8 July 2022

9:00 AM It’s July 8 and it’s 51 F outside and it’s raining. I built a fire in the wood stove. It’s uncomfortably cool and damp. There could not be a more depressing day, at least for myself. While it is technically still Summer but we are starting to get little glimpses into our rapidly approaching cold future. Normally, at this time of year, I have my blackout curtains pulled tight. During the Summer sun is relentless and shining 17+ hours a day and can and does interrupt normal sleep patterns. Almost everyone in Alaska has their blackout curtains pulled tight so as to get some much needed sleep. Yesterday I decided that my bedroom curtains were going to stay open. I’m not too worried about Peeping Toms as I doubt that anyone, and I do mean anyone, wants to see a 77 year old man take off his clothes and go to bed. I’ve been working so much that sleeping is not a problem and I don’t want to miss any of the light. It’ll be dark or darkish for about 17 hours a day very soon and I don’t want to miss any of that gorgeous golden sunshine. I want to go to sleep looking at it and wake up looking at it. Of course, this decision comes a few weeks late. Then there was still bright daylight when I crawl into bed some where between 11 and midnight. Last night at just after 11:00, it was almost dark. Another one of life’s missed opportunities.

If you’ve been to the grocery store or your local gas station, you are likely suffering from ’Sticker Shock’. Now granted, I am old. However, even though it’s been over 60 years since I worked in the grocery store meat market with my father, I cannot believe the prices. I was in our local Safeway a couple of days ago, last Tuesday, I think. Anyway, as Summer, my wonderful and beautiful daughter, is working six days a week delivering the US Mail, I decided that I’d pickup some quick and easy dinner. I was thinking, maybe a roasted chicken, a couple of fresh veggies and something for dessert. I proceeded to the Deli and found that there were only two roasted chickens remaining. I was considering myself fortunate that there was anything left, as this is the tourist season. The Homer economy is geared to the tourist trade, they are like locusts. They clean out virtually everything in both grocery stores. There are aisles that have fewer cans of product than my own pantry. So back to the roasted chicken. I was about to put it into my basket when I decided to check the price. $12.83 !!!!!! Yikes! I quickly put that 2 pound critter back onto the heated shelf. Can you say ’Sticker Shock’? I can remember, while i was still in high school, working in the meat market and that we were selling fryer chickens for 17 cents a pound. For 17 cents a pound we cut them into pieces and wrapped them. I must have parted out a zillion chickens. Rotisserie roasted chickens were about a dollar-twenty-five. Dad roasted them, at least, three times a week and covered them in his special BBQ sauce on Fridays. They made the store smell wonderful. The point of this trip back into the distant past is that while things have become easier in many ways they really haven’t become any better. Food, gasoline and diesel are at the highest prices in the history of America. There is a looming worldwide food shortage and who knows what else whether the lights will stay on. There is an old adage, ”In the Land of the Blind, the one eyed man is king”. I am afraid that the ” man with one eye” will be the government doling out the food. Whoever controls the food controls the people. People will submit to or do anything to feed themselves and their families. The ”New World Order” seems to be the old world order where a few people controlled all of the land and the people were slaves to them. If you haven’t been stockpiling food, you may become one of the slaves. Just two years ago food, and fuel were cheap and plentiful compared to todays’ prices and shortages. The entire American economy is not just in shambles it is a full on disaster. I don’t have to say it but you know who to blame.

With winter rushing toward us like a runaway freight train, I have been busy buying, hauling and processing firewood. Normally, I would stop at 8-9 cords. However, in light of the exorbitant price of fuel oil, this year I’m doing, at least, 12 cords. I’ve heard it said that you aren’t a ‘real Alaskan’ until you’ve had to burn the furniture to stay warm. Two things: Much of the furniture is not flammable and there isn’t more than a day or three of it that is flammable. House empty in three days and then freeze to death. NOPE! This year I am able to buy some Birch logs which are much more dense and burn hotter than the Spruce logs that we’ve had for the past 5 winters. The 500 gallons of fuel oil we normally have in our tank, that is now empty, will likely cost in excess of $2800. I’m guessing the price because I’ve been afraid to ask the price. I do know that we’ll be buying it a hundred gallons (the minimum delivery) at the time, as we can afford it.

At last, we are getting the foundation under the house. I had given up. I simply did not possess the necessary skills to fix what was slowly becoming an instant disaster. The house was slowly moving to the point that it would simply fall off the pilings and become a pile of kindling. Dangerous Dan, Summer’s significant other, is an expert in these matters. He has stepped in for free to stabilize the house and get a proper foundation under it. In spite of the free labor, this project will cost about $7000.

This is an older house built, in 1982, on pretty much whatever happened to be handy. Mostly old creosoted power poles and chunks of Spruce logs. None of the sunk more than 2-3 feet into the ground. With every freeze and thaw they moved up and down and slowly but surely leaned toward the downhill side of the house. We had maybe another year before we would be living in a tent and become homeless.

Yep, we need to paint on the house. But because the house was apt to become kindling I really had no desire to splash out for several hundred dollars for paint. Paint will likely become a reality next Spring.

Much of my life has been or should have been a TV show called ’How Stupid Can You Be’. I barely graduated from a high school whose year book was call ”Retrospect’. This was a book that sold for $15 that I could not afford to purchase. My only participation in that book was a Senior picture. No accolades. No participation. Just a blank space under my name and I was then and am now okay with that. I learned more in the 3-4 books a week that I checked out of the library than from all of the classes that I took. I do not know why Aristotle and Socrates were interesting for the same reason that Treasure Island, and hundreds of others caught my attention. All through high school, I was forced too visit various Student Counselors whose constant refrain was ”Robert, we know that you can do better than this.” The problem was and is that I couldn’t. I was being smothered. Education then was stultifying and now has lapsed into pure stultifying indoctrination. The NEA was just cranking up when I was in school. Now this same organization is selling ”I’m here, I’m queer and hand me a beer” to the children in kindergarten. I may be wrong but I don’t think that that equates to ”Mom and Apple Pie”.

