The Ultimate Answer to Kings

So the first Wednesday of the month is Senior Day at the Palace of Food, which Neighbor L and I hit most months.

On the way back she graciously agreed to stop at the post office to see if the new orifice for my misbehaving bedroom heater had arrived. Happy day, it had! Which celebration turned to concern as the moment for installing it approached, because if this didn’t work I was down to replacing the whole furnace. Which was going to make me feel pretty stupid, but that’s the extremity I’m prepared to go to if it gets me my bedroom heater back. The worst of the winter is (probably) over but the nights are always still cold: At high altitude, with little humidity, we get some pretty mean day/night temperature swings and I want my bedroom heater, dammit. (Stomps foot like a 3-year-old.)

I had already taken off the firebox access plate, on which the pilot assembly is mounted, so often that the gaskets were falling apart. So I got a new roll of flat woven gasket material from the local hardware and was ready to go. Messing with the new gasket situation added time to the process of getting the new pilot assembly – with its second new orifice – installed, but by about two in the afternoon we were ready to try.

And it works! Oh happy day, it works. I have my bedroom heater back. At least for now.

Gad, it’s been a weird winter.

January was properly cold but we had whole weeks in December and February that were t-shirt weather. March is shaping up to be mild as can be – but I’m only saying that to get the sudden but inevitable betrayal out of the way because March is always the month that breaks my heart. By this time of the season I’m normally so sick of cocooning indoors to stave off the cold that I sort of declare winter over, and it never really is. But this winter, well…

…Tobie’s digging all the Jeep rides, what more can I say.

Anyway – Spring may not be here, but it’s coming. Yesterday I saw the first of the English Sparrows that annually nest in the grocery store columns…

They’re always a welcome sight. And the wind – oh yeah, the Spring wind is here. Shortly the junipers will start getting frisky, and that’s why…

…I’ve made my first pre-emptive antihistamine buy of the season. :\

I can find a little bit of it if I try. Yesterday I struggled for almost an hour and a half to replace one front shock on a Jeep TJ, the easiest front shock I know of. This morning I knocked the second one out in less than half an hour, and had to take the air filter box off to do it.

Helps when you remember what wrench where and how to apply it – repetition is the reason dealership wrenches can make flat rate – and I did remember to soak the nuts before I left yesterday. So while yesterday everything that could go wrong did go wrong and the universe was clearly plotting against me, today it was just “three bolts off, three bolts on, put your tools away.”

Then I took the Jeep for a bumpy ride, driving much too fast in hope that if anything was going to shake loose it’d do it on my watch, and at the top of a blind hill I literally had to swerve to avoid crashing into the Jeep’s actual owners. What are the chances they’d be on their way home in that one spot in the desert at that one moment? Uncle Murphy gives me no respect. No respect at all.

I don’t know why it hates me, I was always nice to it. Okay, I left it out in the weather for a couple of months that time my Jeep was getting its transmission ignored, and it’s used to being garaged. And there’s that time Tobie ate the parking brake handle…

Okay, upon review maybe L’s Jeep has reason to hate me. But I’m really trying to do it good, and all it gives me is frozen bolts in awkward places.

I spent a full hour replacing a single front shock absorber. I should have been able to finish the job and also drink a couple of beers in a hour. And by the time I was done with the left shock I was so bent I just soaked the right side bolts in WD-40 and promised to come back tomorrow. Supposed to be nicer weather tomorrow anyway.

Then on the way home Tobie and I went past Ian’s where yesterday I had cemented a 2X4 into a concrete block…

…for something fun.

I have a whole bunch of hanging metal targets at the rifle range, but that’s a long way to go just to empty a quick magazine to keep my hand in. Closer to the cabin, as shown in a couple of ancient Forgotten Weapons videos, I have my old yard target…

…which I made – oh, god, eighteen years ago when I still worked at the saw shop in town. And it works fine as long as you only use pistols, which is all I practice with in the yard. But I wanted something more reactive; at 25 yards I can’t always tell when I hit it. So after a lot of procrastination and “you don’t need to spend money on that” I indulged in this little dueling tree. Clearly I have to plant it deeper, but I leveled it with some flat rocks just to see if it would work with my dinky 9mm. And it does, so now it’ll be worth going to the effort of planting it more deeply.

It’s like the old joke about hitting yourself with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop. Last week Neighbor L lamented that, in addition to all the other back-and-forthing she has to do, she needed to take her Jeep to the big town about 50 miles away to get it all new shocks. And I impulsively blurted, “Oh, I can do that for you.”

