Where's Hazel? Pet Hazel. Hazel needs her dreadlocks
trimmed.
I headed off to an eclipse one Summer into the face of a
Rain Likely forecast. Given the general reliability of
forecasts by the Weather Service (50% Correct less than half
the time) I figured what the hell... We rode my 750-4 Honda
south from Nashua, headed for somewhere south in Virginia.
The boy riding pillion and I were equipped for camping and
planned on space in some town park on the center line.
The first night we camped in a grave yard in eastern
Pennsylvania. Rain began the morning of our second day. Rain
continued. We road south close behind a semi, drifting from
side to side to let the driver know we were there and at the
same time I was chatting with other eclipse hopefuls on the
ham radio. One group travelling south ahead of us had
reserved a block of motel rooms, they invited us to join
them.
Rain continued into the day of the eclipse. A few of that
group, more desperate than me, chartered a plane to get them
above the clouds. My self, my companion and others watched
the show on the TV the motel provided. The ride home was
bright and sunny of course.
Right Distal Dorsal Forearm, Biopsy by Shave
Method: Malignant.
- BASAL CELL CARCINOMA, SUPERFICIAL AND NODULAR TYPES
- CHROMOBLASTOMYCOSIS My next appointment will be on Happy Big
Wind Day to see if Shylock will get his pound of flesh
after all.
2024 April 3, 83rd Orbit Begins
Nice at least. One person sent a nice card. One website sent
greetings as they do every year. My dental group computer
sent SPAM with a smile. One person sent a useful gift. I
changed insurance company for TinyTruck to get a small
savings in an otherwise outrageous premium. A quartet of
volunteers at the Food Bank sang Happy Birthday while the
Food Room Manager washed my pie dish. My sisters sent text
greetings. Two people called. Several, including you--thank
you very much, sent email. One person sent a different
'83' theme song.
I do not regret growing older; it is a privilege denied to
many.
4 April - Happy Susan’s Birthday
When my mother first came home with Susan she presented the
baby to me as my late birthday present. I'm doing better
emotionally since I decided not to go off chasing this solar
eclipse. Instead I have started putting together a list of
previous solar eclipses I have seen sarcastically subtitled
"You Seen One
Eclipse You Seen 'em All" But not really. Every
eclipse was different. In part for the location and the
weather. The people I was with, especially the ones I
brought along, made a big difference in my experience. So I
am going to miss all that with this eclipse but the hype has
turned the experience into a circus and that will devolve,
has already, into a madhouse of traffic jams, shortages, and
fools/victims with retinal damage.
Entropy
My friend Mike and I have an on-going clutter-unclutter
relationship. As a teeter-totter goes up and down some
things go to and fro between us, between thrift store and
Mike, between me and Amazon... But there seems to be
an imbalance at work. Stuff flows more to than fro;
every year when I weigh The Cat Drag'd Inn the bus
is heavier by an hundred pounds. Each time I move
stuff around from one shed to another there is always more
to move.
The Great North American Eclipse
I could not see my way clear to chase this one and so
watched with a pinhole camera and on the NASA channel where
I saw totality six times. The sky stayed very bright
here in Tonopah at about 50% totality but the solar PV array
output took a big hit. See the graph. The sky was very clear
for solar minimum just after 1100 local time. The dips
before and after were transient clouds.
After the eclipse I loaded TinyTruck to go camping out on
Saddle mountain with Paul and others. Tube steaks and apple
pie for supper. A grand night sleeping under the stars. I
was surprised how bright was the sky. Too many too bright
lights from the egg factory, a power plant, and at least one
construction project installing another huge solar array.
The sky never did get truly deep dark however I did see a
couple satellites, maybe three or four, at least one meteor,
and lots of stars. When I returned to The Cat
Drag’d Inn late next morning Hurricane Hazel-Rah
looked at me with dagger-eyes and growled Where’s my
breakfast?
Here we had a blast of 28mph that blew over one of my
free-standing 100w PV panels. No damage. Tied down better
now. Yesterday was also an hour and a half "under the knife"
of Dr Shylock as he removed a 3x1cm slice of basal cell
carcinoma from my right forearm. No swimming or hot tub
soaking for ten days; minimal physical activity until the
stitches are removed.
