The Ultimate Answer to Kings

I owe you a care package post, and I promise I’m working on it, but first I want to make an announcement to people who’ve been using my maildrop address: Please don’t send any more packages to that address. Things are in a state of flux at the moment. Nothing unpleasant, just life changes.

In general, the new hotness in expensive firearms isn’t going to matter that much to a penniless hermit. In fact if it weren’t for a Forgotten Weapons video I was on with Ian going on 3 years ago I might not know there was even such a thing as a Sig P365. Miniature 9mm pistols don’t interest me that much in any case, though I did notice while shooting the ones in that video that the P365 seemed to be ahead of the pack in that particular niche. Partly it’s just an old target shooter’s prejudice for a non-crap trigger.

I met Ian for the first time in – well hell, nearly a year I think – and he showed me his new concealed carry pistol. In the interest of taking pictures of everything with one of my new toys, I had the notion of comparing new and old school notions of what makes a good compact pistol.

My own is – well, kinda dorky and old I’m afraid…

Roughly the same overall dimensions, though he’ll have an easier time hiding the butt – which holds two more rounds of more potent ammo – than I do. Personally I like a gun butt big enough to hang onto, not that it’s necessarily going to do a lot of good with the Mak’s minuscule sights. Someday I want to spend some serious time with an optic-equipped pistol, it seems as though it ought to be a really good idea if the optic will survive getting smashed back and forth on the slide – which people say they do. I’d get serious about finding one for my S&W if that wouldn’t really screw up the holster situation, but it would.

I can’t really speak for the Sig, having only put a couple of mags of ammo through one a few years ago, but I can say that the Mak is surprisingly easy to shoot instinctively; it points really well, and though the blowback action doesn’t spare you any recoil it also weighs probably twice what the Sig does, and in 9mm Para the Sig definitely has some recoil.

Getting back to crap triggers: The Mak definitely has one, at least in double action, while the Sig’s trigger is remarkably crisp and drama-free. Ironically that spoils it for concealed carry in the eyes of a lot of people, there being a school of thought that a concealed pistol’s safety actually ought to be the long hard trigger pull. I don’t know, maybe. I see what they’re saying, but I think I’m just going to have to conclude that if a person is shopping for a little carry pistol of recent design, it’s good to have choices. Ian went with a nice trigger and a mechanical safety. Having come up shooting 1911s, I think that would probably be my choice as well.

Today has been scheduled for baking all week, and in addition to the usual I wanted to do something unusual: Actual bread sticks.

I like to keep snacks around, BB has spoiled me that way, but for reasons not to be discussed in public this is a lean month for money. I can’t buy munchies but happily I can bake as many as I like. Should be doing that anyway but I’ve gotten lazy. A quick trip to the bookshelf gives me the modification I need to convert ordinary bread dough…

…into munchie dough.

And while that was baking, I could get set up for my usual bread.

Not my prettiest loaf ever, but it all eats the same.

This all took quite a lot of time and I was well past my usual time to go do chicken chores. I would have just walked over there with Tobie, but I had some hay to deliver and so had to take the Jeep. Leaving Tobie alone in the cabin with a still-hot loaf of bread is not at all smart. He is now easily able to clean off the counter halfway to the wall. But at least for now, just a little precaution keeps him away from the bounty.

Just sitting around reading most of the day, doing mundane chores for the rest.

Here’s a funny video…

I don’t know anything about the comparative value of camera brands or models. I don’t know very much about cameras: When I read a review most of it may as well be in Urdu. But I have figured out that one quick’n’dirty way to determine whether a lens is complete crap…

Click for bigger

I was out getting firewood at noon when I happened to look up and see that the moon is in the first quarter. On a whim I left the bucket in the woodshed and went inside for that nice digital camera somebody gave me last year. Stuck the mem card in the laptop, and sure enough: The moon was almost as discernible on the pic as it was in real life.

Pretty cool!

