Adaptive Curmudgeon

Frank is back!!!!!

I was idly sifting through Craigslist when I bumped into the same ad I’d seen in 2014. It’s “Frank” selling bridge mats as firewood! After a few year’s absence (at least on Craigslist) the ads re-appeared. Frank will probably rule the world someday.

His odd little universe is one of my favorite stories. It looks like he’s doing the very same pitch as in 2014. The Craigslist photo is framed just so. You can’t tell what’s up. Holy shit, the man’s a crooked, lying, force of nature… but I can’t help but be impressed by his Moxie.

If you don’t know the story of Jake, Julie, and Frank and their “bridge mats of deceit” you should read my story from 2014. (Linked below.)

A.C.

P.S. I’m not bitter. The adventure of the bridge mats of ’14 was hilarious and strange but it really did work out for me. I did get a decent deal from Frank (though I was probably the first customer to do so). Also, the material had plenty of BTUs too. I’d love to see if Julie has finally learned to operate the phone and/or destroyed her car yet. Maybe Frank has built himself a throne and castle to go with his strange little empire in the forest? Unfortunately, “Frank’s” business model is to bend you over the hood of your own truck and have his way. There’s no way a snake like that will me get away with an honest purchase twice. He probably frets knowing one customer in hundreds (thousands?) I got a fair deal half a decade ago. My fondest wishes go to Frank’s crooked heart and his inept and oppressed crew. Best of luck to them all but I’m keeping my distance from the whole mess.

Scoring Firewood On The Gray Market: Onion Sandwiches and Bridge Mats

• Firewood Saga: Part 0
• Firewood Saga: Part 1: Units
• Firewood Saga: Part 2: Cold Calling
• Firewood Saga: Part 3: The Art Of The Deal
• Firewood Saga: Part 4: Jake and Julie
• Firewood Saga: Part 5: Bridge Mats
• Firewood Saga: Part 6: Frank Tries To Screw Me
• Firewood Saga: Part 7: Mission Accomplished / Math Works

“Sadly, I ran out of steam for stacking. Muscles don’t come back in a day (or a weekend). I estimate I’ve got 2/3 cord sitting on the utility trailer I’ve been using to haul my little sailboat. I guess I’ll have to unload and stack it before I can sail again.“

I wanted to free my trailer for another sail/camp trip so I set to work. It’s hard work lifting stove bolts off a trailer and stacking them. But I was pretty diligent and just over an hour later the trailer was empty.

After I’d stacked everything I checked it with a tape measure. I expected 2/3 cord but it measured out at only 1/3 cord. Huh?

That’s weird. I’m usually good at judging such things. But it is what it is. Clearly I made mistakes in my estimation and must accept that I’ve amassed less firewood than I’d hoped. After all, it’s right there in front of me and tape measures don’t lie. In fact…

RUSSIAN COLLUSION! THE GODDAMN RUSSIAN SECRET AGENTS CAME AND STOLE MY FIREWOOD. THEY INFLUENCED ME THROUGH FACEBOOK ADS. THEY MADE THE WOOD VANISH!

I’M GONNA’ GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS. I’LL INVESTIGATE THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF IT AND EVEN IF A 400 PAGE REPORT HAS NO SOLID EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER THAT RUSSIANS ARE STEALING FIREWOOD… I DON’T CARE. IT CERTAINLY DOESN’T PROVE THEY’RE NOT STEALING MY FIREWOOD. AFTER ALL, THE ONLY OTHER OPTION IS THAT REALITY DOESN’T MATCH MY PROJECTIONS AND THAT’S TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE!

…is a maddening unit of measure. Technically it’s the volume of wood one can stack in a 4′ x 4′ x 8′ pile.  This is bullshit because a buyer patiently stacking uniform, small diameter, gently tapered, logs can cram a shitton of wood into the same space a busy (and mechanized) seller will occupy with a smaller amount of lightly tossed, poorly stacked, scraggly, tapered and forked, large diameter, junk… in a pyramidal heap. Not to mention that no sane human will stack 8′ bolts of anything. An 8′ bolt is just too unwieldy. Thus, cords ostensibly made of 8′ bolts manifest as 128 cubic feet of dead tree in 24 linear feet of 16″ stovebolts stacked 4′ high; if the work is done by a man’s own labors. (Not withstanding my neighbor who likes to burn 20″ bolts in his external wood boiler.)

