Adaptive Curmudgeon

I’d felt like shit all week and then Biden took an intellectual (or rather an anti-intellectual) dump on my TV which really bummed me out. I needed a break in the cycle of suck. Also, all this negativity had me crapped out with the squirrels. I’d been making progress with the squirrel story but lately I’ve been doing naught but treading water.

It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness so I decided to take a “mini-vacation”. A chance to rest, do no homestead chores whatsoever, and maybe get my groove back with the squirrels. It was a spur of the moment weekend morning idea but why the hell not? My plan was to drive several hours to a city of no particular interest and spend the night at a hotel that’s nobody’s idea of a destination resort. I’d maybe walk the dog inside a Cabela’s store. (It’s always fun to do an indoor dog walk.) Possibly I’d get some sushi. The next day I’d hammer a few thousand words of squirrel at a coffee shop and go home. It’s not a beach in Tahiti but even the lamest of vacations is better than nothing.

It’s surprising how quickly I perked up. I started having visions of an indoor shooting range. Mrs. Curmudgeon was on board with that! She started a web-search to see if one was available.

While she was Googling, I jammed a toothbrush and a handful of wadded clothes into a bag. I tossed it in the car. While I was there I might as well grab some junk that was cluttering the car. I decided to put the junk in the basement.

I walked to the basement and found an inch of water on the floor. BAM! My simple little plans took a headshot!

Adulting sucks.

Every hope, dream, positive vibe, and spring in my step evaporated. Game over man!

I alerted Mrs. Curmudgeon that there was a leak, that the mini-vacation was canceled, and also that life was a useless slog of misery. (I was not a happy camper.)

Now there are plumbing issues and there are plumbing ISSUES. This was definitely on the minor side of the spectrum. For one thing it’s an unfinished basement so the leak was spraying water on concrete. Technically, nothing was damaged… yet. My pissing and moaning was because I had things I’d rather do than standing on a ladder getting sprayed with funky water. Who doesn’t?

Unlike the dickheads in politics, I can’t talk problems out of existence. (They can’t either but they sure try.) When plumbing gives out I must drop everything until it’s fixed. There’s nobody else who’ll handle it for me. I’ve no landlord, authority figure, God, or roll of the dice that will heal a busted pipe without blowing a hole in my day. In particular, living in East Bumfuck nowhere meant I can’t easily call a plumber.

It was my job and mine alone. It’s just my “white male privilege” manifesting itself. Lucky me!

Lets start by saying this isn’t my first rodeo. My house, when I bought it, had barely functional plumbing. It froze often and catastrophically. I patched and replaced and rebuilt and insulated and fixed until it was much better. It does what it needs to do and it’s even reliable (well at least I thought so before the leak disabused me of that notion). I suppose the plumbing is “good enough for some definition of good” and today’s definition of “good enough” had stochastically failed. The long-term alternative is to tear everything out and replace it all, including the hard stuff behind drywall and in crawl spaces; an approach that’s prohibitively labor intensive and expensive.

This particular leak wasn’t rocket science. It was visible, obvious, and near a similar situation I’d battled about 15 years ago. There was a fair chance I’d fix it myself with minimal drama. But I’m no fool… I wouldn’t bet on an easy fix.

I live in reality. As a plumber, I am barely adequate. I know that. We are all human. Nobody can do everything. Unless it’s stupid simple, I’ll fix things temporarily and let the guys with professionally certified ass cracks handle the permanent situation.

We wisely decided on a two prong approach. Mrs. Curmudgeon grabbed the phone and started getting rejected by every plumber in the time zone. Simultaneously, I grabbed a wrench and started getting wet. In theory, either her phone calls or my struggles would work out. I doubted she’d get anyone on the phone. It feels like the last plumber in the county retired a decade ago.

Without going down a plumbing rabbit hole, the problem was the flexible hose that leaves my well pump and goes to my pressure tank. (Technically what I call “flexible hose” is “plastic pipe”. It’s the kind of shit that comes on big reels, is 1” diameter, and is not really flexible at all. I hate the stuff!)

Back in the day, that hose split causing a 1” pressurized hose blast from hell to flood the basement big time. At the time I didn’t have a way to drain the basement. I shut off the flow from the well pump, begged a handyman for help (not a plumber because those hardly exist), and we spent days unfucking the situation. $3500 later it was fixed.

We fixed it right, or as right as we could. After mucking out a billion gallons of water with an array of pumps I set out to make sure I’d never need to do it again. The solution included hammering a hole in my concrete floor! The handyman and I sunk a receptacle the size of a 5 gallon bucket below floor level and cemented it in place.

If you’ve never took a pickaxe and shovel to the concrete floor of a skeevy basement your life is good and you should offer thanks to the Gods of Plumbing. If you’ve never hauled endless 5 gallon buckets of rock and concrete up basement stairs you’ve no idea how much life can suck! It was exhausting and I never want to do it again.

Take my word for this, if some horror movie plot left a murder victim cemented under your floor… just leave it there!

Into this hard won “pit”, we installed a sump pump with float valve. Later I had an electrician wire a special circuit just for that pump. It’s plumbed to evacuate water into the septic system, complete with check valves that, should they fail and siphon from the septic, I’m going to move.

Since building that sturdy (and expensive) backup, I’ve never needed it. This particular leak had soaked everything in the vicinity like a mist irrigation system gone rogue. But it was still only a few inches deep and hadn’t flowed to the sump pump yet.

As for the flexible hose, it emerges from underneath one of my sketchier crawl spaces. Some parts of my house are well over 100 years old. Actually, my house isn’t really a single house at all. What I mean is it grew. When the farm family that lived in it popped out another kid or two, they built more space. They did that for nearly a century. I live in a mishmash of random unplanned additions glued to a decrepit core.

In case you’re wondering, the core pre-dates both indoor plumbing and electricity.

I don’t like where that hose comes from! I’d like to replace it. Unfortunately, someone in the 1970’s saw fit to build a floor directly over it. Short of taking a chainsaw to my laundry room floor there’s only so much I can do. The best solution I could come up with (15 years ago) was to cut the hose (pipe) at the failure point. From there I crammed a nipple (friction fit one side and male threads the other), added a valve (female both sides), and installed a second nipple on the other side to rejoin the undamaged portion of the hose (pipe) that goes to the pressure tank. It’s an ugly solution but it is what it is.

