The Ultimate Answer to Kings

A few days ago I got a text from a traveler, a fellow freedomista who has visited the Gulch before. Five years before, to be almost exact, at which time he helped me get the interior of the bedroom addition ready for habitation. Suffering a dose of cabin fever he found himself on the road and in my vicinity, and I told him he was most welcome to come and visit.

Hell of a guy. really. Of course I’m still me, so…

…I did what I could to be hospitable. Tobie, bless him, was a far better host.

We had some very pleasant conversations, and he headed out on his way this afternoon.

…it was “Did I add enough?”

Exhibit A: This is victims 3 and 4 of my suddenly very effective porch bucket trap.

Alas, disposal will have to wait till the afternoon because temperature got into the teens overnight and the antifreeze in the bucket didn’t have enough of the desired effect. At the moment they’re playing Very Small Mammoths Frozen in Ice.

Give me a nice crisp cold morning with frozen ground any day. Not this miserable windy wet rain/snow just-barely-cold.

But slogga we musta, for Tobie’s colon – and probably my own health as well – doth so decree. Then hang out at the porch railing scraping boots for a while.

Speaking of the porch, guess who didn’t get the memo…

A mouse in the mud bucket. Why? For that matter, how? But I’m averaging a mouse a day in there. Meanwhile…

…no customers for the more-accessible drowning bucket.

Today I’m just gonna take the mud bucket back to the woodshed. Should have done that yesterday.

The Lair’s indicated battery voltage has gone nowhere but slowly down all morning and there’s no sign of any break in the clouds. Forecast says it’ll keep doing this most of the week, so…

…no point in waiting till the batteries are suffering to kick in my new Plan B.

For battery banks up to four T-105s, I can heartily recommend this charger. Should have gotten serious about this years ago.

There hasn’t been much going on around the Secret Lair. Winter has settled in: Hardly any snow but lots of gloom and enough cold to keep the old man inside. Still, the local wildlife has been trying to keep me entertained.

This is the old mud bucket I use to move firewood to the cabin. I normally leave it on the porch outside the door when I’m done with it because why make a separate trip to the woodshed just to store it?

Lately, nearly every morning at five am, Tobie has shown a special interest in the contents of that bucket because it usually contains a mouse. This morning it contained two. I have no idea why they find it so fatally fascinating, or for that matter why so many mice are attracted to the porch. But I do know…

If it’s interested in my cabin, I’m interested in killing it. And a bucket of water will always be more interesting to a desert mouse than an empty bucket. So there it is, guys. Dive in and have a ball.

I must not lose track of Tobie around it, of course. Antifreeze will kill a dog as surely as a mouse, though of course he won’t drown in it.

…have been really sparse so far.

Can’t complain about the size or resolution of the pictures it takes, but the sensitivity leaves quite a lot to be desired. It seldom notices a Jeep going by and only sporadically an old man with a dog. It ignores birds entirely even though they flock to the spring. So I don’t take the fact that it hasn’t taken a single wildlife pic as evidence of a lack of wildlife.

I’ve gone through the settings repeatedly and unless I’m doing something really stupid wrong (never out of the question, as regular readers know) it’s set as sensitive as it can be.

We were just talking about how hard the well water here is. One reason that’s kind of a problem is that the calcium in the water treats every orifice in my plumbing as a leak to be sealed. Therefore, one thing I always have to keep on hand is a jug of vinegar. Stronger cleaning vinegar is best but any vinegar will do.

This is my kitchen faucet.

It only runs cold water. Hot running water is only possible using this water with (by my standards) MASSIVE expensive infrastructure I literally don’t even want*. Even so, every couple of months I’ll notice that my faucet isn’t running so well and I know the reason why.

No problem: It’s just periodic maintenance now.

I take the aerator off the faucet and drop it in an old measuring cup I keep just for that purpose. Fill the cup with strong vinegar.

Wait a couple of hours, then attack it with an old toothbrush.

Problem solved. 🙂

Now if I could only figure out how to do the same thing with a toilet valve, I could stop buying them in bulk.

—
*Three years ago we did all the infrastructure fixes necessary to put a proper shower in Ian’s Cave. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, but the running joke is that that is the most expensive shower outside Malibu or maybe Arlington.

So yesterday afternoon I went out to the new spring in the wash with a shovel. I dug as deep as I could which wasn’t very deep since the sand kept filling back in. The hole filled with water from the first moment there was a hole, and it was predictably so muddy you couldn’t have done a thing with it.

As hoped, by this morning the hole had become shallower, much wider and filled with clear, slowly-flowing water. I cracked a scum of ice and dipped out a mugful…

…brought it home and put that new TDS meter to work at last.

