The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Sweartagod, after I’ve betrayed the revolution and set myself up as president-for-life, there are gonna be some changes around here.

I go through this every gorram time. All I wanted to do was replace the single regulator on Ian’s propane station with a bypass regulator, to prevent the water heater from running out of propane mid-shower. The Lair has two bypass regulators, one for the kitchen and one for the bedroom, and each time I installed one I had to scramble – multiple times each – to find the one fitting that would connect this to that. I have a coffee can full of them – all wrong, of course. Because there are so gorram many of them.

In Ian’s case the matter is a bit more serious than a possible cold shower. Ian originally planned to get one of those big household tanks, which of course would need to be accessible to a propane truck. So he buried quite a lot of pipe. Bleeding all that line from the bottle to the water heater is, as I know from personal experience, a time-consuming matter I’d like to avoid in future.

So anyway: I bought a regulator online, hoping to use two pigtails I already had. Naturally they were incompatible; don’t know what I was thinking. This past week I bought two pigtails that would work. So far so good, but not done yet. This morning I tried to connect the regulator to the hose going to Ian’s place, and of course the fitting is the wrong size.

And of course I don’t have the right size, because the one off his old regulator won’t go on the new regulator.

Utterly pissed off, I decided that while I was there I could at least accomplish something: He has a 100# bottle that’s been stored at that station for years: I can’t use it because it’s too much for the old men to get back and forth. It couldn’t stay inside the station any more, so I decided to roll it down the hill to Ian’s place.

Probably would have thought that through a little better if at the time I hadn’t been, as previously mentioned, utterly pissed off.

Let’s just say the bottle got a really good roll going before…

…I realized that it wasn’t going to stop at the driveway. It was going to overshoot the driveway and hurtle straight over the cliff to the wash.

Probably wouldn’t have hurt the bottle; it’s soft sand down there. But still. Cliff. So here’s the stiff old one-legged man running downhill as best he can, trying to prevent a scene that probably featured prominently in at least one Three Stooges short.

Made it. Barely.

Too early to drink?

Last summer I gave up on my improvised solar water heater because it sprang a theoretically impossible but quite substantial leak. This morning I pulled all the innards down to see if I could find it.

It’s just good quality black garden hose. Not made for the temperature in that box, to be sure, but it really shouldn’t leak until the hose completely deteriorates – and then it should unmistakeably leak.

I pressurized it, no leak. Left it out in the sun all day. No leak. So why was it leaking before? Tomorrow I’ll put it all back together and see how long it works. It’s kind of handy, if only the water would stay where it belongs.

And that’s how you know you’re getting old, I suppose.

Maybe two months ago I stopped wearing my bifocals, which I got online and truly hate, in favor of dollar store reading glasses. At roughly the same moment, I stopped being able to shoot a pistol straight and for a while I actually blamed the pistol.

Since my cataract surgery my long-distance vision is actually very sharp. I badly need glasses for reading, where I used to be so nearsighted that my sharpest point of focus was an inch in front of my eyes. I was a funny sight, rebuilding chainsaw carburetors.

So I can count leaves on trees at 100 yards but can’t count the fingers on my hand at arm’s length. And a little farther than that is where I keep the front sight on my pistol.

This morning, after a very fitful seven hours of sleep…

…and after all the usual morning Tobie-related stuff, I finally did what I’ve been promising for a couple of weeks but kept letting other things get in the way: I dusted off my bifocals, took them and a box of commercial cowboy action ammo and a paper target to my driveway target stand, and…

Sigh…it’s not the gun. It’s definitely not the gun.

Even so, I’m thinking very seriously of joining the 21^st century. My model 69 will take an adapter plate for a red dot, and I’ve about decided I want one. Problem being I have no experience with mounting one on a pistol and I can just about afford to do it once. So a logistical mistake would be disastrous. Analysis paralysis has set in hard.

Hood prop…

Jumper cable…

Sorry about the lack of content, the spring wind has gone into extra innings and it’s got all the pollen going up my nose. I’m living on pseudoephedrine and getting nothing done whatsoever.

Personal best so far this week: Baking day.

And I must say…

…even though I do say it myself, I’m finally getting kinda good at this.

I happened to be in town with D&L yesterday on unrelated business. They stopped at the convenience store: I looked at the corner of the building, and saw…

…or rather didn’t see, the store’s payphone! It’s gone! And it hasn’t been gone long – it was there just a week or two ago.

I have long imagined, probably inaccurately and certainly without basis, that that was the last payphone in the American landscape. What next? No more teepee-shaped motels? God, I’m old…

The banana yucca are in full bloom now.

The nicest thing about them is that they have no scent.

“It’s after 6:30. The day is half gone.”

Tobie’s only real function, at this early stage, is to keep me honest about getting out the door instead of rolling over and going back to sleep. And may I say he’s doing a hell of a job.

