The Ultimate Answer to Kings

We got a couple inches of snow overnight. The temperature never got out of the twenties all day, though the bright sun has converted quite a lot of the snow to mud already.

It’s been such a weirdly mild winter to this point that I haven’t actually had a lot of need for my new love-of-my-life…

…but it’s been running off and on for most of today, for sure. Not that it matters a lot but I wondered if my magic heat-powered woodstove fan would work on the new propane heater…

…It doesn’t. Top never gets more than uncomfortably warm. The thing is amazingly efficient: There’s really no point for the fireproof walls. They barely get warm. And the best thing about it…

It doesn’t burn wood. That efficiency is kind of the worst thing about it, to be honest. A little of it goes a long way. It wants the cabin in the seventies, and by this time of year I’m normally layered-up and keeping the inside in the high fifties to mid-sixties. Now I have to get into the habit of dressing for the indoors and then suiting up like an astronaut any time I want to step outdoors. But I can learn to live with problematic luxury. Still have some permanent plumbing to do, but it’s not in a problematic state any longer.

About the only other thing I have to report…

I was finally – after the better part of two years – able to score a couple of spare magazines for the Arex. Which makes practicing a lot less inconvenient. I can keep its regular mag filled with carry ammo instead of having to swap ammo back and forth every time I want to walk down the driveway and practice.

Other than that, nothing really going on. Tobie still finds snow dangerously exciting.

This blogging thing has come to a middle. Several years ago I mused that it was probably time to retire the blog because it wasn’t about the adventure of roughing it in the boonies anymore, but the sedate adventures of an old man living in a cabin with a corgi. Now it’s a big brown mutt, the corgi having found a way to break my heart, but the ‘sedate’ part is all too true. The aches and pains of this past year have me spending most of my time indoors, and with any luck the next big adventure will involve pulling pipe to properly plumb my new propane cabin heater. Which I love, by the way.

Weather-wise, this has been a very strange December.

Day after day in the sixties and seventies. Nights in the forties sometimes. T-shirt weather in December does not happen – or didn’t till this year. We got a little actual weather a few days ago, though, and now the temperature has fallen to something closer to normal. 9:30 in the morning and it’s still below freezing outside. Inside it’s sinfully toasty. By this time of year I’m used to living in layers and a hoody, hoping the inside temperature gets warm enough for a sink bath once or twice a week. I really do love this new heater.

Homegrown disasters can still occur, of course. Christmas Eve night laid what turned out to be a minor one on me…

When the AC power just abruptly stopped working. I still mostly had lights, because most of my lighting is DC. But the outlets didn’t work, the AC lighting didn’t work, none of my electronics were charging, the stove clickers didn’t click and of course the oven was now just a dark box without function. I truly fretted about that. Still nice and warm, though. Christmas morning I found out what the problem was…

Once the sun came up enough to make moving around practical I confirmed that there was nothing wrong with the power generation. The charge controllers were working, the batteries were batting, the inverter was humming happily to itself. No error messages anywhere. So I took myself inside and crawled under the kitchen counter in the farthest corner of the cabin to where my circuit breaker box has sat minding its own business in the dark for over fifteen years. Nothing apparently wrong with the circuit breakers themselves. I wiggled wires till I got an arky-sparky, and found the problem. A loose-ish connection from the very earliest days of my cabin-wiring experiments, just waiting for a little corrosion in some scrounged wire – before I figured out that pulling skanky scrounged wire through the actual walls of my very flammable cabin was probably a bad idea, and actually bought a roll of new wire for that. But what the box was wired with was original, and just waiting for its chance to give Uncle Murphy a little laugh. It has now been replaced with proper wire, and tightly connected, and everything’s hunky-dory again.

I spent the holiday weekend quietly, the closest thing to an adventure going to tend a neighbor’s cat while they were away with family…

…and that’s been the extent of my adventuring. So I’m going to stop apologizing for the scant-to-no blogging, because it’s time to admit this is the new normal. Not shutting it down, just ceasing to pretend that I’m much of a blogger anymore.

