Still bringing my main character into the present.

Ol' Shadow didn't have a happy life before he ended up in his desert idyll. Somebody's almost bound to ask how much of this is autobiographical, since he's about to undergo something I've described in my own life. It's not an autobiography. Shadow isn't me. For one thing, I'm a lot happier than he is and have a higher tech base and standard of living. But since he's a hermit in the desert and so am I, I am taking certain liberties with events from my own life to describe his.

This, for example, is pretty much exactly what happened to me...

There's something severely wrong with this.

So many things, I wish I hadn't seen it because compiling the list would cut into my morning and I've got things to do.



I think my headline would have been, "Do you want to be this guy? Then visit www.godrownyourself.com today!"

Tactical this, tactical that...

Hey, at least it starts with the number four.

Yesterday Uncle made the comment that the Taurus Judge had truly jumped the shark. And I'm not arguing - though a revolver you can load with .410 shotshells has a certain charm in snake country, mounting a rail on it and calling it "tactical" does seem a bit...well...

But jump the shark? C'mon, Unc. That shark is so far behind us, it ain't never catching up.

"Tactical" has entered my personal list of words I reserve for "new and improved," or "survival." May once have had an objective meaning, but now they're just marketing.

Here's some interesting Claire news!

Claire Wolfe has just announced not one but two new books that'll be available in the near future. One I knew about, a compilation of Hardyville stories. The other's a surprise to me and apparently to her as well. This is pretty cool; There hasn't been a new book since the Freedom Outlaw's Handbook, and that was six years ago.

Call me Ishmael.

The White Whale is somebody else's problem! Yay!


A friend of a friend's friend had an eight-ton Kodiak that pulled that bad boy out of here without the slightest little problem, and in a flash substantially improved the looks of our ridge. No harpoon required.

One down, two to go.

Check out Little Bear's new threads!

Courtesy of Landlady, who originally bought it for Magnus, years ago, and found it while cleaning out one of the barn's attic spaces last weekend. I can imagine how Magnus reacted to it.
And yes, that is LB's "You'll never sleep another peaceful night" look. But he might actually wear it under some load, once he decides it's not just a plot to kill him. It would be nice to have some cargo capability, if only for extra water during long walkies. My legs aren't what (or even where) they ought to be.

What not to wear when the government guy comes calling...

Eating breakfast and planning out my day, I decided I'd better start with laundry. It's a beautiful, sunny morning, but it's also Monsoon so who knows how long that'll last?

While hanging the first load, I got to thinking about a brief conversation Landlady had with me before the building inspector arrived. I don't really like black t-shirts because they're too hot, and don't usually wear slogan shirts because...well, because I'm not 16. But this one, a gift from Claire, always kinda tickled me.



Curiously, she didn't want me around when the government man came calling. I wonder why not?

Bizzy Bizzy Bizzy...

Well, I did predict that this would be a busy weekend. It was also a highly productive one, from the viewpoint of all three participants - Landlady, M, and myself. We got a lot done.

For Landlady, the objective was to finish the rough electrical and plumbing on the Meadow House, and get it to pass inspection on Monday. M needed to get his retaining wall foundations ready to pour, with the cement truck also due Monday. As for me, I wanted to finish the demolition of the old pantry building, for which I needed more muscle if it was going to come apart in reassemble-able pieces.

So Saturday, while M worked on getting steel in his forms, Landlady and I put up the boxes for light fixtures and finished pulling and routing wire. Sunday we tore down the pantry and hauled its big chunks to the Lair's site. Alas theres more rot damage than I hoped - though not as much as I feared - and I may as well face the fact that I'll be using its bits to build a whole new shed rather than just nailing the sections of the old one back together. But there's still plenty of bits to use, and by putting it right against the back of the Lair it'll serve as a powershed as well as a pantry, so that's a big plus. (I've been planning to put my old scrounged solar panels on a rack behind the lair rather than mounting to the roof as fashion dictates, because I don't want to put holes in my nice tight roof for panels that'll need to be replaced one day. Now I can put them on the shed roof instead.