April 19th National Clothesline Day!
NAZ (formerly NAWS) yesterday sent a note that my very dear
inverter, out of service now a fortnight waiting on parts,
was repaired-tested-ready and would be shipped overnight via
UPS, Then UPS sent a note saying my very dear inverter
would be delivered some time today. Special
delivery instructions said: Special Instructions: DO NOT
LEAVE PACKAGE ON GROUND! TEXT [ahead] AND I WILL MEET
YOU AT THE GATE. So I subscribed to UPS’s Follow That
Driver text feed and waited.
At 13h42 TEXT arrived: “UPS ups.com/su/... DELIVERED as of
04/19/2024 1:39 PM.” Oh! Shit! I yelled.
Thanks for letting me know ahead of time so I could meet you
at the gate! And went out to retrieve my dear inverter
before the same guy who stole the battery out of Paul’s
truck last week returned for a second helping. The
inverter weighs 47 pounds so I took TinyTruck and drove out
to the front gate. No inverter. Turned around
and drove back to check Hassyampa Hall, Paul’s Cappanone,
the big garage, the small garage, No Inverter! Back to
the UPS website to look for “Proof of Delivery”. They
take photos now of where they hide things... The photo
was dark and fuzzy, about all one could make out is that the
box is blue. At least that will show up in the forest
of green thorny bushes.
I donned my Sherlockian Deerstalker and wandered
around. Found the box in the third least likely
location. Not at the front gate-mailbox-parcel place,
not at the logical easy to get to big white garage, not at
the easy to find tho poorly identified front door of
Hassyampa Hall nor the guarded by dogs, and three clawed
cats front door of Paul’s Cappanone, but finally, at the
unmarked, obscure, northeast mangate, outside, on the ground
of course.
Feast Day of Saint George
I had my stitches out yesterday; that scar is looking
good. A few days ago I had occasion to listen to some
lady friend bemoaning the present state of her health and
when she paused to take a breath I held up my arm to display
my stitches. Her eyes narrowed as she focused on the
scar. Oh shit, she said, you win; that was the end of
her moaning.
tercero de mayo
Suddenly May Day has been and gone and I realise I have not
done my Annual Birthday Silver Polish and Wood Oil
tasks. I’ve been busy with a fortnight of Inverter
Issues and PV Charge Controller Problems that I won’t
belabour. Helpers at NAZ and SunForged have been kind
and patient with their counsel and interpretations of arcane
literature. Right now I believe these two very
essential power sources are functional. All smoke and
mirrors. Who said “Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic”?
Octo de Mayo
Found in Steven’s Chinese Fortune Cookie: “Even as the cell
is the unit of the organic body, so the family is the unit
of society.” Too true. Now the chicken/egg
question: If the deterioration of one leads to that of the
other, which is the cause of the present abysmal condition?
I’m Saving This, Might Be A Profundity:
All of that straightness was suggestive of demonism; more
natural and human
was the ever-turning way, where you could never see round
the next corner,
and the overall plan could be understood only after lengthy
meditation.
--Judge Fang v.s Dr X
24 May 25 Healthy Issue
A pressing issue in my bowel woke me at some time after
midnight and commenced to leave me drained and bordering on
dehydrated before the morning passed. Gastro Enteritis
the tele-medicine doctor said after an hour of musical
nurses. My own doctor does not work on holiday
weekends.
I did manage an hour or so between runs to work on the gate
but even that was interrupted by a visit to a nearby sand
hill. As with a cold: three to five days and the problem
should pass. So what I have done today is mostly nap a
lot. Good thing I scored a case of Gatorade a the food
bank.
Animals In The Ark
Keeping me company along with Hurricane Hazel-Rah The Oliver
Cat are at least two species of spider inside: Cellar
Spider and Wolf
Spider [at least those are my closest approximation].
And maybe a few other kinds outside. One of the
results of sitting in these ruts too long is the number of
webs, like anchor chains, tying the bus to the ground.