It worked fine right until it didn’t. I’m glad. I didn’t have many other options without hurling a bank loan at it. Such are the compromises between practicality (“it’s weird but it works”) and Utopian ideals (“nuke it from space and build a house that isn’t crap”) that rural folks (especially broke ones) have to face. I swear, half of our nation’s political divide is between people who’ve installed a “Sharkbite” fitting into a crappy old broken pipe and those who’d wave an entirely new plumbing system into being in their mind but never made a fitting water tight in physical reality.

Danger Will Rogers! Mid-stream bitch session to ensue!

As an aside, I once had a discussion with an urban dweller about how I don’t pay water OR septic bills. I explained that I maintain a well and pump and pressure tank and all the assorted things. I am literally my own independent water supply. The labor and capital to do this is all my burden. Regardless, he thought it was somehow “unfair” that he has a water bill and I don’t.

After that the conversation turned to “sewer bills”. I tried to explain my entirely privately financed independent owned septic tank and leach field. I think the guy had nightmares. He assumed that every dump taken by every human in every house in every nation is always piped to a municipal treatment plant. I explained that “leach field” and “treatment facility” are similar or related technology but it did no good. Municipalities are special because they employ magic elves which use the power of government to turn shit into rainbows.

What’s worse is that the fact that I live miles and miles from the nearest treatment plant. That true fact just didn’t fit with his world view. Nobody can run twenty or forty miles of pipe from just one house! If you live miles from the nearest town, your morning shit can’t be piped to an urban treatment at the crap spa.

(I once met a person who couldn’t drive at night where there were no streetlights… same thing.)

I tried to explain that’s just how it is. Many things can’t exist in a low population density. Many things are not provided to hinterland people. I can’t have light rail or subway service. There are no street lights. I haul my own garbage, pump my own water, and treat my own sewage. (He’d have a stroke if he knew I cut my own firewood and that I use FIRE as a form of heat.) Heck, I can’t even get pizza delivered.

The analogy never took hold. He refused all my explanations. His opinion is that I ought to pay for services like he does and it’s somehow immoral to simply provide them myself. If I can’t use a city bus that can’t come to my house I still ought to pay.

Sigh…

In his mind it was somehow “unfair” he had monthly bills. When I dropped ten large on a new septic tank and paid for the whole fucking thing in one shot that didn’t mean anything. It didn’t count, for reasons that aren’t clear. The gulf between urban and rural is larger than either side fully understands.

Back to today’s story, I was carefully remembering the last time this hose (pipe) broke. It was a stone cold bitch to insert the friction fit into the hose. I remember a big struggle.

I killed the power to the well pump and depressurized my house’s pipes. But the little pinhole leak was still pressurized and spraying. I closed the valve to isolate it from the pressure tank input. I don’t think that’s how pressure tanks work (I don’t even know if the valve I installed 15 years ago made sense. I just tend to prefer valves to avoid “there’s nothing I can do other than let it leak” locations.) At least it stopped spraying me in the face.

In the meantime, Mrs. Curmudgeon had gotten nowhere finding a plumber. Nobody would even answer the phone on a weekend. I shouted upstairs that the water was off. Just then I heard the toilet flush.

“I hope it was worth it, that’s the last one.” I thought.

There’s more to follow but it might not go live for a few days… After the plumbing event, I decided to run away and go camping. I’ll be back when I get back. See ya’ then…

Hur said Biden was non compos mentis. That’s not great news for Captain Corn Pop but it’s not a surprise or insurmountable. All Biden needed to do was hide (as he usually does). He could enjoy another “committed a crime but nobody will touch it with a ten foot pole” moment by simply doing the same thing he’s done for years.

Hur provided the perfect timing too. All Biden had to do was stay under a rock until the Super Bowl. Nothing does a mental reset to the masses like bread and circuses. If Biden was really lucky TayTay would have a wardrobe malfunction or something and make everyone forget. (Yes, that stupid thing also happened. It was another of THOSE days. During superbowl 2004 Janet Jackson flashed a tit at halftime. Otherwise adult humans pretended they’d never seen such a super inappropriate thing before. A boob? Heavens to Betsy, who could imagine such a thing! We were just sitting here reciting hymns about how threshing wheat is fun! Sixteen years later the society that pretended it was shocked that Janet Jackson had breasts made Wet Ass Pussy a hit. That’s exactly how a reasonable society of mature adults behaves. Right?)

Anyway if Biden hides long enough, something stupid and weird will happen and everyone will officially forget he’s simultaneously too mentally declined to stand trail and Commander in Chief of the biggest nuclear armed military on earth. (Isn’t that a great thing to ponder?)

Biden knows how to hide. His 2020 campaign was from a basement. The press informed me that serious leaders of major countries routinely hide in their basements while campaigning. It must be true because he got more votes than any other presidential candidate in history!

Because the wise thing to do was take the hit and then smile, Biden insisted on doing the exact opposite. He decided a live response would prove he’s a crack thinker at the top of his game. And that portion of THOSE days popped up on my feed.

I haven’t seen Biden live since… um… I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him perform live since he was sworn in behind a wall of concertina wire. He used to do live stuff as VP but that’s a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. His amazing, unquestionable, statistically astounding, and legally flawless record setting vote tally sure as hell didn’t come from live performances.

I was curious. I watched the whole 16 minute disaster and it was “cringe”. Youths win on that slang. I normally wouldn’t say “cringe” but the 16 minute fuck up I watched was deeply uncomfortable to watch. I literally cringed watching him.

I don’t like seeing grown men having tantrums. I don’t like zombie level word salad mutterings. Alternating between rage and mumbling senescence is unnerving. It’s just not a good look.

You know how kids sometimes melt down on some hapless mom in the grocery store? The kid is screaming like a wild animal and flopping around in the canned goods aisle. Everyone is uncomfortable and embarrassed for the mom. They’re trying to pretend they’re not annoyed but they hate the situation. The mom is trying to contain her unholy offspring but the fucking kid is carrying on like a retarded banshee. We get that toddlers are toddlers. But it’s still awful for everyone involved… except the kid who’s too undeveloped to know how disgusting it is. That’s what a “cringe” press conference feels like.