I joined the Homer VFW a few months back. I haven’t been much of a joiner since a joined the Naval Reserve in 1961 at age 17. I was a pretty good sailor. I did my job. I didn’t do much. I was a Radarman on a ship that refueled other ships at sea. I made three trips to the South China Sea. Mostly boring as hell with moments of sheer terror. The reason I mention this is that I can’t seem to bring myself to go to the VFW Club. I’m not entirely sure why but I suspect that it is because I am afraid that I will meet someone like my late younger brother (Marine Recon) that really is a hero and next to him I’m a slug. My brother was the nicest most gentle man you might ever meet. I was standing next to him when a moron asked him ”Did you ever kill anybody?’ His answer was a classic. He replied ”Only women and children”. After he died from some weird cancer, it occurred to me that what he said was, at least, partially true. The NVA would put a gun in the hands of women and children during a firefight. The American soldiers had no idea who was or wasn’t the enemy. My brother, the poor bastard, had a dump truck load of guilt that he did not deserve. If the Agent Orange cancer didn’t kill him his guilt did. It’s a little late but Semper FI, Brother Doug.

I am back to my old game. I am repairing appliances for the nice folks around Homer and Anchor Point. Obviously, I can use the money but more than that after nearly 5 years of living on this hill mostly alone, I needed to see and talk with other human beings. Making a few bucks is good but interacting with other humans is wonderful. I am happy as a clam in soft sand that I get off this Greer Road hill a few times a week.

Well that’s it for me. It’s 11:42 and I have a refrigerator to repair tomorrow and 2 cords of wood to process. Good Night!

Unlike lawyers, most people don’t see things as having several truths. The truth simply ”IS”. The truth now is that Lady Liberty is in a deep pond of male bovine feces and just barely keeping her nose above the stinking mess. Our President is suffering from Elder Abuse. He is so impaired that he no longer knows who he is or where he is much of the time. And yet, the abusers parade him out to say a few garbled sentences and drift off into some fantasy world where he was once a truck driver or a postman or some other imagined skilled labor or profession. Wife Jill has all but disappeared. She was, at first, allowed to be on stage to control and to take him by the elbow and guide him off the stage before he lapsed into one of his fantasies. Now he is often out on the stage alone and lost. Who is, actually, running the American government is a question on the minds of many, including myself. We appear to be living in a country where unelected bureaucrats are calling all of the shots (No COVID pun intended). With all of the inflation, shortages and other impositions of the failing economy, I’m not quite sure what to do next. Here in Alaska ‘next’ probably means hoping for an extra warm summer to grow enough food for next winter and beyond. Things are likely to get a lot worse before they get better. As for you in the Lower 48, I’d say plant a garden, harvest your crops, vacuum seal and freeze them. Groceries may be hard to come by soon.

Yesterday, Sunday, was the last day of Greer Rd Greenhouse. We sold it out almost completely. All that is left are some small, but questionable, purchases made by Summer nearly two years ago, some blow mold plastic pots and trays and a couple of boxes of fertilizer. On one hand, I am happy as a clam that it has closed and on the other hand a little sad. It was Summer’s dream. It could have been very successful this year but the long term outlook was far less lucrative than her new job delivering the US Mail. Summer and I took down all of the road signs yesterday. There is not a trace of the business left except the big tent/greenhouse where it once existed. On Saturday, a lady wrote down her phone number because she wanted to buy the tent/greenhouse. I don’t know why she would want to buy a used tent/greenhouse when you can buy the tent, the extra tent frame and greenhouse vinyl for about $1500. Plus the fact that you’d have to take it down and the reassemble it. It seems like a lot of extra work to me. People are a mystery.

Today was the day I was supposed to get on with the waterproofing of the store tent that is about to become the storage tent. The waterproofing entails ’buttering’ 1×2 strips of wood with roofing cement and screwing them down on the deck and against the 2x8s that the tent is mounted upon. During the construction, I put enough adhesive between the 2x8s and the deck to waterproof and attach the boards down forever. That’s what I thought. In spite of my best efforts the rain water runs under the 2x8s in several places. Today, of course, it is raining. I was, also, going to change from the studded tires to my summer tires and, of course, it’s raining. So this is what I’m doing. Sitting here, pecking away at my iPad and drinking coffee. I’ve got a huge refrigerator stashed in ”Dangerous Dan’s” garage. It has a freon leak somewhere. I’ve now got to buy a nitrogen regulator and a bottle of nitrogen to try and find said leak. I could use an air compressor but that would introduce moisture into the system which as you might guess is not a good thing. So-o-o here I am waiting again. There is, however, a good thing about the rain. Yep, it’s melting the snow. The bad thing is that the ground is thawing and we will be mired in mud for 8-10 days. This is one of those ‘You can’t win for losing’ situations. One good thing is that the chickens now are able to roam freely around the property and harvest the bounty of worms and bugs released from the frozen ground. This free range feeding saves a lot of money on store bought feed. There are always two sides to every coin but when I call ’Heads’ the coin often has two ’Tails’. Hmmm, I think I may be complaining too much. Sorry.

I don’t know what to repair first, the Range Rover or the tractor. We need them both. I’m leaning toward repairing the Rover as it looks like an easier, quicker fix. Also, the tractor may have and most likely has a parts availability problem. Pasquali no longer supports or stocks parts for this tractor and, apparently, neither does anyone else.. The tractor is an antique. As near as I can tell, it was built in the 1970s. You’d think that the manufacturer would still have some parts lying around after 50 years. I’d say that not having parts for a tractor that they purposefully built to last a very long time is pretty damned short sighted. I have a second Pasquali, in pieces, that I might have to reassemble to solve the tractor problem.