The whole 8′ thing is nutty. It’s a tradition springing from industrial processes that came sometime after Paul Bunyan was sledging shit around Maine with a blue ox and and slightly before this morning when someone in British Columbia fired up a whole tree chipper with self leveling cab. It’s enough to make a man go metric!

But I digress.

A cord of wood is so much more that a vague way to specify 128 cubic feet that’s (to a lesser or greater extent) occupied by chopped up tree. It’s more dammit! Especially firewood. Here’s a Curmudgeonly rant:

Firewood isn’t money in the bank, it’s gold in your pocket! It’s a solid fuck you to big oil AND a simultaneous kiss my ass to dweebs with subsidized solar panels. It’s the manliest way to heat your house and the easiest way to work a man to death. It’s the ability to live off grid in ball freezing climates that no rational person would expect of homo sapiens. It’s the brutally hard construction of a personal biomass mountain that you’ll happily torch to ash in your living room: because that’s how you roll! Firewood is about the freest damn thing you can do. If you can harness it, firewood is an endless fountain of tax free, unregulated, privately owned, hand hewn, BTUs of freedom!

It’s also hard fucking work!

Firewood is proof that shit that’s so cheap it literally grows on trees can also be priceless and sometimes unobtainable. It’s pretty damn hard to amass “so cheap it grows on trees” shit when you progress from theory to reality. Life is hard but vivid when you start wandering around the woods armed with nothing but a chainsaw and great clanging balls.

So yeah, I stacked firewood this week. And I’m pretty damn happy about it.

Why am I happy? Because I’ve been taken out of the game for a while. Injury, then illness, then time constraints, then a thousand other little deaths. Lather, rinse, repeat. The world conspires to make us weak.

Also caution held me back. Which is a good thing. A chainsaw will kill you dead. You shouldn’t mess with one unless you feel like you’re firing on all cylinders. Lately, I haven’t often felt healthy enough to mess with beastly forces like a chainsaw.

Until a few days ago. I was leaving the firewood game to studlier people than me. Instead, I had a camp out planned. I was going to deploy my supertent and sail my microboat (pretty good plan eh?). Alas, the weather sucked. Not quite rain but definitely cloudy, neither warm nor cold, winds ranging from mild to none. I paced the house like a caged animal, getting increasingly frustrated, until I set out to see if my body was ready to mess with raw tonnage. My Stihl started readily. My rebuilt and over-engineered wood splitter coughed to life. The only thing that could fail was… me.

Working in cautious 2-3 hour chunks (with ample rest and lots of hydration) I managed to lay up a 16′ long stack of 16″ stovebolts that’s 6′ high. Do the math and that’s one cord.

Then I dropped an old dead tree that’s been trying to fall and block my driveway. Not a big tree but a good chance to see if my directional felling skills had atrophied. They haven’t; that bitch landed on target like I’d typed the coordinates into a GPS. Nice!

Accepting that age implies both limits AND privileges, I didn’t do the tree entirely on my own. Eventually, I pressed a teenager into service to help with splitting and swamping. He did his duty with the minimum required eye rolling and only minor complaints… which is pretty good nowadays. Millennials have potential… or at least this one does. The hard target was to get the shit cleared off the driveway before Mrs. Curmudgeon came home to find her dipshit husband had gone into some sort of logger flashback and blocked the driveway. We made the deadline!

Sadly, I ran out of steam for stacking. Muscles don’t come back in a day (or a weekend). I estimate I’ve got 2/3 cord sitting on the utility trailer I’ve been using to haul my little sailboat. I guess I’ll have to unload and stack it before I can sail again. I can live with that, though I’ll probably let my back rest a day or two before I’m back at it. By the time the next cord is stacked and ready for winter I’ll have earned my sail/camp trip. Earnin’ shit feels good!