It rained Sunday and there was some fear of the condition of the washes, but Monday dawned beautiful and cool and for an absolute wonder the cement truck not only showed up on time but didn't even get lost! By nine AM we'd poured six yards of concrete in two short but deep and wide footers and the pour went perfectly!


These are the retaining walls that will allow M's Dome to become M's Earth-Bermed House before snow flies. Yes, that's heavy industrial cable sticking out instead of the 7/8" rebar the plan calls for. We had the cable laying around, and nobody carries rebar that big. Not a helluva lot of skyscrapers going up around here at the moment. The only thing missing is mortar for the blocks, but M has already ordered it and it'll arrive tomorrow. Next weekend we lay block!

After the pour yesterday things started to go a little wrong. We got a whole bunch of trash loaded in the Jeep's trailer, and just as M and I were climbing aboard I remembered that the landfill is closed on Mondays. Then the building inspector said he couldn't possibly make it before two in the afternoon, which considering that Landlady and M needed to drive six hours back to the city was more than a bit inconvenient. But when he finally showed, he passed the house with flying colors and we can MOVE ON! Very exciting.

I picked up a little trash-hauling gig of my own, which means I need the trailer tomorrow, which in turn means I need to empty the *&^%! trailer. I can't just haul it to the landfill, as would make a lot more sense, because after getting paid for shit-shoveling yesterday I sent virtually my last dollar into town with M when they left to make the last payment on my chainsaw. Now I own it free and clear (yay!) and am so broke I can't pay a landfill fee. (boo.)

But the force is still with me, because the trash in this new trash-hauling gig consists almost entirely of old pallets, which make acceptable firewood. So instead of hauling to the landfill as my customer wants, I'll cut it into 16" chunks with my very own, paid-off chainsaw and keep it. Heh.

J's Lightning Rod Installation

J&H's house has been hit by lightning twice in two years, and they finally decided to take that as a subtle hint that maybe they're vulnerable to, you know, lightning. So they dipped into the fund they'd been laying by for more solar panels, and yesterday the installer came and did the deed. I took pix this morning.

They've got four lightning rods, three on the ends of the eaves and one on top of the stovepipe.


The rods connect to braided aluminum cable, that connect together and run down the corners of the house.


Near the ground, the aluminum cable connects to braided copper cable. That cable goes to copper ground plates buried underground. Normally, I'm told they use ground rods. But the ground is so rocky here they had to come up with an alternative.


There are two ground plates, and they're buried at opposite corners of the house. Everything metal that enters the house is tied to the copper cable...


...like the propane pipe, for example. That would be important, I suppose.

They also went through and grounded the living hell out of all the electrical infrastructure. In theory that ties the whole system together. As far as I can tell nobody really knows if the current goes from the strike to ground, or vice versa, or both at different times. This way seems to work no matter which theory you pick.

Things to do with free gadgets...

So you're servicing your car, minding your own business, and you happen to encounter a GPS tracker that wasn't there before.

Thanks, fellas! Hey, I'm a guy. I love gadgets.

Here are some suggestions for what to do with it:

1) Remove and destroy

2) Leave it alone, and drive only where you want the authorities to know you’re going

3) Remove and place in garbage

4) Remove and place on random civilian vehicle

5) Remove and place on long-haul freight truck

6) Remove and mail to Hong Kong

7) Remove and mail to cops

8 ) Remove and send to FBI via strip-o-gram

9) Remove and sell on ebay

10) Remove, disassemble and use as part of an autonomous aircraft guidance system. post videos to Youtube, be sure to thank authorities for the free donation of the electronics that made it all possible

11) Remove and place on police car (slightly risky)

12) Remove and attach to helium-filled weather balloon

13) Remove and attach to sewer rat

14) Remove and “clone” so that there are, say, fifty of you running around

Personally I think #4 is kinda cold. The sewer rat thing totally wouldn't work, but the chuckle factor on the helium balloon would be awesome. I might take it completely apart, glue each component to black velvet, and mount it in a shadowbox on my wall. Enemies like this are a badge of honor, and I'd want the trophy.

Any other suggestions?

Sheesh. Where's a guy got to go to get some privacy?