Okay, so it was definitely going to get cold last night. It’s been overcast the past two days, snowed on and off and never got above freezing all yesterday, and overnight the sky cleared. We’re at 6000 feet: it’s gonna get cold.

And it did, too, without setting any records…

But what I was most concerned about was the batteries, which at twilight yesterday were doing this…

That’s not good at all. It’s time for emergency power conservation mode. I went out to the powershed and shut the inverter right off.

When I first wired the cabin in 2010 I had no 12-volt lighting or appliances at all. I’m sure such things existed but I only knew about them in an automotive context and auto 12-volt lighting works great in the cabin of a car or truck and nowhere else. That meant that if my inverter wasn’t on, nothing was on. Time to break out the kerosene lamps and/or just go to bed.

Things started changing a lot in winter 2014 when Big Brother sent me a kit with some rudimentary 12-volt household lighting. That worked really well, and the concept was proven in summer 2015 when a lightning strike fried my scrounged RV inverter. I couldn’t charge a cellphone, but I still had lights. So in 2017 when I built the bedroom addition, all the lighting was 12-volt and so was the ceiling fan. At the same time, LED bulbs with standard connections became affordable, and that was a whole separate revolution in power management for a penniless hermit with a (very) small off-grid system.

The reason this matters is that sometimes in winter my power situation can get low enough that usually insignificant power drains, like the parasitic draw from the inverter, become a no longer acceptable issue.

I hadn’t gone a night without the inverter for quite a while, and I was kind of curious to see how it was going to trip me up. I tried to make a cup of tea and was forcibly reminded that my new stove…

…couldn’t light a fire without wall current, but that was no thing. I’ve got five different ways to start a fire in the main cabin alone. I didn’t hit any serious snags till this morning while trying to compose this very post. But in the morning I did get a mild surprise… Continue reading →

It’s been a really dry winter so far, so…

…a quick half-inch or so of snow is noticeable.

Certainly Tobie thinks so. This is probably only the third time he’s ever seen it in his life, and he hasn’t gotten over finding it exciting.

My only thoughts toward it are a)mud, b)it’s supposed to stay below freezing for the next two days without break and that sucks, and…

…c) as soon as it slacks off I’d better go clean the solar panels, because yesterday was overcast as well and I probably shouldn’t have baked that pork yesterday.

I’ve really grown to dislike the local goats. I have my doubts about the goat people.

I mean they’re perfectly nice people, personally. But they’ve got this goat herd that they can’t really feed and don’t even try to confine, so the goats just go frickin’ everywhere. I particularly object to them crossing my yard, because Tobie is excitable enough without help. Also they leave trails of shit everywhere they go, and … y’know, I don’t shit in your yard. Why should I smile while you shit in mine?

So I’m reading a book in my nice heated bedroom this morning, when Tobie comes blasting in for an excited look through the window by my chair. I glance out my window and there they all are. At least they appear to be on the move. I take my AK off the wall and go out to hurry them on their way, but by the time I cross their trail they’re already down the bank and crossing the wash. Except…

Behind me, up on the ridge, there’s this kid that’s screaming its head off for its mother. It apparently can’t see where the herd is going, and I swear nobody in this herd seems to be looking around for a missing kid.

Well now what am I supposed to do? I can leave bad enough alone and maybe they’ll hook up – except that even as I watch, the kid makes the wrong choice and starts going up the ridge directly away from the herd. It’s screaming its head off, calling every predator for miles. Oh, for…

I’ve mentioned before that these goats are basically pets and so are not especially afraid of strange humans. I have no trouble catching the kid, but by the time I gingerly work my way down the ridge with this baby goat in my arms the herd is nowhere to be found. So now what?

I’m not a saint: The thought of cleaning the carcass and letting it hang from a tree to cool while I look for recipes does cross my mind. I caught it. Technically it’s mine.

