The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Woke up this morning, stumbled into the main room, and saw that the outside temperature read 34^o. Technically above freezing. At six ayem. I had to go see this for myself: Must have really clouded up overnight.

Nope.

It’s mid-January, traditionally the coldest part of the winter. And the reading clearly wasn’t accurate, I mean the mudboards were frozen to the ground and I definitely should have worn lined gloves during the morning walkie, but it still wasn’t nearly as overnight cold as it’s been for the previous week. Don’t know what I did to deserve that, but I’ll take it.

It got cold last night…

Nowhere near a record, but it did manage to freeze the toilet pipe again. Which means I should be crawling under the cabin to see what the problem with the insulation is. Rats, I have no doubt. I hate rats.

Anyway, other than that there was no damage. The water flowed halfway through the afternoon, which is better than last time. And no broken pipes. So that’s good. So far.

The wind blew hard all night…

…covering the snow that was still on the ground with a layer of sand.

Kind of reminded me of Detroit when I was a kid, when the decaying snow drifts were covered with black soot from all the exhausts of all the cars running rich in the cold. I don’t miss carburetors.

No weather overnight except wind, but the storm clouds rolled in during morning walkie and the proper storm came. Not much snow, though – just a couple of dustings mostly blown away before they hit the ground. Then just at sundown the sky cleared and now it’s gonna get cold. 7:30 in the evening and it’s already down to 15^o and dropping like a rock. The woodstove’s all ready to deal with my freezing ass in the morning; I’m just gonna go to bed early. Hope the plumbing survives.

I got the Jeep’s new rear window hinges yesterday and we’re due for another snowstorm tomorrow, so…

…my window of procrastination on this chore was brief. Temperature’s up to 44^o this afternoon, so although the mud was annoying at least I wasn’t shivering in a heavy coat while I tried to hold a frickin’ heavy window over my head with one hand while groping for tools and fittings with the other. Sheesh.

Now, the first time I had to replace a broken rear window hinge, it – er – ended badly. And since I never exactly determined what I did to deserve that particular scary disaster, let’s just say I was proceeding with extreme caution to go with the extreme difficulty. But I guess practice makes adequate, because this one went without a great deal of drama. And now I’m ready for the coming snow.

All else is illusion.

Also: The things I see when I’m not holding a camera, if you only knew…

So it’s post-walkie and Tobie is playing with the remnant of his knuckle bone before the morning nap. It takes a bad hop and winds up behind the far front leg of the woodstove, which is rumbling dangerously away at that moment. Tobie moves in for the retrieval, only to find every part of the approach uncomfortably hot. He tries again and then deploys his tool: he walks over to me and gives me the Stare of Expectation which, since I watched the whole thing fearful that he was really going to burn himself, I immediately understood and acted upon. He took the bone from me and headed back to his bed without a hint of thanks. One doesn’t thank a hammer for correctly planting a nail.

It actually stayed sunny all day with just a little afternoon haze, but it never got nearly above freezing and so promised a nice cold night.

Could have been worse but I’m pretty sure my pipes are trying to freeze. Nothing’s broken so far and I can continue to hope it doesn’t but I just got back from town to (finally) pick up my new Jeep hinges…

…and while there I dropped into the hardware store to pick up fresh plumbing supplies of the sort that don’t shelf well, like PVC cement. So as much as I hope I don’t have to crawl around under the cabin I’ll at least not be let down by lack of supplies.

Have I mentioned that I hate winter?

Felt like I barely slept at all last night. At a minimum I was up at eleven, quarter to two, and a little after four and each time doubted I was going to get back to sleep. So naturally I slept right past seven when Tobie decided to take matters into his own muzzle. Which is the appendage he uses to wake me up when I’m clearly taking this “sleep” thing too far. The reason I mention insomnia is because every time I found myself lying awake I could hear wind moaning in the eaves right on the other side of the bedroom wall. Wasn’t surprised when the first chore of the morning was shoveling off the porch, stairs and woodshed bridge and brushing off the solar panels on the ground mount.

The morning walkie was a little fraught…

…but kinda pretty and it’s nice to have proper winter gear even though it doesn’t get an amazing amount of use. It didn’t actually get as cold overnight as predicted…

But with what remained of the wind you could have fooled me. You wouldn’t have wanted to be out in it when it was howling in the middle of the night. And the voltage needed immediate attention, no doubt. It was down below twelve volts at first rising, which is not at all acceptable, and with no sign at all that it wold be any less gloomy today than it was yesterday.

So we got back from morning walkie around nine ayem, the fire was burning itself out…

…making the interior far too “cozy” for being all wrapped up, but before I could start stripping layers off I had one last chore.