But he’s in for a disappointment this morning, because instead of the usual long walkie we’re going straight to a neighbor’s house where he’ll spend hours tied up outside with a pan of water and whatever part of the scenery he wishes to enjoy.

Yeah, sorry about the blank spot there. I’ve been in a neighbor’s house doing actual work for once, and definitely not taking photos or writing descriptions. Nothing juicy or secret, just – you know – private. Us hermits are big on private.

Anyway. Plan to finish up this morning, so we really are leaving as soon as I post this but not for anything of which Tobie will particularly approve.

Every week D and I fill up our drinking water bottles. L mentioned on the way into town that she ran into another contractor – water softener technician – who wouldn’t believe how hard the well water is until he tested it himself. 935 ppm. And that’s why, even though we all have indoor plumbing, we truck in our drinking water. I didn’t learn until my first kidney stone, almost exactly ten years ago.

Don’t use it much myself, but after all the impassioned news items I was curious to see if there would be baby formula on the store shelves. Nope.

This would have been a very serious – indeed, a life threatening – problem when my daughter was an infant. Momma wanted to breastfeed but didn’t have the milk.

You know you’re shopping in a Mormon town when they bag your six-pack.

And look who was such a good boy! Hoozagooboy? Hasn’t wrecked the place in my absence in months.

In our last exciting episode, I got an early mouse in the bedroom heater’s firebox. Not allowed. They’re getting in through the exterior vent.

Sidebar: Mice in the vent is not ever mentioned as a possible problem in ads for the benefits of vented heaters.

Anyway: I covered it with plastic and duct tape yesterday morning, but Regular Commenter Ben came up a good (and in hindsight perfectly obvious) idea: What about hardware cloth? You could just leave that up permanently.

Huh. Why didn’t I think of that? Continue reading →

This is my punishment for procrastination. Procrastination is my kryptonite.

I happened to be awake at 2am for unrelated reasons when I heard a faint metallic clang – and I knew right away where it came from.

Last October I had to fish a massive mouse nest out of the bedroom heater and evict a mother and at least two babies out into the cold and snow. I swore that when Spring came, I would cover the outside vent with plastic and duct tape.

I didn’t forget that vow, I just kept putting it off. Last night I was served notice of the consequences of my sloth. Continue reading →

It’ll be three years old in August, and by then we may have crossed a thousand miles. 800 today, with one major electrical fault, probably a cold solder joint, and two thorn flats. So far.

An interesting tidbit: I got 20 miles on its first battery charge back in 2019. Today I put just shy of 18 miles on it, and…

The battery indicated well over half full when I parked it. Now: I’m a lot more knowledgeable about power management now than then and most of today’s mileage was on relatively flat pavement rather than the usual hilly dirt. Even so, it definitely goes farther on a full battery now than it did at first. Which is kind of weird to me, but I’ll take it. In a town the bike will easily do 40, probably more like 50 miles on a charge.

Tobie likes peanut butter, a taste Laddie completely lacked. But Tobie doesn’t have Little Bear’s anteater tongue.

He tried, though. Worked on it for a happy hour.

I’m trying to think of a term, maybe you can help me because I’m drawing a blank.

During the morning walkie/sniffathon, I was listening to a podcast discussing myths related to the latest gungrabber hobgoblin, “ghost guns.” And while waiting for Tobie to finish reading peemail I tried to construct a mental list of all the labels I can recall that have been used at one time or another for the purpose of keeping the populace clamorous to be led to safety through helplessness. This list is certainly not complete, my memory being what it is lately…

Saturday Night Specials
Semiautomatic pistols
Deadly sniper rifles
Concealable guns
Machine guns
High capacity magazines
Assault weapons
Weapons of war
And now, of course, ‘ghost guns.’

And where I hit a mental roadblock was trying to recall the blanket term for this sort of rhetorical device. I’m sure there’s a phrase for it, but I’m hitting a total blank. Anybody help me out?

Even to me, that sounds like a weird sentence.

I remember a time, many years ago in the Texas panhandle, some of the younger members of the local rifle and pistol club wanted to use a horseshoe canyon on the club’s property to set up a range for the monthly combat pistol match. Trouble was, the canyon was choked with old tumbleweeds. Being young and dumb, we figured what the hell? Tumbleweeds burn readily and enthusiastically. We actually got away with that without consequence.

That incident came to mind this morning, for the first time in I don’t remember when. I know this cool little canyon where I used to go with the dogs when I first moved here. It’s a lot closer to Landlady’s place than to the Lair, and I haven’t been there in over ten years. Couldn’t quite remember exactly where it was, to be honest.

It’s got the coolest weird rock formations…

…all up and down it, and I was going to have a ball taking pictures. Trouble is…

Yeah. A sea of tumbleweeds.