(sigh) But not in any other sense. So instead I put it in the back of (D&L’s, and please don’t tell them) Jeep and drive all the way to the goat people’s place. Where there’s nobody around. I prop up the gate to their only intact enclosure and leave the baby in there. Its mother will either come home or not; I wash my hands of it. Literally: Goats, even baby goats, stink.

…because she was always the most dependable egg-layer. Not especially good eggs unless you like them small and green, but one egg a day like a nervous, spastic little machine.

But I was beginning to think none of them were ever planning to lay an egg again.

And it’s usual for them to molt in winter, so we get a slim month or six weeks. But check this out…

November…

December…

Where we just stopped wasting marker ink recording the obvious.

January!

At the very end of January, almost three months after these freeloaders started to molt, we finally got an egg. Sure, they’ll throttle back in winter, molt or no molt, because the days are so short. But I’ve never seen a dry winter like this one.

Gotta say: While eggs are available in stores, nobody raises laying hens because it’s economical. It ain’t.

Out of the blue, Neighbor S volunteered to go up on the Lair’s roof and replace the chimney cap, an improvement the Lair has needed for, roughly, ever.

Don’t know how effective it’ll be as a spark arrester, but I think that’ll end the extremely annoying ‘birds in the stovepipe’ issue.

By this time of the season it’s kind of automatic…

Chop kindling, …

…and lay tomorrow’s fire.

For several years this was a more emotional issue than it should have had any need to be, because ten years ago I had a chimney fire – caused entirely by my own ignorance and poor design – and for quite a long time after that the sound of a rumbling fire in the stove really made my blood pressure do bad things. But I’m mostly over that now. Still keeps me johnny-on-the-spot with the chimney sweeping, I must admit.

And unfortunately for the paranoid, the secret to good quick warmth – and ironically also to a creosote-free stovepipe – is a high hot start. This will definitely make with the rumbling noise in the stovepipe that will do the blood pressure thing and I put up with years of cooler, less efficient and ultimately more dangerous fires as a result. But now I can stack the tinder high and let the woodstove’s freak flag fly without too much early morning anxiety.

It’s been an unusually mild winter so far, easy on the firewood supply, but even during a cold one I most commonly only burn the woodstove in the morning to take off the initial chill. By this part of winter I’m more likely to reach for a sweater, and also most days it’s sunny enough for the big south window to sufficiently heat the (still quite small, even with the addition) cabin. And now that the structure is complete, it’s well enough insulated to hold the heat through the evening. I really don’t like it so warm I’m stripping down to a t-shirt every time I step inside and then bundling back up to go outside.

As for lighting the fire: I recall many discussions on prepper fora about improvised firestarters and the like. Maybe that sort of thing has its charms if you’re at a hobby campfire, but believe me – when you need the fire every damned morning and right frickin’ now, that nonsense gets old. Say hello to my li’l friend…

I used to go through a lot of wooden matches in the winter. Between a propane torch and my new spark-lit stovetop, I barely even bother to stock matches anymore. 🙂

I was running an errand this morning, listening to C&Rsenal on my earpiece, when Othias ran this bit…

…and I had to ruefully admit that until recently I had never owned a set of gunsmith screwdrivers in my life, despite a lifetime of being a shooter. When you’re primarily into semiauto pistols, it’s not that big a deal.

But a couple of years ago, my darlin’ came into my life…

I’m beginning to have guilty-feeling second thoughts at present, thanks to the current ammo drought, but still in my heart I consider this S&W Model 69 to be (nearly*) the perfect big-bore trail gun. It’s relatively small (and way too light) but capable of firing the heaviest .44 magnum if needed while being easy to carry every day. Needless to say it mostly gets a diet of .44 special which has become a unicorn cartridge lately, so reloads. Lots of reloads.

I love this thing. I’ve already told the story about how I happened to acquire it – I don’t exactly live on a S&W budget – but I was only gradually aware of what an odyssey this revolver must have had before ending up in my adoring mitts. It had been kind of bubba’ed up, and definitely not by the neighbor from whom I acquired it. The front sight is ever so slightly bent, the mainspring had been replaced with something so light it was giving me light strikes, and – relevant to this post – the sideplate screws were all chewed up.