Drag the Honda out to the porch, chain open the powershed door, then lug the generator over there and get it set up for battery charging. First pull, baby! (love this thing.)

Now of course since I went to the trouble of doing that the sun is suddenly shining. If it stays thus the batteries would eventually recharge by afternoon but only a fool would count on that at this time of year.

So early yesterday we had that snowstorm and then it was gloomy all day. Ran the Honda to charge the batteries up to full, so I didn’t have to worry about hauling my old bones up a scary slippery ladder to clean off the roof panels. They’re still not quite clear of snow.

We didn’t lose much snow yesterday but today started sunny and now we’re getting a lot of mud. But the grade to Ian’s place is still deep in snow so I took Tobie down the driveway to the wash instead. It’s been so long since we took our morning walk in the wash I almost forgot why we don’t usually do that – Tobie is a slave to his nose, and I swear every one of God’s creatures uses the wash for something. Never mind the snow, which always makes him forget his manners: His nose was pulling him in so many directions at once he didn’t know what to do – but paying attention to the rules wasn’t one of those things. Forgiveness is easier than permission.

Speaking of snowy walkies…

Having only one meat foot, I need only one good snow boot. And I have a really good one courtesy of a generous neighbor who started out in Minnesota where they presumably know a thing or two about snow. Since we don’t actually get that much snow annually I expect this boot to outlast me – but I’ll keep it in good shape in the meantime because it’s the nicest I’ve ever owned. Sorel, I think?

Anyway – since it was sunny I sorted laundry and trudged up to Ian’s to wash a load. I was just about to start hanging it on the line when I got a text: Neighbor L wanted to go to town to get a load of pellets and did I want to tag along. Amazon had assured me that my Jeep window hinges were waiting for me so I hurried up, hung the laundry, chipped the ice off the Jeep, changed boots and got to D&L’s in time to catch my ride. The hinges were not, in fact, waiting for me. Harrumph.

But now it was time to run home, grab a bite, put on my back brace, and then Tobie and I had a nice Jeep ride back to D&L’s to unload wood pellets.

Neighbor D is home but still laid up but we have a newish neighbor, youngest in the Gulch by far, who’s amenable to come help unload a ton of pellets so it wasn’t just L and me and we got it unloaded and stacked in no time.

And now I’ve got a new pallet for the stack, got the Jeep as closed up as possible because the weather’s supposed to be weathery again, and I need to do all the afternoon stuff: Set a fire in the woodstove, fill the woodbox, wash dishes, then go up to Ian’s and get my laundry off the line before (early) dark. A beautiful day in the neighborhood.

…and it arrived exactly on schedule.

Which is to say in the wee hours. I woke at three to the sound of wind in the eaves, and was not altogether surprised to find that I had to shovel my way off the porch. Unfortunately the snow was preceded by freezing rain, so I was shuffling around like an old man afraid of more falling down – which I suppose I am at this point. Tobie was absolutely giddy with excitement but rather disappointed at the brevity of his morning walkie.

Now unfortunately…

I have to go back into it and do some work. The ice under the snow makes it pretty much pointless to try and clean off the solar panels, plus the heavy overcast would prevent them from doing much good even if I could clear them. I have made a place for the generator inside the cabin so fortunately it should start without very much cord yanking: Unfortunately I first have to lug it out of the cabin and over to the powershed. Guess I should dust off my snow boot and go do that to get it out of the way. It’s damn near mid-morning already and the battery voltage is currently going nowhere but down.

…and all the sourdoughs come out to stock up on food, freak out at the crowd and hurry back home where it’s quiet.

Or at least that’s what I always end up doing. I almost always see a bunch of roughly-dressed greybeards who tragically look a lot like me, and I can imagine that’s what’s on a lot of their minds. Maybe some of them are extroverts, shouldn’t try to speak for them.

Meanwhile Tobie…

…has a brand-new knucklebone to call his own and has forgotten all about lunch.

Never thought I’d live this long, to be honest. I’m curious: Those of you who actually have to live in the world – have you formed the habit of facing each new year with at least mild dread? Because I’m kind of a bystander and I have to admit I sort of do.

Every morning I take a composition book down from the shelf and record the opening battery voltage and indoor/outdoor temperatures, just so I have basis for comparison when related questions come up, and also things I need to keep track of like propane bottle swaps and dogfood bag openings. Helps me notice consumption trends and related budget issues, propane leaks, that sort of thing. I get two years per side out of a book – flipping it over and using both sides of each page, a book lasts me four years. I’ve been doing it for 12 years. So today was something of an event,…

…because I had to remember to start a new book. Seems to me the cover on this one is quite a lot flimsier, which is bad because they get kind of ratty after four years.