Total Dissolved Solids measured 316 PPM. Not safe for drinking by EPA standards, though…

…it would certainly be better than drinking the tap water that comes from our well. Still, compare that with…

…the filtered water I truck in from town, and have for almost ten years since that very impressive introduction to kidney stones. The well water isn’t actively toxic, but it’s so hard with calcium and iron oxide it almost may as well be. That said, it took a couple of years and some pretty intense dehydration to actually make me sick. But once was enough – and the dehydration came from hot well water being so unpleasant to drink in the first place. So: Say what you will about city services but clean water is good. 🙂

I’m very pleased with the way that new charger worked out, and I must say the timing was exquisite. We had over a week of hardly any sun and that never happens. And it has tested every solar power system in the neighborhood till they scream. I visited Ian’s place early this morning to find the power completely shut down and while I can’t say that has never happened, before now it was always because of something gone wrong with the – ahem – rather amateurish house wiring. This morning it was because the batteries were flat – and that has never happened in 12 years. All that ran in there was a refrigerator and a couple of CFLs, and those have never come close to draining the batteries.

Visited D&L later, and they said their generator ran twice in a day this past week. This is their monster of a generator…

D&L built a giant strawbale & earthbag house, with a giant electrical system. When their giant battery bank goes low it takes a giant automatic-starting propane-powered powerplant to talk it back to some sense of its duty. And it takes several hours’ running time to do it.

That would be rather excessive for the Lair, but my completely opposite approach – that of having no backup to the solar panels at all – took minimalism rather too far to get me through this very unusual gloomy period. None of my improvisations were much help at all. But now I’m ready for next time. Everything in proportion, I guess.

The day dawned mostly clear and forecast to stay that way…

Nearly guaranteeing that the solar panels will be able to bring the batteries to float. Nevertheless the voltage was lower than I like at bedtime, to the point where I’d normally be tempted to turn the inverter off for the night and avoid the parasitic draw. I deliberately did not do so, and this morning the battery voltage read 12.11. I didn’t want to seriously run the new charger while I wasn’t right there to micromanage, so I waited till after the long morning walkie. Then I started up the Honda, let it warm for a couple of minutes, and plugged in the charger…

…and may I say that when this thing is throwing a full charge it really pulls some juice. Nearly bogged the poor Honda right down, but the little machine was up for it. Still, I may try to anticipate another such event and borrow a clamping multimeter from Neighbor S because I’d like to know how many amps it’s drawing.

Anyway: After about fifteen minutes…

…and it shows just over fourteen volts as I type this. Guess I can burn the packaging now. 🙂

In a discussion about the new spring in the wash, people wanted to know if the water coming from the rock was softer than the well water and I replied that my TDS meter went to electron heaven years ago so I didn’t know. Generous Reader MM decided to remove that excuse…

…and so pretty soon I’ll dig a little pit downstream from the rock and collect enough water to find out.

And Big Brother did this…

Considering the weather of the past week, this immediately became a project. I had to bum six feet of eight gauge wire and do some soldering to make a proper installation of it, but…

…there it is, and it works!

Ironically I’ve gotten just enough sun in the past two days to render it moot for the moment, but it’s mid-winter. There will be opportunity to really put it through its paces before long but I have confirmed that it works, and far more dramatically than the two expedients I’ve tried earlier in the winter.

It’s got a built-in charge controller so it’s not just throwing 45 amps across the batteries and watching them boil – or at least that’s what the literature says. Supposedly if you were maintaining an RV battery off grid power you could just leave it plugged in – but of course that’s not the case here. I’ll only use it and the Honda to supplement the solar panels when they’re not doing their duty.

This might also moot the idea of running an extension cord through the floor on the kitchen side of the Lair so I can run the oven off the generator when it’s gloomy. The charger ought to serve to supplement the batteries instead. I’ll be trying that, as well.

Uncle Murphy has decided to pick on my iPhone again. We’re way out at the edge of any coverage area, in hilly country, so there are lots of dead spots. I’m used to that, but always until recently you could climb a hill or do something else to get in line of sight and your signal would come back quickly. Now, though…

…once you lose signal it might stay gone for an hour or more after you get in an area where there ought to be lots of signal. I don’t know if it’s something that can be fixed or if it’s one of those Apple planned obsolescence things I’ve heard about. It’s an iPhone 6, and was pretty old when I got it more than five years ago, so that second thing comes to mind.

Anybody have any experience with this?

I spent four nights in Ian’s place – first time I’ve ever done that, the bed is surprisingly nice but Tobie hated spending nights in the place and wouldn’t let me sleep – four days and nights running my propane heater in the bathroom so the shower would be tolerably warm. The whole thing blew the hell out of my propane budget between that and the Lair’s bedroom heater being cranked up 24/7. Glad I topped off my propane for the visit.

Plus there’s me trying not to be an old white guy with two girls in the house…

“Turn off the lights when you’re not using them!”