I was all kind of excited this morning. I got to bed at a decent time so woke up before light. Sky was clear, temp was cool. Today I'd at least get a start at tearing down that old pantry building before it fell down. If I can get the walls down intact, it'll probably be worth moving to the Lair's site.

Sun barely cleared the ridge when I was already taking off the roof sheeting. Then Ghost alerted to a truck - to my shock, it was the roofer actually coming to install that piece he'd left off from last week's endless roof installation. After only a week? Knock me over with another feather!

Got him on his way, and Ghost started yelling about another truck. This was actually two: A pickup and some sort of ratty-looking tank truck. The only tank trucks that ever come out here are delivering propane, but they're usually newer and far cleaner than this one. This one wasn't familar at all. If it had come this far it had to be headed either here or the Weekender Neighbors' property. Either destination was perplexing: I knew damned well no propane was due here, and the Weekenders always tell me ahead of time because there's a chain across their driveway and I need to let the truck in. To my surprise, the trucks turned right and headed for the ridge up the BLM road. At that point I found a rock and settled down to watch the show, because there was no way that tank truck was going to get up that ridge and there's absolutely no place to turn around except for Y2K Guy's driveway...

Oops! They turned ONTO Y2K Guy's driveway, like they knew exactly where they were going! That NEVER happens. Now, the Y2K Guy thing is kind of involved and I won't get into it here. Kinda sad, really, but the most important thing about that piece of land is that last I heard the Weekender Neighbors were trying to buy it and it looked like they'd succeed. But still, nobody's lived there since I've lived here and if there was any sort of service due there's a good chance I'd have heard about it. Huh. It probably wasn't anything bad, because a bunch of burglars wouldn't show up in a big, loud tank truck. Still, I did promise to keep an eye on the place. Maybe I should drive up there and see, but if I do that there's gonna be a big, tire-biting scene with the dogs, and...

Hey, wait. I know. I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and called Weekender Neighbor, who for a wonder answered his phone. "You got any idea why there'd be a tank truck on Y2K Guy's place?"

Yeah, it turned out they were actually going to close the sale, but first somebody had to check the septic system. Perfectly legit. Okay.

Now I'm trying to go back to work demolishing the old pantry, when Ghost lights up AGAIN. This time it's one of the rich guys from the other side of the plateau, coming down the BLM road on one of those ATVs that looks like a golf cart with a Rambo complex - nothing to do with me. I can go months without seeing anybody drive on that road - today it's a frickin' expressway.

I kinda wish all these people would go away.

What the guys would spend their days doing, if we had a TV...

Hey, remember how concealed carry w/o permit was bad because...

...then nobody would get training, and they'd all, like, die?

Well...

“Nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve seen an increase in people coming out here,” said Mike Morgan, a shooting instructor and range master with Game and Fish. “You’re still going to have people who realize they need to be knowledgeable. There are a lot of user groups who come and use the facility.”

And Morgan said shooting classes like Sure Shots, which began in January and takes place at Cabela’s in Glendale and at the range, are always being developed and introduced to increase interest.

“We do very limited advertising and we don’t have a problem filling up those classes,” he said.

“There’s definitely an interest out there.”

So neener neener, Quisling.

You have no "reasonable expectation of privacy"...

Anywhere, apparently.

So. You thought you could avoid those intrusive airport technological strip searches by not flying on a commercial plane? You thought they were just were doing that to "other people"? You thought it was okay to look the other way as your Fourth Amendment rights were violated when you flew on an airplane. It was all in the name of "safety", right?

Do you think somebody should tell the government that 1984 wasn't supposed to be an instruction manual?

H/T to Tam, one of those places I go when I don't have anything of my own to say.

Still just playing around here.

Once upon a time, there was a television show called the Brady Bunch. A photogenic widower with photogenic sons meets and marries a photogenic widow with photogenic daughters. Hilarity ensues.

This was not going to be like that, though nobody seemed to know it at the time. But yeah, the widower in question had three sons remaining at home. The widow, three daughters. They got that much right.

Rain

Rain in the desert is really very inconvenient.

