The Ultimate Answer to Kings

…and buys an obnoxious mouse a broken neck and a quick flight off the cliff in front of Ian’s Cave.

She avoided her well-deserved fate for a couple of days – but fell prey to the allures of peanut butter.

I seem to be having one of those summers, rodent-wise: I killed a mouse and then (judging from the results) the rat I was gunning for on my porch, but when I set the rat trap again just to be sure it got its bait cup cleaned out without tripping, which says I probably have nocturnal mice there as well. Glad I have a couple of new mousetraps. But the one that got this girl is going back to the reloading bench. Just to be sure. The “Please Don’t Piss on the Precision Measuring Devices” sign didn’t seem to be working.

One reason I can’t get along very well without a functioning 4X4 is chickens.

At present there isn’t any water source on what used to be Landlady’s ridge, which is where the chicken house is. Part of my duty toward the chickens is supplying water, and my strategy for that varies as situations change but it always involves moving multiple 5-gallon jugs relatively long distances. They’re heavy. I’m not going to carry them (a minimum of) half a mile over rough hilly country.

The war with that family of mice that’s determined to befoul my reloading bench into uselessness has gone into extra innings. I got what I took to be the main culprit fairly early on, and things got better. But the next one – its mate? – is starting to make me question my conviction that humans are the smartest mammals on the planet. Look at this…

This mouse proved very good at stealing bait without triggering the trap. So I stripped the stuffings out of some 550 cord for really tiny string and tied the bait down. Mind you I didn’t tie the string around the paddle, no: I went through the hole. And I thought, the only way the mouse could win now is not to play. Right? Uh huh. That picture was taken less than an hour after I set the trap. I’m going back to peanut butter: brought the trap home to bait it, and I’ll be resetting it later this morning.

On the erosion front: I’ve been trying to stop the sand from washing out from behind Ian’s cave by building a small porous dam across the channel the runoff water had dug. This picture was taken yesterday, after a couple of rainy afternoons…

And this one was taken this morning after yesterday’s gully-washer.

It’s having some effect, in that sand is starting to pile up behind the dam. In front of the dam, the water is undermining my work so I have to shore up what I thought was the irrelevant side of the obstruction. But it is kind of working. Meanwhile…

I want it on record that I hate volcanos. Never had much of an opinion about them before I moved here, but since then I’ve learned that half-million-year-old ash makes the worst mud there is. And it keeps flowing downhill through inconvenient parts of my yard every damn time it rains. Which, lately, is almost every single day. Places where I just have to walk, I keep covering it up with sand and clay dug out of the front drainage ditch, which keeps silting up pretty much daily. Which means I have to dig pretty much daily, at least enough to point the water away from the cabin.

For all that, this hasn’t been an unusually wet Monsoon. Not unusually dry, either: My rain gauge shows 5.88 inches year-to-date. And it’s safest to assume we’ve got another good month to go before it ends.

The good news is that, since it started early, this has been the coolest summer I remember. Temperature hasn’t gone over 100^o even once so far. And that’s almost worth the mud.

I’m washing dishes with the daily storm building-and rumbling- outside my window. Looked over at Tobie’s bed and found it empty. Looked back toward the bedroom…

When the storm actually breaks he’ll be in the closet, as far from dangerous windows as he can contrive to get. He’s tired of Monsoon, too.

No, not that kind. It’s been tried, I’m far past hope.

But both modes of my transport have taken it into their collective head to fail simultaneously. Granted one has been coming on for a long time and one had a lot of help.

The pressure hose on the Jeep’s power steering system has been marking territory for over a year. I should have had it fixed when the Jeep was in the shop over the winter, but they’d already taken so long on the transmission and anyway it’s only a hose: I should be able to fix that.

I even have the hose. But it was bound to be an unpleasant job so I kept putting it off, and when the hose failed almost entirely and I was forced to get off my ass it turned out not to be something I could reasonably fix in my (very muddy at the moment) driveway. On some Wranglers, allegedly, you can just barely get to the hose fitting on the top of the steering gear: That does not happen to be the case with my Wrangler. Okay, heavy sigh and annoyed grunt, I know how to drop the gear. Except that the skid plate under the gear will not come off the Jeep. Far as I can tell, the welds broke on a captive nut and one essential bolt just spins it. There is physically no way to get a wrench on that nut, which is why I assume it must have been spot-welded before the frame was assembled. Forced to it and in the absence of a cutting torch I suppose I could curse and sweat for hours while I hacksawed the bolt, I’ve done it before. That was on the order of forty years ago, though. I don’t bend so good anymore. And a hoist would help.

So I’m forced to admit that I must take the Jeep to the shop in town. Which took months last time. Of course last time was a transmission rebuild.

Unfortunately, just as I’m driven to that conclusion my ebike broke down.