At the grocery store the mom is miserable. Often just standing there, tear in her eye, thinking about how tired she is, wishing it were over. I wonder how Jill Biden felt?

I breathed a sigh of relief when Biden walked off stage. I really did. I’m not sure anyone enjoyed watching Biden fume (aside from maybe Trump). I was worried about the guy and I don’t even like Biden. I was relieved when he called it quits. He’d forgotten the location where he got his son’s rosary beads and that’s about it. The rest of the time he was mostly explaining he was “as sharp as a tack and the way you know it is because I’m shouting and angry”. I don’t associate shouting and angry with intellectual merit, but then again I didn’t get more votes than any other candidate in history.

Then, when a very ugly experience was almost over and all that was left for stunned staffers and “journalists” to spin away as much reputational damage as possible; he returned. He took the time to explain about Mexico’s border wall between Gaza and Egypt. Yep, he did that. He was at the finish line but he picked that moment to snatch defeat from the hands of… Well, it sure as hell wasn’t victory, but having a tantrum is one thing and confusing Mexico with Egypt is another. American’s aren’t great at geography but we know that Egypt borders Gaza, the Mexican border is with America, and the two aren’t even in the same hemisphere!

That gaffe doesn’t on it’s own prove he’s non compos mentis but it sure as hell doesn’t disprove it. The whole thing was embarrassing to watch. I feel like disinfecting my TV. Watching lizards fuck on the Discovery Channel is spiritually uplifting compared to Biden’s emotional incontinence.

Couch potatoing had NOT been a success. I wasn’t feeling good to start with and now I felt like Biden had peed on my leg.

Trying to save something sane for the last moment of the day, I tuned into Justin Johnson. Johnson playing Gravediggger Blues on his 3 string shovel guitar. He’s everything that bitchy decrepit political hacks aren’t. He’s got plain old excellence. It’s not country, it’s not heavy metal, it’s not WAP on the top 40 schlock radio, it’s not “performed” by TayTay, it’s pure blues essence. I encourage you to watch (listen!).

I have no formal education in music theory but there’s something about 3 string makeshift guitars and the blues. For blues (and I think it’s only blues?) 3 strings can sound fully soulful almost more perfectly than the usual 6 strings. I think there’s something in the root of blues that makes the 3 strings work just right. (I don’t know what bluegrass would sound like on 3 strings but I’m guessing it wouldn’t fit as well.)

I tried to master guitar and it wasn’t in the cards for me. I liked playing but I’ll never be anything but mediocre (or worse). What Johnson plays, I can almost understand but not really. It was a nice “recovery” from one of THOSE days, to witness excellence.

Anyway I encourage you to listen to Justin Johnson.

If I had known the future, I’d have known the blues was appropriate. Stay tuned for the rest of the story.

Having beaten the definition of THOSE days to death, let’s address what happened when I innocently tried to be a couch potato. Basically everything went wrong because I’d picked one of THOSE days.

Tucker Carlson had just interviewed Putin. Tucker was fired by Fox News and now gets more hits than Fox News and several other media outlets combined. Obi-Wan Kenobi told Darth Vader “If you strike me down, I’ll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Obi-Wan is a wimp and a loser compared to Tucker. Tucker didn’t just outshine Darth Vader, he routinely gets more hits than his former employer and the whole fucking market combined. When you fire a guy and he soars while you take a dump on your own shoe… it’s you that failed, not him.

An interview with Putin is this thing that used to exist in the old days; journalism. Tucker landed the interview that nobody else could because he doesn’t have a political party’s hand up his ass like a fucking Muppet. This happened shortly before I settled down to vegetate.

At first I was happy. An adult thing with adult interest for actual adults! What a fine distraction! Neither Putin nor Carlson are drooling idiots so I’d find a transcript and read it. Tragically, I’m literate. I’m from a generation that doesn’t need to be spoon fed every fucking word. I much prefer 30 minutes reading a transcript to two hours watching dudes sitting in chairs. (Who thinks as slow as people talk?)

There were a zillion links but 99% of what I saw were carefully selected “clips” of “talking points”. These were complete with reactions by “journalists”. Journalists are skull splittingly stupid. I’ve scraped smarter things off my shoe. Nobody needs or wants some ass-clown who took journalism because it’s the easiest college degree (aside from education) “interpreting” what I can read for my own damn self!

(Note: I delivered newspapers as a child. I read the paper I delivered. Journalists seemed about average back then. I was 12. I need to repeat that because it’s important: half a lifetime ago the giants of print media back when it was a legit industry seemed more or less “average” to a 12 year old. Notice they didn’t impress me with their wisdom of depth of thought. If you can’t outthink a 12 year old delivering a paper for a few cents a shot, you’re a nobody. Since then the press has declined considerably. They’re now semi-sentient herd mammals who can do naught but cut and paste press releases.)

I really wanted a transcript. Go to the primary source if you can! If I wanted to know what the New York Times editorial board thought of a Putin interview I’d bend over and let them insert it rectally… which appears how most people get their news. (Credit to Vox Day who linked to an automated English translation based on Russian media. Unfortunately, machine translation is not great for complex speech. Putin wasn’t talking like the mainstream media or a third grader (roughly the same vocabulary) so the slurred translation was less than ideal.) I grumbled about it; probably sounding like an old man bitching about kids on his lawn. Then I gave up.

I started watching videos of clever rednecks rebuilding antique tractors. They were short videos. Each time a video ended I had to wade back into the interface to find another. As if the algorithm had gone into heat, my screen started loading up with non-tractor bullshit. One of THOSE days was just winding up.

The proximate cause of the bullshit was the release of special counsel Robert Hur’s report. He listed many instances of Biden flat out breaking the law relating to classified documents (as Obama’s VP Biden didn’t have the powers of President in relation to classified materials but Biden decided he could do whatever the fuck he wanted because since when do rules apply to anyone named Biden?). Hur punted doing anything about it. Raise your hand if that surprised you. Then hit yourself with your raised hand, dumbass.