…which I love, by the way, with a warmth of affection only matched by the propane heater in my bedroom…

There were some lingering issues.

Like what to do with all that firewood. Fortunately I still have neighbors who heat with wood, and one of them came and filled his pickup as full as we could fill it to get it off my hands. He’ll (probably) come back at some point to take the rest off my hands. Which will leave me with the question of what to do with the woodshed, but that doesn’t really class as a problem.

What DID class as a problem is where to take the old woodstove, and how to get it there. That sucker’s heavy. Even stripped down I could get it out of the cabin by myself but I couldn’t lift it high enough to get it into the Jeep. Happily, the aforementioned neighbor came to get firewood and between the two of us it was easy.

I took it to Ian’s Cave…

My friend Ian has many fine qualities. He’s brilliant and talented and obsessively hard working when the project interests him and he likes guns but he’s not a civil engineer. He had this idea, back when we built his place in 2009, that little or no winter heating would be required. He was – not as right as he usually is about that. We did retrofit it with Landlady’s cast-off woodstove (which worked just fine in her cabin, though it was too small) and found that we couldn’t get it to sustain a fire at all. Too little firebox, too much stovepipe, not enough draft. And it’s been that way ever since. But I needed a place to put my larger and still perfectly good woodstove, so…

…Now it’s got a home. So a (very) few things are getting done.

I made the post below, went out with Tobie to do laundry, and came back to an apparently dead laptop. I have no reason to believe that the battery is dead and anyway it’s always plugged in.

I have a perfectly good tablet as a plan B and to be honest I’ve been thinking of replacing the MacBook anyway because the keyboard is worn out. I’m just so very happy that I sent Ian his manuscript yesterday afternoon and didn’t sit on it until today because now it’s inside this apparently dead laptop.

By the way speaking of editing I’m thumbing this post out on my phone so any typos are staying in.

PS: I hopelessly hit the power button again and it turned right on. No idea why it turned off in the first place, though. I think it’s time to retire the old girl.

Yesterday a rare convergence of factors caused me to take what’s almost certainly my last bike ride to town of the year…

I finished editing Ian’s Forged in Snow manuscript, it was a wonderfully mild day with temps almost in the sixties and no wind, and I got a notice from a Generous Reader that he’d replenished my practice ammo supply for me. Plus I had a couple of other town chores that needed doing on a weekday, so I put the bike on the back of the Jeep and drove it to the edges of semi-civilization, then rode the four remaining miles to the crappy little town nearest where I live.

And wow, Ammo Claus was nice to uncle Joel!

An entire case of steel-case 124-grain! Enough to get me through the winter with ease, at my rather sad old-man tempo of pistol practice. Thanks, Ammo Claus!

I know. Yes. I did it again. Sorry. But let me catch you up…

Okay – actually not a lot has been going on. But there was one big (BIG) development just yesterday. But first:

A Generous Reader, familiar with my kink for good coffee, sent me a gourmet gift! I’m already well into the first one, and it’s goood. Thanks!

Day before yesterday we got our first snow…

Gone by today, of course. Didn’t even leave much mud. But a symbolic official start to winter. And significant because…

As November came and went and I still hadn’t set up the woodstove’s support system I came to a really serious conclusion. People, I hate my woodstove. I mean an older, cobbled-together woodstove system tried to burn me out at the end of my very first winter in the cabin and I’ve been paranoid ever since but it’s not that. It’s the work, and the hassle. I never got around to cutting wood this autumn. Still have lots in the woodshed but that’s not the point: I always cut wood, whether I think I need it or not, and I just didn’t. I hate the hassle. I hate the mess. I hate the fact that it’s feed it every fifteen minutes (and overheat the cabin) or it goes out, so feast or famine. Did I mention I hate the work. I hate how much space it takes up. I hate – everything about my woodstove. I’m literally getting too old for this shit. And yet winter is here, and the bedroom propane heater can only do so much. So heavy sigh, right? I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.

