The Ultimate Answer to Kings

There are places here and there in the wash where water comes to the surface. Prior to this summer I only knew of two, but there’s lots of wash I never explored. In the Gulch the wash is commonly used as a road but there are other places where strangers are unwelcome.

Anyway, when this one appeared so suddenly so close to the Lair I didn’t find it that odd, given the oddity of the Monsoon we just suffered through. I also didn’t expect it to last. I’ve sort of grown used to getting things I don’t expect, so now I’m assuming this one will be with me for a while.

It seems to come out in the neighborhood of these big fallen rocks – possibly underneath them…

…and it flows. I obviously can’t show that in a still picture but water is actively flowing downstream…

…saturating the entire width of the wash for roughly 100 yards before it runs out of volume. That’s a lot of sand. A lot of water just naturally coming out of the ground. In Michigan and the mountains of upper California there’s nothing unusual about artesian springs but they’re not the norm in the desert. The water table is too deep. I don’t know enough geology to understand how this works.

I do know from the tracks that it’s attracting a lot of wildlife, and not just the damned cattle. Maybe the mulies and elk will hang out closer to the cabin now.

They all got rounded up and hauled off a month or so and I thought that was the end of them for the cold season. Apparently not so.

They’re baaaack. Just chased this bunch out of my yard.

I hate frickin’ cattle. At least this time of year they can’t eat my flowers.

It works at a glacial pace, but it does work.

Interested in keeping track of time, I set up the distiller but didn’t turn the flame on till 8am exactly. Not surprisingly, it took a long time for anything at all to happen.

The distiller is in three stainless steel pieces: Bottom to top, they’re the water pan, the collector pan, and the condenser pan. I filled the water pan with bottled drinking water trucked in from town and the condenser pan with well water. Four hours later I feared I was going to regret that last thing but it turned out all right.

Continue reading →

…from a Generous Reader…

Early this year there was a shortage complete absence of distilled water available anywhere, and it went on for quite a while, expending my stored supply. Literally down to nothing but still having a bunch of lead/acid batteries that needed monthly maintenance, I tried my hand at home distillation using expedient materials. The results were not very encouraging, almost not of any use.

Shortly thereafter, supplies of distilled water miraculously re-appeared and the crisis ended. But I didn’t forget – and happily, neither did a Generous Reader! So expect a rematch and a review in the very near future.

This has been on my mind, wondering when the pistol sight would fail me and whether – as per tradition – it would do it suddenly and at a really bad time.

In fact I was surprised when the LED just kind of faded over a couple of days. At first I thought it was my imagination but this morning it was barely visible against a sunny window and clicked right off every time I tried to dial it up. A new battery fixed it. So…

I installed the sight on the Model 69 in mid-June. From then until the yoke screw broke in early July I mostly kept the sight turned off. That was proving a colossal pain in the ass so after I fixed the pistol in September I just left it on, having already bought a moderate pile of replacement batteries. So that’s in the neighborhood of two months continuous use, always keeping in mind that I have no idea as to the actual condition of the battery the sight came with.

I marked it in my ledger, same way I keep track of a lot of other consumables. Nice to know when to expect your stuff to let you down, when it isn’t always instantly replaceable.

$63.20, or $3.80 a gallon. The good news is that I’m very happy I topped off the bottles when I did, at the end of last winter. Not real common for me to make smart financial decisions: Maybe I’m finally growing up.

The bad news is everything else. Suddenly becomes worth it to replace that slightly leaky pigtail hose.

…sent me this heat-actuated woodstove fan about five years ago. Still works great!

The original version of the heat-actuated fan comes from Canada and is quite expensive. Also quite good: D&L have a couple of them in their workshop and they’ve faithfully whirled away for well over ten years now. One might be excused for not automatically assuming the Chinese knockoff would behave as well, and I’m happy to be a testbed of that notion. In fact so far, every time it comes out of its box in November, it has worked flawlessly. Apparently the only way to wreck it is to violate clearly-printed instructions on the back, put it too close to the stovepipe collar, and fry the wiring.

D&L had another doctor appointment in the big town about 50 miles away today so I came over to feed the boys their lunch.

While I was weighing out hay there was a great clattering in the far corner of the hayroom, and up over a piece of plywood against the outside wall there came a little cottontail. It hopped down on the haybales with an air of familiarity, and only then noticed an unwelcome human.

It’s under the pellet pallet in that picture, having objected to my presence, but you can click on the next pic…

…and that’s it standing at the door in front of the tractor. Nothing special, I just thought it was kind of funny that at least one rabbit – along with an unguessable number of rats – knows where its winter feed is coming from.

