And that's more-or-less what the kitchen will look like.

Sink under the window. The corner cabinet will have one big door on a piano hinge, so I can get at the electrical when I need to. Stove to the right of the stub counter.

There won't be a fridge, unfortunately - at least not indoors. There simply isn't room. Maybe in the pantry shed, when I get around to building it. I've pretty much gotten used to living without refrigeration, though it's nice. I have NOT gotten used to living without running water. Trust a guy who's been without it for seven months now: That's one of those luxuries that's so much an improvement it may as well be a necessity.

There's just enough room to the left of the counter for a 3-foot roll-top desk and my big chair.

So you want to build a straw-bale house?

They've been stuccoing. For. Months. Seven days a week. Granted that it's a big house, but still...

They make their own stucco, from native clay and sand mixed with chopped straw. Experimented till they got a mix that wouldn't wash off.

Seriously, I don't know why she's smiling. She usually isn't, by this time of the day.

I don't get it. Can someone explain tattoos to me?

I followed this link from Robb Allen's blog, and between that and having just visited with a local lady I know, it got me to wondering. When that happens near a keyboard, it often leads to ill-considered posting.

It's not that I have anything against it, or would pass laws forbidding it, or anything like that. As with many things I don't understand, I just...don't understand. The point of it, that is. Doesn't really make it any of my business.

First, so much can go wrong. I worked with a guy who once decided he just had to have a "green man" tattooed all over his back...

And I'm sure it would have been a better idea if he hadn't been in Thailand at the time, and if (judging purely from the evidence) the "artist" hadn't been as drunk as he was. It looked more like "pile of bright green puke." My co-worker basically determined that he would never be seen without a shirt ever again, and I only learned about it by accident. Guy ended up spending a fortune - and a very great deal of pain - getting it fixed stateside. Still looked terrible.

Then there's the fact that certain tattoos seem to go in and out of style. Tribal bands, for example - I'm sure they were all edgy and cool back when, but now they're as trendy as bellbottoms - but a lot more permanent.

There's the whole aging thing. An old CPO with navy tats on his forearms might be kinda cool, in a "been-there, done-that" kinda way. But I know a lady who's in her sixties, has clearly been and done some edgy-ass things in her life, and looks like somebody left a Picasso out in the rain - if you know what I mean. It's not that attractive.

Finally there's the matter of "identifying marks," but that's just me being paranoid and anti-cop. Ignore that.

Even when I was a kid, I didn't get the attraction. Won't say I was never tempted, but I never came close to actually succumbing to the temptation.

Seriously: Ten years from now, is this guy really gonna be glad he did this?

Secret Lair Kitchen - Stage One Complete!

Tomorrow, fitting it to the cabin. After that, overhead cabinets!

Right now it looks like I might be going with a tiled countertop, which would be more work than I'd planned but look kinda nice across from the identically-tiled stove area.

It's easily the nicest piece of woodwork in the whole place.

Grandatter's already breaking all the feminist rules (I'm so proud...)

Got something done after all...

About sixty microseconds after my earlier whining post, the sun came out. An hour later I was at D&L's cutting lumber.

No pix, because around 3:30 the clouds were rolling in fast and I needed to run home and let the boys out. But I've just about completed the main (longest) part of the counter. It looks almost as though I knew what I was doing. Now it's thunderbooming like crazy, but I actually accomplished something after all.

Tomorrow - earlier start!

Unfortunately this seems to be the only way FIJA can get any press...

Man sentenced for pamphleteering

“It is prohibited for any person or group to engage in any type of First Amendment activities within the main Orange County courthouse complex grounds, unless the First Amendment activities occur within a designated Exempt Zone…”

Next person who assures me about all those "constitutional guarantees," gets it. Just sayin'.

"Resistance is futile. You will be monetized."

Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg: Anonymity Online 'Has To Go Away'

It's for the children, of course. Or something.

Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s marketing director, has a fix for cyberbullying: stop people from doing anything online without their names attached.

From what I've heard of Facebook, they're doing a heckuva job.

Tell me again why people submit to this? A Facebook account is still voluntary, last I heard.

H/T to Claire.

*Grump*

I'm supposed to cut up the wood for my Lair's kitchen today. I've been supposed to do it since Wednesday.

Monday and Tuesday were supposed to be geiger counters. GC Guy pushed it back to Tuesday and Wednesday, so there went Wednesday.