It's true! Everywhere else, rain is a part of the landscape. Let a farmer go a month without rain and listen to him bitch. Here, rain was clearly an afterthought for whoever designed the place. There are dry riverbeds all around, like natural gutters. Nine months out of the year, they're just in the way. For a few hours or days out of the remaining three months, they're really in the way. Because they're not dry. But did anybody get around to building bridges over them? Hell, no. Afterthoughts. For something that is just really very inconvenient.

I mean, what good does it do? Dig a ditch, that's when the rain will come along and loosen the clay, which will head right for the lowest point it can find. That would be where you dug your ditch. Which you now get to dig again. Convenient? I don't think so.

Sun, the landscape can deal with. It's made for sun. Most of the wildlife can't even live without sun, since most of the wildlife is cold-blooded. Wind? No problem! So some dirt blows around. There's lots of dirt. But rain is a real problem.

I'm only talking about rain because it's raining now. Right outside this window. It's August, mid-morning, and it should be bright as hell, dry as hell, hot as hell. Instead I'm thinking of finding a jacket and wondering which of my guns will rust behind my back. That's just not right. How's a guy supposed to cope with that? Huh?

Well, you cope with it the way you cope with the sun, and the wind. You just do, that's all.

That's the problem with people today. Too much bitching, not enough coping. And there I go bitching about it. A foolish consistency, Emerson said, is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. Personally I avoid consistency like the plague it is. Whenever that bothers me, I just remember that all the great atrocities in history were carried out in the name of philosophical purity. Consistency, when it isn't being really boring, is the father of horror. You wouldn't want me to become a monster, would you? After I've betrayed the revolution and declared myself President-For-Life? Scary thought, that. I'd make a terribly incompetent monster, and they're often the worst kind.

I sure wish it'd stop raining. It's been raining for hours, and it never does that. Well, okay – it did it yesterday. But that was different, because...well. It's just inconsistent, that's all.

Can't go out and play. So I think I'll write a book, instead.

Lightning Rods

Ramen Fiend said,

I'm moving to the mountains of Montana here soon, and I read this and realized that I need lightning rods (and a dog that isn't afraid of running water). So how does one go about making lightning rods?

Oddly enough, I've been noodling that myself. Though I'm sure a contractor will tell us we'd be safer juggling chainsaws and mason jars of nitroglycerin than building our own lightning rods, it really doesn't look all that complicated.

Look here and here for information. I should think that grounding rods, available at any big home improvement store, should do nicely for both ends. I'm certainly considering putting some on the Lair.

I'll know more after J gets his. He's suddenly gotten very serious about lightning rods, and plans to pay somebody else to do it for him.

Here's another free story.

So Saturday evening Landlady, M and I were sitting around my trailer, and we were hitting M's mead kinda hard and they started pitching this new project.

They want me to write The Great American Novel. They'd apparently given this quite a lot of thought.

M's view is that the path to publishing success (a path I have never walked, or even glimpsed, though I've certainly thought about it a lot) is to write the sort of book that will make high school students curse your very name. A book with lots and lots of symbolism, or at least apparent symbolism. I don't know if this is actually that path or not. But what the hell? Can't dance.

It involves the Shadow stories, of course.

So this morning I started noodling with the idea. I don't know if it'll really go anywhere, because 100,000 words takes a lot of motivation. More than I'm feeling at the moment. But I liked their book idea, and I like the Shadow stories.

So I dug out an unfinished story that hadn't gone anywhere, and started noodling with it. Tell me what you think.

I don't post videos on how to waltz...

...and a lot of people shouldn't post videos on how to be tacticool.



They just really shouldn't.

H/T to Tam.

Have I mentioned that Landlady hates trailers?

And yet we're up to our kiesters in them. I hauled off Serenity a year ago February, and it almost promptly got replaced with another, even more obnoxious one. We call it "The White Whale." It's the biggest, fanciest fifth-wheel trailer in the whole wide festering world, and it's parked beside the driveway on the very highest point of the ridge. You can see it for miles, which brings frequent distress to this old ghost's paranoid and secretive soul. I'll bet you can see it from orbit.

