More lazy blogging…some thoughts about being home after 2 months of living in a 21-foot travel trailer.
I’m Home!
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Tag Archives: home
Fix or Repair Daily
It’s not always easy having stuff.
I have too much stuff. That’s not under question. But I’ve learned that one of the problems with having too much stuff — besides finding places to store it all — is keeping it all working and in good repair.
Vehicular Responsibilities
Take, for example, my two motorcycles. Bought brand new in 1992 and 1996, I rarely ride them. I simply don’t have the time. So they sit in storage, gathering dust while the gasoline in their tanks turns to varnish and their batteries die. I’ve tried battery tenders and gasoline stabilizers, but every time I want to take one of them out, I have a heck of a time getting it started. The solution, of course, is to sell at least one of them and I’ve made the decision to do just that. But I still have to get it running and bring it over to the motorcycle guy who said he’d sell it for me.
My new old redneck truck — nicknamed the “Brokeback Mountain Truck” because of the way its 14-year-old pearlized red paint looks pink in strong sunlight — required a bunch of small repairs to get it up to operating standards for the long trip it’ll take me on in May. That bunch of repairs, which I thought would cost about $500 to $700 cost a whopping $1,500. Ouch! The mechanic, who I trust, says it’ll run a good, long time. It better. It’s my first Ford. Some of us know what F-O-R-D stands for. (If you don’t check the title for this post.)
To be fair, we drove it this weekend to Howard Mesa and Flagstaff (so far) and it’s running okay. Sure, its 8-cylinder engine is a dog and the Ford steering is about as loose as you can get, but get it up to highway speed and turn on the cruise control and everything is satisfactory. I’ll have accurate fuel burn numbers when I fill up in Chino Valley on our way home.
Mummies in the Attic
But the ongoing source of our repair efforts is our little vacation cabin. Its exterior was built by people who know how to use the necessary tools and materials and they did a reasonably good job. The place is sturdy, anyway. But after adding plumbing, electrical, fixtures, appliances, and furniture to make it a home way from home, the problems began.
First it was the mice, who seemed to invade the premises every time we left. That means a thorough cleaning and disinfecting each time we arrived. I don’t know about you, but after a 3-1/2 hour drive, the last thing in the world I want to do is spend four hours vacuuming and washing floors and countertops, and furniture. The mouse moved into the walls, so we’d often hear them scurrying around at night. It took a long time to find and seal up all the holes where they were coming in. When I got sick of dealing with the humane mouse traps, I resorted to rat poison. The worst night we ever at the place was the night after Mike threw rat poison into the roof rafters and sealed up the holes on either end with steel wool. All night long, the doomed rodents were running back and forth over the ceiling.
And yes, there are now mouse bodies in our ceiling. But thanks to the dry Arizona air, they mummify quickly.
Split Pipes
We were still battling the mouse problem when the plumbing problem began. We’d used PVC piping which, due to our low water usage needs, should have been fine. Trouble is, if you don’t drain the pipes properly, the water in them freezes up in the winter. That causes the pipes to expand until they break.
Our first Christmas at the cabin gave us our first plumbing repair job. We brought everything inside, turned on the water, and turn on the pump. Within seconds, water was gushing out of the wall.
Mike spent most of the next day repairing the broken pipe. When he was done and everything was closed back up, we turned on the pump again. Another pipe was broken. He fixed that one the next day, on Christmas Eve. So yes, on that trip, we didn’t have running water for more than 48 hours.
Despite our best efforts to drain the pipes on departure, this happened again, to a lesser extent, on our next visit. Mike got very good at repairing pipes.
The following Christmas, Mike came prepared. He replaced all the PVC pipes with copper. Unfortunately, there had been water in the toilet valve and that had split. (We had installed an RV toilet to conserve water.) So we had to manually flush with a bucket of water.
On our most recent trip, we discovered a crack in the pump. We bought a replacement and hope to repair the old one as a spare. But when he went to fix the toilet — after replacing the pump — he discovered that the replacement part he’d bought for that didn’t have the piece he needed. So we continue to bucket flush.
Other Problems
We’ve had other problems with the place over the years. There was the mouse nest in the furnace that prevented it from staying lighted until the nest was removed. Before fixing that, the cabin actually got down to the low 40s at night.
And then there was the poorly set windows and doors. I spent a whole day with a caulk gun filling cracks with clear caulk to stop the cold wind from finding its way into the building.
Otherwise, everything has been fine. But now I know why Mike doesn’t like going up to the vacation cabin. Every time we go, there’s something that needs to be fixed.
At Home
Our house is just over 10 years old now, at that age when little things start needing attention.
