the generator out of the cabin to charge the batteries – the batteries turn five this year and now that I have the ability to keep them charged I’m inclined to do so rather than stress them out of laziness – but the sun came out and let the solar panels do their jobs. Today it’s again forecast to be gloomy all day – we’ll see what it actually does and I’ll act accordingly. But yesterday was also windy and raw all day and today’s starting out colder, and that’s likely to continue to be so. Might snow, might not. All in all, a good day for a good book.

Unless there’s some good reason not to or circumstances just won’t allow it, I always like to keep my propane bottles topped off whenever I can – because I never know when next there’ll be some good reason not to or when circumstances will no longer allow it. I like to think of myself as the biggest baddest meanest MF in the valley – but I still watch out for Murphy.

I always check to see if reverse is working before I get the Jeep into a situation where only reverse will do. Until the time I don’t. And that’s when…

…with an evil chuckle and a twist of his mustache, Murphy strikes.

Got the Jeep stuck good in a sort of impromptu hedge. Called a neighbor for a tow, and by the time he saw the text and replied I had it pulled about a tenth of the necessary distance with a come-along and a combination of a chain, cable and tow strap. I’d have had it straightened out in another hour and a half or so.

It’s been more than half a week since it closed and my video feed is still filled with “The Ten Greatest Shotguns of 2024!!!” or “The Greatest Plastic Striker-Fired 9mm (that’s just like all the other plastic striker-fired 9mms) Ever!!!” or “All the overpriced red dots you can’t afford to show up at the range without!!!”

I like guns. I think I’ve made it clear that I like guns. I even hope to acquire a new handgun this year. (The same handgun I hoped to acquire last year.) But I guess I’m just not a consumer anymore. Once I probably would have found all this more intriguing.

They’ve been singing me the song of their people fairly close to the cabin for the past few nights. I’ve got tinnitus real bad and am pretty much deaf to high-pitched sounds so I can’t hear them when I’m indoors. But Tobie sure can, and he reacts by rushing around and barking at all the windows no matter the hour of night it happens to be. I put up with it because, well, if he has a job that’s pretty much it and I can’t complain that he does it.

But this morning during the morning walkie the whole chorus cut loose with a big crescendo just as we got to the top of the ridge, and Tobie’s reaction was … well, we’ll politely leave it out of the scrapbook. It’ll just be between him and me and everybody who reads this that, unprotected by the Lair’s walls, he immediately wanted to take his morning dump and then ditch the rest of the walkie to get back inside the Lair’s walls. As soon as possible if you please, Uncle Joel.

No surprise – I’m always out of shape this time of year but I really got a chance to show it this morning…

Neighbor L got another ton of wood pellets and this time there was no young guy to foist most of the work off on. I got it done without too much delay for huffing and puffing but I’m a bit sore this afternoon.

…walkie time is going to be better. The sky cleared right on schedule and it got seasonally cold overnight for the first time in over a week. The mud froze…

…we stopped at Ian’s place to hang out laundry I’d washed yesterday afternoon in anticipation of a bright day…

…and then I had to run to D&L’s because she wanted to go to town. I came back with a speshul treat…

Tobie has always loved those little yogurt cups – to the point where if you give him some you’d really better mean it because it’s the one thing he’ll fight me about if he thinks I’m trying to take it away. So if I want to enjoy one unmolested I have to remember to buy two.

Wet and heavy, already sagging off any slanting surface. Just when the mud was starting to dry…

I pull out the trashcan and the undercoat rake, he’s right there. “Brush me more, Uncle Joel.” As long, you know, as I keep it away from his butt. Hey, I sympathize.

But he knows that little tub of ear wipes. And when that comes out…

…he immediately drops all pretense of cooperation, leaves the room and refuses to make eye contact. I had to chase him down and then hold him by the collar during the whole thing. Exactly why he objects so strongly I don’t know – he has never had what I’d expect him to consider a bad experience with having his ears cleaned. As far as he’s concerned, he’s not judging other dogs that maybe like having their ears messed with but he wishes to have no part in such unnatural goings-on.

7:30 and the sky was so dark it took that long before there was enough light for a walkie. At least the mud was mostly frozen, so we got in a good if rather gloomy walkie. The forecast promised more of the same until mid-afternoon when it would start snowing. I was puttering around the cabin when I noticed something odd – the light seemed to be getting brighter, and…

…the battery voltage was rising. WTF? Tobie, even more sick of sitting around indoors than I was, declared himself all in favor of an exploratory mid-morning walkie. And sonuvagun…

…the sky to the south was clearing. In fact it was clearing fast. The clouds weren’t just moving off the horizon, they were dissolving.

A sunny day? Was such a thing possible? The weatherman said no way, not until the weekend maybe if you’re a good boy. But there it was: The sky had turned a most alien and uncharacteristic blueish color.

The end times? I dunno – I could check with Alex Jones but I don’t do Twitter so I guess I’ll just have to fearfully wait and see.

Mornings like this I think heretical thoughts: “If I hadn’t gotten this big dog, I could have stayed in bed.”

And have I mentioned lately how much I hate mud? I have a scraper and a rough mat down below the porch stairs, and after scraping and wiping my boots most attentively…

…I still have to stand out at the railing and work the soles over with an old screwdriver before I can let them in the cabin. And my floor still looks like I hosted a miner’s convention. Yech.

