Migraine

Sometimes I wake up feeling kinda weird. It doesn't happen very often, but it's happened for years and years. I don't feel bad exactly, just weird. And I can't focus my eyes to read - in fact I can barely cross a room. I generally sit it out and that's as bad as it gets.

This morning my vision cleared and I thought it was over. It's shit-shoveling day, and yesterday the wind blew so hard I didn't want to work outside at all but this morning was just beautiful so I figured on getting quite a bit done. But no sooner did I go out in the sun and start on the horses than my head got all strange. I couldn't concentrate, could barely hold a conversation with H about her new horse, and my head started to hurt like the worst hangover I ever had. Except I haven't had much of anything to drink. I finished with the horses, but it took a long time.

Now I'm just sitting in the quiet and cool of the Scriptorium. The boys are probably mad at me, because I left them in Gitmo. Should let them out, I suppose, but this would be the day they do something stupid. They're in cahoots with Uncle Murphy, and I can't deal with him right now. Dammit - such a pretty day.

H sold Solari the World's Most Nervous Mare, and bought a new mare. She's the friendliest horse I've met in years, laps up attention like a puppy. But H's luck holds true, because as soon as she got her saddled to go riding with a friend she threw a shoe. The horse has some long, weird name. H told me what it is but I can't remember. Also I think there's something wrong with her, because she's been here since Friday and barely shat enough to fill the bottom of a wagon. Sometimes I think H isn't the finest judge of horseflesh.

I'm just gonna be irresponsible for the rest of the afternoon, I think. Even writing this is making my eyes cross again. Forgive any typos.

Beans 101

When I first started looking at storing food long-term, I noticed that everybody talked about storing food but nobody talked about eating it. And some of the food items people stored - or talked about storing - aren't what most people actually eat. Or sometimes even recognize as food. Lentils, for example, still perplex me somewhat.

The classic example of this is beans.

Beans are cheap. Easily available. Store forever. Great! They're also inedible in stored form, and damn near so even after you've soaked and cooked them. Beans, by themselves, taste like dung. So I thought I'd pass on my own experiences in rendering them not only edible but palatable.

I live at a fairly high altitude. One of the first things I learned about cooking beans was that it seemed to be impossible. I soaked them. I boiled them. I soaked and boiled the damn things until they fermented in the pot, and they were still crunchy. Turns out what I needed was a pressure cooker. This not only made the process possible, it reduced the time scale to a tolerable level.

But I've still found it desirable to cook the beans twice before I plan to eat them. So the first thing I do is just cook the beans - about fifteen minutes after the cooker starts venting. This leaves me with softish beans and some dark, nutritious liquid. It looks and tastes terrible.

Now I start adding ingredients. This is very highly variable. We've got a whole cabinet full of canned goods, some of which are getting pretty old. My approach to canned food is that it isn't really food, it's spice. For example, we have numerous flats of refried beans. I despise refried beans out of the can. But if I add a can of it to a pot of beans, it makes the whole thing taste good.

This is a fairly basic load for my favorite "recipe" - beans, broth, refried beans, corn, and fresh potatoes and an onion. Spice to taste. Canned chili also worked fantastically for this.

This is also an excellent way to get rid of those grody "food" items in #10 cans from Y2Que. Yes, we've still got some. I'm working on it.

What you end up with is delicious. It's delightful to the eyes. It lasts for a couple of days, which means it's like stone soup - you can just keep adding stuff till it's gone. If it doesn't come out right, you can doctor it to an amazing degree.

Point being, if you practice food storage, don't just put away a whole bunch of dried food and think you're golden. You and your family need to be willing and happy to eat the shite, so you should be working on how you're going to be ready to do that. In fact, live on the stuff for a while as you rotate your stock. It's fun!

Happy Mudder's Day!

Oh, this is too much like work.

Okay, so maybe perfect was a little too strong. There was still some digging this morning. Plus getting cinders in the trailer is about as much work as I thought it was gonna be.

Having dug the leach trench and getting the slope right, it's time to start filling it with stuff. I think I've got enough cinders I can scavenge to at least lay down the bed for the pipe.

Also the barrel pit has suffered some erosion. That was never unexpected, since last Monsoon it practically filled with silt and I had to dig it all out again. This time's not nearly as bad, and the pit is quite a bit wider than it needs to be anyway. That's the nature of backhoes, especially in unfamiliar hands. Both M and I spent time learning how to use it while digging this pit. The blocks are for the two barrels, of course. Right now the barrels are on the property, getting fitted with plumbing. I'll show how those are installed after I do it.