Here’s how I felt after doing a little chainsaw therapy:

A brace is no good without bits. Modern bits are expensive and lack “history”. So I made a wild ass bid on some “old” bits on e-bay. I think I did OK:

The photo’s not great but the bits seem OK. I’ve got duplicates of a few sizes. There are a few odd ducks (three adjustable spade bits on top left). Some look ready to go right now. A few could use sharpening (not that I know how to sharpen a 100 year old bit). Some have a bit of patina but none have pitting rust. One is slightly bent but only a little. I’ve heard they can be straightened.

I’m stashing them away until winter. Summer’s a busy time for me. Some cold frozen weekend I’m going to sit down with a file (or whatever) and a glass of whiskey. I’ll patiently see if I can sharpen what needs sharpening. If it works out I’ve pretty much got all the “bit and brace” a man needs. If not, at least I had fun shopping and it wasn’t too expensive.

Dale Cooper is a man of wisdom.

Last week I made a $10 impulse buy:

The best part is I got it from “some dude”. I met him while shopping at a woodworking store. The store didn’t carry a “brace” but this guy, whoever he was, had one in the backseat of his car and was glad to sell it. I think he roams the world picking up tools at garage sales and whatnot. He keeps them in his car to dispense (at a modest profit) to folks like me. He hangs out in woodworking shops looking for people who like tools that don’t have laser sights and two phase AC motors.

As far as I’m concerned he’s a tool based superhero.

About a month ago I wrote:

“Kayaks (for no discernible reason) seem largely the domain of vegan cat ladies who carry them around on Subarus adorned with left wing bumper stickers. Most of them only paddle on sunny weekends. Invariably they paddle in groups. I suspect chardonnay may be involved? Not my scene. (Doubt my assessment of kayaks in America in 2019? Fine. Send me a photo of a burly man solo kayaking a moose quarter through a swamp and I’ll recant.)”

A reader sent this. That speck in the lower right corner is the kayaker who is clearly doing an epic paddle. No moose but whomever this is, he/she is sufficiently bad ass that I recant my “vegan cat ladies in Subarus” statement.

Not to be outdone, another commenter sent the link to this:

OK fine. Y’all win. 90% of what I’ve seen in the kayak world has has been on the “vegan cat lady” side of the scale but I now admit some folks are out there kayaking like a Norse God. The fact that I’m not seeing them reflects more on me than kayaks. If I got my ass out on the water more maybe I’d meet more dudes like this.

Touche’ internet!

A.C.

P.S. I have no idea who these people are, where they are, or if they want their photos posted on some nitwit’s blog. If you’re the person in either photos and want it gone… send me an e-mail and your wish is my command. Also, way to be awesome!

I built (not bought) my sailboat. Since I was already doing the “roll your own” approach, didn’t buy a regular sailboat trailer. I’ve been fiddling with various transportation alternatives with mixed results. Most of the time the boat rides in a “cradle” I made of 2″ x 4″s and padded with foam from pool noodles. The cradle is tied down in a firewood hauling utility trailer. It looks incredibly redneck but has worked for thousands of miles. I’m still refining solutions for bypassing boat ramps (I dislike being tied to boat ramp infrastructure).

I’ve spent a lot off time looking at homemade trailer designs. Now that I’ve got more “state park” / “overland” camping gear I want to get more organized (especially for carrying my huge Teton Cot and giant Gazelle T4 tent). Many ideas are to be found if you look.

About a month ago a reader, who’s clearly got his shit together (and carries a Teton cot too), sent me these photos:

Very cool! Here’s the description:

“The Harbor Freight kit is pretty popular for DIY motorcycle trailer projects – inexpensive, assembles easily, and pulls nicely.

Some folks build them with car-top carriers, but the TSC tool box worked better for carrying the Coleman 8-person Instant Tent and the Teton cot – the tent is about the same size as the when packed for travel. I put the cot on one side, the tent on the other, a folding chair on top of each, and bungee them down to the eye bolts.

The cooler rack is homebuilt and fastened to the tongue with u-bolts – a couple of bungee cords hold the cooler.”

…since I was spared by a moment of grace.

(If you want to read the story click here: A Moment Of Grace: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3.5, Part 4.)

The summary is that a year ago I was hammered by a series of unfortunate events, including but not limited to exhaustion, illness, the death of loved ones, and eventually the near certainty that my beloved dog was going to die. None of these alone would break me but in sequence, with no rest or recovery between, it was crushing. Especially the dog. I was in no shape to handle that event at that time. Not everyone can understand the bond between a man and a good dog (and not everyone gets the blessing of having a good dog). It’s a two edged sword. It comes with the knowledge that you’ll outlive the dog; that’s part of the price.