Well, here’s the thing: I could afford to heat with propane now. Couldn’t in earlier years but I could now. I thought about getting a propane stove this summer but the problem is logistic: There’s noplace around here to buy a real propane room stove. And this summer I got sick and didn’t do anything, so winter came and I was stuck with my woodstove.

Except…Remember this?

D&L replaced their wood pellet stove with a propane model a few months ago, to the sound of rejoicing. But it had a problem: It wouldn’t stay lit with the fan on. Ran perfectly fine if you unplugged the fan, but with the fan on the pilot kept going out. Numerous service calls later, the company she bought it from gave up and offered her a discount on a higher-end model. And she asked what would become of the old one. And they said they’d take the fan off of it for service calls and scrap the stove. And she asked how much if a neighbor wanted to buy it?

You know where I’m going with this.

$100. Yeah, right now the gas plumbing is temporary – I mean scary temporary but good enough to test it. And it works great. I was really afraid it would drive me right out of the cabin but on the lowest setting it’s not quite enough to heat the cabin – but on the second-to-lowest it’s great.

NO MORE WOODSTOVE! WOODSTOVE IS GONE! I’m going to haul it over to Ian’s, where it can replace the unuseably small woodstove that nobody ever bothers to light because you can’t build a fire in it big enough to heat up the stovepipe and sustain fire. I’VE GOT A PROPANE STOVE FOR THE MAIN CABIN!

Me happy. That is all.

Here’s a pretty picture.

Hey, I got another Headstamp Publishing editing gig! I’ve done two: The first was Ian’s first book, Chassepot To FAMAS, and the second the very entertaining Pistols of the Warlords. But that last was almost five years ago and I never heard back after that – my tender ego thought I might have screwed something up and lost his trust as an editor but apparently not because now he has sent me the text file for his latest, Forged in Snow, a book about Finnish arms development, the kickstarter for which is still going on. The kickstarter has long since exceeded its kickoff goal, as they all have, though not to the spectacular extent his first book did.

I used to do editing for pocket money, during my scrambling/freelance/starvation phase, and it’s always so very painful. Except with Ian, who is easily the best writer I ever worked with. The biggest problem with one of his projects is I get interested in just reading the damned thing and forget I’m supposed to be making critical notes.

I have a refrigerator! It’s been almost exactly nineteen years since I moved here, all that time planning food around minimum or no refrigeration. And now I not only have a refrigerator with actual food in it, but I also used my oven today during a rainstorm with heavy overcast – and the batteries didn’t complain about it at all. For years I’ve exclusively used the oven only when the sun was directly shining on the panels because my battery bank wasn’t sufficient to withstand the draw otherwise. Now – after 14 years of incrementally upgrading the electrical system – I’ve crossed the threshold of being able to do normal things without concern for the immediate weather. Oh, it’s still a solar power system, so extended gloom will still require the generator – but I have a generator, and a way to connect it to the batteries. It feels positively depraved. What’s next, limousines and champagne? Expensive hookers?

Okay, so I washed clothes this morning, including the pants I wore all through last week’s battery adventure. I deliberately stuck to my oldest, most worn-out pants, because…

…it would’ve been a miracle if this didn’t happen. When I loaded those four big batteries into Neighbor L’s truck one of the cell caps leaked all over the tailgate. I couldn’t see where any of it splashed on me but I’m pretty sure that’s where I got splashed. It happens.