There’s some humidity in the air, which always helps with my bread. I got a nice loaf yesterday.

And that’s about all there is to report. I hope your new year goes at least as well for you as the last one did.

Yeah, I’ve been hiding inside despite a spell of not at all unpleasant weather. For some reason the same thing happened to me as happened this time last year: I got blisters on the end of my stump that progressed into really painful and impressive-looking bruises, making the act of walking rather more unpleasant than usual. Somebody’s going to point out that this corresponds with my also having given up daily showers for the season but no, give me a little credit, I’ve been doing the amputee thing for over fifty years and I know what happens when you neglect hygiene. I really don’t know what I did to deserve this – I only know it happened in late December last year, too.

So anyway, I’ve been sitting around a lot with nothing to report but this morning I had to gear up and go outside because… Continue reading →

We’re three days past the solstice and it has barely mattered, with heavy overcast and lots of rain. Overnight the sky cleared…

…and now everything outdoors is frozen solid. But it’s nice to see the sky again.

What with what I’m still hoping is only a new learning curve concerning Ian’s batteries, I’ve been considering moving his solar panels. Due to ongoing construction, back in 2009 we built his panel rack facing pretty much due east…

…which gives it great winter sun first thing in the morning but puts it in shadow halfway through the afternoon. We planned to move it at the time but never got around to it because it works where it is and since I couldn’t move it alone anyway I’ll never get around to doing it right. But it did get me thinking about panel placement.

I have two panel mounts, facing in somewhat different directions, and I have found that that accidentally worked to my advantage.

The first rack faces magnetic south, because that’s the way I built the cabin having forgotten all about declination. In summer it really doesn’t matter because this is the SW desert and we get lots of sun but in winter the mistake is an advantage…

Because the ground mount, which faces true south like the manuals tell you to do it, is in shadow until almost 8:30.

When people started using solar power more commonly, solar panels cost so much that a very great deal was written about proper panel placement to get the last possible erg of charge out of every one. People even bought expensive (and unreliable) tracking racks to make (or imagine they were making) their panels track the sun across the sky. You were supposed to change the angle of your panels seasonally. There were elaborate charts you filled out to calculate your demand to ensure you had just enough panels to barely do the job. It was daunting. Shortly before I moved here the Chinese got into the market, the price crashed, and now you just pile on panels until your batteries are charged by mid-day and don’t sweat it.

So hail Mao, I guess. Even so it is something to keep in mind because shadows are definitely not your friends and it’s a good idea to look and see every now and then if a tree has grown between your panels and the sun, or if what seemed like great placement in June maybe isn’t working great for you in late December when you need all the help you can get.

It’s the solstice! Shortest, darkest day of the winter. I’ve been going to bed early and staying in bed late…

…and Tobie has been letting me do it. Guess he figures, same as me, if it’s dark out it must be night. I’ll come bug Uncle Joel when it’s light enough to see the rabbits.

Which is fine, except there’s barely been a morning this week when I wanted to get out of bed at all. It’s been one of those weeks. Continue reading →

I’ve had nothing but trouble with Ian’s new batteries, and for no good reason I could see. No matter how charged I thought they were by afternoon, the next morning the system had shut down with a “low voltage” error. Yeah, the new batteries are half the size of the old ones but that can’t render them completely useless. And yet – nothing was actually wrong but nothing was able to work for very long.

There was only one new element, and that was the batteries, and since there was clearly nothing physical wrong with them the only variable I could come up with was state of charge. It can take quite a while to really fully charge a big deep-cycle battery, let alone eight of them.

So I conducted a little experiment. I turned off every major appliance in the whole system – which consisted of the refrigerator, the pressure pump and the water softener* – while leaving the system itself active. Now the only serious drain on the batteries was the inverter itself.

The next morning, to my pleasure but not really to my surprise, the system was still running. I let this happen for two more days without difficulty, and the charge controller finally indicated a float condition, meaning that in its opinion the batteries were fully charged. For the very first time**.

This sunny morning I turned the pump back on and washed laundry. Now I’m going to leave it on and see if I get an error and shutdown overnight. The refrigerator can wait till I work out whether the fully-charged batteries will run the water system without glitching out.

We shall see. This has all been a lot more complicated than I hoped for.

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*The water softener doesn’t actually pull much juice at any time as far as I know but it does regenerate periodically which requires a lot of water pressure which won’t happen without the pump which pulls a lot of juice, exclusively at night. So I turned it off just to simplify matters.