Then of course there's the original fifth-wheel, T and Landlady's home for years, Claire's home until weekend before last. It looks like it's embedded in the earth, all skirted and surrounded with wooden walkways and mysterious pipes and hoses and wires coming out of the ground. Thing looks like a mangrove tree designed by Salvadore Dali.

I just got back from shit-shoveling and learned that the White Whale is going away this week. If you're wondering why I learned this while shit-shoveling, just keep wondering. It's one of those very weird yet internally somehow perfectly logical things that happen around here. Naturally, it makes more work for me. It's got to be ready when S the Road Guy comes to take it away. Won't take a lot of work, but I've got to do it today.

Which puts off the thing I intended to do today, which was get the other fifth-wheel ready to roll. It's going away too, if M and Landlady can find a buyer. I might not get a lot of warning about that one, and there's a lot more work involved. All that wooden stuff has to go. No idea what I'm going to do with it.

The weekend didn't go south, it didn't turn weird, until late Sunday. Yes, I know I haven't posted all weekend but that was only because I was busy and the computer connection is now in the scriptorium which on weekends is somebody else's apartment. I helped Landlady rough in the electrical in the Meadow House, M went to the other ridge and finished the foundation frames for his retaining wall. Lots of other things, small things mostly. This weekend was busy: Next weekend is going to be insane. We had a lot of those last summer, but this one had found some sort of rhythm till recently.

Anyway, they drove away late Sunday morning. I did what I always do: I got a little toasted on whatever was lying around (M's first-batch mead, in this case) and sat down to read a book and de-stress. I'm a hermit, after all, and it doesn't take a lot to load me right up on company. The clouds rolled in, and around quarter after four the sky just opened up and had a tantrum. Hardest rain we've had all year. Really close lightning strikes. We've had storms all around since the beginning of Monsoon, but this one was here.

Intense but brief, as they tend to be. When it passed I went down to the meadow house, because I'm very distrustful of that new roof. Good news: as far as I can tell the roof is perfectly tight. Bad news: Some of the windows Claire and I installed leak like sieves. We'll have to go around with a garden hose and find out where the water's coming in.

While I was doing that, Little Bear was...being Little Bear. I've been giving him a lot more rope since Claire and her dogs left, trying to find how far I can trust him. The wash was running after the storm, of course, and I should have kept a better eye on him. When I finally caught sight of him he was on the far side of the wash, having waded through the water. Trouble is, the water was rising fast and his passage through it scared him. It still wasn't dangerously high or fast, but he refused to come back across. Refused absolutely.

No way I'd risk the Jeep with the water rising the way it was. I might get across and not be able to return; I might get halfway across. I took off my boots, rolled up my pants, walked Little Bear to a spot where he could get almost across and only have to wade through some slow, sheeting water onto a little raised island. Between the island and me, not ten feet across, the water was fast and getting faster but not dangerously so. Just a little stream, really, but he's a desert dog. He considers standing water a rare, wonderful and at the moment terrifying thing. He refused to go another inch into that water. I'd have praised him for being smart, if he wasn't the stupid ass who got himself - and now me - into this in the first place.

If you did it, you'd get a little wet. Anybody who's ever walked on a beach has seen far rougher water than this, it really wasn't much of a flow. But I'm an amputee, and I don't keep prosthetic legs as long as I do by wading around with them. Sigh - I'm also a dog-owner, and so into the water I went. Damage acceptable. I grabbed LB's collar and fought him into the water. He fought to go back until we were almost across, then broke for the Home side and I let him go.

Once back up the ridge he wanted inside bad, but I put him on his tie-out cable, brushed him, and told him to dry the hell off first. Then I took my leg apart, cleaned and dried it, put it back together.

Just about then the phone rang. Just D spreading gossip. Seems one of those close lightning strikes had struck J&H's house. I saw it this morning - lightning hit the stovepipe, went through the roof and the stove doing no apparent damage whatsoever, then caused two of the marble tiles on the stove's pedestal to explode like grenades. Frags damaged the stove, and dozens of them buried themselves in the ceiling; most of the blast went straight up. Deafened J and H both; their ears are still ringing. Two of their dogs crapped themselves on the spot. Everybody there could have been killed but nobody was hurt, thank Zeus.

Ah, the quiet life.