The above was written in April and it is now June 10. Pretty much everything described above has not been done. I decided for my own sanity and to make a few bucks to go back into the appliance repair business. I have decades of experience. However, those have seemed like the wrong decades as almost everything now has a computer in it. I was around for the beginning and middle of the computer invasion but am somewhat ill prepared for the full on computer assault on appliances that worked much better without the computers. This is not to say that I can’t repair these pieces of crap. What I am saying is that the old stuff was way more reliable. The old time Maytag washer would likely go 20-25 years before it, at last, needed both belts replaced or, maybe, a pump. A new Maytag washer might go 5 years before some major computer or electronic problem. I worked on a Maytag washer a couple of weeks ago that the wires supplying power to the pump were so small and brittle that they broke. I repaired one by splicing in a bit of more flexible wire. Then was called back a couple weeks later to replace the other wire to the pump. This was a machine that was less than 9 months old and the owner was angry. My advice to all of you is to keep your old machine until it dies or you die.

This is Friday. A week ago, I had an accident that took about a half inch off my left index finger, the one next to my thumb. It felt so good that I considered doing it again. NOT! It cut off some bone and now I’m handicapped with one good hand. The doctor tells me that I’m in for, at least, two months of healing. He told me this while he was using some nippers to cut off the jagged parts of the bone so that he could pull some skin back over the raw meat and exposed bone. The tractor and the Rover will likely go unrepaired until September. Of course, mid-September is when it typically starts to rain almost every day. This incident happened when I was unhitching the trailer. The trailer rolled forward and caught my finger between the ball and the trailer hitch. It didn’t cut the end of my finger off. It mashed it off. YIKES and OUCH!!!

Dangerous Dan, Summer’s significant other, has taken over the house foundation project. He is an construction expert. He, actually, went to school for construction and has over 30 years of experience in home building. He volunteered for this gig because since April the house has moved about 6 inches down hill and I am not competent to solve the problem. Dan has arranged to have a new foundation dug and concrete poured. I would be helping dig or whatever except now I am handicapped. Of course, I will do what I can which will likely be the act of providing money and material transport. My stupid accident could not have come at a worse time.

Well, that brings you up to date, if you cared to be updated. I often think about posting some stuff but then the time gets away from me. My usual posts often take 2-3 hours. With that in mind, I have decided that, in the future, I will attempt to post more often and make the posts much shorter than the ‘books’ I usually post.

HAPPY SUMMER!!! GO TO THE BEACH IF YOU CAN AFFORD THE GAS,

Elon Musk may or may not be the savior of free speech but he certainly rocked the world of a lot of Liberals and Democrats. His purchase of just over 9% of Twitter has created a tsunami of criticism and applause. With Musk you never know which way he might turn next. With Twitter he might just collect his dividends and let the operation continue as it has. On the other hand, he could start cleaning out the Liberal Board of Directors and set the company on a path to equal access. He might even restore President Trump’s Twitter account. Or he could simply buy enough shares to run it however he wishes. Or he could just pump it and dump it to make few hundred million dollars. Only time will tell. The Rasputin lookalike the used to run Twitter runs SQUARE. I did not know that until today. I will be dumping SQUARE for some other payment company. If you run a small mobile business you must take cards but I’ll be damned if I’ll make Rasputin another nickel. Anyway, many of us will be waiting anxiously to seek what Mr. Musk does. As for President Zelenskyy, he has shown us what a man should be and it isn’t some ’snowflake’ in a dress. ”I don’t need a ride, I need ammo” are the words of a man and a hero. The movie ‘The Three Hundred’ comes to mind when I read about him and the Ukrainian people. They are facing an enemy with very nearly unlimited resources due to the fact that some of the is EU still buying heating fuel from him.

My foray into appliance repair has not been going very well. I get a two, maybe three, calls a week. Almost all of them are unrepairable or needing to order parts. Parts take a week and sometimes more to get from somewhere in the Lower 48 to me. By the time the arrive, I’ve forgotten who they are for and that has me looking at the invoices to find the customer to whom they belong. I went on one call on a front load washer and did the trouble shooting. Their handyman had already come up with the answer to the fault except when he did exactly what I would have done it didn’t fix it. I told them that if the new sensor didn’t solve the problem that the Control Board was likely defective. They said ”Thank You” and I’ve heard nothing else about it. I will say that I am curious but not curious enough to go back. There is no point in getting involved in something that no longer concerns me.

The closing of Summer’s Greer Rd Greenhouse is continuing. She’s losing about 10% on everything she sells but 90% of something is better than 100% of nothing. I ran the store last Friday and Saturday. There weren’t a lot of customers so I set up the camera that also has a motion detector. That way I could do whatever needed to be done and the motion detector would ping my phone, if a customer went into the store. I swear all of this new fangled stuff is like magic. I can be a hundred yards away or in the house and get the ping and see the customers on my phone. I could talk to them too except the speaker is so small that it is barely audible. I’m thinking of charging up a couple of walkie talkies and leaving one on the counter of the store. So when the camera pings me I can talk to the customer and tell them I’ll be there in a minute or two. Keeps the customer happy and I’m not having to rush.