Did a bunch of little things around the cabin today. Hauled off the old batteries to a place where they can sit without being in the way till I find a way to recycle them properly. Straightened up a few things that got crooked while my multi-day battery adventure was going on. Fixed the front steps…

…Again. When you’re as old as those steps you’ll need periodic repairs too. I scavenged them, modified them multiple times. None of the treads are original. Replaced most of the grip tapes on the top platform, and basically got them ready for winter. And…

I know I’ve had the refrigerator for over two months but the Secret Lair at last officially has a refrigerator. I turned it on yesterday to test how things were going to go, and things went absolutely grand. I’m pretty sure I could have run it on four batteries, had the batteries been in better shape. Six batteries don’t seem to notice the refrigerator. So the cooler box has been demoted to monthly food-moving service from the Palace of Food. I’ve got a fridge! Not much in it at the moment, since I never used the cooler for more than condiments and daily meat – all my actual refrigerated food is at Ian’s but a lot of it will migrate to the porch in the fullness of time. I do have to do something about a better stand when the opportunity presents itself. My homemade stand is – not my best invention. But it works.

I was very interested to see what the opening voltage would be this morning…

I took the picture in darkness because I was cheating a bit, and it wouldn’t focus. Still: Just a hair under 12.5 volts, which is a personal best for my system. Which wasn’t really a surprise. A pleasant confirmation, though. Lately it’s been more like…

…which is not acceptable at all, and that’s on a pleasantly mild morning. Wait’ll the cold comes and starts screwing with the battery efficiency. I really needed to get this done before the cold, and now it is.

I was able to tag along on a ride to town this morning. Went to the auto parts store, and…

Now we’re completely done. I replaced the positive cable with a longer one that didn’t have to lay across the top of the batteries, and got a connector so I could make a new positive wire for the battery charger which is now connected. Greased the positive connections on all six batteries, and we’re done. And just in time for a promised early visit from winter.

This morning I disconnected the four batteries I put there in 2019 and dragged them out to the yard, replacing them with the six batteries I bought yesterday. There was some fiddling in between: I needed a larger tabletop but I’d already cut that, and I needed to move the battery charger on the wall but that didn’t take long. Then I wired the batteries up and when the charge controllers came on line – I had 19 volts. Not 12. Not 24. 19. I needed 12. The inverter just gave me an error code. I had no power to the cabin except for DC. Which was 19 volts. This was not going to work.

So I did what I always end up doing whenever I have to mess with new battery configurations: I picked up the phone and whined to Neighbor S. He was wrapped up in something else but shook free about 3 hours later and helped me sort it out. And now it works.

There’s still some fiddling to do. The new series/parallel circuit required exactly one more cable than I had – but by pure coincidence BB had just sent me a spare he had lying around, possibly smelling my impending embarrassment. So not everything fits just right and I need some cosmetic retrofitting. And the battery charger isn’t hooked up because the positive cable doesn’t reach. But those are minor tweaks. The Secret Lair now has 50% more battery capacity than it did before. Actually far more than 50% because my old batteries were dying fast. It was imperative that I get this done before the cold. Happily, so far November has been very mild.

Now: The next question:

Can I use my hillbilly refrigerator, which has been sitting out on the porch since September? Stay tuned. Maybe I no longer need to haul ice from Ian’s freezer.

How it began: Yesterday I pushed 4 Rolls Surrette L16 batteries up a plank ramp and into the Jeep.

It wasn’t daunting – exactly – but it did kind of point out that this past year’s indisposition has robbed me of some physical strength I’m probably not getting back.

But that wasn’t going to be the hard part. No.

Those batteries, plus a junk battery somebody had dumped on the property that I took this opportunity to dispose of properly, had to be transferred from my Jeep to Neighbor L’s ludicrously high Dodge truck. This eventually resulted in her parking a little lower on a slope than the jeep, tailgate-to-tailgate, so I could slide the L16s on a plank between the vehicles while she held the plank in place to prevent – or at least warn of – disaster.

Then we drove a long way. At the battery store…

…things got marginally simpler. I thought – because this was the way it worked last time I was there – that my lifting heavy Rolls Surrette batteries had come to an end since they had a beefy young guy to do that. It seems they now do *not* have a beefy young guy to do that. But it was just lifting them off the tailgate and easing them to the ground and the waiting handtruck. I then purchased 6 T110 batteries. $1300+, baby. Couldn’t have done that two years ago.

