The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Tobie got very excited last night around eight. I was in the bedroom reading chair, the window was open, and I thought he was going to insist on sharing the chair with me to get his nose closer to the screen. I knew why: cattle gently lowed not at all far away. Wondered how much mess I’d need to clean up in the morning.

Not that much, as it turned out. But that one cow managed to plop it directly in the middle of the principal path to and from the Lair.

Guess who loves to eat cow shit. (If you guessed it’s me, remove five points.)

See, this is just rude. I don’t shit in your yard. Why should I smile when you send your animals to shit in mine?

I had this one propane bottle with an iffy valve. Wasn’t leaking, but the bleedoff screw was nearly impossible to move and sometimes the propane guy gets touchy about that. Also sometimes the bottle doesn’t want to fill with it closed. It’s really just there to prevent vaporlock during filling.

But I didn’t want to take a bottle out of rotation to get it fixed. So I marked the bottle – they pretty much all look alike although the valve finish at least lets you know old from new – and planned for this one to get emptied at or very near the end of the real ‘need the heater’ season.

And that actually worked! I remembered to do it and everything, and then the propane shop actually did the job promptly! I’m still a little woozy.

It’s nothing fancy, just a Victorinox kitchen knife I could probably replace from Amazon with ease.

But it was a gift from a now deceased friend just before I moved into the boonies and I’ve used it several times a day since then for going on 17 years. The handle scales are cracked, the tip is bent, every scar on it was earned, and I like it.

Unfortunately over the years it fell victim to my secret shame: I’ve always been terrible at sharpening knives. Seriously terrible. When I was young and larped as this accomplished survivalist outdoorsman it was something I kept trying to cover for with every “this’ll do it” gadget on the market. But the fact is I was simply hopeless.

Which means that as I actually LEARNED TO COOK and also did other daily things that really depended on sharp knives, this is one of the knives that suffered through my long and troubleprone learning period. Basically, I wrecked the secondary grind and couldn’t keep the knife sharp anymore.

In the past couple of years I’ve gotten less intimidated by the notion of recontouring edged tools. Yesterday I worked up the nerve to take some coarse sandpaper to my principal kitchen knife…

…just because things had gotten so bad I really couldn’t do any harm. I basically re-cut a secondary grind that in some places goes all the way into those little scallops, then put 600 and then 1000-grit waterproof paper on the block and established a new primary grind that nicely took – and hopefully will keep – a sharp edge.

I guess we’ll see if I’ve finally learned this rather basic thing. Otherwise I’m going to have to replace an old friend and I don’t wanna.

Once again just not a lot going on here at the Secret Lair. And not for lack of trying! Spring has sprung…

…but of course in April that’s only sporadically a good thing. Temperature’s all over the place and the spring wind is always a factor. But complaining about weather in April makes you seem kind of an ingrate.

Still working on getting the shower online with my scrounged little Heater Buddy. Forced the small-room temperature to a new high two days ago…

…only to lose a lot of that very promptly to the cold walls and floor, of course. Entropy’s a bitch, but we have the resting temperature of the whole interior up ten degrees in just a week or so, and the shower is now officially online if not exactly a place you want to linger and enjoy an afternoon cocktail.

And the experience reminded me of why I need to be shopping for a new one of these…

This is the backup: Over the winter my twice-as-capable Mr. Heater bit the dust and I dragged this one – which I scrounged many years ago – out of storage. And it showed me, again, why somebody threw it away: When it gets fully hot the knob stops working and so you can’t turn it OFF. When you’re using it with the little disposable bottles that’s an actual problem. When you use it the way I traditionally do…

…it’s – not really an actual problem but still kind of a pain. I haven’t used either of them for serious purposes in years but I did need them this past winter for company and they kind of let me down so I should be looking for a new one.

