The Ultimate Answer to Kings

I had exactly fifteen rounds of my favorite commercial .44 Special in my possession. That’s five in the gun and ten in speed loaders. It was looking bad for our heroes.

Oh, I could still reload – except that early in the Panic I learned to my horror that the two bricks of primers I thought I could fall back on had been stored (badly) so long that they were no longer first-strike dependable. That ironically kind of made them better for practice ammo, since now we’re throwing in random misfire drills. But it was not a good look if I had to fall back on reloads for every day carry.

By either synchronicity or wild coincidence, the only ammo counter in the crappy little desert town nearest where I live started buying up whatever they could get, and in my darkest hour that included a couple of thousand large pistol primers. At horribly inflated price, but since primers have up till now been unavailable at any price I jumped on them. Didn’t buy them all up, because that’s a dick move, but I did get 500 and then 500 more the next week. If any are left tomorrow I’ll be tempted.

And since I already have quite a lot of jacketed bullets in reserve, voilà!

I loaded and tested 20 yesterday, and then whipped up a box-worth this morning after morning walkie. I have quite a lot of once-fired .44 Magnum brass I’ve kept for just this occasion, so I shouldn’t have to worry about split cases. My .44 Special practice brass is getting pretty experienced.

For three years now, this has been part of the Spring ritual…

Drag the ebike into the light. Air up the tires and top off the battery.

This has been a very mild winter, and there have been a few times I’ve wanted to ride to town – but it wasn’t so mild I was willing to bounce over 20 miles of dirt going to town and back. Normally I cheat by putting it on the Jeep’s bike rack, but I spent most of the winter with D&L’s Jeep which doesn’t have a trailer hitch. So I haven’t ridden the bike any real distance since October, and that was a muddy mess – though it did lead to my being available for a good deed.

This coming week is supposed to be warm and sunny, and I’m feeling the itch.

One problem being the sad puppy act Tobie puts on whenever I leave the Lair without him, even for so much as a bucket of firewood. But his theatrics are a price I’m willing to pay on a beautiful sunny Spring. Hope we have one.

Last November marked 15 years of fulltime Gulch living for me, 10 years since the Lair became … not complete, gods know, but habitable. It’s always good to reflect on how you’re doing, what could be improved, what needs to be changed or eliminated in your life – and also maybe give yourself an occasional pat on the back.

Example: I am a near-complete failure as a gardener. How ancient people sustained any agriculture at all in this soil, if they did, is a complete mystery to me. I am aware of large subsistence gardens that Mormons have been running for generations not 20 miles from this spot, and they’re … humbling. I used to ponder: They’re using the same weather I am, right? The same humidity? The same soil? What’s their secret ingredient, piety?

As time went by I learned that in fact they’re not using the same humidity, or soil for that matter. They’re on a plain, not in the mountains. They’ve been amending the soil industriously for those self-same generations, and they diverted a frickin’ river for their gardens. Oh. Okay. Joel off the hook. Experimentation has demonstrated that I could in fact grow food plants if I expended the effort and resources to build a greenhouse: That works, I suspect because you can control the humidity and soil balance, and reduce the major day/night temperature swings to say nothing of rodent thievery. But can you grow enough plants for sustenance? Oh, hell no. Not on the scale I could build. So stop beating yourself up, Joel.

My construction skills have definitely improved in the past ten years. Compare my embarrassing crooked-little-man powershed (admittedly built entirely with scavenged materials, but still embarrassing)…
…with the Lair’s bedroom addition.

I leave the Lair itself out of this because I was really just a worker on the main structure’s construction. It wouldn’t have done nearly as well if I’d been the one making framing decisions back then. The Snuffy Smith interior is entirely my fault. I like to think things have improved.

My personal health and fitness are certainly a lot better from living this way. No chronic stress, no McDonalds drive-through to sustain me on the constant commute. Lots more exercise.

But getting to the point I started writing this post about – my attitude toward material possessions has changed remarkably. Continue reading →

For a long time the Jeep has needed repairs that I continually ignored out of a belief that the transmission was soon going to completely fail (it did) and then the Jeep would become a permanently-parked blight on the landscape rendering further repairs a waste of time and money (it didn’t). Ain’t gonna need this house no longer, I’m a’gettin ready to meet the saints.