D called and said they didn't have enough electricity for the big power tools Thursday. That left today.

Today it started raining at 8 in the frickin' morning.

I still have hope for later, but this is starting to look like a wasted week, kitchen-wise.

Yeah. Oookay. Y'know, I'm just going to stay the hell away from Canton.

Via Codrea, the latest and greatest on Daniel Harless, TUAK's Law Enforcement Poster Boy of the Month.

That other videos are surfacing isn't a big surprise. Officer "Shoot you in the [bleeping] face and sleep at night" didn't pull that shite only once. What did surprise me a bit was that it's a local Canton source, and written by a guy who doesn't seem to care too much for Officer Scared'o'guns.

And then, depression set in. I made the same damned mistake I always make - I read the comments.

Yeah, now I've got multiple reasons to stay the hell away from Canton.

Why don't you just come out once and scream it?

From the "really obvious questions that people ask anyway" Department...

NSA Lawyer Questioned Over Cellphone Location Tracking of Americans: Is the government using cellular data to track Americans as they move around the U.S.?

Seems like an answer to that would be fairly straightfoward, doncha think? The possibilities are: Yes or No. Paranoid recluses everywhere would suggest the answer is "yes." The NSA's lawyer's answer will be "no." Because he's lying. (hey, he's a lawyer AND he's with the NSA. You were expecting the truth?)

But nooooo...

“There are certain circumstances where that authority may exist,” he said. His comments came after Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) asked him several times whether the government has the authority to “use cell site data to track the location of Americans inside the country.”

No, no, no! I explained this! It's a Yes or No Question. So is it YES, or is it frickin' NO??

Oh, but that's okay. Don't sweat the uncertainty, citizens. They'll get back to us on that...

Although Olsen acknowledged the possibility, he also said “it is a very complicated question” and that the intelligence community is working on a memo that will provide a better answer for the committee.

I'm gonna hold my breath until I see that memo. Starting...NOW!

Nostalgic About Pterry.

Guffaw posted a nostalgic look at model rockets this morning, that got me to thinking of ze gut old dayz.

Like him, I was into the little black powder-powered cardboard-and-balsa rockets when I was a kid. Much later I discovered that the hobby had grown a bit. High-power rockets use composite fuel of Ammonium Perchlorate and rubber, as I recall, and are powerful enough to have caused convulsions in several federal agencies - I'm tickled to say. I built several scratch-built rockets, but my all-time favorite was a kit from a company called Public Missiles, Ltd. My Pterodactyl was my first Level 2 certification flight from the Tripoli Rocketry Association, and even though the rocket itself wasn't much more sophisticated than an Estes model rocket it still gave me a proud day.

Alas, Pterry was limited. It was too big and heavy to really perform with its single rocket motor, and had no payload capacity at all which meant no avionics. After a few flights it all became routine, which just wasn't right. I was thinking of risking wife's (further) animosity by building yet another expensive rocket to replace Pterry, but then something terrible happened. A recovery system failure left me with a pile of shattered airframe surrounded by a bunch of perfectly good parts, and Pterry was reborn as Stretch Pterry.

SP was bigger and heavier, but also much more powerful. With two outboard motors to help it get off the ground, I expected a great deal better performance. The airframe was stretched to include a proper avionics bay big enough for any expansion my twisted soul and depleted bank account would allow. I even gave it a proper paint job.

Unfortunately, it never survived its maiden flight and it's all my fault. Running into some stability problems at the actual launch site, I rushed and improvised on the fly and ... shouldn't have done any of those things. What I mostly shouldn't have done was fail to consult with others who had a lot more experience clustering motors than I did. The outboards fired well before the main motor, pulled the igniter out of the main before ignition, and... Alas. It deserved a better owner.

The main motor never lit, and the rocket didn't get a whole lot higher than this. Just high enough to wreck it completely.

Shortly thereafter a bunch of moves and personal problems - and the fact that the ATF was making life as hard as possible for rocket hobbyists at the time - caused me to drift away and the rocket was never rebuilt. But sometimes I do think of getting back into it. Trouble is, it requires a very great deal of open space if you're going to do it right. Also a great deal of money. So I probably never will.

Things you're not likely to hear around here...

"This just can't be happening to me."

As Kevin Wilmeth correctly points out, 'Yes it can, Bunky.'