When the world was darkest, in what I call a moment of grace, my dog got up from where I thought it had lain down to die. Death seemed a done deal but it simply didn’t happen. It’s as if the dog knew it had more work to do and so it didn’t leave me. It recovered and has been with me ever since. That moment, roughly a year ago, was a turning point. I struggled to the couch, very sick, and slept under the ever watchful eye of my dog. That’s when the fever broke and I began to recover. It took us both a few weeks to properly get back on our feet. But that was the moment when things went from decline to recovery.

Knowing the clock is ticking I’ve been extra nice to my dog. It’s retired now. Security duties it once handled are back on my shoulders. I don’t mind. I give it treats and am increasingly lax with discipline. That which was not allowed to the young pup is forgiven for the honored elder. I carefully administer medicine, treats, and lavish it with attention. Walks are whenever it wants for as long as it wants. The dog is old, the time will come… soon.

I hope, when I’m old, people treat me as well as I treat my dog.

Rewind many years: When the dog arrived to our house as a rolly polly little puppy we set it up for it’s first night without its brothers and sisters. This is always a hard time for a new puppy. It whined. One of our kids, God bless him, insisted that he be there for the little creature. I concurred. The kid slept on the floor in his tiny fireman sleeping bag near the puppy. The puppy calmed and slept. It was the sweetest thing.

It didn’t take long for the puppy to adjust. Only a night or two and the whining had passed. We established that the dog sleeps on the ground floor, the better to guard the door. That’s its domain and it has patrolled with dedication. I sleep better knowing anyone who enters my door at night will encounter 120+ pounds of guardian dog before I step in and take over. It’s a good arrangement.

Now the kid is much older. He is a fine young man, full of potential and charting his own course. The dog is very old, having already lived its lifespan; and performing admirably every step of the way as it did it.

Last week, there was a thunderstorm. The dog has never liked thunder, a threat for which it cannot ascertain the source. This time, the dog limped up the stairs, slowly, negotiating each step as only the elderly do. I heard it struggle, listening carefully in case I needed to help. It came to my bedside “there’s thunder, I don’t like it”.

A few years ago I’d have been firm “you sleep on the ground floor, get back on post”. No longer. I reassured it and let it sleep right there. It fell asleep with my hand on its head. Comically, it snored.

Full circle; my son reassuring it as a puppy,  many years of solo patrols, and now snoring  within inches of my bed. The cycle of life is beautiful.

I felt bad telling everyone that SpotX pricing is a wishy-washy mishmash of options (which is true if not a satisfying answer). I clicked to their pricing site and investigated. Here’s a summary:

Your basic, activated all year plan is $20 to activate and $12 a month. That includes 20 texts a month plus unlimited “check ins”. (I just discovered the pre-defined messages are free in addition to “check ins” which I already knew to be free. I should read fine print more.) It’ll cost you $12/month and add up to $164 a year.  I think that’s pretty good for what you’re getting.

A basic, only activate in months you want plan is $25 to activate and $15 a month. During the active months it’s the same # of texts; 20. This plan allows you to shut down service and then restart it without fees. (I haven’t tested this.) This means if you only want to use a SpotX for one month of elk hunting it’ll cost you $40 a year total. That ‘aint bad either.

I’ve already experimented enough to decided that 100 texts a month (which is what I got) is too much. 20 is probably fine given that pre-defined and “check in” are “free”.

There are more options. But that’s the gist of it.

There are few sexy options… totally not required but for my experimental first year I went nuts:

Remember how this all started with John Wick? He had pre-planned ass covering for situations where his ass needed covering. I wanted something like that for me! Well, for an extra $25 a year you can buy coverage for “up to $100K in Search and Rescue (SAR) expenses – even coordinating a private SAR contractor if needed to get you to safety”. Fine print tells me that’s $50k per event and 2 possible “events” which is plenty. (Fer crissakes if you need more than 2 extractions in one year they should put you on a leash.) I don’t plan on ever needing SAR but helicopters are expensive. You can’t even look at a helicopter without losing a mortgage payment and it goes up from there. I bought the $25 coverage. Hopefully I’ll never be able to tell you how well it works.