We had a bumper crop last summer after the heavy Monsoon, and now the canyons are choked with them. Even if I were prepared to put up with the millions of thorns, that particular canyon is a real legbreaker and you need to see where you’re putting your feet. Or foot, in my case. So my expedition was rather shorter than planned.

Drove up the wash to replace that target stand that was falling apart when it was wood…

For some reason I’m pulling all my shots left all of a sudden. Keep meaning to take a paper target to the regular range and figure out if it’s me or what. Probably me: I’m having this optical issue lately where I can see in the distance really well and close up okay with glasses, but right about where my front sight is…not really so much.

Speaking of being a boomer…I’ve got this smartphone, right? Landlady gave it to me: It’s the only way I’m connected out here. Had it for several years now, and the only way I can hear it is with a Bluetooth earpiece. And since cheap ones tend to fall apart quick, I actually have like three earpieces in various stages of decay. And this morning they all simultaneously decided they didn’t want to connect with the phone. No idea why. I rummaged around and found the old headset I bought first when learning about Bluetooth … and wouldn’t you know that works just fine with the phone. So now I don’t think it’s something I’m doing wrong. Confusing.

If I had a VCR, the clock would probably blink 12:00 at all times. Continue reading →

So Tam noticed something weird about a particular Charter Arms gun…

You may have heard that Charter Arms is offering a five-shot .44 Special snubbie entirely devoid of useful sights that they are calling the “Boomer”.

Well, I obviously had to follow the link, and sure enough…

And now I know I’ll never find out if it’s a play on ‘gun go boom’ (which this one surely would) or a comment on the probable buyer demographic…

One of the things I hate about portable generators – any generators really – is the noise. The incessant, teeth-grinding noise. I like quiet. It’s a major reason I live here.

One of the things I always liked about other people’s Honda inverter generators is they’ve got something called an “eco-throttle,”…

…which throttles the engine down to a very low idle when there’s no load on the generator. It’s quiet. Unfortunately, since I first took mine out of the box almost five years ago, that setting on mine hasn’t worked. There’s nothing wrong with the machine, apparently it’s an altitude thing. The engine ran too rich at 6000′ to idle that low.

Supposedly there’s a carb jet kit you can buy for high altitude, but I never got one. So I never used that feature. Except this spring I decided to give it a try for shits and giggles and for some reason I don’t understand, it works now. I like my cool generator even more now.

Anyway: I had it, and a bunch of different power tools, out this morning to make a new stand for that metallic target I brought in a while ago.

Up till spring 2018, the rifle range target stand consisted of an old fuel tank rack. It fell over in one of the big 2017 floods, and the following year I cut it up for its angle iron and made proper target stands. I had the ends of the rack left over, nothing to do with them but they were too big and heavy to haul to the dump. Erosion was slowly burying them in the hillside.

But this morning…

…I cut them both in half. Much grinding and drilling ensued, and by the time I was done making noise…

I made a thing! Weather won’t wear this one out, by golly.

May is easily my favorite month.

I spent a fair amount of the morning in the reading chair this morning after the long morning walkie. Tobie mostly stayed in his bed, but occasionally came into the bedroom briefly to see if he could jazz up any action from the old man…

I have occasionally wondered if I shouldn’t feel kind of bad about having adopted him. I mean, by the time he’s scheduled to die of old age it’s gonna be kind of a race: I’ll be over eighty. Which means he has a lot of sitting and waiting in his future, and he’d clearly like more action than he already gets.

Still, he’s showing signs of maturing, and I like the way it’s going. In the very early days I was quick to let him off the leash and it didn’t work out well. As soon as he realized I physically couldn’t control him, he decided that meant I didn’t get a vote at all. And he’s been on the leash ever since.

But that was almost a year ago. Laddie was on the leash for the first year as well, until he showed signs of actually paying attention. Once he proved he’d stay close, the leash went away and we spent the next (final, alas) year being real buddies. Now I’ve been testing Tobie with short, routine things off the leash, mostly to and from the Jeep, and he’s behaving himself very well. Soon we’ll try to and from Ian’s place. He’s unlikely to find ways to get hurt so close to the cabin, and I’m very interested to see how he behaves when – inevitably – he has to chase a rabbit. If he comes straight back, or – the platonic ideal – stops when he’s called, then I’ll know we’re getting there.

But I’m not rushing it: ASDs are supposed to take longer to mature than he’s had so far and I don’t really trust him yet. How much of this is just my own overprotectiveness, I can’t say. But this isn’t a park, and it does seem like I’ve buried an awful lot of dogs since moving here, so how much protectiveness is too much?

I was playing with effects on my new camera the other evening, and think this is the prettiest Tobie picture to date…

D&L had doctor appointments in the big town about 50 miles away, so at mid-day we went to feed horses and dogs…

Tobie got to commune with the horses till they went in for food, which he seems to enjoy though they regard him with complete indifference when they bother to regard him at all.