Well, we know how that went: After a long infuriating period the Jeep is back and apparently in it for the long haul. In celebration, I have a number of comparatively minor repairs planned for the early part of the warm season. Starting with a really easy one…

I don’t know what happened to crumble its previous mirror glass, I never have the heart to ask, but I first met the Jeep in 2005 and it needed new side mirrors then. They’re not even very expensive; I just didn’t care if the Jeep was street legal and never got around to replacing them. But they are frequently handy, and definitely easy, so I thought I’d start there to get the project rolling. And the replacements arrived yesterday, accompanied by a completely unasked-for and pretty much unwanted third box which I curiously opened this morning…

A bunch of swag advertising…some company I know (and care) nothing whatsoever about.

A bag of coffee is always welcome, otherwise this is just junk I don’t need or want. I’ll probably throw the shirt on the “to the thrift store” pile, the rest of this is headed directly to the landfill. And I was very surprised that even penniless desert hermits are getting goody bags now: Is this some new sales technique? Because otherwise I don’t see the point.

Judging by recent experiences friends have had with building contractors, these people are years too late.

“Phone Hasn’t Stopped Ringing” – The World’s Ultra Rich Are Panic Buying Doomsday Bunkers

The “ultra rich” in the title is probably very wrong: Allegedly all the ultra rich already have theirs, and the average cost was a hell of a lot more than…

…between $70,000 to $240,000.

…because there’s a big difference between an armored hole in the ground and longterm luxury accommodations for friends, family and VIP security squads.

I just thought it funny that lower-tier rich folks would start calling contractors now, because that plumbs new depths (heh) of ‘not paying attention.’ They may be ready for the Holocaust of 2042, though…

It’s been very mild for early March, which is normally extremely changeable in the high desert. Sometimes I’ve even been briefly opening some windows that don’t directly face the heavy late winter/spring wind. Kind of important to remember to close them again later.

So overnight the wind came up again and we got a little snow. It never got very cold, high twenties, not even enough to freeze the chicken water. But it seemed a little colder than expected indoors. I lit the fire and passed it off as the wind.

Normally by seven or eight in the morning there’s no further need for the fire; it’s a small cabin, tight enough to hold the heat till the sun’s high. But it seemed that no sooner had I let the fire die than it got chilly again. Weird. I shrugged and lit another fire. Must be the wind.

Wasn’t till like nine, when I was thinking of lighting yet another fire, that I happened to glance at the front window over Tobie’s bed…

…which was wide freaking open and had been all night.

I blame Tobie. Or it might be all the antihistamines I’ve been popping, because the other thing the spring wind brings is allergy season and I’ve really been going through handkerchiefs.

…is not something I really thought I was going to have to do. But for some reason, though bottled tapwater is easily available under a large variety of labels…

…there is a widespread shortage of distilled water. I genuinely did not see that coming.

Happily, over the years the volume of distilled water I go through each month has dropped substantially, it used to be a much bigger deal, but I still use at least a gallon a month and yesterday I opened my last sealed gallon jug – and it hadn’t even originally been bought for batteries. That was meant for an ultrasonic brass cleaner somebody gave me. But the local market stopped carrying distilled water … and the stores in the Big City where Landlady lives stopped carrying distilled water … and not to my surprise, today I learned that the Palace of Food in the biggish town about 35 miles away doesn’t have any either.

But the batteries still need distilled water, whether I buy it or distill it myself. Happily, I have free (well, cheap) access to water that’s a lot closer to pure than our well water, and distilling already clean water is simple if a bit fuel-intensive. I’ve never actually done it, but the practice as demonstrated on the half-dozen YouTube videos I watched is very simple. My only question is: How quickly can I distill a gallon of pure water? Because I’ve a feeling it’s going to be time consuming.

And we’re about to find out.

…has been pretty pitiful this winter. During the mid-day walkie I dumped yesterday’s empty brass into the tumbler and turned it on. Came back two hours later to find…

…that everything in the tumbler didn’t make much of a pile. In fact,…

It contained only 143 cases, which represent basically all the practice shooting I’ve done all winter*. Hell, I’ve still got 100 unfired rounds waiting on the side of my bench, loaded last autumn. I’ve been a bad boy, mostly because I saw the dwindling pile of cast bullets in my last Big Box O’Bullets and I can’t stand to run out of things.