Summer sold all of the geese. All six went to a lady that has other Toulouse geese. She needed some fresh blood in her flock. I was really, really happy to see them go. It is one less thing for which I have to be responsible. Even though I haven’t had a lot of service calls for my appliance repair business, I expect that it will gradually pick up. When it does I will have less time for the ’homestead’ duties. I got my fill of farming when I was a boy. I lived with my grandparents outside of Newport, Arkansas. They were farmworkers. That meant that we boys were farm workers. I was in the cotton patch in the Spring hoeing the weeds out of the cotton In the Fall, I was dragging a cotton sack. I was 7 years old when this began. I distinctly remember that we were being paid $3 per hundred pounds picked cotton. At the age of 8, I picked, maybe, 60-70 pounds of cotton from just after daylight until about 5 o’clock. Not much money nowadays but the $2 a day that I earned made a difference in how we lived. By the time I was 12, I was picking 140 pounds a day and earning $4 every day we picked. When I was 12, my brother Johnny was 9. He, like myself, picked a row next to our Grandma Byrd. He’d pick 70- 80 or so pounds a day. Every little bit helped. Early every Saturday morning my grandmother lit a fire under her wash pot, pumped it full of water and when it was steaming she dumped in all of the clothes and agitated them with a boat paddle. The clothes were guaranteed to be bacteria free. We weren’t, as we taking a full bath only on Saturday mornings. Everybody bathed in a Number 3 wash tub. Unlike in the olden times the bathwater did get changed. There was no potential of ”Throwing the baby out with the bath water”. We three boys were laundered in a single tub of water. The adults, my grandparents and my mother all got a fresh tub of warm water. The warm water was from the wash pot. After the laundry was done the pot was emptied and bath water was heated. By noon on Saturday we were on our way to the big city of Newport. My grandmother and my mother went shopping and would then visit my Great Aunt Ginnie ( Virginia, my grandmother’s twin sister) at the county courthouse. My Great Uncle, whose name I don’t remember, was the janitor for the building. Part of his compensation for being the janitor was an apartment in the court house building. It was a hold over from the Great Depression, I guess. As I understood it, he had been in the job for many, many years before I was born. Grandpa Byrd would go and stand under some trees next to the railroad track which ran parallel to the main business district. Yep, There downtown he would talk to the other farmers and farm hands about the weather, the crops and who was sick or dead. In other words, the local gossip. Johnny and I would get 25 cents to go to the movies. 10 cents to get in, 5 cents for popcorn, 5 cents for a candy bar and 5 cents for a soft drink, usually a Coke. In looking back I don’t remember being unhappy and, quite frankly, I had no idea that we were poor. Our financial status seemed about the same as everyone else. Get up in the dark and then go to bed when it got dark again. The experience gave me my full quota and fill of farm life.

Some of you might be considering buying a greenhouse for your backyard. There are a bunch of them on the market and most of them have the translucent corrugated panels and aluminum frames. The look like a good idea. However, they are crap. The easy assembly kit contains hundreds of little nuts and bolts which make it a nightmare to assemble. Worse yet the assembly instructions, we received, might has well have been written in Swahili or Erse. The company was buying them from China and had little or no expertise in the assembly process. Summer spent hours on the phone trying to get a coherent set of assembly instructions, all to no avail. In fact, the guy with an Asian accent seemed to be pissed off that we were bothering him. Even worse than the previous worse is that the damned thing has literally fallen apart in the wind. Nuts have shaken off bolts, the sliding door has fallen off and the plastic panels blow out constantly. The damned thing really has been a nightmare. No matter what brand they are all crap and are a million piece jigsaw puzzle with parts that may or may not fit properly. DON’T BUY ONE!!!

It is fairly certain that you have become an Alaskan when 40F is considered a heat wave. We’ve been having heat waves almost daily for a week of so. There were a couple of times that it was warmer in Homer than in N. Florida. I’ve been looking at the site electroverse.net and that has explained a lot of these weather anomalies. It is weird that it has been blizzard snowing in all of the northwest states and western states in April. They’ve, also, had record breaking low temperatures.

We are about to tear out all of the sheetrock on the lower floor of the house. This will entail removing all of the furniture, all of the kitchen including the cabinets. It is going to be a mess. We’ll have to remove everything including clothes in the closets. Again, this is going to be a mess. Everything will be moved into the defunct store. I’ve run electrical service to the store but have yet to hook it up. We’ll be cooking and eating in the store but I think we will still be sleeping in the house. It will be a weird several weeks until I get the house rewired and have the sheetrock reinstalled and finished. It will be a panic trying to get it done before winter sets in again. I really don’t think sleeping in an uninsulated tent at near zero temps would be very much fun.

Well that’s it. Hope everyone has had a Peaceful Passover or a HAPPY EASTER!!!

Monday 28 March 2022 Got another snow fall yesterday and into last night.. The temperature was just barely below freezing 31.4F. Still the stuff stuck and accumulated to a couple of inches by this morning. Even before sunrise the temp was back up to a bit over 34F. The snow has melted off the roof, my car and everything else except the ground where it is destined to become ice tonight, if the temp goes below freezing again. The current temp at 3:09 in the afternoon is 40.9F and we are warmer than much of the lower 48. We were getting very close to being able to work outside again but then the little snow and then the prediction for today was rain. I and a few hundred thousand others are ready for this wintery mess to be over with soon.

Today as perviously indicated was a work inside day. This led to cleaning the stove top again. Summer can’t seem to cook without spilling on the stove top. I cook on the stove, as well But I’m blaming it all on her as I am riddled with male genetic defects as Dan often says about men, in general. It could be related to having outside plumbing but probably not. We had outside plumbing of a different sort when I and my brothers live with our grandparents just outside of Newport, Arkansas. There was a hand operated well pump next to the house and an outhouse a hundred or so feet from the house and the well. The outhouse was in the chicken yard where, also, resided a gigantic tom turkey that my grandmother named Big Tom.. At least, when I was a skinny little 8 year old, he seemed gigantic. There were two imminent dangers in crossing the chicken yard. Big Tom, of course but, also, the danger of stepping in chicken crap and having it oozing between the toes of your bare feet. What a wonderful sensation. The clean out of the toe goop was a trip to the hand pump where my brother, Johnny, pumped up the water while I used a small stick to scrape the mess from between my toes. We were always barefooted in the Summer. We only got shoes for winter. They were big, old brown brogan high tops. There was no need for this type of shoe. The primary reason was that they were cheap at, perhaps, two dollars a pair. Every Spring, I finished the last bit of school putting cardboard inside my shoes to keep the dirt out. The cardboard worked okay for the dirt but wasn’t worth a damn for water or mud.

