The Ultimate Answer to Kings

That would be moderately cold for 2:30am in April. At 2:30pm I think it might be a personal record.

And the snow is really starting to come down and stick. The weather’s been miserable all week but this is the first time we got more than a dusting.

Maybe this is Canada’s payback for those tariffs I’ve heard about? I want it on record that I had nothing to do with that.

So precisely on the first of April the weather went all to hell.

Days of gale wind, temps that never got out of the thirties, followed by a couple of dustings of snow. Quite seasonal for early April, really – you know for a fact that March is going to break your heart but you never know what April is going to do.

I’d have spent the past week cocooning indoors anyway, because…

…my new leg has been driving me crazy. You can walk back and forth at the prosthetist’s shop all you like but sooner or later you’re going to have to wear the thing home and walk on it all day and it’s only then that you’ll get to know the leg. Pray the inevitable problems are fixable from that point.

Trouble is, this thing keeps finding new ways to afflict me. Every day it’s rubbing me the wrong way in some completely different spot. So I’m still in the “fiddling with the padding to try and see what it likes” phase of our relationship.

The good news is that the toe of the socket, where the old leg rubbed the end of my stump bloody day after day, has been completely fine. He really got that part right, and nothing else is actually injuring me so I think we’re going to be all right in the end.

Speaking of damaged goods…

I took a commenter’s advice and did something with Tobie’s bed I should have done four years ago – I covered it with a dog blanket somebody had given me, that I had squirreled away and forgotten about. Tobie accepted it immediately…

…and every morning I find it wadded up…

…so that explains why I so seldom see him actually scratching at the bed, even though he has destroyed one and damaged another. My big scary bodyguard needed a blankie. Thus come the consequences of being an unsentimental hermit, I guess.

And finally, for those who always ask about it…

The pear tree is in full flower, and apparently loving life. I had hoped I didn’t shock it somehow with that major pruning.

I overslept this morning, finally waking at 6:15 from a vivid dream about folding laundry.

My poor engineering strikes again…

My new dueling tree started misbehaving. The top target worked okay but the bottom one kept stopping in the middle of its swing.

Not super hard to understand why. The weight of the swinging targets broke the block I’d cemented the 2X4 into, and now the board was leaning backward.

Okay, digga we musta.

It’s remarkable how many problems in the desert can be fixed with a shovel and a little sweat. 🙂 I set up the target in February when I was still hurting after a day of working on Neighbor L’s Jeep, and did a half-ass job. We’ll see how long it lasts this time.

On a roll, I soldiered on and replaced the chicken wire on the paper target stand that has needed replacing for … oh, years. I’ll start procrastinating again tomorrow.

…and maybe it’s too early to say whether my problem is solved. Honestly with a new leg it’s always too early to say that. There’s “this just isn’t right at all” and then there’s “this is just new, I’ll get used to it.”

At present I’m thinking this is that second thing. Of course I thought that about the last one. It’s kind of a process. If you have both your legs, best to hang onto them.

What can I say? He’s a scratcher. Tobie is working on destroying his second bed – it’s only one year old and he has already clawed holes in it.

With the first one I let matters go until he annihilated the poor thing. This time I decided to take measures.

Took it apart and gave it a wash, then…

…after it dried I brought it home to assess the damage. I had intended to apply patches on the inside but that proved unworkable due to there being two layers of cloth. So I figured…

“Well, he won’t care.” And it kind of fits the overall decor, such as it is.

I really like these beds, both gifts from Generous Reader MM. They miraculously fit the available space between the wall and the Official TUAK Desk. But they’re not proving very durable – when this one finishes wearing out I’ll need to try something else.

A bedroom heater that goes “foop” on command first thing in the morning…

Fresh hot bread in a chilly cabin…

The first bike ride of the season…

To go get a gift from a Friend of the Blog!

My ammo can runneth over.