I got it sized and deprimed, and I’ll flare and inspect the cases before I clean the primer pockets and seat new primers. If an old case is going to fail during the reload cycle it’ll most likely split during flaring, and at almost ten cents a pop when you can find them at all a primer is a terrible thing to waste.

But for now, I’m back in business.

—
*Not counting commercial ammo fired in anger, which are mostly steel so I don’t keep them, and probably a couple of split cases I threw away here or there. Some of this brass has been with me ten years. Also not counting .22 plinking, of course.

After sitting unused for more than 3 months, a battery that should have had another year or so in it let me down this morning…

…and annoying as that is, the timing couldn’t have been better. I no sooner got the charger on it than I got a text from D&L who wanted to go to town this afternoon. And thanks to a policy of austerity in the fear that the Jeep would cost more than hoped, I was actually able to replace the deader without pain.

On that subject, somebody asked last week whether the Great Transmission Bleg was able to pay for the repair. Having now settled my mind about additional related cost, I can say that you guys nailed the price almost precisely. TUAK contributions specific to the transmission repair totaled $2360, and the actual bill was $2580. And for that, I am most sincerely grateful. Without you guys, the Jeep would be a permanently parked home for rats and I’d be afoot.

A Generous Reader who asked not to be identified sent me a big bag of home-cast .44 boolits for free. I promised a review, and here it is.

I weighed about 40 of them at random and they are quite as consistent as any commercial bullets I’ve given the same treatment, actually better than the box I’m currently loading from. If they fill the mold consistently they can probably be relied on for stability. Loaded twenty rounds with 7.4 grains of Ramshot True Blue and went out to the target stand in my yard…

Wow them groups fall apart when you step away for a couple of months. I have no explanation for that one flyer: I didn’t call it but it’s almost certainly just me pulling a shot. Now that my components are replenished I really need to shoot more often. Also practice on paper, which is a lot less forgiving than steel.

Either way, as far as I can tell these bullets are great. Thanks very much!

To my surprise, the followup trip to the shop on Tuesday does seem to have improved the Jeep’s situation. I admit that a) I didn’t even know it had an adjustable TV cable, and b) I still don’t understand why a maladjusted cable would cause a transmission to go out of gear, and especially while climbing steep grades. But all they did was adjust the cable, and it had a marked effect on the condition. Didn’t fix it, you understand, but significantly improved it on grades and seems to have eliminated the problem on level surfaces. I plan to study and try for more improvements, but there’s no point taking it back to the shop again. The Jeep is useable.

Which pleased Tobie immediately. Remember this?

That was poor phobic little Tobie for the first month after he came to the Lair. He HATED the Jeep, had to be forced in and forced to stay. I assume he had a very bad car experience – in fact I think I can guess what it was – and I needed to force him through that until he realized that Jeep rides are fun. It really didn’t take him long.

And he got the message so well that after more than three Jeepless months…

He got excited when it showed up back in the driveway, and really likes coming along.

The shotgun seat has gone through multiple generations of large dogs by this point and is getting really ratty. It’s very seldom needed for non-canine passengers so I considered removing it and replacing it with a box or even nothing, but…

…the truth is Tobie really isn’t very good at keeping his balance during some of the Jeep’s antics, and compensates by really using the seatback when he’s not hanging his head out the window. So I guess I’ll live with the ragged-ass seat.

Aw, it got away from me… 😉

I was barely home with the Jeep last week when it was clear that things weren’t right. This came as no surprise.

Everything was well enough except the transmission kept randomly going out of gear under acceleration, especially up steep grades. The Gulch has no shortage of steep grades.

Oh lord I did not want to go through all that again. But I went and spoke with the owner yesterday, he had a confab with his transmission guy, and they thought they might be able to adjust us all out of the situation. So first thing this morning…

…and now we’ll see. I admit to a spasm of optimism: Once back on my home turf I went to the steepest grade near the Lair, stopped at the foot and then slowly climbed it, and the transmission worked just fine where it certainly wouldn’t have (and didn’t) yesterday. So we’ll see. I so want the transmission saga to be over.