Tuesday we hit some unexpected deep mud and took a bad spill. I wasn’t even scratched but to my horror the bike was totaled.

Electrically it stopped working entirely and I haven’t yet figured out why. Something like this happened two years ago and it turned out to be a cold-solder joint in the battery tray that shook loose for no reason. I have to say, Radrover was great about it: I sent them a short video explaining the problem and they sent me – free – ALL THE PARTS that could possibly cause my problem. I was seriously impressed, and I guess I’m going to end up doing that again. If the bike is still in warranty, which I’m a little afraid to check. Anyway I didn’t learn for sure about the cold-solder joint until I unpotted the battery tray looking for the specific problem, after I already had a new one in hand. I still have all those other parts.

Then there’s the matter of the derailleur…

…which doesn’t appear to be bent but is certainly misaligned. In any speed lower than third the chain now rubs the tire and eventually hops right off the gear and locks between the gears and the wheel. Probably a bike shop could clear that up without breaking stride but I can’t even see specifically what’s wrong.

Which, since I already have to take my best pistol to a gunsmith in the big town about 50 miles away, makes me wonder if I shouldn’t research bike shops in the same town – there’s bound to be at least one – and bring the bike along in the pickup when I can finally go. I’m not convinced I can fix it this time.

I can barely get out of a chair this morning for my aching knees, and this dumb thing is giving me “ok” smiley faces…

Tired of Monsoon now. Though I have to admit the relative cool is nice.

I heard on the Jeep radio yesterday that the US government was not declaring the national economy to be in recession, despite two consecutive quarters of negative growth, for reasons apparently related to their redefinition of the term “recession.”

This morning I learn that this development makes logical sense, from a certain point of view…

Went to town with D&L this morning. And I’m not telling this story to make fun of anyone, other than maybe myself. Just saying: Getting old ain’t for sissies. And part of my ordeal is that I’m about half deaf.

I was in the pitiful hardware section of the local pitiful market, vainly searching for some Pex fittings for a revision I need to make in Ian’s Cave. So I was longer in the store than I wanted to be and only started throwing groceries in my basket as I saw D&L checking out. I finished up quick as I could and just as I got to the checkout counter D came back in, said something I couldn’t hear to the cashier, and then started looking around the floor.

L came in, also very interested in the floor. I asked what was going on. L said she misplaced her truck key, and (I swear she added) D hadn’t brought his.

Which was, of course, very bad. At this point, once I’d checked out and stashed my groceries in the truck, I joined in the search with a will. We went over every square inch of this rather small store. Turned their groceries inside out. Looked through her purse, her pockets. Under every seat. Then we did it all again. This went on for a really long time.

At last all options were spent. The key was gone as if it had never existed. L had vainly gone back into the store, D and I were on either side of the truck, front doors open. D said, with what I took to be hopeless irony, “I always keep my key here,” patting his pocket.

I said, “Well, at least we have phones. I wonder if (the other neighbor L) is home. Maybe we can send her to your place. Do you know where you keep your key?”

He gave me a strange look. “Yeah. I keep it here.” And he reached into his pocket and withdrew his key.

After perhaps 3 seconds of silence, I replied, “So…we’re not stranded then.” Because I have to tell you, I thought all the sturm und drang was about us being stranded 10+ miles from home. They can get another key.

And then D went off on a story about a time when L had locked her key in their car and he was afraid to leave it because then somebody would break a window and steal the car. And I realized that what this was really about was my OCD friends being OCD. Like somebody was going to find the missing key and then trek the desert to find and steal their truck out of their locked garage. Which is attached to their heavily-armed house.

Generous Reader Terrapod sent me coffee that’ll last me well into 2023, at the current rate of consumption…

…and Big Brother sent a little something for Tobie…

Best-fed living dog in the Gulch, that one…

There’s been a big rat leaving piles of – well, leavings – on my porch every night for over a week. I don’t know why. I do know it grew tiresome.

The nice thing about rats? When they annoy you, you don’t have to feel bad about just flat out murdering them.

So I dug out my last functioning rat trap, and the first night it very messily killed a mouse that was clearly too small to be my culprit. And oh by the way the little cup of peanut butter was empty and it’s a safe bet the mouse didn’t last long enough to empty it, so…

You’d have thought that would be enough of a hint for the big guy. Often, unfortunately, it is. Oh, they won’t go away like you want. But thereafter they’ll avoid the trap.

But not this guy. He apparently decided he’d earned that peanut butter.

That sort of attitude always has a price.

The last time I had trouble with one of the ebike’s tires, Big Brother sent me a bottle of this puncture-plugging slime you’re supposed to pump into the tubes. I didn’t use it, because I’ve seen balance trouble with car tires that used something similar. But the more I thought about it the less it seemed to matter, and even if there were some balance issues they surely can’t be as bad as a deflation five miles from home, caused by one tiny goathead thorn.