Tobie likes to bark at exciting things happening outside the Lair, which I normally encourage. For several days now he has found one particular spot in the Lair’s front yard very interesting, and I finally decided to see if whatever it is is a recurring thing – meaning an animal in the habit of coming right up to the cabin…

Click for moving pictures…

So far nothing – but it’s probably just a rabbit anyway. As usual all the camera has recorded is a lot of close-ups of a dog and a lame old man going back and forth.

I’m starting to think Tobie’s “keep the Lair safe from intruders” filter is set too sensitive.

In hindsight it shouldn’t have come as any surprise: The compass app could hardly know where north is if I had all location permissions turned off. Truthfully I never really believed turning that feature off did anything – and I’m still not completely convinced that it does anything but disable some phone functions. Just because you know you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

But it turns out that turning “Location Services” on opens a menu of services you can permit or deny. I left virtually all of them off, which should have the same basic effect, if any, as turning the main switch off.

Anyway, the compass app is working now. And now it’ll probably be another several years before I use it again – normally when I know I’m going to need a compass I just bring my actual (excellent) compass.

I needed a compass this morning and recalled that there was (supposedly) one on my smartphone. Opened the app, and it was more than 120^o out of whack. If there’s a way to recalibrate it to reality, I’m not seeing it. On the other hand I really don’t do “apps” so maybe I’m just having a grandpa moment.

It’s still March, you never know what the weather’s going to do except each day will at least start cold and the wind is probably going to be an adventure. So the old man is mostly staying indoors and reading. I recently got turned on to Ursula K. Le Guin, a writer I mostly ignored when young because no ray guns or exploding space ships. I’m currently halfway through The Dispossessed, which I somehow never read before. Oh, c’mon, Joel: It wouldn’t have held your interest for six minutes back when it was written.

Anyway…

Big News! The cylinder holding up the Official TUAK Chair gave up the ghost after a little less than three years, and has been replaced. Which led to the rather pressing problem of what to do with the old one.

Happily, by wild coincidence Neighbor L chose virtually that moment to say she needed help with a run to the county dump. Her barrels are apparently filling more rapidly than is traditional with “medical waste,” which I did not choose to inquire into. So…

…this very morning the old chair will hit the dump, to be buried and wondered over by archeologists a thousand years from now. Maybe they’ll clone my ass.

Meanwhile…

The pear tree is starting to bud! This always bugged me that it did it in March, since we’re certainly not past frosty mornings. But it is what it is; it almost certainly won’t fruit this year anyway. Still, if it does…

…the fruit won’t be as hard to get to as it was last summer. After the harvest I determined to remove those interior vertical branches that were so hard to pick from. Following them down it all came to one major cut, which I made in December after the tree went dormant. I cut that and all the little inward-growing branchlets, and hopefully the tree will now start to grow outward rather than up.

That’s about all the excitement there is around here at the moment. I’m pet-sitting for S&L tomorrow, and Thursday I’m going to the big town about 50 miles away to (hopefully) pick up my new leg. Which will be an exciting and very expensive day, and I’m sure I’ll want to write all about it.

I had to look it up to remember: Big Brother sent me my current weather station a little over four years ago and to be honest I didn’t really expect it to last as long as it has. But we’re giving it a good function test today.

It has measured gusts of over 30mph, screaming up the wash channel*. Takes a lot of wind to make the Lair creak, especially since we shored it up with the bedroom addition eight years ago. But it has creaked a few times today, as March demonstrates how much of a bitch it really can be sometimes.

Anyway, that plastic anemometer didn’t look like much when I put it on the 20′ length of well pipe in January 2021 but it’s still spinning dizzily away out there so I guess I underestimated it.

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*The Lair is down in a sheltered hollow: Up on the top of the ridge we’re getting at least a full gale. The mid-day walkie was memorable.