The little Jeep trailer really isn't made for a lot of weight, so actually filling it would be a mistake. Still, after a whole lot of shoveling the amount of cinders I actually had to unload into the ditch looked pretty pitiful.

I have just got to get this thing done and filled before it starts getting really hot, or life will not be a good thing for a while.

I had to look closely, but...

Once I realized what I was looking at I slapped the table and yelled, "Brilliant!" Scared the dogs.

Seems like overkill, but then I don't know how hard those things vibrate. Kevin added, "I'm not even going to ask what he uses for case lube."

Near perfect.

God, I'm good once I get into trenching mode. The slope for the leach trench is near perfect. Just a little more to do, but I ran out of steam for today.

The boys helped. Can I get them to dig a hole in the right place? I cannot. But at least they hung around and let me work.

Now I've got a decision to make. I can spend money on cinders, or spend much time sifting pebbles out of the wash. I'm gonna test the pebbles approach, but I've a feeling it's time to spend money.

If you're losing the game, change the rules.

I read this story over at Guffaw in AZ and it got me thinking about one of my favorite shooting match stories.

I was never a world-class shooter, but I did used to shoot a very great deal more than I do now and I really enjoyed combat and hunter-pistol matches. The club in the little Texas panhandle town where I lived had a series of monthly pistol matches and I was generally there. None of us were big-time competitors, it was just for fun and practice. All the regulars knew each other.

There were three local cops who used to come to the combat matches, one of them regularly. He was pretty good, too, though he never finished in the money. The other two were frankly pitiful. Then one month none of the cops showed up. The next month, none of the cops showed up. We wondered about this, and dispatched one of our number to ask one of the cops why. They were perfectly welcome to compete, it wasn't like anybody (Well, I did, but I kept it to myself) wanted them to go away. The answer that came back was kind of ominous - "You'll find out." It seems that the three cops stopped coming to our match because they were ordered to. Nobody actually said we were embarrassing the department and the local chief didn't like it, but that was the impression we got.

Around that time the local cops started building their own range on city property. This was redundant, because they'd always had free access to the club's two ranges. When some of us went to see, we were chased off - it was very hush-hush. Shortly after that, the cop who used to compete regularly came to our combat match - not to shoot, but to deliver an invitation. We were invited to form a pistol team and come to their first match. I think it was PPC rules.

We should have studied the rules more carefully. We were cocky as hell, sent our best shooters (I just barely made the team) and we got our clocks cleaned. We showed up with our .45's and stared in bemusement at the heavy-barreled .38's we were competing against. The stage times were really liberal: We were used to shooting each stage as fast as possible because that was part of the scoring, but in this match it was best to take your time. The scoring rings were really, um, small. And the loads they were using were barely more than squibs.

Yeah, we got clobbered.

We got a little of our own back after the match proper, when they set up bowling pin tables. The .38's went back in the shooting boxes and the .45's came out, but now they were competing with people who literally slept with their .45's. Our team took that event 1-2-3. But we weren't anxious to do it again, so I guess they showed us.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing...

Somehow, in spite of record cold snaps this past winter, the Lair never broke a pipe. It wasn't because of great planning on my part, and I spent the whole winter waiting for it to happen. It would have been a disaster since I got all my water from the Lair site all winter long.

I also spent the winter thinking about what I should do about it. This morning I finally did it.

Dug out the supply line and cut it off. This is just far enough under the Lair to be a real PITA, so when I actually installed the new gadget I crawled all the way under and did it prone.

This is the new gadget. The gate valve shuts off water to the cabin (believe it or not the only other shut-off I've got is all the way by the cistern, and even that probably wouldn't be there if M hadn't put it there.) The tap will allow me to drain the cabin's pipes if I fear a big freeze - or just if I'm going away for a long time.

Got it installed, and it Doesn't! Even! Leak!

Okay, you know me better than that - of course it leaks. ($%^#ing threaded PVC fittings) But only a little, and only on the tap, which will actually be easy to fix. Probably should have just glued the threads instead of depending on Teflon tape - which almost always leaks.

See, I think this is very pretty. Sparkling, tinkling water flowing in the desert. It's completely impractical, but I often think I'd like to recreate the little water garden I built at my house in Kalifornia.