Those are the words of someone in Condition White. ... They were not prepared for this emergency, mentally: "[t]his just can't be happening to me" announces with crystal clarity that the speaker did not really believe it could happen to him at all. They had a tool available (not the most failsafe one, certainly, but still, a tool), but apparently did not even keep it ready for emergency use! Further, they did not keep their heads when they most needed to keep their heads, but rather did the very worst thing they could have done to provoke a predator to give chase.

As to the specific threat of bears, we don't see a lot of them here. But just last month, thanks to a forest fire to our south, we suddenly found ourselves up to our armpits in bear reports. And some of the bears were criminally impolite.

Imagine this: It's evening. You're at home, nothing at all is wrong. You're doing whatever you do while relaxing at home. Suddenly a six-hundred-pound bear comes through your glass door. What do you do?

A neighbor and casual friend found himself in this exact position last month. What he wished to do was run for his rifle, but he determined that if he did that his best-case scenario was a destructive bear actually in the house with him, something he still had a moment to prevent. So instead he attacked the bear with the weapon he had at hand, a 9mm pistol loaded with hollow points, admittedly not the first choice he'd have made given time. And instead of suffering further damage or becoming a casualty, he drove the bear off. Not an optimum solution, granted - now the neighborhood had a wounded bear to deal with. But it was an imperfect situation. I sure don't recall hearing anybody criticize the fella afterward. Point is, even in his own home with no reason in this world to expect trouble - except that it's always around the corner - he wasn't in Condition White. If ever in the same circumstance, I hope I do as well.

Did I mention the guy who did this wasn't exactly Conan the Barbarian? Size doesn't matter. Attitude matters. And staying close to your equalizer.

One thing life in the boonies will teach you is that the wolf is always at the door - or the bear, coyote pack, mountain lion, rattler, lightning strike, flash flood, stranded vehicle, killing freeze, you name it - or at least you'd better behave as if he is, because he might show up at any time. These kids were walking through Grizzly country without so much as OC spray close to hand? Their adult supervisors should be whipped. Contemptible.

What kind of right wing, paranoid, radical anarchist crazy man would consider carrying a gun in a bad neighborhood? That's just insane!

Canton, Ohio. Never been there, but it does appear that sanity is not a requirement for a job in "public service" in Canton.



H/T to Snarkybytes.

In fact, it sounds as though Canton could use a Hero!

Ian's getting weirder by the minute (I'm so proud)

My friend Ian likes guns.

Okay - you like guns. I like guns. All God's chilluns like guns. You don't understand - Ian REALLY likes guns. Ian's father is a veritable published scholar of certain types of military small arms, and Ian has embraced that interest. To a degree that teaches you, after a certain level of familiarity has been achieved, that - whatever you may have believed about yourself prior to meeting him - you're not a gun nut. That's a gun nut.

Ian has a website that lets him indulge and express his interests. I've plugged Forgotten Weapons before, and recommend it to anyone interested in such things. But in putting together The Independent Spirit there were certain rules he, Debra and I agreed to: I couldn't indulge my inner anarchist lunatic, and nobody started ranting about guns. So far that pact hasn't been officially violated since nobody's actually, you know, ranting.

(Let's be fair - Ian doesn't rant. He'll talk your ear off about the intricacies of the feeder mechanism on the 1931 Andalusian PFVC-31 light machinegun and how it compares with the similar but not identical Scandahoovian RXP-29, but he doesn't rant. That's my job.)

Buuut...the subject has come up. See, Ian has one single ambition he has not yet achieved. He's never owned a machine gun. Now contrary to popular misconception, machine gun ownership is not actually illegal under federal law. They never outlawed it, they just made it really expensive and hard. So expensive and so hard that only a rich person or a madman would indulge in it. Ian's not...rich.

Another thing Ian's into is Jack Spirko's Survival Podcast. As a lark, Ian - who is already deep in the legal process of legally acquiring his very own legal machine legal gun (I'm just going to keep repeating the L-word here) - called in to the show to ask Spirko's opinion of machine guns as an investment commodity. Spirko replied to the question on the show, and Saturday night we all sat in Landlady's Meadow House and crowed as we listened. The answer was - once Spirko got over the sheer weird badass lunacy of the question - quite clearly reasoned and balanced. I was impressed.

Which is my long-winded way of telling you the link to that part of the show is here. Go listen - it's fun.