So we all knew what would happen because the relationship between “law” and “executive branch is now based on partly affiliation. The interesting part was Hur’s novel excuse for inaction. He said that Biden would present himself to any jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. By some interpretation of the law that isn’t written in actual words, everything is fine if you’re old and infirm… and of course a connected member of one of two parties.

Hur’s report is just “the Comey defense / excuse” so I hardly even noticed. But Robert Hur upgraded to the improved Mark 2 variant and that was neat. I note that it’s also delivered several months earlier than usual. More timely delivery than Door Dash. Biden got his “it’s a Dem so we’re not going pursue it” announcement in February of an election year. Hillary Clinton had to wait until July of her election year; which wasn’t ideal timing to use James Comey’s identical conclusion for the purposes of her coronation.

Also Hur (as fitting an improved turbo powered Mark 2 variant) gave a reason. Hur said Biden clearly broke the law but Biden is just too clueless and cuddly to prosecute. Hillary didn’t get that. Comey gave no reason at all. He just said “she broke the law but let’s face it nobody’s going to prosecute”.

It would have been nice if all that bullshit happened on a day when I wasn’t watching TV.

It didn’t immediately vanish like I expected. Hur said Biden was non compos mentis. It means “of unsound mind” and he handed it over like a get out of jail free card. If someone gave me an “out” for a crime I’d done, I’d take it! Hur also said Biden had broken the law “willfully”. Comey said Hillary didn’t have “intent” (though particular crimes with classified documents don’t require intent). Hur basically said that Biden had will in the past but if he’s currently non compos mentis and no longer possesses will.

That’s a thing that happens… though rarely. Suppose ten years ago you shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. That’s murder! Possibly it’s murder even if a Democratic politician does it. Like if, I’m just spitballing here, it had happened to Epstein, which is silly because of course that was all totally on the level. Anyway, if you went on the lam to evade prosecution and held out until you subsequently turned into a drooling idiot who doesn’t know what day of the week it is… you might walk on the grounds of incompetency. (Note: I’m not suggesting you break any such laws… even if you’re connected enough that the law doesn’t apply to you, it doesn’t change the fact that immorality has it’s own punishment.)

Anyway it’s generally illegal to break the law, as Hur had noted Biden really did. (And Comey noted Hillary really did.) But if you’re lucky they’ll dither a long time until you can barely remember the name of your pudding cup. (Which was not true of Hillary but is likely true of Biden.) It’s at least theoretically possible to say “Biden is non compos mentis and we don’t want to convict a dude who can’t remember his own name, so lets leave him here to watch Matlock”.

I thought Hur’s investigation would be memory holed. Coverups are nothing new and also Biden has a good shot at the “I’m too damn clueless to be held responsible” defense. He’s had years to master the perfectly calibrated level of (in)competence needed to do stupid things and then act like he had nothing to do with him. If anyone can thread the needle between “too fucked up to understand a court proceeding” and “super sharp president that’s definitely who you want accessing the nuclear football” it’s Biden.

We’ve seen the “barely alive / fully in control” cover up before. Biden could consult with the ghost of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. The press reported RGB was sharp as a tack and winning chess competitions while preparing for a triathlon? They did this for at least a few years when she could barely fog a mirror. Who knows how many staffers for how many years functioned as an extra-legal committee to exercise RGB’s official authority?

They kept RGB out of live events and propped up in a corner in a real life Weekend at Bernies plot for years. So far they’ve done the same with Biden. RGB was intellectually flawless until she finally dropped dead. Biden is a tower of brilliance, just ask him. One thing brilliant people do is tell you how brilliant they are. (That’s sarcasm y’all and it applies to both Trump and Biden.)

By the way, if you think a decrepit American president propped up by a dutiful (or power hungry) wife is a new thing, it’s not. Woodrow Wilson had a stroke on October 2, 1919 and stayed in power for the rest of his term. He was largely or completely incapacitated and at first an inner circle knew about it and eventually everyone knew about it. Edith Wilson functioned as the president’s unelected secret brain for 16 months until March 4, 1921 when he was replaced by Warren Harding. She and Jill Biden are the two “wives of vegetables who grasped the wheel” that I know of. (Also, Jill Biden is the only human on earth with a doctoral degree in education who thinks you should call her “Dr.”) I’m not sure about Ronald Reagan. He was definitely in decline during his last term and I could see it for myself on TV but he was still pretty sharp and did things Biden doesn’t, like make public appearances without looking like a Roomba.

Anyway, there’s the way things would play out in a sane world of rational adults and the way it played out in our demented shadow of reality. Stay tuned for more rambling.

[Warning #1: This post meanders. What can I say? I wandered into the weeds addressing astronaut shit and covfefe. You expected linear thinking? Here? Good luck!]

It’s an odd, disjointed, winter. The weather is tame and that’s fabulous luck. But it isn’t not doing me any good. I “recovered” from an illness that nuked me during a routine winter hike in January only to “unrecover” in February. I’ve been slogging it out and even missed a few day’s work. I keep trying to do good things for my health but it doesn’t seem to work out.

[Warning #2: I was mugged by politics, feel free to skip the rest of this post.]

One evening I was out of energy and sleepless due to illness. Most Americans are couch potatoes so I thought maybe I should try that for a while? A lifetime sitting on the couch will ruin you but what harm comes from a few hours? (That’s foreshadowing y’all!) I forgot… TV is evil. My bad luck (and likely this will happen often in 2024) was that it was “one of THOSE days”. Idiots reminding me that everyone has lost their goddamn mind started coming out of the woodwork!

As a non-political aside, I feel like I should define “THOSE days”. It’s a special combination of something silly and the media (and in fact society) climbing up their own asshole to experience the true level of their inanity. Here’s an example story to help define “THOSE days”:

Back in 2007 (also in February… it’s a bad month) an astronaut named Lisa Nowak freaked out. She’d been through a painful divorce and subsequently hooked up with another astronaut. He (presumably) dumped her and she lost it. I have nothing but sympathy up to that part of the story. Life sucks and sometimes a person just breaks.

