The Ultimate Answer to Kings

I broke my pistol! My very favorite gun! Or…well, my pistol broke. I swear I didn’t do it.

Happened a few days ago and it was like a death in the family. I had run a box of reloads through it earlier that day, and in the evening while watching a movie I took it apart to clean. Trying to put it back together, the yoke wouldn’t go all the way into its hole. I fiddled and fiddled, finally got it in, and then found out what the problem was when I tried to secure the yoke screw.

It was broken! And about half its threads were still in the frame, explaining why the yoke barrel didn’t want to seat. I fumbled the yoke back out and tried to chase the screw bits out of the frame with some plastic picks, but no go. Screwed!

I was seriously heartsick. Wasn’t till the next day that I came up with a plan of action more serious than digging my Plan B revolver out of the drawer it was relegated to for the past few years…

Yes of course I have a spare .44 Magnum. A penis as freakishly small as mine requires reliable compensation. But I hated the Taurus compared to the S&W, and after substantial dry firing over the past few days I can’t say my opinion has changed. Still, it works.

Then yesterday I did something I really hate doing: I talked to strangers on the telephone. Found a person who claims to be a gunsmith in the big town about 50 miles away, and as soon as I can bum a ride I’m going there to see what can be done for my beautiful baby.

Exactly how it happened is kind of a mystery. I know I didn’t crossthread that screw: First, you can’t accidentally do that – not with a small screwdriver. Second, I was a dealership mechanic: Crossthreading a fastener is like the most basic of the deadly sins, and I had thousands of opportunities to learn how not to do it. It’s muscle memory, has been for decades. I didn’t crossthread it.

Also: The screw isn’t just missing some threads – it’s broken. The hell?

In other news, I’m going to the Safeway in the biggish town about 35 miles away. D&L want to leave at noon, and at first I questioned that decision because it’s Monsoon: The wash has run for the past two days and you don’t want to get caught on the wrong side after an afternoon storm. But a look at the forecast says blue skies all day today, so maybe it’ll be okay. Anyway, that gave me time to make this baking day…

My loaves have gotten prettier lately. This one didn’t get much of an oven rise, though. Controlling the rise is still kind of a mystery to me.

All the wet sand clinging to the rocks I picked up earlier made a mess of the back of the Jeep. I swung back by Ian’s where there’s a wet/dry vacuum. Cleaned out the back and Tobie was fine with that, but then…

I opened HIS door and started working on the floor…

…and he was not okay with that at all. 🙂 “I didn’t know the vacuum cleaner monster could reach the Jeep!”

In all we got almost two inches of rain yesterday, and it shows in the ruts on the slopes and the piled-up mud on the flats. My particular concern, erosion-wise, was at Ian’s place…

…where erosion is washing the sand out from behind his cave and threatening to turn it back into a dome in the fullness of time. This actually started a couple of years ago but yesterday there were noticeable inroads and it was clearly past time to do something.

To be honest I didn’t want to dam this up because the rut makes walking behind the dome for other repair easier, but enough was enough. This moist morning before it got hot, I took the Jeep to a rock field in the wash…

Loaded the back with as much as I could without bogging down in the wet sand, and then with those rocks and some concrete blocks…

…I made a quick’n’ugly dam. Unless the water plays a mean trick on me, that’ll stop the sand from returning to the wash from the top of Ian’s Cave.

The weather in the high desert likes its drama. Sometimes it gets downright scary even for a seen-it-all old hermit. This was probably the biggest storm Tobie had ever seen, and at its height it had him seriously considering peeing on the floor.

According to the rain gauge we got a little over an inch and a half in an hour. I would have guessed more than that – and at the height of the storm it was slamming down hard enough I’d guess accuracy is an issue. Continue reading →

This actually happened during yesterday’s walkie but I forgot about it till just now. If I’d known it was going to happen I’d have put his shock collar on and set it to Barbecue Dog.

Instead I just waited till he crept forward for a sniff and then really sharply yelled at him. Already not sure this was a smart thing to do, he teleported about fifty yards straight back. It was a cool moist early-Monsoon morning and this poor snake was inert: Tobie could have eaten it without danger of harm, but I didn’t want him to know that.

I already knew he’s not reliably snake averse, but there’s been a shortage of good snakes to test him on.

I’ve only personally known two dogs who got rattlesnake-bit. They both survived but one went through some truly grotesque symptoms while we rushed her to the vet (we no longer have a vet so close) and I’m pretty sure she would have died without immediate treatment. The other was just sick and sad for a evening but he really didn’t get a good strike: Rattlesnakes are as fallible as anybody else.

Anyway, I’d be much happier about letting Tobie run free if I thought he wouldn’t try to be friends with the first Mojave Green he encountered…

The weather behaved itself this morning for once so I went out to practice with my newly-augmented pistol…

…which is working out very well for me, by the way, so I moved on from slow-fire. Spread out a groundsheet and worked on holster and speed loader drills till I burned through my ration of practice ammo.