Enough reminiscing about my lovely childhood. As I stated today was an inside work day. Almost three months of procrastination had to come to an end. I usually clean out the refrigerator every couple of weeks. The refrigerator portions that I did not clean after the recent Tater Soup Fiasco were looking like they might be some kind of biological weapons experiment. It has always amazed me that small bowls of this and that tend to migrate to be back where they can remain unseen. Sometimes, they can reside there in the back for months. I was, recently, wondering what had happened to all of our soup bowls. SURPRISE!! They are in the back and growing ugly stuff. Yikes! I filled a trash bag with partially used cans of dried up dog food, pineapple slices and stuff that I wouldn’t have recognized were it not for the label on the can. I cannot let this happen again. I penciled in a cleaning for two weeks from today. I spent a number of years in the used appliance business and the one thing I really hated was cleaning refrigerators. No matter how clean a refrigerator looked when it came in it got completely disassembled and cleaned. It was a lot of work for very little appreciation or money. The people who bought them were interested in only two things. Does it cool and is it cheap? Nobody ever said ”Wow, this is clean and it doesn’t stink” Anyway, a shelf by shelf drawer by drawer cleaning of the refrigerator greatly improved our chances of not dying from some sort of weird incurable disease. Next was the several days late on changing the sheets on my bed project. I usually change them every week on Saturday and it is now Monday afternoon. Time to do the dirty deed and install clean sheets as I intend to take my monthly shower this evening. Just kidding. Three showers a week in the winter and as many as necessary in the Spring and Summer. If you don’t sweat you don’t stink and you just don’t sweat much during the winter here in Alaska.

Tuesday 29 March 2022 Got up at my usual 8AM. It seems late until you know that I am rarely in bed before midnight and sometimes closer to 1AM. I guess I hate going to bed as much as I do getting out of bed. I’m sitting drinking coffee and dreading the cleaning of the downstairs bath. Mostly of the dread is two baskets full of bath towels, hand towels and dish towels that need to be folded and put away. I suppose I could turn all of this, folding and stacking on the shelves, into some Zen like exercise because it requires absolutely no thought. Ohm-m-m-m-m. The first thing this morning, even before coffee and nothing should come before coffee, was to rekindle the fire. It was 32.4F outside and a bit chilly inside. Aside from today’s scintillating foray into towel folding and commode cleaning, also, included organizing, and cleaning as necessary, the refrigerator freezer and the upright freezer in the pantry. This is Alaska and you’d think that there would be some exciting stuff to do. Mostly, you’d be wrong. There is ski stuff in the winter but to downhill ski is a 150 mile trip to a ski slope at Alyeska. Or you could do some exciting cross country skiing. A whole lot of work to go no where fast. You could buy $15k-$20k snow machine and go fast on some prepped trails but once you done them, then what? AND the snow machine sits under a tarp for eight or nine months of the year. “The fishing must be great” you say. Well, the fishing is great for about 15 minutes every summer. The limits are low that you spend $100 or more on your fishing trip then catch two fish and you are done for the day. Because of this limit you see people piling 4-5 people on a boat that should max out at three. Some of the boat occupants might not fish but their presence makes it possible to catch and keep more fish. If you are going to spend a $100 you need to have enough people to ‘limit out’ and make the trip worth the money. Because of the limit rules, and that some people are needing the fish to feed their family through the winter, they drown a few people every summer. And another thing, some of the fish that you might catch are so protected that you cannot take them out of the water. If you, accidentally, catch one you must unhook it in the water. I don’t know how you unhook a wriggling fish in the water but IT’S THE LAW. In the South and most of the Lower 48, you go to the river, creek or lake and you catch fish and whatever fish you catch you keep. Of course, there are limits of some gamefish but mostly you take home what you catch. You catch three Bream, four Catfish and a couple of Perch and they all go home with you for a family fish dinner.dinner I know people in Alabama that just catch and release in both salt and fresh water but even that is mostly against the law up here. I can understand the need to limit the salmon catch but all of the other fish, as well? It makes no sense in a state with only 750,000 residents, millions of acres of land, tens of thousand of acres of rivers, lakes and streams. And most of the year you can’t catch and keep a single damned fish for your dinner, while you are camping out. What is more surreal the State of Alaska spends taxpayer money to stock certain lakes every Spring so that people can go catch a good mess of fish without transgressing some law or regulation. It is truly weird. Hunting up here is like everywhere else. There are seasons, bag limits and there are lotteries for some protected big game like Musk Ox. The result of all of the myriad of convoluted, complicated laws regarding fishing is that I’ve been up here for over four years and have yet to wet a hook. Enough!! No more ranting about the fishing or lack thereof in Alaska. Time for my second cup of coffee and a further delay in getting to the bathroom/laundry room and the mindless towel folding.

The dogs just went crazy, again. The moose wandering through the yard drives them nearly insane. All of them are little dogs, mostly or all Chihuahua. All of three of them together seem to think that they are a pack of big wolves and capable to taking down a moose. We can’t let them outside, if there is a moose in the vicinity. They’ll try to chase the moose and the moose will likely try to stomp them to death. All of that yipping and yapping only makes the moose mad and if it has a calf with it it becomes deadly mad. I’ve seem a cow moose, with a calf, chase Taco for about 30 yards and then very nearly stomp poor old Gandie who was simply trying to take a dump in the middle of the road. This incident happened during our first Spring here in Fritz Creek. The current moose visitor has departed and all is quiet again. All I’m hearing aside from the tinnitus ringing in my ears is the fire popping and the little heat driven fans on top of the stove whirling. The sun has, finally, come out to play. The weather forecast was for cloudy skies. The bright sunshine makes me happy. That’s it for the second cup. It’s time to get on with my household chores.

29 March 2022 continued…..Two hours later. The bathroom is clean. US Navy training makes me kind of a ’clean freak’. From the looks of that bathroom, however, you’d have never known that bit of info. No matter what your job is in the Navy, your first job is cleaning. 200-300 men on a ship would be a big mess in a hurry if it weren’t for the Navy insisting, demanding that everyone be a cleaner of things. All of the towels got folded and stowed neatly. While I was cleaning, the fire in the stove went out, which was just as well It is currently currently 42F outside. A nice, warm sunny day. If it weren’t for the leftover ice and snow, I’d be out in the mud getting some stuff done. Last fall I took the rear tires off the Land Rover to ascertain what was making the roaring noise at the read. The calipers were, supposedly, bad so I took them off and was planning to replace the brake pads, as well. When I took the caliper off to remove the brake pads the entire rear axle came off with the caliper. I had located the source of the roar. The bearing were none existent. I had never checked the rear end for grease/oil and since the vehicle had been ’professionally serviced’ I saw no point in it. Also, a visual inspection when changing the tires (Summer tires/Winter tires) showed no oil leakage at the ends of the axles or on the rear end itself. What happened to the rear in lubrication is a mystery. What is not a mystery is that ’professional service’ does not include checking the rear end or greasing any fittings (if there are any) on the steering/suspension. They change the engine oil and the filter, collect their small fortune, pat you on your ’little pointy head’ and send you on your way. Apparently, doing anything else entails a potential liability for them. Your car can eat itself but they have no liability for that circumstance. As Rush used to say ”It is what it is”. We bought another Land Rover, with a bad engine, for parts and it is my great hope that the rear end of it is good. There are 27 bolts holding the rear end on on both cars. So it will be 54 bolts out, 27 bolts in, several skinned, bleeding knuckles and without a doubt a great spewing of not nice words.