Other than that things are going swimmingly. A bit too well, actually: Big Brother bequeathed me his second-best Kindle a couple of months ago and it has practically turned me into a shut-in. For a long time I blamed my increasing reluctance to spend time with books on a YouTube-addled attention span, but it kind of turns out that at least part of the problem is deteriorating eyesight: The Kindle is simply easier to use. And of course books are easy and cheap to acquire, which in my situation is actually more of a problem than a blessing, because with the new phone I have a functioning wi-fi if I want it and also self-control and time preference were never my very best qualities…

So several years ago I made a couple of signs for the spot where the “road” officially becomes a driveway.

I was quite proud of them. They looked nice when new. And yes, I was aware of the inherent problem with planting wooden posts in the ground here, that you’re just feeding the termites. I planted them in concrete and thought that would be good.

The termites thought it was good too. Last autumn the other post just fell over, eaten right off at ground level. Yes, including the part surrounded by concrete*.

In the meantime I had scrounged some metal fenceposts but by the time I put the old sign on the new post it was getting cold. I leaned it against a juniper and put it off till…

…this morning.

And it occurred to me as I worked that “gnarly old hermit digging in the desert to repair his ‘stay off my lawn’ sign” just might at last qualify as Peak Redneck.

Now if I could just get my big mean-looking dog to stop singing Unchained Melody to random trespassers…

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*And yes, long-time readers, I am aware of the implication of that for the longterm health of my woodshed. I have actually devised a plan for when it inevitably detaches from the ground.

See, this is why I’m not a huge fan of lots of thermal mass in home construction…

We’re in the middle of an unseasonably warm spell here at the Gulch. Started yesterday, peaked today, supposed to be gone by Friday. I enjoyed my first muck sweat of the year! Yay!

Unfortunately…

…Ian’s Cave is taking its sweet time warming up. I’m tired of all this natural stuff, so…

…although it’s against my religion to spend propane on situations that would take care of themselves in the fullness of time, I pulled a half-full 20-pound bottle off Ian’s propane bottle station, lugged it down to the cave and plugged it into my Heater Buddy in the shower. I Want That Shower … but not quite enough to put up with the shivers.

Tomorrow I Shower.

In another week the flowering trees in town will all be doing their thing. The pear tree is certainly getting ready.

Spent part of the morning before the Monday morning water run cleaning out the woodstove*. I’m not quite confident enough in the end of winter as to put away the woodbox, but I can live in hope.

Speaking of which…

I filled all the empty propane bottles a while back, arranging for this particular one to be the next to suck dry because I wanted to take it to town for a new valve. It’s probably my oldest soldier, and valves aren’t forever. With these 30-pound bottles it just barely makes more economic sense to repair than to replace them. When those little 20-pound barbecue bottles wear out you take them to one of those bottle-swap places and take the hit on the overpriced and underfilled propane.

Somebody else decided to spruce up for Spring…

Just last post I showed a picture of the wind- and UV-damaged flag and banners at the laundromat where we fill our water bottles: Apparently the owner noticed too, and decided to – briefly, no doubt – take care of that. Good man.

Speaking of damage…

New year, new skeletal issue for the old man. I abruptly starting having really painful issues with my right knee – that’s the good one, that’s only been taken apart and put back together twice – and it isn’t getting better. I tried wrapping it and that actually helped with mobility, so I bought a knee brace online and it came today. And sunuvagun it actually helps, though it’s going to get hot when summer comes. Hope – without a whole lot of hope – that the joint improves. Neighbor D has had TWO joint replacements on the right side alone, telling me that in addition to being financially out of my league they don’t always go well.

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* Pro-tip: Don’t leave wood ash in your stove for long periods of time. The stovepipe will allow a certain amount of moisture in, and the combination of wood ash and even a little water is what rots out stove bottoms. Keep them empty during the warm season and they’ll last damn near forever.

Wash’t here a few days ago. May not be here a few days from now. But today and through the weekend it’s supposed to be nice.