And I was planning to go right home after that. But I had a little time before lunch, and Tobie has gotten so much better at staying by himself without freaking out and wrecking my stuff…

That I decided to sneak off to the reloading shack to refill my ammo box. Continue reading →

h/t

Big Brother sent me this cool little digital hygrometer, and from day one we’ve had a dispute…

One of the reasons I prefer a desert environment is that in my youth I broke several major bones and twisted basically all my joints, and now in my late 60’s I’m learning how much I truly healed from that. At the humidity where the gauge gives me a “dry” frowny-face, I’m quite happy. At the humidity where I don’t want to get out of bed, the stupid gauge gives me a smiley face and says “Ok.”

For the record it’s wrong and I’m right. My house, my rules.

The population of cottontail and jack rabbits here goes through boom and bust cycles I’ve never tried to explain. Some say plague, some say predators. I say it just happens. During 2021 we were going through a marked rabbit drought, so they weren’t much of a factor in raising Puppy Tobie.

That has changed. At least the jackrabbits are coming back in a big way, and Tobie has noticed. In another year or so this hopefully won’t be a problem: He’s perfectly welcome to chase rabbits as long as he’s mature enough to come straight back after he’s had his fun. (This is a test Little Bear never passed, and he never got off the leash.) Right now, Tobie may have achieved his full size but he’s definitely not mature. And there’s just something about a rabbit that makes a young dog forget all about the business at hand.

This morning we went out for the early walkie, a utilitarian matter of dealing with physical requirements in as quick and businesslike a manner as possible so that Uncle Joel can have his morning coffee. But halfway up the slope, Tobie caught sight of a young jackrabbit.

Being only half awake, I wasn’t paying attention but since we were literally tied together I didn’t believe it mattered all that much: Tobie would hit the end of the leash and that would remind him to get back to business. Tobie had an entirely different approach in mind: Uncle Joel is welcome to come along but I’m chasing that rabbit.

We had words. Uncle Joel does not tolerate side quests when coffee is at stake.

I was able to scrounge some used lumber a week or so ago…

Nearly new, since it came from some interior framing. I had asked Neighbor S if I could tag along next time he went to the Lowes in the big town about 50 miles away because I needed some lumber. He said he had just salvaged some and that I should help myself. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted but I did not argue. Continue reading →

It didn’t even rain very much yesterday afternoon, at least not down here. I suspect the rain was heavier up on the plateau, because the wash ran just a little bit.

That in itself isn’t all that significant. What I found interesting – and a little ominous – though…

Open puddles twelve hours later? On deep sand? Oh, boy. It’s already saturated, and it’s not even July.

It’s on the order of five years ago that S&L moved to the Gulch fulltime, and L started insisting on washing my clothes once a week. I did not vigorously demur: In addition to a washer and dryer, S&L have a water softener! And soon my clothing stopped being capable of doing alternate duty as abrasive material.

But after going on sixteen years living in the boonies on the economic edge I have quite a number of rules I stick to as faithfully as possible, and two of the ones at the top are:

1) Never get too dependent on other people, for shit doth happen to us all, and…

2) Always have a Plan B.

Anyway: Neighbor L went out of state and it might be a while before I see her again, right at a moment when my supply of good gelsocks has passed minimum. When you’re an amputee, Always Use Clean Stumpsocks is a rule you learn not to break very early. I’ve been obeying it for over fifty years now.

So anyway: This morning I’m looking at the contents of my nightstand drawer. And I get to thinking it’s time to implement Laundry Plan B. I’m still okay for a few days, but with the weather the way it’s been I might need that long for thick gelsocks to dry.

For just a moment I mourn the loss of S&L’s water softener, but then it occurs to me: There’s been one at Ian’s place for a year and a half!

Yay!

So this morning Tobie and I, and my old manual agitator, took ourselves to Ian’s big sink. Hot running water and a TDS count below 300? I’m there!

And it’s a pain in the neck.

Started abruptly last week, and it’s forecast for every afternoon in the foreseeable future.

At least it’s cooler, and we could use the moisture. But it’s still a bother.

The crazies are out there and I’m out here.

I’m always happy about that but today I’m practically ecstatic.

You ever get the impression maybe Washington has too much power over peoples’ lives, no matter which wing of the stinking carrion bird happens to be holding the reins this year?

Good luck out there.

…thick with calcium and iron oxide, and abusive to anything it touches. Galvanized plumbing is right out; the water eats right through it. Plastic won’t dissolve, but calcium deposits eventually gum up moving parts – like toilet valves.

So before I installed the ivory throne this morning, and while it was conveniently in the shower tub anyway, I took the opportunity to clean out the tank and preemptively replace the plastic bits inside…

…which left another mess to clean up before I was done.

But now I can scratch that job off my summertime to-do list.

Laid down grout on the bathroom floor this morning. Went outside to clean the bucket. Forgot something very important…

No big deal, just an annoyance and mostly at myself: Of course he went straight in to investigate. Totally my fault.