The Pasquale tractor that we’ve used for a bit over three years has started to leak the drive train oil so badly that it is barely usable. The seals on the shaft that drives the back half of the 4 wheel drive work horse are shot. To replace them it is necessary to separate the two halves of the tractor. It sounds simple but I expect to spend all or most of 8 hours just doing that simple task. After that it will require disassembling portions of the front half and the rear half to get to the offending seals. Did I mention that this is an antique? The project after that will be finding the oil seals for and obsolete tractor that the manufacturer no longer supports. This is a special tractor as it is articulated. The unit is jointed in the middle so that the front can move horizontally and independent of the rear half of the tractor. This comes in very handy when you are trying to dump a load of something exactly where it is needed. The horizontal movement is facilitated by a hydraulic cylinder on each side. Turning the steering wheel operates these cylinders. Of course, when you point the front in a particular direction, while you are moving, the back half follows. It, also is articulated vertically. The front end can be at an angle while the rear is level or facing the opposite angle. They were designed in Italy to be used in vineyards and other applications where the ground might be uneven. It is the perfect Alaskan homestead tractor, as far as I am concerned. I have a 600 pound concrete weight attached to the back of the tractor. I have on, occasionally, picked up things heavy enough to lift the back of the tractor and the 600 pound weight off the ground. I put them back on the ground instantly.

Well that’s it for me. I’ve got to put on my boots. I’ve got to go collect the eggs and make sure that the chickens and the geese have food and water. “Stay thirsty, my friends.”

We’re living in some kind of time warp where everything is backward. We’ve slipped into a rabbit hole far deeper and scarier than Alice could imagine. The ”Woman of the Year” is a man possessing a penis. The best woman swimmer in college is a man with a penis. The `WOMAN who wants to be on the Supreme Court cannot define the word ’woman’. Joey is doing his dead level best to start WWIII while Putin is sitting on the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. The zealous support by the Hollyweird Left and all of the Democrat party for Ukrainian borders far exceeds the support for our own Southern border. A border where thousands of illegal aliens pour into the waiting arms of Border Patrol nannies and tons of Fentanyl and other drugs are carried in each week. Over 100,000 Americans died last year from Fentanyl poisoning. The border is a war zone where heavily armed narco-terrorists fire weapons across the river at the barely armed Border Patrol nannies. All of this is absolutely insane. But if that isn’t enough to bring you to your senses, how about this? Gasoline at over $7 a gallon in The Peoples Republic of California foreshadowing similar pricing everywhere, potential food shortages due to the extreme price of diesel, ports clogged, apparently, on purpose by the unions, colder than normal weather over much of the US causing crop damage and late planting. Inflation estimated by the government to be 7% but the true inflation rate maybe twice that number. A piece of beef that 18 months ago was $3.99 a pound is now $8.99 a pound or more in some places. To simply say that ”Things are bad” would be an astounding understatement and yet that is what we here from our government. Things aren’t just ”bad”. They are disastrously worse than “bad”. There are very few people living who have seen it worse as the ”Great Depression” survivors are pretty much all gone. Just as an aside, I opened and ate a 7 year old can of pinto beans the other day. The were a bit mushy but they still tasted like pinto beans. Do you have a years supply of food? Now might be the time to stock up before the price and availability becomes a major problem. A 7 year old can of beans may not be desirable or very tasty but it will keep you from suffering the ‘Missed Meal Colic’. I may be ‘all wet’ but to paraphrase my Grandmother Byrd who raised three children while living through the Great Depression ”Better safe than starving”.

Today I had almost nothing to do. No plans, no schemes and damned little ambition. After much procrastination, I carried water to the chickens. I picked up a few eggs and yelled at my brick headed dog.Buddy, as he had stolen and was eating one of the stale bread rolls that I has tossed to the chickens. I tried to get the roll but he ran under the house and that was the end of the chase. I should have brought in wood today. I didn’t. I should have changed the sheets on my bed. I didn’t. I should have tried to better organize the conex. I didn’t. I needed to do some laundry. I didn’t. After even more procrastination, I took the 6 dozen eggs to the local feed store and sold them. On the way home I checked the mail only to find that the mail box was falling down. It along with three others were all but on the ground. I went home and got the necessary tools and a few pieces of lumber as went back. After about an hour and some amazing engineering the 4 boxes were up stable and not likely to fall before we get our shiny new aluminum mail boxes this Spring. The shiny new boxes have cost each family about $200. These new post office like boxes are keyed boxes. Frankly, I like the new keyed boxes. A box at the US Post Office can cost up to $100 a year and this is a one time cost of $200. Seems a bargain to have your mail private and safe.

It appears that were are in full on ’breakup’. The snow is melting very quickly in the above freezing days and barely refreezing at night. This phenomenon is almost a month early. Of course, things could change and we’d be back to colder than………well, you know. This winter has had a lot of ups and downs. All of it due to the wavy jet stream. The normal jet stream runs pretty much in a straight line around the world but these past several months it has been wavy and dragging warm air up and cold air down. It isn’t unprecedented but it is aggravating and sometimes dangerous. I’ve been looking at a website called electroverse.net and have found out weather stuff of which I had no idea.