I’m not a particularly introspective person. Navel gazing has never struck me as useful, in general, and for much of my adult life I was simply too busy, too harassed, to want to do anything with often rare free time but blow it on distractions or sleep. If I was ever presented with scenes or situations that might have triggered emotional reactions arising from things that happened in my childhood, most of which I don’t really remember, I would have rushed right past them or reflexively blanked them out. I certainly wouldn’t have dwelt on them.

I’ve lived alone in the desert for sixteen years now, at a much slower pace, and the best thing about it is that nobody else sets the agenda and nobody else enforces it. There is no carrot and no stick, and when bad things happen I am free to deal with them in whatever way seems right. Sometimes I even actually stop and smell the roses. Or the corpse flowers, whatever. What I mean: Sometimes I see something that makes me feel insecure and tense for no apparent reason. And sometimes I see something that makes me feel calm and happy. And when that happens, I’m free to stop and wonder why that might be, if I want to.

Like this…

Regular readers might wonder why Joel keeps talking about his stupid clothesline. And I have wondered the same thing. But ever since I put it up in early September I’ve enjoyed using – or just standing and watching – this thing. It makes no sense at all – I hung out wet clothes for years on clotheslines hung between junipers, and it was just laundry. But this feels different. When I was a kid, every back yard of every house had a couple of cruciform clothesline poles, which usually had laundry flapping between them, and apparently nothing bad ever happened to me concerning them when I was young. Or maybe good things happened. Maybe dangerous adults found them calming as well. I really don’t know. Frankly it feels kind of odd to even bother wondering about it.

Maybe this is perfectly normal. I really wouldn’t know.

I’m getting to an age where I have an excuse to pick my time to do certain chores. Not that I need excuses, most of the time, except to my own built-in Yankee work ethic, but still. I don’t need to pretend to be a tough guy. I could wait till the sun shined on the dirt pile and the woodshed bridge before I went out and shoveled.

There’s still plenty of spoil on the far side of the drainage ditch, from my constantly having had to dig it out the first few years. Lately it has gotten straight and slick enough that it doesn’t commonly fill up with ash mud when the gully runs. But those spoil piles are useful for building the annual plug under the bridge. Hopefully this will keep me from sewer pipe trouble during the winter.

Then when the sun was nicely warming the side of the cabin, I undid all yesterday’s work on the propane system. Put the bypass regulator back on and opened up both propane bottles, then cracked the supply pipe under the furnace and filled the bedroom with propane fumes. Opened all the windows and went into the main cabin to wash the lunch dishes. Came back in, lit the pilot, cranked the thermostat, and…

I’ll be damned. That actually worked. Apparently it just wanted a good bleed? I must remember that next time.

Now if it lights itself up at 3 am when the temperature’s downward slide passes 55^o F, I’ll consider it fixed.

We have a day or two of nice weather before more early winter is forecast. I’m trying to use it to get some annoying things out of the way. But at the moment I’m just waiting for the outside temperature to warm up. Having done all the necessary early things including Tobie’s long morning walkie, I’ve been trying to sit and enjoy a book for an hour but somebody…

…has decided he doesn’t like that. Keeps walking over and placing his chin very precisely on my book, like he thinks he’s a cat and I’m committing the sin of Feline Ignorement. I’ve been trying to explain to him that he’s actually a dog: He’s perfectly welcome to lay here or on his bed but for the moment he’s had his tithe of exclusive attention. He wasn’t buying it. Finally gave up on the book and went to the desk beside his bed to do this blog post I should have done yesterday, and that was apparently what he wanted…

…because now he’s leaving me alone to work. Maybe he was really trying to guilt me into ceasing to ignore the blog.

Anyway: A couple of very annoying things happened more or less simultaneously last week… Continue reading →

Thursday and much of yesterday brought misery worthy of December. Yesterday afternoon the sun came out and melted the snow, and by 8:30 this morning I was working outside in shirtsleeves.

I’m still trying to work out how best to do my newest chore…

Thursday morning I mistook a brief clearing to be the end of the weather and hung out a bunch of towels. Guess how well that worked. But today I’m feeling better about this big load of general laundry. In summer it would all be dry before lunch: I’m not quite that optimistic but at least it’s supposed to be sunnier and less cold today.

Right, so last night the wind came up and the rain turned into snow…

Not a lot, maybe an inch. But with the temperature crash and the heavy overcast, this time it stayed on the ground, so…

…this morning Tobie was all “So much white stuff! Must sniff all the white stuff! Why you always in such a hurry, Uncle Joel?”

h/t

Yup, it’s November. It rained on and off all night long, waking me up repeatedly. And it has rained on and off all morning. That seep under Ian’s Cave is worse than it’s ever been…

With not merely damp but wet concrete greeting me this morning…

I think I’ve identified the perfect location for the new sump that’s going in there, central to the dampest part of the floor but quite unobtrusive, right behind the bathroom door. I can run a hose from the pump behind the shower wall into the drain in the utility closet. Now I just have to negotiate who’s paying for it.