Original light bulbs all over the house have been dying lately. The guy who built our house probably had stock in the local utility company. Every single light fixture in the house has either 3 or 4 bulbs in it. The master bathroom, which has a long countertop with two sinks and a vanity, is lighted by a row of 16 bulbs. When we moved in, there was a 150-watt bulb in each one. That’s 2400 watts of lighting with the flick of one switch. We replaced all those bulbs with 40s and put a dimmer switch on it. I don’t need to get a tan in my own bathroom.
We’ve had a few minor leaks in the past few years. We’ve needed some paint touchups inside and out. A few of the ceramic tiles between the kitchen and front door are cracking but not loosening up. The appliances are still all working fine, although I know that when they start dying, I’ll replace them with better rated equipment and leave the foo-foo brand names for another sucker. (I’ll take my old Kenmore dishwasher over the JennAire I have now any day.)
So I’m waiting patiently. Something else will break shortly — I can feel it in my bones — and I need to be ready to take care of the repair.
Snow on the Mountains
A look out my window.
I spent just about all of yesterday in bed, fighting the flu. It didn’t matter much. The weather outside turned nasty at around noon, with low clouds, rain, wind, and hail. Temperatures were in the high 40s for most of that time.
As I suspected, while we were getting rain, the mountains north of us were getting snow. This morning dawned clear and bright with a view of the snow-dusted Weaver Mountains about 15 miles north.
This shot was taken from our upstairs front window with a 55mm lens.
Snow on the Weavers isn’t very unusual. I’d say it happens 5 to 10 times a year. In almost all cases, the snow is gone by midday. Once, earlier this year, it lasted 2 or 3 days.
Today remains cold — it’s only 40°F right now at 8:45 AM. But the sun is out and I expect the snow to be gone soon.
Tires, Horses, Lost Dogs, Used Trucks, and a Garage Project
Or, how I tired myself out on a Saturday.
Yesterday was one of those days when you’re just so darn busy doing things that time goes by in a blur, ending in exhaustion and a good night’s sleep.
I woke as usual before 6 AM. I made coffee for me and a scrambled egg for Alex the Bird. Then I settled down at the kitchen table with a laptop to write up my “Feels So Good” blog entry. Mike and Jack the dog came down and had breakfast. Later, I cleaned the remains of the previous day from Alex’s cage, set him up with food and water for the day, and locked him in.
A typical morning.
Taking Out the Tires
Mike had gotten new tires for his new used car. He bought the car a month or so ago and it came with fancy rims and low-profile tires. Those rims and tires really aren’t practical for life on the edge of nowhere, especially when the last mile of road to the house is unpaved. So he bought new rims and tires on eBay. They’d arrived the day before and he had a Saturday morning appointment to get them put on his car. Since he couldn’t take them in his car, I had to drive them over to Big O in his pickup. We did that at about 8:30 AM.
It was a beautiful morning. It had rained steadily most of the day before, so everything was wet. The sky was mostly clear and the sun shined down on all the water droplets hanging from the trees, making everything sparkle. But what was even more interesting was that as the sun heated the moist ground, it was creating thin trails of mist in the washes and wispy low clouds in the low mountains around town. Wow.
Horseback Riding
I dropped the tires off and took the truck back home. My friend Janet called along the way. She’s visiting the area from Colorado, where she now lives. She used to live in Wickenburg and then in Congress, which is one town north of Wickenburg, but like so many of our friends, she moved away in search of a place better matched to her lifestyle. She’s an artist who paints original artwork on turkey feathers. While that might sound tacky, it really isn’t. You can see some of her work on her Web site and in a number of galleries and gift shops throughout the southwest.
Janet has three horses. Although they were in Wickenburg for a few weeks, her husband took them home when he returned a week or so ago. Janet’s here for some more business and to help out a friend before she heads home. She’s got one of their two dogs with them, Maggie, a part hound dog who looks a lot like the dog from The Simpson’s, but brownish red. Janet and I planned to go horseback riding the day before, but weather had cancelled that plan. With nothing else scheduled that morning, we figured we’d try again.
I’d been home less than a half hour when she showed up with Maggie. I showed her my baby chicks — she raises turkeys — and we went down to fetch the horses. We had them both saddled up and ready to go a while later. She’d be riding Jake, Mike’s horse. I’d be riding Cherokee.
By this time, we’d attracted the attention of our neighbor’s dogs, Trixie and the 6-month-old Charlotte. Charlotte had gone for her first ever ride with us about two weeks before and other than getting lost once for about 10 minutes, she did fine. Trixie always follows us. Jack, of course, lives to go out on the trail. And we had Maggie, too. So that was four dogs with two horseback riders.
The hills around our home were green with new grass and really pretty. We don’t get much rain in the desert so we don’t have much green anything. When it does rain, the grass grows quickly, seizing life to produce seed for the next generation in record time. The green stuff out there was mostly about four inches long and looked like a carpet. It would be nice to ride through all that green.