So this last time, I squirted the goop into the tubes…

…and this morning I learned that at least my worries about balance were unfounded. The wheels work as well as ever. Hopefully the goop will have an effect on the frequency of my tube replacements, but I think I’m also going to end up investing in one of those anti-puncture liners.

Went to town to pick up some goodies I’d ordered. Among which…

I don’t think I mentioned this on the blog but Tobie started having issues with gooey discharge in one of his ears. At first I thought it was a bad infection but apparently it’s just earwax. Bless his heart, it turned out he didn’t really mind me sticking my finger deep in his earhole with a wet rag or we’d have had difficulties. There kind of was the matter of “It’s too hot” or “It’s too cold,” though, and since apparently this is going to be a regular item of dog maintenance I did some research on whether there’s a product for this sort of thing. Never had the problem with any of the other dogs.

And yes, of course there’s a product for this sort of thing. In fact there are all manner of products for it. Tobie is turning into quite an opportunity for education. So now he’s got his very own tub of ‘ear wipes for dogs,’ which certainly seem to pick up the goo. Little Bear and Ghost would have fought me to the death over this sort of intrusion but Tobie seems to like it. No accounting for taste.

h/t

Just another day. I unlocked Ian’s place coming back from Tobie’s afternoon walkie, took the leash off, grabbed a beer from the fridge and took a slug while making my way to the dark musty bowels of the cave. Time to check the water infrastructure before stripping down for my shower.

I checked the water softener display, which is when I met this KAIJU living under the lid…

You’d think I’d be used to this by now. The high desert is home to approximately all the spiders, and most of them don’t particularly freak me out. But I hate it when a big one sneaks up on me, y’know? Anyway, during the ensuing struggle to the death the water softener’s lid may have, um, accidentally contacted the control panel just a little.

I didn’t give it much thought at the time. I mean, other than expostulating over “the size of that thing,” there was nothing much to be said. Just another day.

But it’s the things you don’t know that get you. And what I didn’t know was that it wasn’t just necessary for that control panel to be intact and fully plugged in: It also had to be locked in a very specific position over this weird primitive mechanical wheel that controlled the operation of the backwash gear. And yesterday, a few days after the spider incident, I noticed that the regular scheduled backwash hadn’t happened. So I started one manually – and got an error message.

Hm.

Dug out the manual. Which told me to … check the control panel position? What the hell difference could that make?

Turned out to make all the difference, which was kind of weird but whatever. My job is to keep the stuff running, not to have an opinion about how it runs.

Hey. Watch your language around me or I’ll swat you again.

The yellow Jeep, my more-or-less faithful steed since 2008, never belonged to me. It always belonged to Landlady*, and at first it was a reciprocal matter of me keeping it running for her occasional use in return for me using it the rest of the time. Occasionally that was even useful to her, like during Monsoon visits when she left her ride at the county road and I ferried her to and from her place. More and more as time went by it just became a Joel subsidy as there was virtually no chance she was ever going to want to – or even be able to, given my various improvisations in the name of keeping it going on next-to-zero budget – use it or take back custody.

Now more lately Landlady has moved on, having no plans to maintain ties to the Gulch. And I’m afraid this week she made it official. She sent me the title.

Nobody ever gave me a Jeep before. I should probably feel better about that than I do.

—-
*She hasn’t actually been my actual landlady for twelve years, it’s just her blog name.

…not to do what I have done.

I snuck off and spent a quiet hour alone in the reloading shack this morning…

Really just stocking up on practice ammo since the gun I need to be practicing with is still in two pieces in a pistol rug.

Still, empty ammo boxes make Uncle Joel sad.

…and while I worked, I contemplated the penalties of poor economic choices.

I mean, we’re well into the third year of the latest Great Ammo Panic and I imagine that for a lot of people things have pretty much returned to normal, if probably at higher prices than completely desirable. Even out here 9mm is available, 5.56 is available. 12 gauge is available in bird, buck and slug. But revolver ammo is not to be found at any price. And .44 Special, my particular flavor, was becoming a unicorn caliber years before the panic. It might never come back.

I’m literally down to depending entirely on reloads for my everyday pistol, having completely expended my once-admirable stash of commercial ammo. Didn’t see that coming.

Would it have killed me to buy some sort of 9mm, back when I was in a position to buy guns? Just for a rainy day? Huh? Would it? But no. I never even considered it.

You can bet I’ve still got a shot-out wreck of a .45 1911, though. Because somewhere along the line I became a dinosaur.

Speaking of the reloading shack…

I’m in a battle of wits with at least one mouse with nothing better to do than crap all over my stuff. Meant to buy some new traps when I was in town last week, and they’re definitely on the list for Monday. He can steal the bait from my one remaining trap – and almost as an insult he stole yesterday’s pepperoni and then left it uneaten on the bench. If he could hold a pen I imagine he’d have left a taunting note.