I wasn't the only one who thought that would be a good idea - the little stream that formed while I emptied air from the water line attracted wildlife pretty much instantly, though only this guy came close.

Sorry about that, chief...

It was just too pretty a day for sitting in the Scriptorium. I even got some trenching done. Septic field! Do I know how to have fun, or what?

I'm gonna go do it more.

Well, alrighty then.

I worry about the boys too much.

Post-walky, I took them in the Jeep to go water the trees. Less than five minutes after I started watering the first tree (Yes, I timed it, though not for that reason) they sidled off over a rise and disappeared. I didn't bother them; figured they'd probably come back. They didn't.

I finished up watering - one reason I was timing, I get bored and want to make sure I water each tree at least five minutes - took the battery out of the tractor for recharging, turned off the water, started up the Jeep. No boys. I called, but didn't waste a lot of time on that. I drove down the ridge, past the Lair, into the wash, and home. No boys.

I was determined not to worry about it. One of three things would happen: They would catch up with the Jeep, meet me at home (they know where they live) or I'd get an annoyed phone call from a neighbor. A distant fourth possibility: One or both of them would get hurt and I'd spend the rest of my life guilt-stricken. See, I never used to worry about the dogs wandering off. They did that sometimes, and they always came home. But the older dogs were always a moderating influence: If they weren't getting a walk or a Jeep ride, all they wanted to do was hang around the yard. After Magnus and Fritz died, Ghost and LB remembered they were young dogs and I started having a lot of behavior problems - and calls from the neighbors. But that was a year and a half ago, and lately they've behaved themselves. So it's time to loosen the leash if I can.

Came home, backed the Jeep to the barn, and heard panting before I even unshipped the battery. Here they both came, and Little Bear made a beeline for the quiet and cool of the Scriptorium, where he has staked out a shelf for sleeping. Why they didn't meet up with the Jeep and get a ride, I dunno. They just wanted a run. That's okay as long as they come home, and they did. So there, worrywart.

BTW, after fifteen minutes of watering the water still came out of the hose hot. That's about 600 feet of water line exposed to the sun (there's a lot of trenching in the future) and enough free hot water for a good lingering shower. I don't think arranging hot water in the Lair is gonna be a big deal - at least in the summer.

On this front, at least, we're winning.

According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership, two out of the fifty states - Alaska and Arizona - score a big 0 out of a possible 100. According to the Brady Campaign to Promote Victim Helplessness, those two states only avoided negative numbers because they're still on the side of the angels when it comes to mandating college student helplessness, at any rate.

I like the color scheme on their interactive map. States scoring 0-10 get colored in red - and by far most of the country is red. This is so not the way things were going just a few years ago - the right activists are winning, for once.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Truth in Advertising claims "we want modest controls, and not to confiscate guns or make gun ownership difficult for the sake of making it difficult" Yet in any state that scored 100 on their totalitarian little test, gun ownership would be so circumscribed that you really would have to be a nut - or a criminal - to practice it.

The Brady Campaign to Redefine Common Sense claims "Sensible Gun Laws Work!" Yet even the most cursory examination of violent crime and murder statistics by state shows no correlation whatever between the severity of a state's gun laws and the rate of those crimes. By city, the correlation can be negative - DC and Chicago are consistently the most violent cities in the country, and hardly models of firearm freedom.

Yet the Brady Campaign to Prevent Logical Deduction keeps shouting the same old slogans, demanding a return to tried-and-failed nostrums that do nothing but empower predators (and government thugs, but I repeat myself.)

I confess that it perplexes me, because I never expected the old oppressive trends to reverse. But there it is. Rotsa Ruck, Paul.

A Manifesto of Sorts for the Freedom Outlaw

Speaking of Claire, this is beautiful.

What's an Outlaw to Do?

You have no obligation to bear all the world’s pains. You have no duty to accept whatever’s imposed upon you against your will. The only obligations you must carry are your self-obligations — and with creativity they may be made lighter.

Why are you still here? Go! Read!

Blackwater/Xe/Thugs'R'Us needs to change its name again...

They can call themselves "Cognitive Dissonances'R'Us. Here are three words I'll bet you never expected to see in one sentence - at least not without negative qualifiers...

Blackwater’s New Ethics Chief: John Ashcroft

As far as I can tell, they're being serious.