I don’t regret it, exactly, because what with D so laid up and the constant trips to doctors’ offices she really is busy enough to stress anybody out and it’s something I really can do for her – but I can’t say I didn’t sort of regret it while laying on the ground with her Jeep’s low-slung fuel tank in my face and trying to persuade long-frozen bolts to let go of a shock absorber. This sort of thing is never easy, exactly, but I’m pretty sure it was easier 40 years ago. Anyway, two hours after starting I finished – with the rear shocks – and told her I’d get the fronts tomorrow because I was beat.

And I will, too – front shocks are dead easy on a TJ. But I was swaying on my feet; time to give it a rest.

…didn’t go ideally well.

I said I wasn’t going to settle this time. The prosthetist took my foot/peg off my old socket, mounted it on the test socket, fiddled and fooled around, watched me walk back and forth and then bid me go outside and walk up and down ramps and such. Instead I crossed the parking lot and walked back and forth on the dirt and rocks around the decorative little trees between the lot and the road, explaining that there is no pavement where I live.

And then I pointed out in as much detail as I could – politely and constructively, it was a friendly conversation – everything I didn’t like about the test socket. It’s not a hopeless case, I mean it’s more comfortable than the one I have. But it isn’t right – and I don’t plan to go through this again. I said before that I wasn’t going to settle this time, and I’m a man of my word.

Anyway, I’m going back in two weeks for what was supposed to be picking up my new leg but instead will be a second fitting. See? I can be a diva when I need to be.

I was so excited yesterday morning! We went on a water run Sunday, which we never do but that’s just the way D&L’s schedule has been working lately. In a fit of wishfulness I checked my post office box, and…

Hey presto, the new pilot assembly for my bedroom heater was inside! Festivals and celebrations! Extra gruel for the field slaves! When I got home I practically sprinted inside and started tearing the firebox apart. And then, when I got it all back together and happily relit the pilot…

Hoooly crap, it was a holocaust in there. That definitely wasn’t right, the flame was heating up the bedroom with the thermostat turned off. Bother! What could have gone wrong?

I shut it all down, pulled the firebox apart again. Checked the part number on the shipping tag with the number on the confirmation email: It was supposed to be right. Pulled the manual off the shelf and checked the parts list: According to this, it was the wrong number: this one was for natural gas. Now I was just confused.

And also depressed. I had one last forlorn hope…

Neighbor L lent me a bag of gunspring blanks she had used in the past for rodding out orifi. Maybe one of these would work on the old orifice and get me going again?

No. The hole was too small. But there was nothing to do but put the old assembly back into the stove and see if it still worked just a little.

Well, the pilot lit willingly enough but now the strange magic that had allowed me to somehow manually start the furnace by fiddling with the sightglass cover (yes I know that makes no sense but it worked for a while last year too) was broken and gone. I was totally screwed.

I was going to write this up yesterday but didn’t have the heart, it was that depressing. But as one last spit in the abyss’s eye I wrote the following email to Empire Heating Systems…

Hi,

I purchased a new pilot assembly, and what was shipped to me was Empire R2890 Pilot (LP) R12796

Which should have been the right part for propane but clearly isn’t: The pilot flame is much too large and hot. According to your website that part number is correct for propane but in my manual the correct part number is R12795.

Could you please clear this up for me? My bedroom heater is kind of dear to me this time of year and it’s not working at the moment.

I don’t know how your life goes but for me this never works. So to my shock, I got a reply early this morning:

Yes that is the correct pilot. We will send out a new pilot orifice for it.

Wait. If it’s the right part maybe it was fitted with the wrong orifice? And now they’re sending me the correct one? Or it’s the right “LP” orifice but they have another one for … propane? I always took those terms as synonymous and life worked pretty well. I’m confused, but I’ll take it as a last reed to grasp until the package arrives (in 8-10 days if their last package is any indication) and shatters my dreams anew.

Incidentally I have now taken the firebox apart so often that the gasket material is falling apart, so in the meantime I have to find new. Hopefully at the local hardware store, but if not online.

…to allow me to get over my mobility problems and help Neighbor L with her – by now much needed – new pallet of pellets.

Happily it went well. I wasn’t sure it would. But it was more a pleasant workout than a painful ordeal, so good.

Probably the incoming new leg will solve the immediate issue I’m having but I have to tell them that at my current rate of physical deterioration I can’t absolutely guarantee that I’m going to be available to do this next winter.

Yesterday my older brother sent me a text about a new gadget he recently acquired in his ceaseless (and annually very justified) quest to perfect his hurricane preps…

We had a little back-and-forth about it, and then I forgot about it and went on with my day. Later in the evening, though, I went on Amazon about an unrelated matter, and…

I’m reasonably sure I never saw the name “Jackery” before yesterday, so it caught my eye when I otherwise might not have noticed that some bot somewhere is reading my mail over my shoulder. Not surprising but I can’t say I appreciate the attention.