Okay, the breadsticks didn’t work out so well – especially after a couple of days in the bag.

This morning I looked at some little boxes of raisins BB sent me last month, then went to my copy of Joy of Cooking for a raisin bread recipe.

Unlike my usual half-assed efforts at something different, this was an entirely unfamiliar bread recipe which I followed very carefully, leading to such internal dialogue as “No, you idiot. A quarter cup, not a quarter teaspoon.” Because I normally never measure anything anymore.

I kind of messed up the topping, because I made an assumption before turning the page and learning that I’d missed like two paragraphs. But except for that it seemed to come out okay…

Oh, yeah.

That worked.

I’m kind of widening out this winter. At least I’m doing it on my own cooking.

Tobie helped.

…about their borders are relatively rare in the modern world. Yet there are plenty of places where borders are clear on maps but vague on the ground because there’s really nothing there to defend. Example: I know I’ve been in the UAE but may or may not have been in Oman at some point. (If you want to try this yourself bring food, lots of water, and multiple very capable 4X4s rigged for towing and tire inflation because you WILL get stuck. Repeatedly. And a camera: wild camels. They like hot dog buns. For extra entertainment points, do it with a bunch of Australians who, I learned, actually do barbecue lobsters. In the damndest places.) But I’m unaware that either country considers their putative border a source of much humor.

Not so in Scandinavia. There is a place where Sweden, Norway and Finland come together…

…and apparently some people have thought it would be fun to go there and run in a circle yelling, “I’m in Sweden/Norway/Finland!”

Okay, I don’t judge. Trouble is, the place is located in the Käsivärsi wilderness, a good day’s hike from anything, and to make matters worse the exact spot is covered with water: Specifically, Goldajávri Lake. So getting to that spot is almost as difficult as pronouncing it.

But from the evidence, Finns/Swedes/Norwegians do not lack a sense of humor – so they solved the problem. In fact they apparently went to considerable trouble to do so…

I share chicken chores with another neighbor, as we share expenses and eggs. Today was my day. I went over there with Tobie in the Jeep, went into the powershed to swap waterers…

…or I should say I tried to. At first the door wouldn’t open, because it kept crashing into a juvenile goat.

Insert heavy sigh here.

Best guess: The door got accidentally left open yesterday, a passing goat with her kid investigated and found an open bag of hay sweepings I bring home from D&L’s for nesting material, and settled in for a nice long snack. Somehow in the process of that she managed to latch the door shut. Or yesterday’s heavy wind had something to do with it, I don’t know.

What I can say with absolute assurance is that two goats stuck in a small room for most of a full day will make an amazing mess of the room. They have exactly as much concern about where their droppings land as chickens, and a great deal more volume of output.

If you must move into the boonies to raise barnyard animals, please do have the decency to take care of them yourself. Don’t make them your neighbors’ problem.

Not by any means a huge snowfall – hell, we got 10″ almost exactly a year ago – but it’s by far the biggest of this so-far very dry winter.

There was some overnight wind so I don’t know how accurate this is, but this is my burn barrel lid so it’s not drifted up.

Oh, bother. If the forecast is right and this bit of cold and wet is just a blip in the warmish and dry February we’ve had to date, here comes the mud.

I hate mud.

I hated it more without the yellow Jeep, whose windows I should most definitely have rolled up last night.

After a quick walkie with a dangerously excited Tobie, you know what time it is, kids…

That’s right! No cheating today, Joel: Up that ladder and clean off every inch, because I’m not at all sure we’re going to get any direct sunlight today even though the forecast still says we are. In fact the weather page says we’re at “mostly sunny” right now, when it’s thick overcast from horizon to horizon. Maybe they know something I don’t. That happens.

Anyway…

Trudge around in the unfamiliar snow till you’ve done your duty, then you can drag your old ass back inside to have some breakfast and explain to Tobie why he’s not getting a long walkie this morning.