Yeah, it was gloomy the whole time, which did the batteries no favors. Rained all one day, snowed the last day so I had to kind of shoo us all down the road early while I could be reasonably sure Daughter’s little car could even make it out to pavement. Then later in the day the sun came out a little and all the snow suddenly melted, so my prediction was proven correct as the road became a sea of mud again. Nobody really wanted to break up the visit, but if they hadn’t left when they did they’d still be here and probably with the car stuck in a ditch somewhere.

My daughter, bless her, has the same gift my brother Vaughn has: She’s not uncomfortable with companionable silences. So we spent most of the time sitting around reading, and still had a great time.

Tobie was absolutely besotted with love for them both. We went to S&L’s for supper the final evening, and he was very upset at being left home. Kind of did some obnoxious puppy things in our absence.

Yesterday I went back and forth getting stuff out of Ian’s place, kind of crashed with some old movies. Tobie slept all day. And this morning…

…he’s back to like nothing ever happened.

I ran the last of my gasoline through the generator yesterday trying to jazz some juice into the batteries with that new 12v cable. Did very little good. Today I’m going to the Palace of Food with D&L, and I need to go to town to get gasoline and also hopefully there’s a Big New Thing waiting for me there: A Generous Reader sent me a proper small-homestead-size battery charger that can work with the Honda, and if it works as advertised I’ll stop being that crank who can’t turn on the lights after three cloudy days.

Well, here’s an issue I never planned to face. Granddaughter is 11, I think, and I doubt she’s had any gun safety training. May not be familiar at all – and that’s a curious and therefore dangerous age. One of my more … shall we say influential … childhood experiences involved two neighbor boys playing with a loaded rifle. Therefore, since the Lair doesn’t have a gunsafe but it does have firearms squirreled away basically everywhere, I’m spending the first part of the morning on a sort of scavenger hunt to find them all and put them in the Jeep for transport to Ian’s Cave for the next few days.

Kind of feels like taking a page from the gun grabber playbook, which wounds my gun hugger heart. But you know what they say about blind squirrels.

This is more difficult than I expected: I keep remembering guns that weren’t in the action plan. There’s an NAA minirevolver in this tiny little drawer in the rolltop desk, and I probably haven’t thought about it in years…

Think I’ll leave these alone just for decor…

…but I’ll unload the Marlin. All the real guns will be gone by noon.

I was reading some old posts and came upon this…

Poor Little Bear – I often called him “all my sins remembered” because when he came to me almost 14 years ago I knew nothing about puppy training or for that matter dog care. If I hadn’t let him drink well water exclusively he might still be with me, though quite old.

I should have guests starting tomorrow evening and I need to bake bread. But it’s forecast to be cloudy and wet the next several days, and you know how I like to dote on my batteries. So…

Crust got a little dry on this one. I blame the Honda.

Actually this was such a no-brainer that now I’m thinking of getting a really good exterior-grade extension cord and making another modification to the Lair in the kitchen corner.

Finally got a seriously overcast day: By 10am the battery voltage was lower than it was at 5am. Supposed to rain and snow most of the day so the photonic situation won’t be improving.

Perfect day to see what the generator’s 12v outlet can do for my battery bank. I’m not really expecting much better performance than my Battery Minder gave me – but assuming something won’t work is often worse in the long run than assuming it will. And in any case I ought to have had one of these cables for the Jeep long since.

Simple enough…

And in truth, I’m getting quicker results than I expected. Except this time the batteries haven’t been abused by multiple overcast days, so I guess it would show better results right at first. We’ll see how it goes.

I received a text this afternoon informing me that my only sister has died. Of a ‘second stroke,’ and I wasn’t aware she had ever suffered a first one. Actually I didn’t know for sure that she was even still alive.

There were originally five siblings in my generation of what I’ll conventionally call ‘my family,’ and I have regular correspondence with exactly one of them. This is – I must be honest – entirely his doing. He is the only really normal sibling of our generation, including me. He’s a genuinely nice guy, and I’ve always thought he deserved a better family than the one he ended up with.

As to my sister … well, I last heard from her a little over fifty years ago and the circumstances were kind of weird. I was in an intensive care unit at the time, and she ripped me off for my only twenty bucks. She became a rather extreme hermit, proof (if my now-dead-for-over-25-years younger brother wasn’t sufficient proof) that mental illness still kind of runs in my family.

Not sure what I should make of that. Kind of wish I cared more.

Brought my air mattress in from the metal shed and let it warm up before inflating it and making sure it still holds air. Tobie found this very peculiar…

He doesn’t know the half. If all goes as planned, he and I will be moving into Ian’s Cave at the end of the week to make room for daughter and granddaughter.

He won’t like that in the slightest. But he doesn’t get a vote.