And by nice…

…I mean not only mild in temperature but also in wind. And in the high desert, the price we pay for mild temperature is often damaging wind. I took this picture earlier this week at the laundromat where we fill our water bottles. I remember when this place changed hands, and the new owner put a lot of work into sprucing the place up, including this new flag and banners. Wasn’t that long ago. Kind of feel bad for him.

Yesterday and today I’ve been finding excuses to play outside, with hardly any wind, no threat of rain, and shirtsleeve temperatures by mid-morning. Had to take the show indoors and open the window, though, because I ate the last of my homebaked bread for breakfast and needed to replace it…

Always a pleasant and relaxing chore. I’ve been doing this so long now that it’s all autopilot, followed by pleasant odors. Have to keep my eye on Tobie afterward, though: That boy has developed into the champion counter surfer of all time, and as far as he’s concerned if I didn’t want him to have it I should have protected it more carefully. Right?

Nothing much of note going on here at the Secret Lair. I’m just enjoying the first undependable signs of real spring.

A blustery early-April day here at the Gulch…

I dressed far too thinly for the morning walkie, the wind at the top of the ridge had me shivering halfway through. So I started looking for indoor activities.

Perusing Gunbloggers, I came on an article shilling a company that sells kydex holsters for red-dot-equipped S&W revolvers. Happens I have one of those and it needs a new holster. Unfortunately the holster this company sells is only for the snubby version and I’m not paying $90 for that. Got me thinking, though…

I have this…

A Fobus holster I’ve had for a really long time. I cut it down for my old Taurus 431.

Then it turned out to fit the (frame of) the Taurus Tracker…

…and it got used thus until I acquired a better leather holster. Which also happened to (mostly) fit the Model 69.

But that was going on eight years ago and leather holsters wear out. This one was well on the way before I cut it last summer to accommodate the red dot. It’s getting pretty decrepit: Won’t stay still on my belt and the thumb break is so floppy it gets in the way of reholstering.

I dug around in my box’o’holsters and found that old Fobus gathering dust. If it fit the Tracker it should fit the S&W. But would it get in the way of the red dot?

Not really! A tiny bit of excision with a Dremel, and it fit just fine.

Of course I’m no happier with this than I would have been with that $90 snubby holster – or let’s say I’m $90 happier but not especially happy. Not nearly enough protection for my beloved Model 69. Someday I’m going to find somebody who makes custom kydex – that wouldn’t involve me sending my beloved Model 69 out in the mail – and maybe then I’ll get a proper new holster.

In the meantime I’ve been wondering if carrying the .44 is even appropriate anymore. The Gulch is – I say with a bit of sadness – quite a lot tamer than it used to be. The feral dog problem is long in the past. I barely remember the last time I saw a mountain lion. The coyotes are very polite. I kind of lamented to myself just the other day, “I haven’t killed anything in years.” The rare occasions when I actually fire a gun for serious these days, I’m just making noise to get a rude but not threatening animal moving out of my way. Hell, I could do that with the Makarov, which weighs a lot less than the .44. Truth is I’ve been carrying the Mak a lot more often these days, just because it’s less hassle overall.

Did the Icelandic Norse use firearms long before the rest of medieval Europe? Evidence says … yes?

Spoiler alert: All known historical fact (and common sense) says “No. Don’t be silly.”

Ian presents the possibility in all straight-faced seriousness, and he didn’t actually lose me until his disclosure that saltpeter comes from fermented sharks*.

On my first viewing of the video – which naturally took place on April 1 – I failed to notice his reference to another, collaborative video. And this one – presented in the most hackneyed TV documentary style imaginable – is hilarious…

And then today they released a rather long joint video where they discuss the origins and all the easter eggs in their April Fools joke.