And oh by the way…

In October I got a big care package dump including some insulated BDUs I didn’t expect to use very often if at all. Even in this quite mild winter I need to say how wrong I was about that: It’s just too damned convenient to pull on the pair of insulated pants I’ve kept in the closet, rather than wear my usual much thinner BDUs and curse the cold. They’re really nice to have, and it’s not even very cold. But a little wind goes a long way.

Several weeks ago I inventoried my pistol ammo and began to fret. 44 Special is not an especially popular cartridge anymore* and for the past two years it has been unobtainium. My favorite flavor, CCI “flying ashtray” Blazers, was depleted except for what was in the gun and a couple of speedloaders. I have a few boxes of anemic “cowboy action” cartridges which I bought at ruinous cost just because that’s all that was available in 2019, and that’s it.

I reload, of course, and over the years Generous Readers have unloaded a whole bunch of brass on me so I’m okay for cases. Thanks to a certain amount of foresight in early 2020 I’m okay for powder. But I was running out of cast bullets for practice and – most serious – I was down to a couple of bricks of primers which had been badly stored more than 15 years ago and were no longer entirely dependable.

Then this past weekend I got a care package dump with enough cast bullets for a year’s worth of profligate practicing, plus a box of jacketed bullets – and I already have quite a lot of jacketed bullets on hand so I could load my own good defense ammo if only I had trustworthy primers.

Yesterday I walked into the drugstore for a few things, wandered over to the ammo counter as I always do just as a sad little exercise in social observation, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but…

Are. You. Kidding. Me.

Mind you, this is a generic drugstore in a very rural little desert town; they sell sundries of all sorts including basic ammo when they can get it – but before the ammo panic they had never carried reloading components. This is the first time I ever saw primers in that glass cabinet.

If I believed in signs, I’d call this a clear one. I have a couple of Christian friends who gently chide me for being an agnostic who’s open to what I always call ‘synchronicity,’ which they see as contradictory if not sort of hypocritical. I don’t argue: In the course of a long life I’ve never seen any compelling evidence for the existence of a god who twiddles my life’s dials, or at least not a nice one. But I do not deny that sometimes needed things fall into my lap at exactly the right time, and since I don’t understand it I don’t try to explain it. Or explain it away: It is what it is.

Of course, like all things in life, there’s a downside…

Eight cents a pop for primers is highway robbery. But we’re in that kind of world now: I paid it and (now that the Jeep’s safely out of hock) hope to get more. Because now I can load my own dependable carry ammo, and my fretting is over.

—-
* I have never understood this. To me it’s the perfect utility cartridge, but maybe that’s just my inner boomer speaking.

Boy, I really could have used this over the weekend: Neighbor D’s Jeep doesn’t have a trailer hitch and I had to borrow S&L’s pickup to move a bunch of stuff for some other neighbors. But I’ll take what I can get.

During today’s water run I hopelessly stopped at the shop to visit my poor old broken down Yellow Peril – only to find that it was fixed and running and “Didn’t you get my text message?”

No I did NOT get a text message, because it turns out the imbecile who runs the place was sending texts to the wrong frickin’ phone number all this time. But whatever: It was ready to leave! And there was nothing left but to pay the man (an exceptionally non-emotional example of that sort of event, thanks to you guys) and drive it home.

“I don’t want to say I don’t trust these guys,” I said to D&L, “But I don’t trust these guys. So if you’d just stay behind me on the way home, I’d appreciate it.”

As you can see, it was an unnecessary precaution. So far.

Joy! I’m going to go give Tobie a ride.

ETA: Tobie approves! His first Jeep ride in almost four months.

Gelsocks are always welcome at the old one-legged guy’s Lair…

Somebody hit my Amazon wishlist. If you know what this is for, you might have a woodstove.

My old stovepipe brush is ten years old and I have learned that you can wear them out. The bristles no longer touch the pipe all the way around, so this gift was quite timely.

I think the same person also sent a gift for Tobie…

…which will keep the little mercenary happy for a few months. Actually I wish I hadn’t put those on the list, because at the same time I got a massive food drop from BB, who included … you guessed it. So we’ve got lots. 🙂

Here’s a new armored phone cover, which will hopefully keep the new screen intact…

And now for something very heavy… Continue reading →