I wrote the last blog mentioning sidetracks and the responses were both amusing and edifying. So-o-o here is a list of yesterday’s early sidetracks. Got out of bed and made coffee. Went back to the bedroom to get properly dressed. Decided to lie down again for a couple of minutes this led to sleeping another 45 minutes. Got out of bed again and went to get a cup of coffee. I felt kinda cold I had completely forgotten that I wasn’t dressed properly This led to building a fire which led to having to split up kindling. I then realized, just before splitting kindling, that I didn’t have my glasses and splitting kindling without glasses could be hazardous for fingers. I went back to the bedroom to get my glasses which led me to see that the bed had not been made. Made up the bed and still being a bit chilly, I got dressed for outside. On my way back to the kitchen I saw that I had not split kindling or lit the fire. I split enough kindling to start the fire and then lit the fire. On my way back to the coffee maker and the kitchen, I noticed that the dishwasher was displaying END. This led me to opening the dishwasher and putting away the dishes which led me to looking at what hadn’t been washed from the last evenings dinner. I put these last few things in the dishwasher and that caused me to notice that yesterday’s chicken and goose eggs had not been washed. I washed the eggs and was putting them in the refrigerator when I noticed that the red light on the coffee maker was on. And that is when I poured a cup of coffee, sat down and began to read the London Daily Mail online. By that time, I was already feeling exhausted and it wasn’t even 9AM.

I guess that I have run out of drivel. So y’all take it easy and live to see tomorrow.

February 18, 2022

Except for my walks and the occasional trip to the big city of Homer, i am house bound. Winter seems to drag on forever and you begin to get a little nutty. The short days, the snow and the boredom are stifling. Fortunately, the days are getting longer, the snow will be gone soon and I’ll be back working on this house or one of a dozen projects outside. When the first snow falls you are just ecstatic. It’s beautiful and it covers the ugly brown stuff on the ground. BUT after a few months, of snow blowing, shoveling, walking on ice and slip sliding away, you are done. February is quickly coming to a close and I couldn’t be happier. March is still cold but the snow storms are usually over and gone by the middle of the month. After that we have a slow warm up until all of the snow and ice are gone at about the end of April. We have had some anomalous weather this year (electroverse.net). It’s been both warmer and colder than normal. at least, what I consider normal. As I’m typing this missive it is about 38F and raining. Not what you in the Lower 48 might expect for this time of year. There were a couple of days when it was warmer here than in N. Florida or LA (Lower Alabama). Yeah, we’ve still got snow. It melts during the day and becomes ice at night then melts a little the next day time to become a slip hazard. Even to me, it seems that I’m whining too much.. I guess it is a symptom of ’cabin fever’. Onto more pleasant of pertinent things.

Buddy is, presumably, a Chihuahua. When looking at him straight in the face he looks like a miniature German Shepherd. According to the people who gave him to me, he is about a year old. Was supposed to be ’chipped’ and wasn’t. So I’m not assured about his age. Took Buddy in last week for his pre-eunuch medical checkup. He’ll be operated on March 18 and hopefully that will be the end of territory marking in the house. I hate to do it to the little fella but I am really tired of cleaning up his pee spots. Training to take his business outside has been somewhat successful and taking him on the two miles strolls has drained his radiator pretty well before bed time.

Believe it or not we are starting to prep for Spring. Not physical prep. More like planning prep. We’ve got a guy lined up to help us stabilize the house. The house is slowly moving down the hill and will, eventually, collapse off the existing pilings. Picking the house up off the ground might be just a wee bit difficult. We’ve lined up a sheetrock guy and I’m going to tear out he kitchen and remove all of the sheetrock from the ceiling. I can’t rewire the house until the ceiling is down.

March 22, 2022

As you may have ascertained from the current date, I have been off doing other things. Not necessarily things that I had planned to do exactly. My first name should be ‘Sidetrack’. Being sidetracked is the reason that the first date on this missive is in February. As I remember it, I was typing away oblivious to the rest of the world when I realized that I was hungry. Into the kitchen, which is about 6 steps, I went to make a sandwich. Arriving there I noticed that the counter had some crumbs on it. This led me to the sink where I found a dish cloth and noticed that the sink had some debris in it. I cleaned out the sink and then wiped off the counter top. I reached into the cabinet for a paper plate and there were none. This led me to the pantry where I discovered that some cans had fallen over and were out of order. This led to placing can in the proper order which then led me to straightening some boxes. This led to finding two boxes of crackers open. This led to consolidating all of the crackers in one box. Then I took the empty box to the trash only to find the kitchen trash container full. This led to removing the trash and getting a fresh trash bag from under the sink. With the new trash bag in place I took the old trash bag out and realized that I needed to make a dump run. This led to moving the truck and loading various other materials, as well as trash bags into the truck. I’m standing there looking at a truck bed full of stuff and I decide that I might as well go to the dump since the truck was loaded. The trip to the dump led to driving past the SAFEWAY. Tuesday is Safeway Senior Discount Day. This led an hour looking at my Safeway phone app to discover and retrieve the weekly specials. I loaded up my discounted haul from Safeway and went home. Again I am stilling trying to make a Redneck BLT ie Bologna, Lettuce and tomato. However, as I was putting the frying pan on the stove, I noticed where grease from last nights fried shrimp had boiled over onto the stove top. This led to removing the grates and burners. This led to me realizing that they were greasy and needed to go into the dishwasher. This led me back to the grease and debris on the stove top. This led me to the pump bottle of DAWN sitting on the side of the sink that I discovered was empty. This led me to be on my hands and knees digging everything from under the sink in order to get the big refill bottle of DAWN. This led me to rearranging the under sink stuff and removing the 899 plastic bags that were stuffed in that cabinet. I refilled the DAWN bottle which led me back to the greasy stove top where I put a little water and some DAWN on it and mopped around to let it soak for a few minutes. I then decided to pour a glass of tea to go with my sandwich which had now degenerated into two slices of bread a slice of bologna and a squirt of yellow mustard. The opening of the refrigerator caused and avalanche as one of the shelves decided to slip out of it’s proper place. n This led to a bowl of potato soup spilling onto the floor and into the bottom of the refrigerator. This disaster led to the removal of the bottom drawers and sopping out potato soup and some other weird stuff out of the bottom of the refrigerator. Also, it led to cleaning a fair amount off the floor which led me to understand that the floor needed to be swept. This led to 10 minutes of broom and dust pan work. While I was washing my hands I realized that it was time to collect the chicken eggs and water the geese. Collecting the eggs led to me seeing that the chickens were out of water. I took the eggs into the house got two buckets of melted snow water and went back and refilled the water for the chickens. This led me to taking two similar buckets to the geese and discovering that they were nearly out of food. This led to a trip to the food storage tent and 50 pounds of feed hauled down to the goose pen. The empty water buckets led to shoveling snow into the buckets to make more water for the critters. I took the buckets inside and put them near the wood stove where I had let the fire go out. This led to starting another fire which led me to notice that were were low on firewood. This led to the wood tent where I loaded a Jet sled full and pulled it back to the door of the house. I unloaded the sled and that was not quite enough to fill the wood bin. I went back for a second load and brought it into the house. All of the in and out commotion got the dogs excited about going outside so I let them out. They had the zoomies and were running all over the yard for several minutes. Two of the showed up at the back steps, one did not. This led to me having to put on coat and hat again and go find the wayward critter. It was Buddy and he’s the new kid on the block and only obeys shouts at the top of my lungs. I could hear him barking but could not see him. He had gone around the conex and was barking at a moose less than 30 feet away. Since he is a chihuahua he is of the opinion, as are all chihuahuas, that he is a really big dog. He would not leave it and I, finally, had to pick the little moron up to take him and myself to safety. This led me back inside where my sandwich bread had gotten kind of hard. This led to toasting the bread with one side having been smeared with mustard. When the toaster popped up I took my bread, placed the bologna back into it and hurried to the table and sat down before I got sidetracked again. After I sat down and had taken a bite of my sandwich I realized that I hadn’t started the dishwasher to clean the stove top grates and burners or cleaned the stovetop that I left soaking. So there you have it a day in the life of ’Sidetrack’ Bob.