There’s also an AAA towing like service. $30 a year for “towing and roadside assistance, offering service on even the most obscure and hard to travel roads imaginable. It doesn’t matter if the roads are paved , dirt or gravel”. (Their words, not mine. I can imagine shit that’ll scare a billy goat so YMMV.) It implies they’ll retrieve things like ATV’s and snowmobiles. That said, I’m suspicious. I suspect they created loopholes for themselves and will say something like “we only cover ATVs on leap years” if you call them. Nonetheless I’ve been having carburetor issues with my Curmudgeonly Bug Out Vehicle (not the Dodge) and so I decided to get this service until I’m sure I’ve got the kinks worked out in the old beast. (More on the BOV when/if I get it ready for primetime.)

[I’m pretty sure I’ve beaten this horse into the ground. However, if you’ve got a question of any sort, just put it in comments. I’ve been testing the hell out of my SpotX and am glad to share.]

It doesn’t even look like a cell phone. (Link goes to Amazon, you know the rest.)

Are there alternatives to the SpotX? Are the alternatives better?

Yes, there are several two-way satellite communication options on the market. Some are pretty neat. That’s a good question you just asked.

The SpotX and its competitors are probably starting an arm’s race. Two-way satellite communication for regular schlubs on a hunting trip is still in its infancy but soon it’ll be as common as GPS. Probably it will leapfrog or overlap with regular cell phones in many markets. Why not?

But that’s the future and I’m concerned with right now. Currently the SpotX’s main competition are old (very crude by comparison) EPIRB devices, satphones (which are spendy), and a new crop of Bluetooth antennae gadgets that link to a smartphone.

The antennae devices are where the action’s at. They link with a special App on the smartphone creating an indirect but certainly usable link to satellite constellations. They’re very cool, very small, and quite James Bond-ish. I hate ‘em but that’s just me.

Occasionally, antennae devices are mixed in with the hardware and abilities of a GPS. Garmin has something like that. It’s a neat idea to mix SAR beacon and GPS navigation. I might spring for one but the GPS/Sat-antennae devices are a solid $100 – $150 more than a SpotX and you wind up babysitting a damn phone. For $100 savings I can use a regular GPS (always carry a compass too). Also, the care and feeding of a smartphone is a hassle I don’t want.

The cell phone angle has drawbacks that nobody cares about (but me) and it has advantages that don’t impress me but astound others. The smartphone is most of the GUI and does most of the work. They have sexy features like weather reports and data plans and you can probably satellite uplink dick picks to Tinder if you try hard enough. I see all that and recoil. I sense many points of failure. But that’s me. My strategy is caution and reliability and that makes me a geezer who wants to ramble about solo and live forever. Who am I to hold out against Millennials who urgently need to post on Snapchat? For many people, especially young ones, the smartphone app is a more natural interface.

Pricewise, Bluetooth/smartphone pairing is more expensive than the SpotX; both for hardware and for service. Most people spend more on their smart phone & data plans than I can stomach so that’s not an issue to them. I suspect smartphone linked devices will be the majority of the market over the next 5 years or so. A dedicated device that does everything on its own, like the SpotX, is (in my opinion) more reliable but it may get BetaMaxed. (Which doesn’t mean I care. Nothing electronic you buy in 2019 will be “modern” in 2029 so why sweat what 2029 people will use.)

Personally, I wouldn’t touch a cell phone app-based system with a ten-foot pole. Daily use shit (a cell phone) and emergency use shit (your satellite communicator) shouldn’t be mixed together. The SpotX is an odd duck in that it’s all in one. It’s a single housing with the display, keyboard, antenna, battery, electronics, software, etc… I like that because it insulates me from emergency gear shutting down to do an OS upgrade or because iTunes wants to sell me some bullshit or because Zuckerberg is having a bad hair day.

My logic is to prefer the SpotX because it’s smarter than an EPIRB but too crude to play Angry Birds. Better to do what it does very well than do irrelevant shit that doesn’t matter. YMMV.

What’s the price for the SpotX?