I was besotted with this pistol – but I’m not traditionally a revolver guy and wasn’t yet clued in to what turned out to be a simple fact: Even if all you ever do is properly clean it from time to time you still need a proper set of screwdrivers. Screws are scattered around the gun in an assortment of sizes, and hardware store drivers don’t work. In the course of … well, screwing around … I replaced the damaged screws and then managed to damage the new screws.

Nobody sold proper screwdrivers around here, but…

…turns out they’re easily available and not at all expensive. And if you’re gonna be a revolver guy, definitely worth having.

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* I wish the trigger guard were bigger. Doesn’t work well in winter with gloves.

By happenstance, a person in my social network paused at my maildrop and found a neato package I didn’t expect to see for another two weeks…

Gelsocks! I don’t know who sent these, they came directly from the distributor. B whoever it was, thanks very much!

I went looking for distilled water for the batteries. Shouldn’t have let my supply get so low, right now I’m down to begging Landlady to bring some up from the city.

Also no bread in the store, but that’s not unusual. Actually no distilled water isn’t unusual, which always perplexes me in a region with so many people living offgrid.

Okay, technically books do come from factories but what I mean is that when I was a little kid I never gave any thought to where books come from. I assumed vegetables came from a canning plant: It actually kind of disgusted me to learn that they grew in the dirt.

Where I’m going with this is that learning how things are made can be revelatory, even for the most mundane or banal things. I used to love roast beef, and my wife made the best roast beef I had ever encountered. It got her a lot of praise, which she enjoyed as who wouldn’t, and she always acted as if the secret to great roast beef was this literal secret, to be jealously guarded. One time shortly after becoming single again, in a fit of depression I decided to learn how to cook good roast beef and it turned out to be the simplest dish there is: My ex-wife was simply the only person in my past who had bothered to read a cookbook.

What got me to thinking about this was today’s breakfast…

The standard restaurant breakfast, eggs/toast/potatoes/meat, always perplexed me because I didn’t know how they got the potatoes to taste like that. All restaurant breakfast potatoes taste exactly the same no matter the region or restaurant, and I didn’t know how they did it. I assumed it was simple because it’s always the same, and I assumed it was cheap because it’s always plentiful: I mean they might scrimp on the meat but they’ll pile your plate with potatoes. When I finally decided to give it some thought it turned out to be – simple and cheap. The only real trick, if we must call it that, is that you don’t use baking potatoes, which is all I ever used to buy.

Living in the boonies has forced me to my own devices in a lot of little ways, and incidentally taught me that many big trade secrets aren’t really secrets at all: just previously unknown simple things.

I haven’t posted for days, because I’ve just been sitting around for days. Nothing’s wrong, it’s just winter.

Tobie has a new thing, though…

I found him some leather bones that don’t turn his guts to water, and he approves as much as Little Bear ever did*. So in moderation he has something to tide him over while Uncle Joel sits in a boring chair reading a boring book.

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*which means they don’t last long.

This has actually happened to me twice since I moved here. The first was on a second-hand teapot, so it didn’t owe me anything. The one two days ago was a nearly-new but really cheap and crappy pot I got from Amazon. The “this” in question was the knob breaking right off the lid.

Anyway, shortly after the first time this happened, which was like 13 years ago, I was at the Lowes in the big town about 50 miles away. I happened to be in the aisle where they sell cabinet parts, don’t remember why, and I was looking at this big display of cabinet door pull knobs and I thought to myself, “self, you know what those look like?”

So yesterday I did it again. Unfortunately the only color the crappy little hardware store in the crappy little town nearest where I live carried was white, but the teapot doesn’t care.

