13 July 2022

My adopted brother, Dave and his wife, Lisa are on COVID Quarantine again (Dave is ’Dangerous’ Dan’s older brother). At least, I think it is again. They’ve had the shots and a booster but are again put upon by the new OMICRON Covid monster. The variant going around up here in Homer, Alaska is the OMICRON, so I’m told. I have read reports that it is about the same intensity as a bad cold. I was seeing my doctor about my trailer hitch shortened finger and I mentioned that it appears that the current state of affairs seems to be a “Pandemic of the Vaccinated”. He laughed and acceded that it did appear that it was indeed the case, while admitting that he had been vaccinated. There are millions of us recalcitrants who have not been nor will we ever be vaccinated with a product that does not protect us nearly 100% from the disease for which it is intended. You take the Bubonic Plague vaccine and you are pretty much 100% immune to any exposure to that plague. The same applies to Chicken Pox, Polio, Measles and others but not to COVID. By definition, a vaccine protects you from the disease therefore the “COVID vaccine” is not a vaccine. The government is selling ”Taking the vaccine lessens the symptoms”. whilst vaccinated people were dropping like flies from previous variants. However, unvaccinated people who’ve contracted the OMICRON variant state that ”It was like a bad cold”. Which means Fauci, the CDC and the NIH are either uninformed or lying. You decide. Ultimately, millions of “We the people” refuse to be stampeded into a behavior that might be more detrimental to our health than OMICRON or any other COVID variant.

It has been a cold summer by my experience. Some people seem to think that it is normal but 51.4F at 7:30 AM and then only 53.9 at noon seems a bit chilly to me. I built a fire this morning. The sun was behind a thick layer of clouds and it felt damp in the house. Burning some of the newly acquired and split wood warmed me for the fourth time. The first three times, cutting it, splitting it and stacking it were not nearly as gratifying as sitting near the warm wood stove. This past weekend, I chainsawed 2 more cords of logs into rounds using my 14” RYOBI chainsaw engine pulling a 16” bar and chain. This $129 or $139 chainsaw has cut over 20 cords of wood, several trees and starts 2nd or 3rd pull every time. It even started on the third pull after having set up all last winter. It has been a remarkable piece of equipment. I bought a brand new STIHL a few years ago that was a useless piece of junk. It often took 10-15 pulls to get it started, if it would start at all. Almost $400 and it was a POS. I will never buy another piece of STIHL equipment.

Some pictures of before and after. I’ll need to start the splitting and stacking, in earnest, soon.

I don’t think I’ve told the remarkable story of Summer’s chicken boy friend (not Dangerous Dan). We were given a ramshackle chicken house by a lady relocating to the Lower 48. The terms of the gift included having to take the few chickens and the several ducks. We agreed and it took most of one day to get the chicken abode onto our trailer and unloaded at our place. This was in the late summer. We kept and fed these chickens and the few that we had prior to this transaction through the winter. The next Spring, chicks were hatched in our incubator. Among those chicks was a chick that became an extraordinarily pretty rooster chick as he got a few weeks old. Fast forward about 2 months and he was handsome and becoming more handsome by the day. Summer thought him so handsome that she named him Fabio after the handsome guy that graced the covers of dozens of romance novels back in the 90s. Then one day Summer went into the chicken coop to get the eggs and feed the chickens only to find herself face to face with a small black bear attempting to open the galvanized trash can where we stored the food. This upset Summer and we decided that the chickens had to go. We gave them all to a couple who had done some work for us on the same terms we acquired the chicken house. ”You can have the chickens but you have to take the chicken house.” They agreed and Summer started catching chickens and loading the in to carriers. Summer had caught Fabio and a hen which she placed in the first carrier. The couple’s son was the door keeper on the carrier and he opened the door too soon for the next two chickens and Fabio escaped. All of the other chickens were caught and hauled away to their ‘old’ new home. Fabio, however, had escaped into the bush and was not seen again for months. We decided that he had become dinner for some critter out in the wild. That was not the case. In late winter, approaching Spring, Summer saw him roosting in a Spruce tree about 20 feet from where the chicken house had been. She tried to catch him after dark on a couple of evenings with no luck. We had and have no idea what he ate or where he roosted during that hard winter. Anyway, Summer began putting food out for him and he, eventually, began to wander around the property. Soft hearted Summer decided that he was lonely and bought two hens from a neighbor to keep him company. The remarkable survival of Fabio through a winter where there was, apparently, nothing to eat and the temps had been as low as -6F is a testament to his unbelievable tenacity. And that fact does not even address the constant dangers of eagles and other very hungry carnivorous critters wandering around in the snow looking for their next meal. His winter survival is nothing short of a miracle. Now that he has been back for a couple of years, Summer will not even consider getting rid of him. And that is how we ended up with 15-20 free range chickens. Fabio has been a busy boy.

Dangerous Dan and his brother, Dave were working on the house foundation this past weekend. They nailed all of the plywood to the studs and beams supporting the house. Dan had put just enough nails in them to keep them attached to the studs, during the previous weekend. Dave put a ton of nails in them to insure that they would never move. After that they jacked up the other corner of the house and installed more beams and studs. Dan did not want to apply the balance of the plywood before removing all of the now useless beams and structures under the edge of the house. This needs to be done so that the foundation can be insulated. If the foundation is not insulated the ground freezes around it and it heaves. The frost heaving ground can and will break or lift the concrete foundation. Breaking or lifting the foundation is not a good thing since it would require a great deal more money and work to repair it. Even with the free labor this project is costing $7000+. I had given up, if Dan hadn’t jumped in to do this, I guess that the house would have fallen off the existing piling foundation before winter and left Summer and I homeless. This house was built on pilings that some only went 2-3 feet into the ground. Some of the pilings were untreated Spruce logs others were chunks of old power poles. The Spruce logs had rotted away completely and I had replaced them with house jacks. The house has moved so much that the house jacks had been pushed over and are no longer supporting anything. I replaced the house jacks with concrete blocks topped with a wooden pad. The house moved more and some of the concrete blocks fell over or were no longer supporting anything.. Now, in a couple of more weeks, the house movement will be stopped for the foreseeable future and I and Summer will continue the inside renovation. I had quit on the house because I was expecting it to become a pile of kindling very soon. I am now re-enthused and ready to start the interior renovation as soon as Dan says that the house will no longer move. We will still have to do some more jacking to get the entire house level. I am really and truly tired of living in a disaster area.

Here are some pictures of the progress and the potential disaster.

Some time during this week I have to move the water line feeding the house as it is in the way of getting in another stud on that SW corner. Also, since the house has moved more, it is once again in a strained position. Adding a bit of pipe will eliminate the 90 elbow and the potential for it to come apart at one of the joints. As you can see I have already had to take the strain off once before. That is how the 90 elbow came to be installed.

Well that’s it for today. I’ve got to get my old bones back to work.