I especially enjoy Ian’s description of his interview with a (genuine) Icelandic expert on Viking weapons. In the first clip the expert seriously answers Ian’s serious question about how Icelandic settlers acquired iron. The answer is in Icelandic, with subtitles that are apparently accurate to what he actually said. The second clip has Ian asking if it would have been plausible for Vikings to have invented and used handgonnes. The subtitled answer praises Ian for having made such a brilliant original deduction based on evidence available to historians all along. What the expert is actually saying is apparently “No, no, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” 🙂

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*It does not.

Ian’s Cave is a concrete dome, 12 feet high and however many feet it is long, covered in nobody knows how many tons of sand but it’s a lot. You wanna talk thermal mass? You can’t handle the thermal mass.

This time of year, neither can I. Because…

For the past couple of years the Cave has contained a perfectly lovely shower. But once it gets cold there’s no effective way (within my propane budget) to actively heat it*. So although it takes a long time in early winter for the cave to fall out of the comfort zone and it never gets anywhere near below freezing…

…it also takes a really long time in Spring before the cave is warm enough for the old man to want to get naked and wet in it. So…

…every warm afternoon so far I’ve been trying to speed things up. Day to day it hasn’t really seemed to accomplish anything, but I remind myself that heating the Cave is never a sudden thing. This past January when Daughter and Granddaughter came to visit I burned a whole 20-pound bottle’s worth of propane in there and JUST BARELY got things sufficiently warm for non-shivery shower use. Took three days. So the big-fan-by-open-window technique sort of qualifies as better than nothing but only just. Eventually things will warm up in there.
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*This is the big problem with the strawbale-and-earthbag extravaganza my neighbors D&L built. They burn an AMAZING amount of expensive wood pellets every winter because they can’t afford to ever let its insides get cold: It would take days to warm back up. My little stick-built cabin gets cold at night but is easy to warm back up in the morning.

Yes I am, and so is the outside temperature for the first time all year. So –

I did something I haven’t done in YEARS…

I went to a gun show.

Okay, full disclosure: There are two reasons I haven’t attended the local annual gun show in a very long time: It’s extremely poorly advertised, so I usually see the sign the Monday after the weekend when it ran, and by ANY gun show standards it’s incredibly pathetic and hardly worth anybody’s time.

Scored a box of commercial .44 Special, though, so maybe the market in revolver ammo is finally coming back.

You probably need to have actually been a mechanic to get the full effect of this one. And I was, and did…

“Wait a minute! Am I missing something here? Don’t you turn on the hotspot in your phone to connect to your laptop? Do it that way and you shouldn’t need a cable.”

…said Ben in a comment on the post below.

Why yes, Ben. Yes I can. As it turns out.

But I swear that didn’t work with the old phone. _{Must have tried it at some point…}

Anyway, suddenly the laptop’s back in the blogging business. Here’s a picture of a coyote from the new trail camera.

BEAUTIFUL day! Temp well into the the sixties: Should have predicted the wind that came up after lunch and come to town in the morning, but so be it. I wanted to do this “software update” that has kept me from being able to connect the laptop to the network with the new iPhone, so I brought all my electro-goodies to town for that very purpose.

Guess who forgot the connecting cable?

So right now all my gadgets are online thanks to the library wifi, but since I can’t connect the laptop to the iPhone it sees no problem. No problem at all. So I can’t fix it. Bother!

On the other hand, I have an excuse to ride my bike to town again, and it’s that time of year when I really want to do that, so…

Temp’s in the mid-thirties at mid-morning, no clouds, no wind (yet). Nice day.

Uncle Joel is happy. Not riding-the-bike-to-town happy, but fingers and toes that don’t hurt isn’t too much to ask. Let’s get some stuff done.

Good day for laundry even though it’s only been three days. Never know when we’ll get another nice one.

Tobie and I went for a nice walkie to service the new trail camera. It’s not doing the blog any good at the moment because I can’t use the laptop online but I got a nice night portrait of a curious coyote two nights ago.

