The Ultimate Answer to Kings

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.

It’s that time of year, when the summer gear goes away and the winter gear starts gradually coming out. And this morning I got to obsessing about holsters. Because there’s something about my holsters that has always perplexed me. I mean I don’t lay awake worrying about it but still – it’s been a persistent question.

Okay, so the set up: Longtime readers know that after a couple of years of thinking about it, I finally switched from a .44 revolver to a stereotypical plastic striker 9mm about eighteen months ago.

It was actually a birthday gift from Gun Jesus, who’d been touting this obscure Slovenian gunmaker for quite some time. And at first I wasn’t sure I agreed with his assessment of the Arex Delta Gen 2 but that turned out to be an ammo compatibility issue that has largely gone away. I mean the gun is almost guaranteed to jam under one particular circumstance but it’s a circumstance that almost never happens outside practice sessions and is easily avoidable and it’s a good gun with all the modern bells and whistles and anyway that’s not what this post is about. Continue reading →

It’s probably three weeks to a month before I break down and set up the woodstove, because I kind of hate the woodstove. But it’s time for…

…my beloved bedroom heater.

First I had to uncover the outside vent…

I never used to have to cover the vent, until I added a handrail to the porch stairs. Approximately 20 minutes after I did that, though, I got my first mouse nest inside the bedroom heater’s firebox. And since I wasn’t expecting that, it was in quite a mature state – complete with babies – when I did find it. And I didn’t know, at the time, how to clean out the firebox so it was a massive disaster at the time though the long-term fallout was learning more about how my heater worked, which came in handy later, and also learning that I have to cover the vent as soon as I put the heater to bed for the warm season. I actually made a hardware cloth cage for the vent but never found a good way to mount it, so I just wrap it with plastic and duct tape – and check that cover periodically. So far it’s never been bothered.

With the cover unwrapped…

…I proceed to the biggest hassle of the procedure: Getting the damned pilot light to catch fire. This used to be a much (much much) bigger deal than it is now because for the first few years the gas plumbing was kind of ad hoc and never permanently pressurized. Getting the air out of it through that tiny orifice was unbelievably time consuming. Like, 45 minutes to an hour. Now it still doesn’t light *right* up but I don’t have to bring a magazine to read while I wait.

Takes a while for the dust burnoff to stop stinking up the cabin, but once it’s done I’ve got my winter cozy spot ready.

I’ve had some business I needed to do in town on a business day for two weeks. The weather socked in for several days: I tried getting out on Thursday but the road was so muddy I didn’t want to do that to the bike. Today was the day.

First step is to put the bike rack on the Jeep…

…which immediately hit a snag because the hitch pin was missing.

Okay that’s bad but not necessarily a show stopper. More than once I’ve laid the pin and its locking key on the bumper and forgotten to put them back in the hitch, right? So they shook loose on the long bumpy driveway between Ian’s place, where I store the bike and the rack, and my place. I’ll find it.

So I went on a long hilly walk, all the way down, and didn’t find any hardware. On the way back I got to wondering, “Could I have put the damned thing on the trailer ball fitting instead of where it belongs?” And that was such a stupid idea, it would have been such a stupid thing to do, that I almost didn’t check to answer the question.

Haven’t put much mileage on the bike this year, on account of how puny I felt for most of the summer. This might be the last ride to town – it’s gonna turn cold soon.

Still, I did just barely pass 1600 on the odometer, so 150ish miles without really trying.

Two mornings ago I woke up a little chilly, even though I was sleeping in a hoody under a quilt…

And thought, okay, maybe it’s time to fire up the bedroom heater.

But then I looked at the forecast, which says this little cold snap is just a blip, and decided to give it another week.

It is about time to decommission my hillbilly water heater for the winter, though.

…because even on sunny days it’s not doing much. I could get more time out of it by closing the glass cover on the heat exchanger box, but once you do that it’s damn near impossible to open again and not really worth the bother. My only question is whether I just turn off the water pressure, or do what I did last autumn and pull the hoses out of the box, disconnect them and lay them on a hillside to drain. That’s not much work but putting them back together and into the box in the spring is a pain in the ass. I probably will though, because if I just leave it for a couple of years the scaling inside the hoses makes the whole thing pretty much useless all season.

When D&L replaced their wood pellet heater with a propane burner last month, they were left with about 20 sacks of pellets in stock and nothing to do with them but let them keep taking up garage space. Happily they were able to find a buyer, who came and got them last week…

…which opened up a whole corner of their big garage for other uses. She moved her smoking spot there, and now there’s all this room in what used to be a pretty cramped spot. Yet another unmentioned disadvantage of pellet stoves: You’ve got to stock a lot of fuel and it absolutely positively must never get wet. Which takes up a lot of indoor space.

Finally…

Late last year the upper on one of my winter boots cracked away from the sole, which wasn’t really bad news. They were comfortable and warm enough in most weathers but too low for slogging through snow. So I finally had an excuse to replace them. Hurray for materialism!

I have a pair of gloves that I really like. I bought them over a year ago. Wear them all the time. I’ve got other gloves I only wear on particular occasions but these are the gloves I’ll stuff in my cargo pocket just in case I want a pair of gloves. The right index finger is about to push through and I know I’m just going to cut the tip of that finger off the glove and keep wearing them. Got it?

So I go to Amazon to buy another pair of gloves just like this one. And I look at the price and realize I must have bought the original pair in a fit of drunken madness…

…and it’s not like I can’t afford to replace these very useful gloves but they’re stupid expensive compared to the ones on a rack at Ace Hardware that I’ll buy for half as much and hate because they don’t fit right and I won’t wear them. And now the indecision is holding up an amazon order for such frivolities as a package of long underwear and a new toilet brush. And probably will till the end of the week when I sigh and decide not to buy the gloves. This is the inside of my brain.

Tobie’s had a longtime relationship with his Kong since the day he came home from the shelter. It didn’t always go super well.

These days he mostly ignores it, not being as toy-obsessed as when he was a puppy. But it does still serve as an efficient peanut butter delivery system, and sometimes he brings it to me – I’m pretty sure specifically for that purpose.