However, unlike an average jilted ex-wife, who drinks a box of wine and adopts a cat to get over it, Nowak went off the rails. She packed a car with latex gloves, a black wig, a BB pistol, pepper spray, a trench coat, a drilling hammer, black gloves, a folding knife and various other items that make for interesting mob stories. Then she hurriedly drove 900 miles. She did this to confront an air force captain who was landing at an airport. Apparently the female captain was bonking Nowak’s former main squeeze. (I’d like to point out this story from 2007 has no throuples or videos of anal sex in the United States Senate hearing rooms. Freaky astronaut drama in 2007 was practically wholesome compared to current Congressional staffer shenanigans.)

Luckily for everyone, things didn’t go much further. Nowak didn’t effectively follow through on whatever mayhem was in her jilted mind. She did find, confront, and pepper spray “the other woman”. But she had enough sense to refrain from murder. She cried, made a run for it, and was picked up by the fuzz. A master criminal? Nope! Which is good. Really, it’s very good. This is a story where a clearly unhinged woman didn’t kill anyone and I feel like Nowak deserves a pat on the back for pulling out of a very deep dive.

What makes that dumb event into “one of THOSE days”? The press went apeshit! On some level I understand that murdery astronaut love triangles are fun. But in the overall scheme of things, the event wasn’t that big of a deal. Crazy chicks do crazy shit every day and there’s no reason to wallow in a distraught (crazy?) woman’s messy interpersonal drama. What really made the whole thing into “one of THOSE days” is the diapers.

You heard me right. Diapers! Astronauts and air force pilots sometimes wear adult diapers to do heroic sitting sessions. This is entirely logical, there’s no shitter on an F-14 and you can’t step out of the Space Shuttle to whiz on a passing asteroid. If you’re an astronaut having a nervous breakdown and need to drive 900 miles to off some bitch…. you use the tools you have at hand. It makes sense to me but something about adult diapers lit the press’ fucking fuse. It was like crack served to howler monkeys. The press had to report on those diapers all fucking day.* I was driving that day. All day! All fucking day! Every 15 minutes or so every single radio network interrupted my boring drive to rehash the fucking diapers. It was pure hell.

Astronaut diaper media feeding frenzy is a prime example of THOSE days. Stay tuned because in my next post I have another of THOSE days.

A.C.

*Incidentally, the press lost their figurative shit over literal astronaut shit but never addressed my first thought. My initial reaction was “BB Gun”? That made me think the crazy chick was either less nutso than she could be or astronauts were now officially weenies. Astronauts have real jobs and can pass a background check. Why did the crazy chick have a BB Gun instead of an actual firearm? WTF? Even crackhead Hunter Biden has (or had) firearms. If you’re going to drive 900 miles to re-enact a scene from Goodfellas, wouldn’t you equip at least as well as some dipshit thug who carjacks an Audi in Oakland? Nobody cared about that or even noticed. It was all “here’s another expert opinion about astronaut diapers”.

P.S. Mass hyperventilation over astronaut diapers was not the worst THOSE days I’ve experienced. Ten years after the astronaut non-murder, Trump mis-typed “covfefe” into a Tweet. Holy shit! The press went into rut. The only reason it wasn’t insufferable was that I wasn’t trapped in my truck cab that day. “Journalists” spent all week pretending a typo was some mysterious secret code Trump uses to communicate with the space aliens that live in their refrigerator crisper. Normal human being instantly identified it as a harmless if amusing typo. The press has no normal human beings. They knew it was a typo but chose (and yes they made a conscious choice to act this dumb) to flake out over invented shit they know to be false. I think they get some sort of masturbatory high out of it. Trump, who has a sense of humor and also knows how to let his enemy prove themselves a fool, though it was funny. He let them run with the idea. Since they have no filter, the press fucked it into the ground. I mean they really went at it like an Olympic event. Watching supposedly sentient beings get into a feeding frenzy of stupid over something that dumb is profoundly ugly (and it’s worse than twice hourly reports about astronaut diapers). I don’t like to see it. The invented covfefe anal inversion was the worst THOSE days I can remember. Although I did think about buying a covfefe coffee mug because it was also funny. (A few years after the typo they kicked Trump off Twitter while he was the President of the United States. There are beings who live on earth and, probably, breathe oxygen who lost their shit over covfefe and then later cheered when the sitting president of the United States was censored. They walk among us and we have to live in a world that internally inconsistent.)

[First, a complaint. I tried to write a post earlier. Sadly, it veered into politics. Regardless of good intentions, my post went off the rails. It’s not my fault. Nor is it your fault. Current politics is a black hole of mental ruin and we didn’t do it.

It’s impossible to wisely consider what is reason free. Are we to discuss adult things, like stoic philosophy or the calculus of economy, in a world of hyperventilating toddlers? The clownworld ass-rodeo of current politics is decrepit, debased, degraded, demented, corrupt, and weird. It behaves in blindingly illogical ways. It’s so extreme that it’s hard to assemble words to address the true form of the world.

I wish to ponder in depth, not merely point and shriek. Yet politics is shielded by walls of emotional incontinence. A tsunami of childlike thinking leaves no room for adults. I’m rendered (temporarily) speechless. It’s amazing really! I have a decent imagination, I ought to be able to bridge the gap between the unicorn dipshits and the solid earth. Fer crissake, I write about talking squirrels with disco based mind control! Yet I can’t do it. The unreality event horizon that is politics in 2024 (or if you will 2020 part 4) cannot be breached.

I drafted a post. I deep sixed it. I tried again. It too was inadequate. Rationality in an irrational environment is elusive.

Finally, I gave up. I wrote this post about tractors and snowplows. What can I say? If you gaze long into an abyss of dipshits, the abyss of dipshits will gaze into you.]

I live in East Bumfuk nowhere. The local supply of goods and services is scant. We all need snow removal but it’s not like there’s a “dial 1-800-plowsno or www.clearmydriveway.com” solution. I meet people who cannot believe there are places like this. I assure you it’s true.