Naturally, since it’s cold wet and windy as hell, I had chores outside the Lair today.

SurvivalDave poured a new slab two days ago, trying to fit it in between Monsoon and the freeze. Since the freeze is supposed to start in earnest tonight, he wanted to lay down plastic and straw today. Was able to scrounge just barely enough of both.

And then D&L had a doctor’s appointment, so…

…I got to visit the boys for lunch. But now we’re back, Tobie has had his mid-day feed and walkie, and I can sit with a good book for a while.

I’ve been pleased as can be with the way my solar power system has functioned this past several years. It came to its current state of maturity maybe four years ago after a long period of gradual growth, and was really working fine on a smaller scale for several years before that.

But it turns out it was a damned good thing I grabbed the opportunity to double its capacity when I did, because two years ago my (Vintage? Antique? I’ve never been quite sure) old oven’s thermocouple crapped out and no generic replacement would fit. Big Brother generously financed a new oven. I carefully researched size and ability to convert to propane but did not ask what turned out to be an important question: Does the oven use a pilot light or an electric heater? I did not know that in the (many!) years since I’d last purchased a new major kitchen appliance, oven pilot flames had gone the way of the Bill Cosby album. Instead, new ovens light their burners with big power-hungry heating elements which were emphatically not designed for use with a tiny bank of lead-acid batteries.

Mind you, it’s not all bad. First, over months and years a pilot flame burns a lot of propane – and when you’re hauling it in eight gallons at a time, it really adds up. So an oven of newer design that’s not being used isn’t costing me anything. Second, this new oven bakes a very lovely loaf of bread.

It turned out that the old oven was the source of much of my dissatisfaction with my bread-baking talent.

There’s really only one downside, and I’ve easily been able to live with it. You need to pick your time. Baking at night is right out. Using the oven to take the chill off the cabin, always a sin because of carbon monoxide but a sin I admit I used to occasionally commit, is now not an option because the only time you’d need that is when it’s night or during a winter storm and those are the two times you mustn’t use the oven.

Whenever possible, I bake only during sunny days. I planned today as a baking day specifically because today was forecast to be sunny, and I stretched the old loaf a bit for that reason. But this morning, I got…

Not heavy overcast, but hardly a bright cloudless day. And it showed…

On a sunny day that would read in the 12.4 range, not really stressing the batteries at all. So not a show-stopper, but something I always have to keep in mind.

The one convenience store in the crappy little town nearest where I live was the last to drop an absolute mandate on wearing masks inside, long after everybody else gave it up as a bad idea, no doubt because it’s the only franchise store in town.

So I found this kind of stupidly ironic when I saw it late this morning…

Sorry for the long silence there, folks. Nothing’s wrong. Winter arrived and I went suddenly into cocoon mode like it was some inescapable lizard instinct. The good news is that I’ve already made inroads on that stack of books beside the bedroom chair. The bad news is that I opened my computer for the first time in days and found multiple emails from readers wanting to know where they should send flowers.

Yesterday I made an effort to break out of my encroaching hibernation…

The wind died and the temperature struggled into the high fifties, and I roused myself to take what might be the last bike ride to town of the season. Lethargy wasn’t the only reason for having to force myself to do it: I needed to accomplish something OFFICIAL. And we all know how that always goes.

Thing is, for various reasons Uncle Joel needs a bank account of his very own. I needed to walk into a bank and say, with Proud Righteous Citizenship ringing in my voice, “I would like to open a bank account.”

Needless to tell longtime readers that I had already procrastinated on this for weeks, waving away several opportunities. Why? Because Uncle Joel is not a good citizen. Uncle Joel’s papers are never, ever in order. This was not going to go well.

The last time I faced this issue, Landlady virtually led me by the hand into a DMV to acquire my very own Photo ID, so that I might (be virtually led by the hand into a Social Security office to) apply for Medicare. Both those incidents went reasonably well – astonishingly well by my standards – because one piece of paperwork I have oddly and ironically managed to hang on to all these years is a faded, dog-eared birth certificate. That document was all I needed to score an official ID, and the two documents got me through the Medicare ordeal. But would they be enough to convince a bank to take my money?

The answer, in case you wondered, is no. I am not yet sufficiently officially me to rate a checking account.

See, it’s things like this that sent me scuttling to the back of beyond in the first place. As I’ve said before, I like to imagine myself this rough tough Jeremiah Johnson throwback when all I really am is a paranoid, excitable, increasingly elderly gimp who can’t keep records.

I knew it would get nippy overnight, but…

…wasn’t expecting snow, and…

…wasn’t expecting it to get quite this nippy.

I didn’t even have the woodstove set up yet. Happily that doesn’t take long…

Unhappily, this means we’re officially in Winter Mode. For the next five or six months. I hate winter, though not as much as I used to. In two months this’ll seem balmy.