We headed out up the hill to our house and down the trail beside my neighbor’s property into the state land. Cherokee started acting up right away and we had to do a little rodeo routine before he agreed to follow Jake down the trail. Cherokee is lazy and, for some reason, he thinks he can get away with crap like that with me. He tries half heartedly to throw me off but I hang on, give him a good slap on the side of his neck, and we get back to the business at hand. Cherokee is not the kind of horse you put a “dude” on.
We took a trail that headed out toward the golf course at Rancho de los Caballeros, then way back out into the desert. The dogs ran around, chasing rabbits and each other, but always coming back within sight within a few minutes. Janet and I chatted about various things, moving along at a moderate pace along the trails. Janet was leading and each time she came to an intersection, I’d call out “left” or “right” to guide us along the way.
We were at the base of the trail that climbed to the top of a mountain ridge — we call it the “Ridge Trail” — when we realized that Maggie was missing. Janet said she often catches the scent of another animal and takes off after it but she’s usually back within fifteen minutes or so. We climbed the trail and stopped at the top to admire the view (which is spectacular), give the horses a rest and a chance to nibble at the grass, and do a dog head count. Maggie was still missing.
Janet was sure she’d catch up to us, so after about ten minutes, we continued on our way. We took a trail down the back side of the ridge that wound through a wide canyon — we call that one “Deer Valley” because we often see deer there. That dumped us out at a big trail intersection and I chose another trail that would bring us home. Our total ride was only about 4 miles, but I thought that was enough for Charlotte.
Maggie was still missing.
Search for the Missing Dog
She was also missing when we got back to my house. By that time, Janet was worried. I told he we’d take the Jeep out to Los Caballeros, as close as we could get to the point we’d last seen Maggie. I gave her every indication of confidence that we’d find Maggie. I felt confident, but I don’t know why. There were thousands of acres of empty desert out there.
We unsaddled, brushed out the horses, and dropped them off in their lower corral. We watched them do some synchronized rolling in the sand, then walked back up to the house to check with Mike about Maggie. No, she hadn’t shown up. I called Los Cab and left a message at the wrangler’s office. We thought there was a possibility that Maggie might have hooked up with other horseback riders out there and followed them back to the ranch.
We climbed into the Jeep and headed out. The ranch was our first stop. Two people had just come in for a ride and were brushing off their mules. No, they hadn’t seen a dog out there. We headed out to the skeet shooting range, which is one of the points accessible by car that was close to the trail we’d been on. Not that close, obviously, but within a half mile. There was no one there, so I parked and we got out. We called and whistled.
Janet caught sight of two riders out in the distance. For some reason, they kept stopping on the trail. Janet thought that maybe Maggie was with them, but we couldn’t see that far (or low) and they were well out of earshot.
We got back into the Jeep and after a few wrong turns, made our way to a little junkyard I’ve seen from the air a few times. I’d actually ridden through it years ago on my first horse and I knew it was pretty darn close to the bottom of the Ridge Trail’s climb. I drove through it, as far as I could before the two-track road ended. Then we parked and got out. We climbed a nearby hill and saw the trail we’d been on right on the other side of a fence. The barbed wire was hanging low in one spot and I gingerly stepped over it to get a better view out toward the wash.
We called and whistled and called. At this point, I started realizing the futility of the situation. If the dog was out there and she heard us, our voices and whistles would be echoing off all the hills around her. How would she know which way to go?
I was on my cell phone, calling the local police to see if the dog catcher had picked up a dog when I caught sight of something moving in the distance. The color was right. It was Maggie, running toward us. I told Janet I saw her, then told the policeman who’d answered the phone why I’d called and that the dog had been found. By the time I hung up, Maggie was with us.
We walked back to the Jeep where I had a dog dish and some water. Maggie seemed glad to have it. She didn’t seem the least bit concerned that she’d been away from us for close to two hours. We loaded her into the Jeep and went home.
The Garage Project, Part I
Mike was already working on the project we were supposed to be doing that day: cleaning out half the garage and putting in shelves to neatly store our accumulated crap. (Who’s law is it that says your collection of junk will always expand to fill the available space to store it?) He was very surprised to see us return with Maggie. He stopped what he was doing — pulling junk out of the garage and piling it on the driveway — and kept us company while we ate lunch. Then Janet and Maggie left and we had no excuse not to get back to work.
Well, we actually did have an excuse. Mike had called the owner of a pickup truck for sale in town. The truck, a 1994 Ford with 4WD and an extended cab, was exactly what we wanted to get as a spare truck we can leave at Howard Mesa. The price was within range. Just as we’d pulled all our junk out of the garage, the owner called, ready to meet with us. So we climbed in Mike’s pickup and headed into town. We drove the truck, agreed that it needed a new transmission, and told the owner we’d have our mechanic call him later in the week. Then, after two quick stops at the local Alco store, we went home and got back to work.