About $250. Shop around but it’s pretty price stable. It’s only been around since last fall so it might drop a little with time? I don’t imagine it’ll drop too far in price. Buying hardware doesn’t include buying the service.

What’s with the SpotX keyboard?

In some reviews people freak out over the SpotX’s keyboard. It’s basically a Blackberry. Fuck them. Touchscreens freeze, break, and get inadvertently jostled in a backpack. The Blackberry approach was the right choice… for the intended purpose.

Warning, it is small. You will need to squint at the screen and type with your thumbs. Google up a photo of someone texting on a Blackberry someday. It worked and humanity endured.

Does it have spell check?

No. It’s a goddamn emergency two way satellite communicator. If you can’t spell properly for 140 characters you don’t deserve to be rescued.

What’s a SPOT?

There’s at thing called a SPOT. That’s the device that pre-dates the SpotX (which hasn’t even been on the market a full year). SPOT uses the same satellites and SAR (search and rescue) network but it’s not two way. You can send pre-designated message and that’s it. It’s inflexible but much cheaper. It’s still a damned fine tracker/beacon and might save your ass for a bargain basement price. When the SpotX came out, the price for a SPOT fell through the floor. You might consider one if that’s how you roll.

What is the price for the service?

Scott Adams once wrote that cell phone companies had only one thing to sell, minutes. So, they came up with complex pricing plans as a “confuseoply”. Price comparing two-way satellite coms is the same. It’s an apples to oranges clusterfuck.  For the SpotX you pre-pay for so many messages and I think you can send additional ones if needed. Some SpotX plans have it “always active” and others let you shut it down (and save) months at a time. You cannot use a SpotX without paying for the nerds that man the satellite & SAR end of things. It’s not a HAM radio.

There are a range of plan options and it’s not cheap but not too expensive. Figure a base price of $164/year to have it live all the time every day and totally usable. Figure a minimum of $40/year to have it live one month (elk hunt? rafting trip?) and dead the other 11 months but you can activate for another month for another $15 supposedly without much hassle. Beyond that you can easily double your expenses signing up for bells and whistles.

There are other two-way satellite com and satellite phone companies and plans. The plan is the bigger expense of the emergency communicator costs. The best I can say is that I chose SpotX.

Does it have GPS?

It has to have location information so it can send your location to people. It also has simple navigation to and from waypoints.

In practice, the GPS is slow to pick up a signal if it has been off or in a fast moving vehicle. It seems fine if you’re hiking. I think it’s good practice to set a waypoint when you leave your truck or whatever but the SpotX is not a great navigation device.

I have a GPS that works great as a GPS. It’s the size and weight of two golf balls. Call me crazy but separate redundant gadgets seems a good solution.

Also, carry a map and compass. Always.

What’s the battery life?

It varies. It’s not as long as I’d like but it’s not too short either. I can see how a little practice teaches the user to max the battery life to a much better level.

When I flog the SpotX mercilessly (which is how I test emergency stuff) it starts to go dead or near dead in three days. But it still sent and received and might have had a fourth day left. Three days was underwhelming but in retrospect that’s 72 consecutive hours of GPS and sending its location (“tracking”) every so many minutes. Also I messed with it a lot.

Now that I’ve got the hang of it and quit abusing the poor device, I can get much more time. Figure a week without breaking a sweat and two weeks with abundant care. Also you could leave it off for many weeks and probably it’ll hold a charge.

Here’s where you need to break cell phone type bad habits. For example, why the hell was I leaving an emergency tracker on when I was asleep in the tent? I posted my location when I got there. I’m still there. Why burn batteries when I’m snoring? Bad thinking!

It’s got an off button. Once I started using it, I doubled the battery life. Duh!

It charges with regular USB. It comes with an AC charger but I use an adapter with my truck cigarette lighter.

How do I use it in an emergency?

There’s an obvious button hidden behind a special door on the front of the device. Open the door and press the “save my ass” button.

Once you’ve done that, you will get instant attention from an SAR operator who will probably start texting you questions about the nature of your emergency. They’ll alert the Marines or send out an ambulance or whatever from their end.

I have no doubt that the SAR services are top notch. Possibly even better than calling 911 if you’re not in a standard house… though I don’t know that.

For obvious reasons don’t fiddle with that button!