**I have a way of charging four batteries at once in my own powershed. I don’t know if the charger will do eight, or if the generator would power the attempt, but I do know that unbolting the charger from my own system and rigging it for Ian’s would require more effort than I’d be happy to call Plan A. Success might also involve dividing Ian’s batteries to two or four at a time for charging, which would kind of defeat the whole purpose of his PV system. So I just turned everything off and let the PV system charge the batteries at its own pace even if it took days. Saved gas, too.

I don’t really do gun forums anymore but I’m happy to hear that the same old arguments are going on in the same old way, over the same old trivialities.

😀 Hell, I’m old enough to remember people arguing endlessly over exactly the same topics in the letter sections of paper gun magazines. So – I dunno – get off my lawn or something. Where’s my Geritol?

Looking like he lost 80 pounds and maybe six inches in the bargain, but he’s back. He’s mobile-ish with a walker but in good spirits.

This newish game camera takes lousy night pics. Also, this coyote has become so bold as to leave me piles practically next to the cabin. Never used to happen, don’t have any idea how to deal with it since it’s virtually certain it would never happen with me outdoors. Not really doing any harm but I find it rude and take it personally. Plus, someday I might decide to raise poultry again and I like the coyotes polite.

D&L are not having a good time. D is still in the medical center in the biggish town about 35 miles away and he’s not improving. His ribs and collarbone are doing okay under the circumstances but his hip isn’t healing and he’s a wisp of what he was two months ago. L is understandably worried but at least now she can go visit him, right?

Except I got a call right around lunch* from Neighbor L: She was about a quarter of the way down the road between the towns coming back from the visit, a road that is the very model of “middle of nowhere,” the truck’s engine redlined and all the alarms went off, she’s now stranded beside the road and hoping to negotiate a tow sometime this calendar year.

Altogether she was stuck there for about 2 and a half hours before the flatbed showed up, brought her back to the crappy little desert town nearest where we live, and could I come get her? Well, (for reasons I don’t wish to discuss here) I couldn’t do it in my Jeep, but I could go to her place and then pick her up in her Jeep if that was all right? She said fine, so that’s just what I did. No problem. Just got back. Tobie has forgiven me.

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*The telephone actually rang, which Tobie has come to recognize as a call to action that usually involves a Jeep ride. He got very excited and I had to tell him to go lay down before I could tend to the call.

Heading into mid-December it hasn’t been very cold at all. Dipped barely into the teens a couple of times, briefly, that’s all. This morning it got proper frosty, though…

Seriously I haven’t even been burning a morning fire most of the time, preferring to put on a hoodie and acclimatize. This morning the fire burned – but not for very long. I like my relatively newly-snug cabin. Holds heat ever so much better than it did at first – and of course I cheat with the bedroom heater.

Ian’s new batteries gave me a scare yesterday. I really didn’t know their state of charge when I brought them home, then the next day it was really cloudy so I didn’t get upset when they didn’t seem to be charging at all. But yesterday we ran into real trouble when they dipped so low they couldn’t run the system. Bright sunny day, no reason they shouldn’t be headed for float but instead they weren’t charging at all! That’s not a battery problem, that’s a system problem!

Ian’s prefab Outback system has run so flawlessly so long that I rarely give most of it any thought, but yesterday afternoon I was feverishly trying to figure out how to determine what, if anything, the charge controller was doing. I quickly decided it wasn’t doing anything, becaus it was stuck on the welcome menu demanding to be configured. I guess completely disconnecting it from its DC side could have had that effect. Anyway that sent me to the manual – and these things always have the worst manuals. I used to do documentation, I’m jaded and opinionated on the subject, but it has been my observation that most doc writers don’t know what they’re writing about, they don’t know what the information on the page means, and so they have no way of making the information they’re given meaningful to a alarmingly ignorant user like me. They just try to get buy-off from the (uninterested) engineer who’s supposed to be guiding them. I’ve been in that situation before, and what always comes out is gibberish.

So it was with a spirit closely approximating despair that I tried to read how to get the charge controller to do something useful – especially since the first thing it wanted me to do was enter the password.

The password? Why the everlasting gobstopper would a household charge controller need a password? Happily, that information was at least highlighted in the manual and when I entered it, the menu became much more helpful. But I still went home yesterday afternoon convinced it wasn’t working. It said it was working, but I didn’t believe it.

Turns out I was wrong about that, because this morning I came back into the powershed to find the batteries fully charged for the first time. Now I’ll go back in a little while and see how it’s running with a load, but it looks good.