Pro-tip: For reasons that should have been but weren’t perfectly obvious to me 13 years ago, avoid metal knobs no matter how nice you think they’ll look on the pot. Ceramic should work well. Also remember before you leave the hardware that you’re going to need a much shorter bolt than the one that comes with the knob.

The Monday morning water run was held on Tuesday afternoon this week, and I took that opportunity for my monthly visit to what I’ve come to think of as the Jeep’s final resting place. To my surprise, I noticed that the Jeep had moved. That was astounding enough to drive me into the shop.

“Didn’t somebody call you?” asked the manager. He asked this with the same level of sincerity he used three weeks ago when promising to get the Jeep on a rack that very day, which is to say none at all. I didn’t even reply, just waited.

He called another guy over from the far end of the shop. That guy came over and opened the conversation by asking, with apparently genuine curiosity, “What were you doing when the transmission let go?”

I said, truthfully, that I was slowly backing up in my own driveway. “Why do you ask?”

He said that he had delivered the transmission’s apparently mutilated corpse to the rebuilder, helped the guy take it apart, and “It seriously looked like a grenade went off in there.”

I said that judging from the sound it made at the time, I wasn’t surprised at all. Didn’t bother to mention that ten miles of towing through the desert probably scattered the pieces pretty thoroughly.

Anyway. We have finally finished with Stage One of the Great Wait: When the only shop in town gets around to your case.

We now enter Stage Two: Parts delivery. Maybe that won’t take another seven freaking weeks? I wouldn’t bet serious money on it.

But what the hell: It’s what passes for good news these days. I guess what has me shocked and disappointed with my fellow man about this is that when I turned wrenches for a living it was always in dealerships, and in dealerships this sort of delay would simply never be contemplated, let alone tolerated. In a dealership, at least when I was in the trade, you rolled iron or you were gone. They wouldn’t waste a rack on your useless carcass long enough for you to starve on flat rate. But asking these guys to behave like reasonable professionals is a waste of good begging.

It’s a dim cool rainy morning here at the Secret Lair, very undesertlike, and I’m taking this opportunity for some maintenance/repair.

I always keep some 2-part epoxy around the Lair for just such occasions. In this case…

The tightening wedge had started to break loose from the socket’s soft insert, hardly a matter that required a trained prosthetist to remedy. At the same time…

…I’d always wanted a bit more pressure on the suspension over the knee joint, and here’s where Tobie’s penchant for chewing up my favorite gloves came in handy because I never throw thin leather bits away.

2022 marks 50 years as a one-legged guy and I’m not shy about gluing bits onto my prosthesis for this or that. Does seem a bit off that I need to do that on such a new leg, but frankly this one has never really thrilled me. It works, and shows no sign of premature wear, and I love the high-tech foot despite its excessive weight, but the socket has never fit quite right. Honestly I’d have thought they’d have come up with better methods by now but it seems not.

Speaking of Tobie…

He didn’t think it was quite right for me to be camped on the bed in the middle of the day – but he has become a little more relaxed about spending time with me in the bedroom though he still refuses to spend the night there.

This used to be such a big deal; I had tarps everywhere and made a huge mess. Took longer to clean the cabin afterward than it took to clean the stovepipe.

People kept trying to tell me I was doing it all wrong, but what did they know? Every time, I lamented my inability to get up on the roof and clean the pipe from the top down, and then commenced to make a big mess cleaning it from the bottom up.

Anyway, I’m too old for that nonsense so now I’ve listened to better advice.

Lift the bottom section of the stovepipe on its coupler and slide the woodstove out from under it, then remove the section and take it outside…

Punch a little hole in a trashbag. Attach the brush to a pole section, slide the pole through the hole, and tape the bag to the hanging portion of the stovepipe. Add the necessary sections to the pole to clean all the way up to the pipe cap.

Go outside and clean the remaining section, then put it all back together. Vacuum up the tiny remaining mess. Miller time.

Tobie was very skeptical of all these unnatural goings-on, but eventually got with the program – which meant just getting the hell out of my way and letting me work. Good boy.