So no surprise, I woke this morning to a little snow on top of a lot of frozen rain…

And it took a while, since it stayed cold all day, for the ice to let go of my solar panels. I went out a couple of times in the morning but finally cleared the panels on the ground mount and started to get some push into the batteries.

Then it was time to make bread. Since it was still cold inside the Lair, I took some good advice from commenters and warmed my mixing bowl with hot water.

Then I was able to proof the yeast…

…and go ahead and make my dough.

And the result was (a warm cabin and) a nice loaf of new bread, which I forgot to take a picture of.

No thunder, mind you; not a bit. But around here rain usually comes with thunder and Tobie decided there was no need to wait for it before beginning his meltdown.

So I put up with him panting and pacing for an hour until the rain turned to snow and he settled right down. Snow never has thunder, so it’s okay.

Yeah, the weather we’ve been promised for the past two days finally arrived, and we’ll see how much snow we have by morning. Judging from the very scant snowfalls we’ve had all winter I’m guessing hardly any, which since I just typed that out loud probably means we’ll be snowed in for the rest of the month.

Several years ago Landlady added a grain mill to the capabilities of Ian’s Cave. I used it to gradually grind up the wheat berries that had been sitting around for longer than I’ve lived here, to no purpose. Took a while to settle on the right proportions for my bread recipe, half a cup per loaf, and it was a big improvement.

But wheat berries are, for some reason I’ve never understood, several times as expensive as plain supermarket flour so when those two buckets’ worth were gone, they were gone. Last year a Friend of the Gulch came past, bringing a gift of wheat berries: Not a lot, but enough to eke out my supply for a while.

A few days ago I ground the last of it…

And that was it, baby. Last of the Mohicans. When that’s gone, it’s St. Famine’s Day.

Except, wait a minute. Yeah, I’ve been totally broke for as long as I’ve lived here, and long since adopted a “scrounge or do without” policy that I’ve sometimes struggled to shake off now that I actually have a small-by-conventional-standards income. Specific to this topic, I’m used to thinking of wheat berries like bars of solid gold, precious objects forever out of my price range. But was that necessarily still true?

Turns out, not in the least!

Happy day! This stuff has been an integral part of my diet for so long I was feeling kind of bereft, and I looked upon those two little sacks with the sort of greedy joy I normally reserve for a new gun or pair of good boots.

Those sacks would never do, though. That was just asking for bugs or mice to help themselves. Happily…

I had optimistically never quite brought myself to repurpose one of the original wheat buckets. So it’ll be fine, while it waits to be ground. And yes, I do plan to fill that bucket in the very near future.

They’re more fun, so you use them more.

I’ve been beating up my new little dueling tree so much in the past few days it’s starting to eat into my ammo stash. In ze old days the closest thing to a reactive target we had was in Hunter Pistol Silhouette matches, and they just fell down.

The Arex is well and truly worn in now, and it has had an unexpected effect on trigger pull. I expected the trigger to smooth out but I didn’t expect it to get lighter.

According to my crappy trigger pull gage it started at 7 1/2 to 8 pounds but now…

…it’s down to a consistent 5 1/2. Which is more likable. Of course that’s after on the order of 1500 rounds of live ammo and god alone knows how much dry firing, but still. As long as wearing it in isn’t wearing it out, I’ll take it.

Every damned year.

After a couple of unpleasantly blustery but not especially cold days, March let winter back out of the box…

Cold AND heavy overcast isn’t the usual combination, but yesterday had me running the Honda on the porch just to jazz some juice into my depleted batteries even though I wasn’t particularly stressing them. Happily, I can do that now. It cleared in the late afternoon just in time for a January-worthy frigid night, so I’m glad I spent the gasoline on that or I might have actually worried about frozen electrolyte.

And this morning…

With the unaccustomed addition of a little humidity from that dusting of snow, the whole desert looks like a jewelbox. That’ll stop as soon as the sun gets a foothold because today’s supposed to be quite a lot warmer than – well, pretty much all last week.

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.