…and I still don’t have anything worth blogging about. So here are funny pictures.

It has, however, just barely gotten me home on quite a number of occasions.

In this particular case, a quick trip to town from the county road went without incident. But when I took the bike off its rack to store it in Ian’s place, the rear tire was completely flat.

The problem was originally caused by a tiny spring I picked up, probably on the return trip…

But before I found that I tried to air the tire up and suffered a big blowout for no discernible reason.

So much for fixing that tube. Fortunately I stocked spares early in the season.

I did have to go to Youtube to figure out how to get the rear wheel off the bike in the first place; it wasn’t obvious just how that should be done. All my previous tire problems have been on the front, a fact that has always kind of worried me. But now that I’ve gained experience in the comfort of Ian’s Cave, it won’t worry me any more.

And now it’s starting to rain; I’ll worry about getting things properly together later in the afternoon, weather permitting.

Tobie and I went off road for a bit during our morning walkie. As we returned to a different stretch of dirt road, Tobie leading the way, he shied sharply to the left as soon as he broke cover. Following along, it was a second before I saw what he had nearly stepped on…

Another helpless bull snake, no doubt hoping with whatever desperation its tiny snake mind could muster that the sun would come out and warm it the hell up before this lunatic dog came back.

But there was no danger of that: Tobie stayed behind me the whole time I was digging my phone out of my pocket and taking that picture. Good boy! Praise and treats!

He’s getting the lesson I’ve been trying to impart: Snakes Bad Juju. Avoid Snakes.

Yeah, I’m spoiled. Pound for pound the consistently very best coffee I ever had in my life has come from Trader Joe’s, and Landlady enabled my entitled coffee fetish for parts of three decades. Alas, all things change: Landlady’s life has gone in a different direction and she doesn’t come around anymore. As my stash of real coffee dwindled, that left me with a dilemma. TJ’s doesn’t seem to sell the good stuff on its web site.

This past week I was in the Palace of Food during my not-quite-monthly trip to the biggish town about 35 miles away, and did something I haven’t done in almost 20 years: I shopped for coffee. You gotta understand: I have peculiar taste in coffee. Cheap-ass bourbon doesn’t bother me, canned meat doesn’t bother me. Used thrift store clothing doesn’t bother me. But coffee has to be right or I go all golden princess. It’s gotta be dark, it’s gotta be rich, it’s gotta be fresh-ground, it’s gotta be strong. Canned Folgers? Fuggedaboutit.

And the most promising product I saw in the store was this…

These are bold claims. Like Vincent Vega with his gourmet heroin, I’m not going to be easy to impress.

This morning I cut open the bag and ground some. And … y’know, not bad. Not Trader Joe House Blend (RIP,) but not bad. A little on the wimpy side (it is NOT the ‘world’s strongest coffee’) but acceptable, once I get used to it.

Oh, boy, have the past [many] years given me lots of experience in paying attention to the lessons of old mistakes and never more so than in the past nearly sixteen years, when I’ve had so many new things to learn.

Little Bear was my first puppy, and I was far too indulgent with him. Then he grew to be a 100+ pound sasquatch, and basically untrainable. I mean we got along fine, but certain lessons that should have been taught when he was a puppy never took. One thing somebody told me at the very first, which I ignored, was “Get him used to you messing with his paws, because sometimes you’ll have to.” Little Bear did not accept me fiddling with his paws.

So one thing I always did with Puppy Tobie was mess with his paws during play. He got to liking it. In fact in the evening when he’s looking for validation, one thing he’ll often do is hold up his paws so I’ll rub them. Good thing, too, because his claws have gotten long and intrusive and really needed clipping. And this evening they got that – and BOY he did not think it was right. He’s big and strong enough to have given me a very hard time about it but he trusted me enough to put up with it, and I credit that to taking good advice the second time around.

He’s a good boy. And I try to never be quite as dumb the second time around.

There’s no practical reason I didn’t do this a year ago. For the past six months I’ve regularly had enough in the bank account that dropping an unscheduled $50 wouldn’t have been a big deal at all. But…

Fact is, that’s been the Official TUAK Chair since long before I moved out of the Interim Lair. Well over ten years. Inertia is a bitch. Attempts at cushioning my bony elderly ass were various, especially in the past 14 months since Tobie came along and started eating my stuff. Some months ago Mark M. sent me a big box of cushions – right about the time Tobie stopped being quite so destructive, so they all still live – but let’s face it: It’s a metal folding chair. And I spend a lot of time at that desk, and I’m pushing 70.

Week before last, after much procrastination, I finally did something 99.999% of Americans would have done maybe 12 years ago…

I dropped fifty-some bucks on Amazon.

And now I have a new – and hopefully much less uncomfortable – Official TUAK Chair.