This poor juniper grove – actually a single very old tree – has a hate/hate relationship with the Lair. Every time I add to the building I have to remove a major piece of the tree, and every time the tree grows in its direction I have to remove a small piece.

In January my granddaughter made a couple of clay faces for some vertical cuts. They’re really quite frightening. Anyway…

…that bit right there scrapes the metal roof right above where I sit and read every time the wind blows, which in winter is all the time. It’s been driving me nuts but when the weather is winter- unpleasant I don’t feel like balancing on a shaky ladder to cut it off. This morning I finally got around to doing it.

Then I accumulated some underfloor insulation damage. Crawling around under the cabin is my second-least favorite chore, next to digging up broken pipes, and with all the layers that have been added to the floor on the past several years I don’t even know how important it really is, but I guess it’s the principle of the thing. So I brought home some washers that won’t slip off the head of a drywall screw, and that will work better to hold the sheets in place than the original construction cement did.

Just irritating little things that crop up while it’s too cold out for the old man to want to be crawling or climbing around. This is the time of year when I start to wake up and get more active.

You know what I hate?

I hate when a mild winter waits till March to make up for lost time. 😠 Less than two weeks ago I was on my bike. Now the bucket trap is freezing again.

One hundred eight dollars and change. I half expected the price of propane to have dropped a bit since last time: instead it went up.

Good thing I got gasoline last week, though, because the crappy little town nearest to me is out of gasoline. I am not making this up.

Or the snow. Whatever. How to ensure precipitation.

Yesterday I wanted to wash laundry but the forecast kept saying it was going to rain. Every time I looked out the window it was partly sunny and mild but never mind, it’s going to rain. Respect the weatherman’s authoritah. Naturally it never did.

So this morning I get ready for the morning walkie and it looks great out. I didn’t even look at the weather report, I just bundled up the dirty laundry and told Tobie we would take our walkie by way of the washing machine at Ian’s place. And so we did. And so of course you know what happened next…

Tobie says hi.

I don’t think that title quite works grammatically. What I meant to say is that someone sent me a couple of nice gifts to be used on the bike.

These weird-looking panniers, which stick up in the back high enough that the old man will never be able to Riker-maneuver his sole remaining leg over them – but it has to be that way because…

…they fold down, you see, and in theory will hold a ton of groceries. The awkward part is that they replace saddlebags that are already half full of things I’m not comfortable going without, like water and a spare tube (bulky, with these fat tires) and a big intimidating chain and lock and other sundries that won’t fit in the tool bag. So where do they go, I asked myself.

Turns out that the second gift kind of made an answer to that question non-negotiable…

Now, this is cool and addresses a problem I’ve wrestled with ever since the bike arrived four seasons ago. It’s a handheld electric tire pump with enough power to actually inflate a fat tire. This is serious: a CO₂ cartridge won’t do it, a little hand pump won’t do it before the heat death of the universe. My only practical method of inflating a bike tire has always been the electric inflator in the back of the Jeep. Not convenient to the side of a remote dirt road when I’m on the bike. I have never had to replace a tube on the side of the road yet but I have limped the bike home with a puncture at least three times just having been lucky. It’s been on my mind: my luck isn’t usually that consistently good. So I really wanted one of these things, and the gift was remarkably timely here at the beginning of the warm season when I’m playing hopefully with the bike every day and praying for the rain to stop.

But it did create yet another storage issue…

…it wouldn’t fit in my conventional underseat tool bag. Bother!

So now I had enough theoretical storage space to evacuate Ukraine but it was all folded up, so there was no place to actually store all the stuff I usually (and very much want to) carry with me! Huh!

Well…

With those folding panniers sticking up like that the top of the cargo rack – which I normally use to actually carry cargo – becomes kind of useless. So – I can’t believe I’m really asking this – could I get a(nother) cargo bag sized to fit the top of the rack? Turns out that yes, I can. So I sent away for one before I talked myself out of it.

This is starting to feel a little silly. Sure hope it all works when I’m through.