Over the years I’ve tried everything. The obvious solution was hiring guys with trucks. My favorite was a big green truck with a utility box. Sometimes the guy showed up, sometimes he didn’t. One winter the same truck showed up but with a different driver every time. One time the truck showed up when there was the merest dusting of snow. I think the driver desperately needed alimony money. I’d dealt with his ex-wife and know why he got divorced! I paid in full even though I didn’t need a plow. This one time had no bearing on whether he would show up the next snowfall (even if summoned by phone). I assume some sort of clan used the plow truck as a sort of “communal property”? Possibly, whoever actually got out of bed that day got to use it. Who knows who maintained it or registered it? I wonder if it was insured? The last time I saw it, the truck was driven by someone’s grandpa. (I think the proximate owner was in jail.) After that, I never saw the truck again. I assume it no longer ran. Nobody answered the phone anymore. As far as I know, the truck and the clan that collectively owned it, just disappeared.

Trying a different approach, I bought a snowblower. I beat it to death. It was a good machine but I forced it into a job 10 times what any sane person would do with a snowthrower. I did get a lot of exercise.

Another time I hired a guy with a bitchin huge UTV. I think he was trying to justify the fancy toy to his wife? He did a good job but had no heat and was shivering every time I saw him. He lasted a winter and then disappeared.

For a few years I used my 60 year old antique tractor. Like the UTV guy I nearly froze to death. Being an antique, the tractor started or didn’t start based on a roll of the dice. I reverted to my ATV, which always started. But trying to clear the driveway with a little 325 cc ATV is like draining the ocean with a teaspoon. It was even colder than the antique tractor too.

I found another truck guy and he was a solid worker. Sadly, I watched him beat a good new truck to absolute smithereens in one season. I don’t know how much he earned pushing snow, but I know trucks ain’t cheap. He vanished too. I hope he managed to pay off his wreckage on wheels.

One winter, I got bronchitis. You never know what causes such things but freezing my ass off battling snow didn’t help. It was time to stop fiddle-farting around. I gave up on a core value and financed a heated cab with a tractor under it. I paid extra for the snowbucket. It was a game changer. The payments are brutal but the heat is a big deal. My problem is solved.

I still see plow trucks come and go. It’s a cycle. They last a few years slowly getting battered to death, then someone somewhere else buys a shiny new truck or perhaps resurrects a different heap. I’ve seen the same blade mounted on different generations of truck too. On a harsh winter plow guys clean up, on a mild winter they barely get by. A heap might limp for years or die in a week. One blown transmission on a new truck eats the season’s earnings.

Meanwhile, I plow my own driveway. It’s convenient to have my own equipment and tractors seem generally tougher than trucks. It’s still work but it’s not miserably cold.

This winter I haven’t had any big blizzards. I’m not complaining! Sometimes it snows so constantly that you need to plow 3 or 4 times in one week. Even with a good tractor, each effort takes anywhere from 45 minutes to a couple hours. I have a “day job” and a blizzard consumes all of my “spare time” until the weather shifts.

My tractor is several years old now. I’m still freaked out I bought a thing that expensive but it’s “broke in” enough that I don’t get it serviced at the stealership. I begged a friendly neighborhood mechanic to do an oil change and he did a fine job. While he was swapping the oil, I was drinking his garage beer and sitting on his garage couch. Good service and free beer! What more could a man want?

His garage is a bit of a gathering place. The bar from Cheers was never so welcoming. While I drank, a bunch of fellows showed up. One of many topics was snowplowing. This year’s mild weather means every dollar invested in a plow truck is “wasted” (same could be said of my tractor). This devolved into talking shit about every brand. Chevies are gay. Fords fall apart. Dodges have an unstable front end like Dolly Parton. The usual.

Plowing is hard. Trucks have more complex steering geometry every year. They’re not built to be used as bulldozers. They do it of course, but the delicate balance between paying too much to buy a new one and servicing a dying old one is a knife edge. A winter without blizzards throws a monkey wrench into the whole profit / loss calculations.

Blue city dweebs shit on rural people as clueless rubes. They’re utterly wrong! An urban dweller may bitch about municipal services while wearing pajamas but what has he actually done? Rednecks “invest” unknowable maintenance to gain unpredictable returns using machines of uncertain lifespan. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. But they definitely play the game.

My tractor does the job so well I sort of forgot the annual struggle to hire a plow guy. I think one guy (let’s call him Frank) is the main resource. The rumor was that Frank said he’d be “in it” as long as his Ford held up, and then he was “moving the fuck out”. He’s earned his retirement. Think about it, for a rural man bitching about municipal services rather than carrying on the fight is “relaxation” while for an urban man that’s the whole battle. I wish Frank well.

When Frank packs his shit and bails, nobody knows who’ll be the next plow guy. With three beers in my gut and a forth in my hand. I had an idea. I looked at my tractor, still dripping oil from the drainplug. Why not?

It’s more or less ready for that job. To become “tractor plow guy” I’d need two upgrades; a flashing light on the roof so I don’t get clobbered on the road and a radio to kill the boredom. Beyond that? Time.

Right now I don’t have time. Day job and all that. But the future is uncertain. A few years ago I was almost fired over a vaccine that doesn’t provide immunity. Given the mess that is this election season, what comes next? In a world where Texas and the Feds are inches from playing Fort Sumter part 2, who among us knows what the future holds. Frank’s Ford might outlast the union. Anything could happen. But it will always snow.

I decided to prep the tractor as a “backup”. I certainly wouldn’t buy a tractor trying to make a profit, but if I already have it… why not? Maybe in a few years Frank will be bitching about the heat in Florida? Maybe at the same time I’ll be free enough to put in 50 hours a week during blizzards? It could happen.

I haven’t purchased flashing lights yet but I did purchase a radio. I bought the radio specifically wired to “plug and play” with my tractor’s cab (which is pre-wired with a specific plug). Amazon charged about ¼ of what the dealer wanted. I have a Kioti. If I had a Massey-Ferguson or a Kubota or any brand I could probably order the same radio with that brand’s plug installed. The sole exception might be John Deere. (John Deere is the driving force behind “right to repair” lawsuits and legislation. Like Apple, they’re nice products with built in anti-competitive proprietary structures. On a green machine who knows if a simple radio swap would require firmware only the dealer can access? John Deere is also like Apple in that it seems to cost about double what you’d pay for an equivalent “off brand”.)

The radio took a while to arrive. I assume the plug was installed “as ordered”? I’ll probably for the summer before I open the dash and add the radio.