Something extremely weird happened yesterday.

Around 3 in the afternoon I loaded Tobie in the Jeep for chicken chores but we didn’t go anywhere, because the Jeep had no electrical activity of any kind. I mean capital-D Dead. It was so dead so suddenly that I didn’t immediately assume the problem was the battery. After all, everything worked just fine on Monday.

But the problem was the battery. It wasn’t just ‘dead,’ as in click-click-click goes the starter. It was dead as in may as well not be present.

It’s nearly new! This made no sense.

I went looking for an explanation and found it in what should have been the most obvious place: The headlights were turned on and apparently left on all night and all day.

Except that made no sense either! The light switch isn’t a button that could be accidentally pressed, it’s a knob on a steering column stalk that has to be twisted. I very rarely go anywhere at night, certainly didn’t Monday night, and honestly wasn’t sure at first yesterday where the light switch even was. Seriously, the column has two stalks and I never use either of them: The windshield wipers haven’t worked in years, and to whom would I signal a turn? It’s so unlikely that the light switch would accidentally get turned on that the most plausible explanation I can come up with is that somebody snuck into my yard and turned it on deliberately.

No, I’m not really suggesting that’s a plausible explanation. Just saying. It’s a weird thing to happen.

And for a while I thought I was really in trouble, because when I hooked up my Battery Minder I got a red light, like “forget it.” And I don’t have a regular battery charger anymore. I seriously had plans to ride my ebike all the way to town today to buy one. But I left the BM on overnight anyway, and fortunately it did charge the battery – though the battery is undoubtedly damaged.

So I’m good, but what a very strange thing to have happen.

…I like to think I’d be the betting man’s favorite for U.S. gold.

Yup: Only five years after I tiled the main cabin, and more than a year after I put a fake-wood floor over the tiles which hadn’t worked out very well, I finally got around to tiling the bathroom – which is less than 10 square feet.

Yup #2: When the voice in your head says something like, “You should go ahead and put the toilet back in, you can always take it up later to finish the tiling,” you must always tell that voice to shut right the hell up.

You may notice that the rest of the bathroom is entirely unfinished after more than 10 years of residence and absolutely will remain so for the rest of my residence, so clearly it wasn’t a particularly emotional issue. Never would have gotten around to finishing the floor if the toilet hadn’t worked loose – entirely due to the unfinished floor.

I guess the good news is that I had everything I needed to knock out the job right at hand. Mortar, grout, a nice tile saw abandoned by a former neighbor several-going-on-many years ago…

…which has seen a lot of use since then, and of course…

…that free Honda Generator which has become one of my most prized possessions. No more trouble with power tools at the cabin!

Tomorrow I’ll grout (yes, really) and then Thursday I’ll remount the toilet. In the meantime, I hope the rain holds off because I’ll be getting use from the Plan B chair out on the porch – one of the benefits of no neighbors within visual range. 🙂

Usually Tobie is content to nap for a couple of hours after his long morning walkie. Since it has unexpectedly turned rainy in the afternoons I intended to take advantage of that to sneak off and get some ammo reloading done: I just about finished off the last of my lead-bullet reloads yesterday, and need a lot of practicing with the newly revised revolver.

But Tobie, for whatever reason, decided that naps weren’t his thing at all. In fact, he was most anxious that we should go off together and do something interesting. His method of imparting this desire is really quite subtle. You might miss it, if you don’t know him.

So I figured what the heck: He’s been spending a lot of time at Ian’s lately since I shower there just about daily, so he ought to be all right while I sneak off to the reloading shack in the back of the powershed. But Tobie…

…was just in a clingy mood this morning. Don’t know why. Maybe it’s the recent thunder, though he didn’t seem very upset by it at the time.

Whatever: It turned out I didn’t have enough sized and primed cases for my purpose, so I moved the priming operation into Ian’s Cave to keep him company for half an hour till he settled down…

…and then I snuck off to make some practice ammo.

He’s my boy. He doesn’t always get his way, but he does get a vote.

Okay, so yesterday after the rain I roughed in the zero on the revolver’s new sight. Then this morning before the rain I took it out to 25 yards with a rest and fined it in…

And THEN I had to harden my heart and do something really scary…

This really committed me to the new thing, because I only have one holster. Now that I know it works, I’ll work on smoothing out the cut and learning how to burnish cut edges.

Introducing the new EDC normal!

The disadvantage, obviously, is that the pistol isn’t quite as useful as a quick reactive defense weapon*. The overwhelming advantage is that I can see the damned sight in all light conditions**, with or without glasses.

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*But mostly when I fire the pistol for realsies it’s just as a noisemaker to change a hostile animal’s plans. I very rarely have to kill anything but the occasional rattler.

**One of the things I feared was that full desert sun would blot out the red dot, a problem with red dots of 10 years ago. But they seem to have overcome that even in the lower-price models.