We drove a long way home. I moved the batteries from the Dodge to the Jeep…

Then from the Jeep to the wagon…

…where I realized I had just made a logistical error. The cabin is on a *very* slight incline. Enough to make pulling a 300+-pound wagon up it an exercise in – exercise.

But that wasn’t the part that tried to kill me. No. Once I rounded the cabin…

…gravity started working *for* me. In a bad way. I barely escaped with my shins intact before the whole thing crashed into my workbench. But at least it’s now in place for the next exciting episode. Which I’m too tired to worry about at the moment.

Just got back from loading 4 extremely heavy Rolls Surrette L16 batteries – that have been cluttering up Ian’s yard for the past two years or so – into the jeep.

Tomorrow I’ll use them as cores for my purchase of six new batteries for the Lair – a task which has been put off for over a month due to logistical difficulties. I was very concerned that it was going to be put off yet again, because I couldn’t get the battery store in the big town about 50 miles away to answer its damned phone and confirm that they would be open tomorrow – which I’m told is a holiday – and also had the batteries I want in stock. But they finally did and they will be and they do, so we’re on.

BTW, those nice new gloves were a gift from Generous Reader Terrapod, which I forgot to mention in writing about my little bike mishap. Thanks, T!

My first Christmas carol, in the drug store in the crappy little town nearest where I live.

November 8, man. 🙁

End of the first week in November and the temperature is in the mid-sixties before noon. Not a cloud in the sky, quite reasonable wind, and I have some packages waiting at the PO. So I took the bike. And on the way back…

…this happened.

You might, at this point in the narrative, dear readers, be in need of further details. Well it’s like this: Uncle Joel’s lower left leg suffers from a medical condition known as “ain’t there.” This adds complications to bicycle-riding, among which: Sometimes on the downstroke my left foot slides off the pedal. This is common and normally manageable. But on this particular downstroke I was going slightly uphill and actually having to work the pedal so when my left foot slid off the pedal it did it with force sufficient to dislodge the prosthesis, which is only held on by the clever application of friction. Under certain circumstances it’s actually designed to come off – and having suffered serious knee injury many years ago when an earlier model didn’t, I approve of this. But in this case the prosthesis began to part company with me without permission, and I was concentrating on trying to get the damned foot back on the damned pedal before the leg actually fell off while at the same time lightly applying the brakes to lessen the oncoming injuries that were going to be caused by the increasingly-probable bike crash…

…the leg fell off, onto the road. And all still might have been – not well exactly, but not actually damaging – if it hadn’t fallen right into the path of the rear wheel.

Even before this I wasn’t 100% in control of the bike but that was the last straw. The rear wheel went into the air, the front wheel turned 90^o and I went ass over teakettle.

Happily I had reduced speed so even though I should have buckled the front rim with that trick, nothing on the bike seems to be damaged at all. Another few scratches. And since I was somewhat padded against the cool, and wearing gloves and a helmet, I wasn’t damaged at all. A bit shaken up, I do admit because the ground came at me with remarkable speed from a remarkable distance but the helmet took the blow and left me with nothing but a slight kink in my neck. The helmet’s not looking as nice as before but that’s okay.

And most happily, absolutely nobody drove by to see all this until I was back on two pins – I had to crawl several yards to recover the prosthesis – and the bike was back on its wheels. So all’s well, including what little dignity I keep around for old time’s sake.

Tobie and I went out at five for the first pee, and the full moon was so high and bright in the cloudless sky that I didn’t even need my headlamp. An hour later I looked out the kitchen window and saw the sky lightening in the east, and went out to take a picture of my favorite view of my funny-looking little cabin…

Every time I have to paint it, or (corral someone else to) do some roof work, I curse the day someone talked me into putting a high loft in the thing. But you can’d deny it does make for a very unusual-looking little building.

I HATE when I do this.