This whole “vignette” got me to thinking about resilience. Getting snow plowed is a bitch but Frank has things covered for now. Half a dozen rednecks with half a dozen trucks in half a dozen various conditions might take up the torch when he leaves. Or maybe another fancy UTV will emerge. Or maybe yours truly will throw his hat in the ring. Whether it’s worth it to me (or anyone else) depends on things like inflation and diesel prices. No city bureaucracy can be as flexible (or colorful) as the local people. It seems like chaos but it becomes a form of resiliency.

My truck has two 12v batteries in series to make 24V. I know everyone is rushing to the keyboard to tell me I can work around that but I’ll stop ya’ right there. I decided to make it independent of the truck itself. After all, if I want to heat a tent or whatnot it can’t be hardwired to the truck. Also, I’m reluctant to unnecessarily draw power from the thing that is supposed to get me home. The truck doesn’t have a radio. (It did but that’s gone too.)

I wanted to power the heater with something like a Jackery Explorer 1000 but that’s not going to work for me.

(Note: I don’t own one of these. So don’t think I’m linking to Amazon because I’m recommending it. I lust after one, but I can’t vouch for it. The reason I went to Amazon is because I read the specifications in detail and it’s not up to snuff for the heater.)

The Vevor heater, and most like it (I think) draws 15 amps during the brief start up phase. Then it drops precipitously. The cool sexy power stations that people buy for camping seem to top out at 10 amps in 12v DC. That’s just how it goes.

Ironically, if you have a plain old stupid 12v deep cycle battery, you can pull 15 amps no problem. This is where some redneck with an electric trolling motor on his fishing boat has an advantage over a hipster who remotely charges his drone. Who knew.

Lucky for me, I’m a stupid redneck who tried an electric trolling motor on his homemade (!) sailboat. The battery is long dead but I still have the battery box. My battery box is the “deluxe” type. It has external terminals, a cigarette lighter port, and a battery tester. A fancy box will cost you about $50 (or did before inflation). My battery box is buried in my garage but here’s a photo of an equivalent box from Amazon.

It’s funny that a deep cycle in a box is better than a fancy power station. But it saves me money! I figure $50 (for the box, but really $0 because I own it) and a deep cycle 12V (who knows how much they cost in the Bidenverse but they used to be about $120). That’ll do what a $1000(!) power station can’t. I’ve seen various YouTubers complain that their camping power stations are too weak to handle the start cycle so I know the specifications matter.

I wanted to test it on AC. So I bought an AC to DC power supply. I didn’t really need this but I’m a HAM. A HAM is always needing another power supply. Most HAM power supplies top out at 10 amps. You’ve been warned. I purchased this:

This funky gadget is a Ham Radio Power Supply Analog DC Regulated 13.8V Fixed Output 30A Designed for Communication Equipment. (Don’t blame me, I don’t make up these names.) This was taken as the furnace was running, see that it’s pulling just over 8 amps? Most of the time the furnace is that low or even lower, but it did peak somewhere around 12 amps during start up. This is further evidence that the sexy power station would trip a breaker even though a plain old battery would be fine.

The point is, the power supply can plug into 120v AC and provide with all the 12v DC you’ll need. It’s enough to run enough radio equipment to get you put on a list. It’s enough for two (!) Vevor heaters. I’ll find a use for it long after the heater has been bolted into the truck.

My photo sucks, here’s one from Amazon. Notice that it has a cigarette lighter outlet and it says “Max 10A”? That’s because getting more than 10A in a cigarette lighter is not standard. That’s why people trying to run diesel heaters (at least some of which need more like 15 amps during start up) off a cigarette lighter get pissed off.

The back of the object is where the real power terminals live. You’ve got 30 amps on tap back there. Also, this little critter is smaller than it looks. It’s pretty sleek actually.

I wanted to be able to plug in and unplug the heater. I had a high amp 12V plug I got for a different project. It looks like this.

I took a million photos while I was setting it up but the photos are on another hard drive. Suffice to say, I put one plug end on the heater and made pigtails from the other end that hook to the AC/DC power supply OR a 12v deep cycle battery box. (I tested that the ring terminals fit.)

In case you’re wondering, I could plug the fancy AC to DC power supply into the AC port of a power station and that would almost certainly work. Turning battery power (inherently DC) to AC with a power station, just to go back to DC with a power supply… that would work. But it’s also an abomination.

The last part is not the least. It’s exhaust. I’m still working on it. For testing I just jammed it out of my garage door. I was impressed, once it’s warmed up and running, there’s hardly any exhaust. The exhaust is the silvery tube. It gets dang hot! The black cylinder is the air input for the combustion chamber. That stays cool. AIr intake for the heat is a vent at the back of the machine. Hot air output is at the front of the machine.

Combustion air and heat air are two different things. There’s no crossover. Properly vented, it won’t smell like exhaust and it won’t kill you off.

This is what my “testbed” looks like:

I’m not done yet, but I’ve got most of the pieces of the puzzle. The only thing holding me back is an (ironically) unheated garage. Wish me luck.

My 4×4 truck has no heat. No worries. Heat’s not rocket science and I was far more concerned with complex stuff like locking differentials and shit. Also, I’m open to unusual solutions…

C’mon… isn’t that photo bad ass?

Anyway, I mentioned that my truck isn’t yet rebuilt enough for winter fun. “…it doesn’t have heat. I don’t mean the canvas top and the ungasketed windows are drafty, I mean it’s utterly 100% unheated. The components that once did that are long gone. There is no insulation anywhere and no heat at all. In winter it’s like riding in a vibrating refrigerated steel box.”

I got several comments about how to plumb into the vehicle’s coolant lines and work up a heater. I get it but that’s not my plan. Since my truck has no heat and all of the parts that I’d need are gone I have a blank slate. The truck’s cab is tabula rasa baby! My plan is to install a diesel furnace.

Now hear me out…

You see that? It’s a VEVOR 8KW Diesel Heater, Diesel Heater All in One with Remote Control and LCD Screen.

IT’S GLORIOUS!

I bought it for myself as a Christmas present. It’s not installed yet but I did some preliminary tinkering. I know the thing works. I was pleased with its performance. It even has a remote and has things like a thermostat.

I really like this idea. There’s thinking outside the box and there’s drop kicking that damn box into the cheap seats. A diesel heater is NOTHING LIKE a regular car’s heater. In my mind, it’s better.