…and came upon my Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) tester…

In the process of testing I stuck it in a cup of the well water that comes out of my tap, and…

Hoooly crap, that’s so much higher than the first time I ever tested it. I thought at first the discrepancy might be an error since I have a new tester a Generous reader sent me two years ago – but I published the reading I got right after receiving that tester, and it read more-or-less consistent with the first test.

That’s a substantial rise in TDS in two years. Doesn’t matter that much since I don’t drink the well water, but it’s something to watch. And wonder about.

So I had a stale tag-end of bread yesterday and nothing better to do with it but toss the chunks into the wash and eavesdrop on it with my game camera.

click for moving pics.

This is not “partly cloudy.”

Which is what you promised me. And your promise is why I scheduled this morning for bread day. You are fired.

Happily…

(And I’m not done being delighted by this) I can do this now.

So even though I have to run my powerhungry oven while my solar panels are taking a break, I still have juice to spare.

And so…

Beautiful.

An Unnamed Benefactor gave me that generator in summer 2017, the year I built the bedroom addition, but it only gradually revolutionized how I use electrical power. For the first several years it was only good for running power tools. Which was really great, don’t get me wrong, but I still had no easy way to use it on the overall power system. Two years ago, out of the blue, Big Brother sent me the last piece of that puzzle.

Creeping closer to the first world, baby. Which is good timing because when your body finds it harder to do hard things, it’s nice when the things you have to do get easier.

Yup, it’s that time.

I’ve had really bad tinnitus since my mid twenties: I’ve been a shooter since I was a child and an idiot for about that long so that’s no surprise. So everything I hear, I need to filter past the loud ringing noise but that never stopped me from carrying on conversations until fairly recently. I noticed it before but it never really drew my attention until last week at the prosthetist’s office. I was in a small, very quiet room conversing with a man whose voice I could barely hear. No excuses about background noise or music.

Not knowing anything about hearing aids I was loath to spend a lot of money on something that might not help at all, so I bought these. Stuck them in my ears last night while watching a DVD, and had to admit I could understand the dialog for the first time in quite a while.

If I keep on this way, sooner or later I’m going to get old or something.

Winter returned to the Gulch…

…just in time for my bedroom heater to pack it in, same as it did this time last year.

First it gets undependable, then it stops working entirely. I figured out last year what was the problem: An issue with a clogged orifice so common and predicable the manual actually did predict it.

And so this time I figured fixing the problem before it became terminal would be a matter of a few minutes’ work. As usual, I was wrong.

Last time, I removed the gas tube and the offending orifice fell out on the floor. This time the orifice was firmly stuck inside all the other gadgetry. Which forced me to keep taking things apart till I could get to it.

I never did get the orifice out of the pilot assembly, so I figured I’d try cleaning it in place. I had an ultrasonic brass cleaner a Generous Reader gave me for cleaning pistol cases: Went and got it, and the cleaning solution and some distilled water, from Ian’s place. Set it up, and…it refused to work at all. It had failed in storage. [“Bad word!!!”]

So I soaked the thing in alcohol and blew it out with compressed air, hoping to clear the orifice that way. The result…

I actually managed to make things worse, probably from my initial efforts to remove the orifice from the assembly. Screwed.

I really hate it when my beloved bedroom heater lets me down. I mean, it truly ruins my day.

The bright spot came when I tried to see if I could find a replacement pilot assembly: Turns out that was really simple. Not quite “buy it on Amazon” simple, but simple enough. Another is on its way.

As happened before, the heater hasn’t entirely failed yet. It’s in its weird “if I fiddle with the sightglass cover it’ll suddenly decide to work for a while” phase. Just like this time last year. But this time I have a new orifice and pilot assembly coming. Hope it doesn’t take long, there’s at least six weeks of winter yet to go and I like my bedroom heater.

The local market in the crappy little town nearest where I live just had work done on its roof…

Seriously, just recently. Overnight we had snow and sleet followed by a quick thaw, which is enough to prove whether the contractor you hired was worth a damn…

So my first appointment at the prosthetic shop happened, and was surprisingly pleasant. I haven’t been there for five years, and Hanger Clinic is a big corporate operation so the guy I sat with wasn’t the same guy that made my current ill-fitting leg. He criticized all the things I’ve grown to hate about it, so I was inclined to approve of him.

They make a plaster cast of your stump.

I have an appointment in two weeks for a fitting with a trial socket. I told him the only thing I really liked about the current leg was the foot, which is a marvel compared to the old technology. He examined the foot and agreed that it was generally still in fine shape, so we’re going to re-use everything on my old leg except the socket. Which sucks, and always has.