I was doing some stuff in the closet. Longtime readers know the Secret Lair has exactly one closet, built in 2017 with the bedroom addition. The addition is eight by sixteen, five feet of which was cordoned off with a partial wall so I could finally have a place to actually put clothing. It’s a little tight. Sometimes – basically twice annually when I switch my seasonal stuff – it gets a clean-out. Anyway, I needed my cobweb brush.

The cobweb brush is on a long extendable pole, and it’s kept in the bathroom. Always. Without exception. So I went into the bathroom to get my cobweb brush – and it wasn’t there.

It’s a big blue brush on a long pole. In a small cabin. A little hard to hide. But it wasn’t ANYWHERE. I went outside and looked in the tin shed where, in addition to seasonal stuff, I also keep the solar panel squeegee. The missing pole and cobweb brush was not a minor matter because when snow falls the brush comes off the pole and the squeegee goes on it. I needed that pole. Maybe I had absently already switched appliances and then forgot about it? Would have been a strange thing to do in October but I’m getting – not younger. But no. It wasn’t in the tin shed.

Now I had to do something I really hate – I had to stop and think. Okay: I sort of recall that the last time I used the cobweb brush, which wasn’t that long ago because you wouldn’t believe the spiders here, I thought to myself it’s getting awfully full of nasty old cobwebs. So I intended to take it outside and clean it with the yard hose. And so assume I did that. And then I did something clever with it. Something that made perfect sense at the time. But what?

I literally reached the standing in the yard waving my arms and cursing myself stage when I happened to see…

I laid it on the sunny wall of the cabin to dry. And totally forgot it existed.

I’m a frickin’ hermit in the frickin’ desert. With a mind like mine, there are times I think I’m lucky to be alive.

When BB and I put a roof over the new front porch in 2019, at midsummer it became clear that I had one small problem. An hour before sundown, on the hottest days of the year when you’re really most likely to be out there with a cool one, the sun comes out from over the cabin and blasts right into your eyes. So I made a sunshade out of a piece of apparently immortal landscape fabric I had lying around and that pretty much fixed the problem. So it goes up sometime in May and usually comes down sometime in September, except that…

…it has the knock-on benefit of breaking up raindrops from rain squalls that come out of the north and smash right into the front bedroom window which, being salvage, has always leaked like a sieve. So I leave it up till the summer rain stops. This year it barely rained at all until late September, and kept it up till halfway through October. But I have to take it down before winter because I very much doubt it would support much of a snow load and I don’t want to ruin it. It came down today.

Also today…

I put my hillbilly water heater to bed for the season.

Pulled the hoses out of the heat exchange box, took them apart, and draped them over a juniper and down a slope to keep them empty so they don’t expand/contract and break loose all the scale that builds up inside and clogs the whole thing up. And that means…

…the new yard hydrant is in winter mode! And it’s not going to freeze and break at the very first cold snap like the old yard upright did last year – and most other years before that. Right? Right? Because it’s freezeproof. Right? (sob)

Finally! Uncle Joel succumbed to the siren call of materialism. Again. It got a bit nippy overnight, so I went out to the tin shed where I keep my seasonal stuff away from the mice and rats, and got out the winter blanket.

It’s just an old Navy blanket I bought at a surplus store – I dunno – well over 20 years ago, and it goes over the light all-year quilt that Landlady made for me several years ago, and along with the bedroom heater it sets me up. And I always liked it that way before. Kind of cozy. Except this year I thought, ‘y’know what? I kind of want some pattern there instead.’ So…

I actually BOUGHT A BLANKET I DIDN’T NEED. I’m a bad penniless hermit. But I like the way it looks better than the plain grey. Maybe it’s a sign of age, I don’t know.

Saturday morning. Getting ready for the weekly water run. I’ve got two empty 3-gallon water bottles and one with maybe a gallon left. So I take that bottle and I fill the ready-use drinking water pitcher, and the teapot. And I clean out Tobie’s water bowl and refill that. And I’m left with…

…like maybe ten cents worth of water in the bottle. And I always feel like a failure of a tightwad when I resist the temptation to leave it for next week and pour it down the kitchen drain.