Inside there are several Cellar Spiders making their webs
under the galley table, between the aloe bush and the spider
plants, and between the driver's seat and the pedals that
make the bus go and stop. Wolf Spiders have been seen from
time to time perched atop the bug-zapper lamp or along the
towel rack in the head where flies frequent to find
water. This Wolf Spider was found lurking under a fold
of prescription label stuck to the wall.
Closing Journal #39
I’ve been writing a daily journal since at least mid
1983. That first book is a gallimaufry of clippings,
notes, photos, and redacted pages. The first instance
of “1983” is near the middle of that book. My
biographer might eventually label 1979 to 1983 “The Lost
Years”. So, forty years... One might say I am now a
Quadrajournalarian.
The Ides of June
...carries the same odiousmess as the Ides of March.
TinyTruck is in the garage with a broken Ignition
Module. Same symptoms as back in April of 2019.
Interesting that the “original” ignition module (original at
least as far as my tenure is marking time) lasted from 1997
to 2019. The replacement served only five years.
The situation was muddy and murky. Basic problem was a
matter of No Spark. Keep in mind this motor is pre-computer
controlled. A half step above mechanical points. A reluctor
and simple transistor switch have replaced the mechanical
points and cam. Various test narrowed the culprits to
a tiny ignition module within the distributor, or the spark
coil on the outside of the distributor.
The failure of the spark only happened at high temperatures.
Initially at least the problem was a matter of not starting
after driving for a while. If I waited long enough she would
start and run ok until the next hot restart and then fail to
start. This sequence happened several times wenzday whilst
shopping and thursday during my morning rounds to the post
office. After getting started the second time thursday
I headed to Allan's Garage. On the way there, the last mile
is washboard gravel so I drove slowly, and a half mile short
of the garage the motor quit--no restart. I called Allan for
a tow.
At the garage he directed a stream of water onto the
distributor and after a few minutes the motor started. So we
figured that ignition module was at fault and replaced with
new. Now the motor wouldn't start even cold. Further testing
indicated the module was working but the spark coil was not
sparking. Allan got out what he called his Universal Spark
Coil and with a few clipleads connected in place of the one
on the motor. Started up fine!
So we reconnected the original. That too started fine. But
there was a germ of suspicion now and some cracks in the
insulation of the original coil so we replaced that with a
proper matching part. Started fine. Of course all this
has taken from Thursday to Monday now. Along the way I did a
Lube & Oil which was a few thousand miles overdue and
played a nearly non-stop game of fetch with the shop dog.
In the end I had time to reflect and remember a similar
ignition failure a few years back which also required a tow
and a lot of troubleshooting but no parts, only a lot of
wriggling wires. So I may not be through with this problem
yet. I just have to remember which wires I wriggled.
Monsoon Season Begins
Time to get this letter on the road. Hot here.
And Humid. We had three traces of rain yesterday. Big
drops--SPLAT!--into the dust, made little craters; but
traces never add up to anything. Another of the
features of this location besides the heat is the
opportunity to observe SpaceX Launches from Vandenberg Space
Force Base. Seconds after "Liftoff" is announced by SpaceX
one can see the vapour trail climbing from the horizon due
west. The contrail arcs up and turns to the
south. When the sky is just so the sight is rather
exciting.
Food Bank Day 26 June
 Yesterday we had RAIN! 0.13" Insufficient to
break the long term drought but that thirteen-hundredth of
an inch of liquid precipitation was the first measurable
rain in 83 days. Windy too. Gust-O-Meter was up to
38mph.
---Limertics cause Rhyme Disease---
You are really stretching the form here
Writhing limericks re near and far there
So much hurts my ears
I'd imbibe a few beers
But my meds proscribe drink in this biosphere.
June’s End
 This week’s broken thing is one of the
irrigation valves out back. Does not shut off
completely. Just trickles a bit, so there is a growing
morass under the big Palo Verde. But also the valve
does not turn on all the way when the timer calls for water
so the lack of full pressure is starving the trees at the
ends of the branches. Lake Verde has attracted a hive
of bees and at least two miniature Black Panthers.
Completed the online lessons of Poll Worker Training.
My grade was 95%. A F2F classroom session next week
and I’ll be ready to work the Primary at the end of July.
|
2024 June Spring into Summer
— Greetings Virtual Travellers and Pen Friends: 