H/T to Claire.

Scheduling Conflicts? Me?

Landlady sent me an email this morning reminding me that her drywall was to be delivered today around noon. If I'd seen it earlier, it would have changed the day. I saw it right after I took a call from my neighbor J. He wanted to know if I wanted to go to [the big town about fifty miles away] for a hardware run. I always need a hardware run, plus it's a break from the desert. I'd just hung up when I saw the email.

Didn't worry about it too much, because the delivery guy has been here for a whole house worth of lumber and should remember where it is. But I called my other neighbor D, who was very likely to be first on the delivery guy's schedule. Asked him to shepherd the drywall, and if there was a problem to give the delivery guy my phone number. I hoped to be back before the delivery, but it was a pretty wan hope. D said no problem, he was indeed going to get a delivery and he'd make sure of the drywall. So I relaxed.

Lowe's is instant sensory overload to me. I could spend hours in this place, and always do spend too much money. Since I probably go here maybe three times a year, it's actually like a fairly inexpensive trip to an amusement park with way better-than-average tchotchkes.

"What do you need? Besides a miracle?"

"Gorilla tape. Lots of Gorilla tape. And some eight-inch carriage bolts."

The Winner!

A few weeks ago I told you my friend M had entered a video contest at something called getrichslowly.org. Looking at his competition, we had a pretty good feeling about this.

Well, he won! Congratulations, M! (who sometimes goes by the nom de guerre "Ian." What a silly fake name.)

We actually have conversations like this. Because I'm a putz.

H/T to Jon.

That's why they fought and died?

I've got a feeling that's not why they thought they were fighting and dying.



H/T to The Adaptive Curmudgeon.

Protecting the innocent, one dead child at a time

NATO officials confirm: While enforcing the Libyan no-fly zone, a NATO warplane fired upon a house that was clearly preparing for takeoff. By the wildest coincidence, the house just happened to be piloted by Muammar Gaddafi and a whole bunch of his family.

Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, the youngest son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and three of his grandchildren have been killed in a NATO air strike, a Libyan government spokesman said.

Gaddafi and his wife were in the Tripoli house of his 29-year-old son, Saif al-Arab Gaddafi, when it was hit by at least one missile fired by a NATO warplane late on Saturday, according to Libyan government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim.

Gaddafi's magic anti-missile forcefield still seems operational; its a shame he didn't buy one for his kids.

Y'know - If you're gonna assassinate a foreign head of state, just do it fergoshsake and stop taking it out on his kids. At this point it's hard to believe the guy's got any family left; he must have bred like a tribble when he was younger.

Prison Nation

Came on this article, comparing the job/benefit prospects of a potential Harvard student versus a California prison guard. Analysis: Skip Harvard.

As a California prison guard, you can make six figures in overtime and bonuses alone. While Harvard-educated lawyers and consultants often have to work long hours with little recompense besides Chinese take-out, prison guards receive time-and-a-half whenever they work more than 40 hours a week. One sergeant with a base salary of $81,683 collected $114,334 in overtime and $8,648 in bonuses last year, and he's not even the highest paid.

Once upon a time I lived for the day when the country would see a glut of lawyers, because when I was younger that was a real growth field. I finally got my wish, only to look around and find myself living in a country where the only growth industry is prisons. And that industry has gotten so big and out of control that entire communities depend on it as nearly their sole employer.

Too many laws? Naw, that can't be it...

Huh! I assumed he was dead all along.

But Landlady told me this morning that Osama Bin Laden is finally dead. And despite a certain knee-jerk suspicion caused by that "bullet in the face" thing, my reaction is

Please God! Let there be a hell!

(Article link courtesy of Claire.)

ETA: Wait. What?

A senior US official told US television networks that he had been buried at sea, without giving further details.

Earlier an administration official said of the corpse: "We are ensuring that it is handled in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition.

"This is something that we take very seriously. And so therefore this is being handled in an appropriate manner."

Burying bin Laden's body at sea would ensure that his final resting place does not become a shrine and a place of pilgrimage for his followers.

Okay, that's a good reason for sending him to sleep with the fishies. But before you've put all skepticism to rest? Hang him from a lamp post outside the Pentagon until the DNA results are independently verified, then dump him in the drink. But now you've got my conspiracy theory genes all in an uproar. Tim Osman isn't gonna show up living in Argentina, is he?

Is he?