Mike had the idea of setting up a camera to do a timelapse movie of our setup. This was a great idea and easy enough. I brought my MacBook Pro out, set up EvoCam software to take a shot every minute and turn it into a movie, and pointed the camera at the blank wall where the shelves would go. Then we got to work.
The shelves were an Ikea product with a typically cryptic name. We’d used them before, in our house in New Jersey, and Mike had bought some new pieces so we’d have enough to cover the wall. What we discovered is that Ikea doesn’t make these things as heavy-duty as they used to. The wood was thinner throughout. Even the bolts were smaller. But they were still sturdy, and went up quickly, despite interruptions by my neighbor’s kids and numerous dogs.
Here’s the video:
Day’s End
It was pretty much dark by the time we finished. Since the forecast didn’t call for any rain, we just left most everything outside, closed the garage door, and came in for supper.
Mike grilled up some elk hamburgers, which tasted excellent with American cheese on them. With that, we had the ratatouille he’d cooked up earlier in the day. We stowed the dishes in the dishwasher and headed upstairs.
I was dead asleep by 8 PM.
Battery Operated Garbage Pail
In my kitchen.
Yesterday, Mike hit Costco on his way home from work. That can be a very dangerous thing. For a while, he was in the habit of bringing home large quantities of food items with a limited shelf life. Being a family of two with no kids (and pets that eat pet food), we usually wind up throwing away huge, unopened cans and bottles of things he bought the previous year to make room for incoming items.
To his credit, he doesn’t do that much anymore. Like me, I think he realizes the amount of waste involved. Unlike me, however, he still doesn’t understand that if you buy an item on sale at the local Safeway supermarket, it’s going to be cheaper than buying it at Costco. Best of all, you don’t have to buy enough to feed the high school football team.
Yesterday, he picked up the shop rags I’d asked him to buy the next time he was at Costco. You might be familiar with these “rags.” They’re really paper towels, blue, soft, and absorbent. I like to keep a roll under the seat in the helicopter to wipe up drips and spills or clean the bubble when I’m away from the hangar. Costco sells them 8 or 10 rolls in a pack and that can easily last me a year. Best of all, they don’t go bad. I store them in the hangar.
But he did come home with an oddity that he set up and put in place while I was still hard at work on chapter 4. [Yes, Cliff, I'm still working. But it's only 5:25 AM and my eyes are barely open. Not open enough to write about Leopard. I'll be at my desk at 6 AM. I promise. I'm shooting for two more chapters today.] He alluded to it during dinner (which he cooked because I’m so busy with the book), saying that he got me a surprise and that I’d find it.
I found it when I was finished for the day, which was around 7:30 PM. I had some miscellaneous papers in my hand and was delivering them to the tall kitchen can when I stopped short. The old garbage pail was gone. A sleek new one with lights on its cover had taken its place.
“I found the surprise,” I called up the stairs to him. “How does it work?”
I did feel pretty stupid asking how a garbage pail works.
“Just put your hand by its top,” he called back.
I followed his instructions. The device made a short whirring sound and the lid opened wide. Afraid it would close again, I quickly threw the trash in. A moment later, another whirr and it closed.
“We really needed this?” I called up.
The truth is, he wanted one. He’s been wanting a step-on can for the kitchen for years, but the ones he’s interested in are in the $100 to $250 range. For a garbage can. There’s no way I was going to let him pay that kind of money for something we throw garbage into.
But let him loose alone in Costco and you never know what might happen.
To be fair, the new garbage pail does look nice in our kitchen. Its brushed stainless steel, which is also the finish on our fridge and dishwasher face. The black cover goes nicely with the black oven and microwave directly across from where it sits and the black countertop appliances.
And it works well. Well, perhaps too well. The damn thing whirs open every time I walk past it. (Another reason to get back on that diet — so I can slip undetected past my garbage pail’s infrared sensors.)
But in reality, this is just another example of wasteful consumerism. We took a perfectly functioning 13-gallon plastic garbage pail with a lid and moved it from where it was being used (the kitchen) to where it would not be used (the garage). We moved in a replacement with multiple moving parts and a motor that requires batteries to operate. So what if the old one was ten years old? It was in perfect condition and kept clean. No one saw that it didn’t match the kitchen — hell, everyone who comes to visit us thinks we keep trash under the sink — is that what most people do?
So we bought something we didn’t need with features that will make us consume more to maintain it. Sheesh.
The final question remains: where was it made? Where do you think?
I guess that’s the light at the end of the tunnel. It’ll be broken within 3 years. Then we can put it in the garage and pull the old one out of exile and back into active duty.