Rainy Dayz

I had a phone call from GC Guy yesterday evening, setting the whole schedule back a day. So instead of geiger counters, this became shit-shoveling day. Finished up with what looked like plenty of time in the sky, but it turned out I got home just in time to avoid getting wet. Let the boys out of Gitmo and they both vanished up the driveway to harass the jackrabbits for a while. They came back after it had already started to sprinkle a bit, all happy and ready to hang out. LB has his own shelf in the scriptorium/pantry where I'll never be permitted to store anything until I get internet access at the new Lair. Ghost really prefers to stay outside unless it's too hot or actively raining.

It looks like it's gonna be thunder-boomers off and on all day, but you never know. Ghost holds me responsible and considers it bad management on my part when his happy nap is disturbed by water falling from the frickin sky, which WTF? Can't I get anything right? Water is supposed to appear in the Gitmo trough or either of two bowls, and nowhere else. This is the desert, Uncle Joel.

So it's kind of a sleepy, do-nothing afternoon with a mildly plausible excuse. Maybe with luck the wash'll run and then my excuses will improve.

Life in prison for failure to identify yourself?

Looks like that's what these cops have in mind...

John Doe, as they have been forced to call him, was arrested for trespassing after he was spotted hanging around the parking garage of the Provo City offices, looking into cars. Police told him to leave three times, but he refused and was arrested July 1.

From that day since, he hasn't told anyone who he is, where he came from, or what he was doing in Provo.

Utah County Sheriff's Lt. Dennis Harris said they are baffled. They've told him he was arrested on minor misdemeanor charges and that if he tells them his name, he would probably be let out for time served. A judge did give him a $1,200 cash-only bail, but he hasn't come up with any cash, and it doesn't look like he's made any attempt to get the money. For now, he just sits in jail.

Sounds like there's a good chance he's simply crazy as a loon, which would certainly help with the whole "obstinacy in the face of authority" thing. I've had trouble keeping silence when faced with inquisitive cops, because you have to look into the eyes of a man who can hurt you without consequence and defy him, which will make him angry. That's harder to do in meatspace than it is on an internet forum, and the need to do so in more serious circumstances is a frequent topic for pondering.

So either hats off to the guy, or best wishes for getting over that head injury. I dunno which.

Al Queda is not Emmanuel Goldstein. Al Queda has never been Emmanuel Goldstein.

In other words, now that we know the alleged perpetrator is not Muslim, we know -- by definition -- that Terrorists are not responsible; conversely, when we thought Muslims were responsible, that meant -- also by definition -- that it was an act of Terrorism.

One man's blond, blue-eyed whacko is another man's swarthy terrorist - but there are no blue-eyed terrorists.

H/T to Claire.

UPDATE: William Grigg comes up with the one cogent lesson we can definitely take from this increasingly murky mess:

...never trust an armed man wearing the costume of a police officer.

Busy day.

Yeah, sorry: I got nothing today.

Couldn't get to sleep last night. Usually in high summer we get a breeze or a shower to cool things down before dark, but when we don't the ol' box'o'tin isn't a great place to spend the night 'till the wee hours. Then when I did finally lay down my head, half the bugs in the northern hemisphere wanted to share my bed. So I overslept, of course, which was bad because I promised biscuits by 6:30 to go with Landlady's sausage gravy. So I've been running since my feet hit the floor. Though there was sausage, so I'm not complaining.

We got the injector pump off Gulchendiggensmoothen for transport and diagnosis. M and I spent a couple of hours sheathing the interior walls of M's Dome. I took my kitchen lumber to D's place, and he and I unloaded the trailer in his barn. I won't be able to start on that till Wednesday earliest, because I've got geiger counter duty for the next two days minimum.

Landlady's planning a "farewell to the building inspector" party later next month, so after unloading the trailer I set upon my duties of going around inviting neighbors who had participated in raising her house to come to the party. That got me trapped on a porch by a VERY vocally unfriendly dog, when the residents weren't home to rescue me. A couple of times there I really thought we were gonna fight before I got back to the Jeep.

Picked up my eatin' stuff and took a shower in the Meadow House, and now the dogs and me are gonna go crash. My back's bothering me again, but it was a good weekend.

Kitchen in a trailer

Yike. Closer to six hundred bucks than to five, and I still forgot the drawer slides. Also, I really hope I didn't lose too many of those shelf supports hanging out the rear there.

But that's my kitchen, not counting the hardware that's in the back of the Jeep. Some assembly required.