Not too long after the above day of sidetracks, I was on my way to town for something of which I cannot recall. Anyway, I was on a down hill curve and hit a patch of black ice. Black ice looks like water on the roadway. The truck started sliding on the ice. It veered to the left and I corrected. It veered to the right and I corrected. It did both of these things a couple more times before it swapped ends and slide backwards off an embankment and down about eight feet. As the truck came to a halt it rolled up on it’s passenger side and slide another 10-15 feet. The whole thing was so smooth and gentle that none of the airbags deployed. When the truck stopped, I was still sitting comfortably in the driver’s seat holding the steering wheel with both feet on the floor. I was uninjured and more than a little perplexed. The engine was still running so I turned of the key and tried to figure out what to do next. This was when I got the bright idea to unsnap the seat belt. I had heard of people being unable to release the seat belt so I was a little concerned. Without thinking about the idea that I was hanging five feet above the ’ground’, I unsnapped the belt. It was one of my all time dumbass moves. I fell head first down to the passenger side window and got a pretty big knot on my head as the ’Dumbass Reward’. It never occurred to me to hold onto the steering wheel. Standing on the passenger door, I tried to kick out the windshield. That didn’t happen. I remembered a big hammer that I always carry in the back floorboard and was looking for it when some guy opened the driver’s side door. I climbed the seat and out as he held the heavy door. This young man took me to a friend’s house and he took me to the ER to check out my ’Dumbass Reward’. I was fine the truck was another matter. The entire passenger side was smashed and all of my tools and other stuff was scattered across the snowy ditch. It was a mess. There are a couple of pictures below.

The picture were taken a couple of hours later and the black ice had melted. As you cab see there was the potential for disaster. The power pole was not real close but had I slid another 10 feet on the road, I would have nailed it dead center. My Grandmother Byrd used to say ”God looks out for fools and children”. So I guess I am both a fool and a child of God. This accident could have been so much worse because I slid across the opposite lane. Had another vehicle been coming up the hill there would likely have been dead people in that vehicle. Me? I would have probably walked away as I would have had the entire rear of the truck as cushion and I was belted in with the seat to cushion the impact further.

It’s that time of the year again. The moose are wandering through looking for food and a place to have their calves. The car that the moose is next to is a Subaru Forester. It’s a small car but not a tiny car and the moose will weigh in at close to half the weight of the car. Buddy the Brick Head ran out the door while I was exiting to take these pictures. He ran to within 10 feet of this big critter barking like crazy. The moose stopped and turned slightly to get a better look, I guess. It certainly didn’t appear to be afraid. When the moose stopped and turned, Buddy stopped in mid bark and lit out for the back door. It was as if he’d suddenly learned that old adage ”Discretion is the better part of valor”. All of this happened so quickly that by the time I could yell at hime he was half way back to the door. I put him inside and took these pictures. I wish I had taken pictures of the moose and Buddy’s short meeting.

Summer opened her business, Greer Road Greenhouse, last Spring. She’s closing it this Spring. She’s gotten a job delivering the US MAIL. The pay is better and steadier than her business. The business only operated about 3 months of the year and after the close she was back to her job walking dogs for Homer Hounds. She enjoyed both the business and walking the dogs out in the country but both of them combined don’t pay as well as her new job. Money isn’t everything but it is certainly something when you don’t have any. She was never broke but the extra cash isn’t hurting her feelings. As for me, I’ve decided to get back into the appliance repair business. It’s been a little slow starting as there is no good way to advertise up here and I keep getting thrown into Fakebook jail. The Fakebook jail sentence keeps me from posting on the local message boards. What is bad about Fakebook is that you are convicted without a clue as to the horrible offense you committed or any chance to mitigate the circumstance.

It’s snaining outside. That is to say it is snowing and raining at the same time. It’s currently 34F. The weather has been strange this year. It was really, really cold for a few weeks and now for the past two months it has been warm. The night time temp has been above 20F for most of the past two months. I think it was last winter when we had 9 below zero here at the house.

Well, I guess that it for me. Y’all keep your powder dry.