As surprising as old tech like plaster casts is to me after all these years – I’ve been at this for 53 years – that business of “trial sockets” was new to me five years ago. I should have taken it more seriously then and certainly will this time around. If this one isn’t comfortable I’m not going to assume I’ll just get used to it over time. The leg I had before this one lasted 22 years, and I don’t have that many years left in me. I’m not going to spend my remaining years gimping around in pain, even if that means some unknown technician in the Valley has to do it twice.

The unseasonable mild weather continues, in a slightly moderated form. Like, yesterday it only spent most of the daylight hours in the fifties. I’m feeling better, that sore on my stump has almost entirely left and it doesn’t hurt anymore, which means…

…walkies are back on the menu. Which Tobie doesn’t seem to mind.

I brought a ladder over to Ian’s Cave and finished the indoors part of installing that new cell signal booster…

Not that it makes any difference in how well it works but at least it won’t be constantly getting knocked off the wall now. As to what failed…

That wasn’t hard to diagnose at all. If there was ever a strain relief on that wire it went away a long time ago. I installed the new yagi more carefully, and it should last indefinitely. I also mounted it higher on the mast: The original one didn’t quite clear the ridgetop and suffered from line-of-sight problems. This one’s signal is much stronger even though it only just clears the ridgetop.

This morning I was up rather earlier than usual, no doubt due to nerves because I have to do something I’ve been dreading. This confused Tobie. All winter I’ve laid in bed till light, 6:30 or even seven. He objected at first but got used to it. Now here I was walking around with a headlamp at five in the frickin’ AM, and he’s like…

“You born in a barn?”

I have a first appointment at the prosthetics shop in the big town about 50 miles away today. (sigh) The first time this ever happened, more than 50 years ago, it was a literal shop that smelled heavily of fiberglass resin. Except for the part about being prodded in a sensitive spot by a stranger, I felt right at home. Now it’s more-or-less a bureaucrat’s office, or at least that’s the way it’s run, and I hate it all the more.

I pretty much hate leaving my grubby little gulch for any reason, but this especially. This is a place where a) guns are expressly forbidden, and b) there’s a chance I’ll have to drop my pants so I can’t just ignore the rule.

One of the things I love about my grubby little gulch is that it’s located in a place where nobody cares what’s on your belt, except possibly as a topic of conversation. So naturally it’s 5:30 in the morning and instead of kicking back with a coffee I’m obsessing over what gun to bring and how to carry it.

Oh, screw it. If I can’t wear it I may as well carry the big one.

Wish me luck.

Ian’s Cave is an unintentional but very effective Faraday Cage. It has so much mesh and is so thoroughly grounded that no electronic signal can penetrate in either direction. If you’re working inside or in the front yard, where the mound blocks all signal, you’d better have a signal booster if you want your smartphone to work at anything but playing recorded music.

And until lately, the Cave had a signal booster. It didn’t work great, not as well as the one on the Lair, but it worked.

Until lately. And it didn’t take me very long to diagnose the failure…

Notice that there’s no coax on that antenna housing? Yeah, that’s because the wire that connected everything together in the housing just fell out. No phone, no pool, no pets.

I spend a fairly substantial amount of time working in and around Ian’s Cave, and I like my smartphone, so it was incumbent on me to fix or replace the booster. Happily I have gained some experience with installing them thanks to the one Big Brother bought me going on five years ago. Not that there’s really anything to it. But I did have serious doubts that I was going to be able to handle that threaded pipe mast by myself.

I won’t say it wasn’t any problem, but I got it done. Then it was just a matter of fishing new coax through the conduit, and…

…connecting some simple components inside the Cave.

Tested the connection with my phone, and…

Yup, it works again. I was pleased with myself, and that I found something useful to do with this unbelievable mild spell we’re enjoying. Sweating in a t-shirt in early February! This has to be some sort of record.

I went to the biggish town about 35 miles away with Neighbor L this morning. L is delighted to have her truck back and working right for the first time in quite a while, and the new hasn’t worn off. She mentioned with a laugh that she has taken to goo-boying her truck for up- and down-shifting correctly.

I replied that I was fully on board with the feeling: I still give my bedroom heater a thumbs-up when I hear it ‘foop’ on demand from the thermostat. This time last year it was a hit-or-miss phenomenon that eventually stopped working entirely and it really hurt my heart at the time.

More recently I’ve had a chance to see what I really value about having running water and what’s just sort of a convenience. A working kitchen sink, for example, is a very useful thing to have but I don’t get emotional about it coming back into my life the way I do – even after all these years – with my Real Flush Toilet. Seriously – I can haul water for the sink. But hauling shit is a real blow to your quality of life.

I’m not suggesting that losing basic amenities is ever a good thing to do. But I will observe that having it happen from time to time helps me appreciate them more when I get them working again.