But at least it isn’t very cold. In January I’ll take my blessings where I can find them. Very little sun yesterday and I doubt there’ll be any today – likely have to run the generator for a few hours later to avoid stressing the batteries. At least I have that option now.

Went to town briefly with Neighbor L this morning. Neighbor D is still in the hospital but reportedly improving.

In among the conversation, she complained that her telephone kept going into Airplane Mode on its own.

Me: “Y’know, I don’t even know what airplane mode does.”

Her: “It makes it so you can’t use the internet or call people.”

Me: “What’s the point of that? Why not just turn the phone off?”

Her: “Dunno.”

Me: “Maybe so you can take pictures of all the screaming people when parts fall off the airplane.”

After nearly a week of springlike weather – without the bad parts of spring like obnoxious wind – I’m told we’re in for a week of winter. It’s starting rather mildly…

…with overnight rain. Liquid precipitation is not that common in January, which is normally the coldest part of winter in the Gulch, but you never know. This isn’t Minnesota – winter is episodic and not always horrible. This morning the mud isn’t even frozen, which isn’t really a plus but at least my fingers don’t hurt.

But whether or not it turns really cold, the next week is forecast to be greasy and gloomy and altogether worth cocooning through. Certainly better than what I’ve heard big parts of the rest of the country is going through right now…

Probably because it was in all the cop movies when I was a kid, right? I didn’t know they were called J-frames, I didn’t know anything about S&W revolvers, but Chief’s Specials just always seemed so very cool.

So I’m somewhere in my mid-twenties, a virgin in a little town in the Texas panhandle, eking out a bare living at this dying Cadillac dealership – and in the glass counter of the town’s only real gun store where I unabashedly hung out in my spare time there was this shiny little used Chief’s Special. It was infatuation at first sight. I put it on layaway immediately and subsisted on generic mac&cheese for weeks to raise the money to get it out of hock. I bought a fancy shoulder holster and wore that stupid thing everywhere for an embarrassingly long time, cosplaying Steve McQueen in my own mind. People kept asking why I was wearing a jacket when the temperature was up over 100^o.

The problem was that this was also during my IPSC period – I was frantically enthusiastic about combat shooting and everybody knew there was no real pistol but a 1911. And for all the hundreds of rounds I loaded and fired through this little revolver I could not get it to group anything remotely as well as my worst franken-1911 cobbled together from parts some of which probably dated back to Korea. I couldn’t shoot it well, I had been conditioned to believe that .38 Special was as useless as spitwads, but I so badly wanted to believe that I looked cool with this dopey inaccurate revolver upside-down under my armpit.

I still like J-frames. Landlady has one I love to play with but I’m reconciled that other people may shoot them well but I just don’t. Guess it’s part of growing up.

Is a dream about work. Not working, I don’t mind that, but being at a workplace. The usual version of this dream is where I’m technically employed there but I don’t seem to have an actual job – or maybe I do but I don’t understand it enough to know what I’m supposed to be doing. So the whole dream is about vaguely wandering about this open office trying to look busy and avoid scrutiny.

This morning’s version was different – It was really detailed and vivid, and the more frustrating for it. I was in a shop this time, a somewhat more comfortable environment than an office, and I was supposed to be building some complicated electrical thing on the ceiling, maybe some sort of automatic lighting system, I don’t know, which combined my two least favorite work-related things: Ladders and electricity. I was hampered by not really knowing what I was doing, not having any of the right materials, and an overly solicitous and possibly sarcastic boss who spent an awful lot of time looking over my shoulder. And it seemed to go on for days.

Kind of encapsulated a lot of my frustrations when I lived in a city and worked for money, and I’ve seldom been so happy to wake up, look at a clock and see it’s time to get out of bed anyway because I really didn’t want to go back to sleep.

I keep finding more reasons to hate wood pellet stoves, and I don’t even own one. Neighbor D is back in the hospital, more infection trouble AND somehow he managed to catch the flu, and Neighbor L is on her last nerve from stress. So naturally her pellet stove, the principal source of heat in their big house, decided to act up again.

Now mind you there couldn’t possibly be anyone who puts more effort into stove maintenance than L. That thing is partially dismantled and thoroughly cleaned daily. And yet it still finds ways to get gummed up. So she decided it had been a while since the stovepipe had been cleaned, and maybe that was affecting the stove’s draft. She called me last night and asked if I’d come over in the morning to help clean the pipe. She knew how it was done in principle, but it was always primarily D’s job mostly because getting the pipe sections apart requires a certain level of upper body strength not normally found in people who’d have to drink a six-pack to top 100 pounds. And as we already demonstrated last month, D and L had pretty distinctly divided up the household chores between them and did not cross into one another’s territory without very good reason. So she could – and routinely does – field-strip and repair the pellet stove but the stove pipe was D’s business.

So I went over this morning, expecting it to be a trip wasted except to settle her mind because I’ve always imagined that those things run clean, right? How much soot could there really be in that 4-inch pipe? Which goes to show how much I know about what I don’t know.

Yeah – there was a lot. I’m morally certain that pipe was clean at the beginning of the season because this is D&L we’re talking about. The OCD Twins. But this pipe really did need cleaning and I left – once again – wondering what the advantages of a pellet stove even are. How do normal people even keep them running?

Joel faces the world through his laptop screen, and gets it wrong again…