There are pros and cons. Pro:

• A diesel heater cranks out heat like a boss. My truck’s heater (even when new) sucked. Rebuilding or replacing it with basically the same thing isn’t going to give me the blast furnace, camp on a frozen lake in the middle of January because you roll that way, heat. I fired up the heater for a test run in my garage and it rocks!
• A diesel heater doesn’t get its BTUs from “waste heat” in the vehicle’s engine coolant system. Ever waited while a stone cold car took forever to generate heat to defrost the windshield? During testing I got full throttle heat out of the 8KW Vevor in less than a minute. My old truck might take 20 minutes to warm up like that.
• A diesel heater, being unrelated to the truck’s engine can make heat even if the engine is shut down. The sole limit is that it needs enough 12v juice to fire and run a small fan. Beyond that, it’ll run all day and all night without needing a truck at all.
• This is the the big pro: being unrelated to the truck, the heater could be removed from the truck and used elsewhere. Imagine some glorious future where I setup my super awesome winter tent and route furnace heat into it! Just let that idea roll around in your head for a while. Savor it. Be one with it. Grok the implications! That’s a big deal. Possibly the biggest of the big. If portable reliable externally vented heat doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, then you’ve never truly been cold.
• Being unrelated to the truck, the odds of losing heat AND engine simultaneously is vastly reduced. If I’m out in the freezing outback and smash a rock so hard I shove my truck’s driveline spline through the bell housing… well at least I’ve got heat. If the heater craps out… well at least I can drive home. This “redundancy” might same my ass someday.
• It’s relatively cheap. I left this for last because it’s hard to believe it. The heater, which is an “all in one” system set me back about 150 clams. It would be hard to create or rebuild a heating system that doesn’t cost a similar amount. That said, it’s not all about money. I’m more concerned with max heat with redundancy than the absolute cheapest solution.

Cons:

• It’s fueled by a small fuel tank. It’s 1.3 gallons and you can even use “farm diesel” but you’ll have to top it off. Forget and you’ve got no heat. I’m sure I’ll spill it all over the place every time I fill it up.
• It’s not “waste heat” so the fuel ain’t free. That said, I don’t care. Suppose you got stuck in a snowdrift and turned your engine off (to avoid carbon monoxide death) but ran your fancy furnace (which has a properly vented exhaust pipe) on high for 8 hours straight. If you had to pay $4 for a full night’s very strong and reliable heat, would you care? What about if it was heating your tent or ice shack all night? The little beast is pretty efficient. It burns supposedly between .04 and .16 gallons per hour. The literature says the tank capacity can run 8 hours at the maximum listed consumption setting. Because no sane human knows what these fractions of a gallon mean, I interpret it as between 1/3 and 1 1/3 pints per hour. For the American based alcoholics out there, it’ll burn less than two cans of shitty beer in volume for an hour on “blast furnace” mode. You’ll most certainly not run it that hard. I was messing around and the thermostat cycles on and off just like a house furnace. Also that dumb little lunchbox took a fair shot at heating my entire garage just during testing. Also, I’m not suggesting you drink diesel instead of shitty beer.
• The heater wants 12v, my truck is 24v. Bummer! This too can be handled but it ain’t plug and play.
• This is the big con: I need to route exhaust and power systems and output hoses and stuff like that. It’s not like you can just toss it in the back seat and turn it on.

Stay tuned for part 2.

I ordered a NOCO Genius 1 and it arrived in a few days. I installed it on my old ATV (or rather plugged it to the pigtails I’d already wired to its battery). It looks like this:

In my last post I mentioned I’d installed a NOCO GC002 X-Connect M6 Eyelet Terminal Accessory on the ATV’s battery. I’d bought that accessory a couple years ago and thought it was necessary. At the time I was trying to swap one maintainer to several machines. If you swap one maintainer to several machines you’re going to need extra pigtails (which I bought while bitching about the price). I forgot that each  NOCO Genius 1 comes with pigtails that are fine to be hooked directly to little (motorcycle/ATV/lawnmower) batteries but too small for big car sized batteries.

Given the cheap cost of the little 1 amp charger, I have no idea why I was going through gyrations trying to use multiple pigtails with one charger. Maybe inflation has changed the maintainer/battery cost ratio?

The pigtails (included with a NOCO Genius 1) have a fuse on the hot (red) side (fuse included), their proprietary plug (that fits all of the maintainers I’ve bought so I can swap maintainers at will), and alligator clips. The pigtails look like this:

Alligator clips work on any battery, but I remove them because I’m not a Neandertal. Just kidding. It just feels more civilized to install pigtails right to a battery so that’s what I prefer. That way I can plug in any Noco maintainer without opening the hood or anything.

The pigtails are designed to have the clips removed easily. Just remove the little screw. Since every maintainer has a set of alligator clips and I hate alligator clips (preferring pigtails) I have a pile of leftover alligator clips. I use them to close half eaten potato chip bags… which is the manliest of all potato chip bag clips. BTW: The clips are pretty well built, they’re not flimsy at all.

One other note, the clips for Noco’s maintainers are different than the clips for Noco’s jump starters. The former are pretty beefy, but the latter are much beefier. On the smallest jump starters, the clips are almost as big as the tiny battery itself; as if you’re planning to reanimate a freight train. I don’t complain because thick wires and clips make it work so very well with the high amp task of a jumpstart.

The drawback is that I have to carry jumpstart clips with the Noco Boost Sport GB20 battery pack that lives on my dirt bike. It’s not built to jump start the bike through the maintainer pigtail (though if ever got desperate I’d try it). The big “jump start” clips are an unavoidable extra few ounces I add to my two wheeled mule in the interest of being unstoppable.

Back to the topic at hand, the proprietary plug between the maintainer and the pigtails is idiot proof. One side is round and the other is a pentagon, you can’t plug it in “backwards”. The clip also has a little red lever that snaps the two sides together and holds everything tight while you abandon your beloved ATV/motorcycle for weeks or months at a time. The lever is big enough you can see it in dim light and it’s idiot proof enough you can plug it in while wearing mittens.

This is what the pigtail looks like hanging off a generic old ATV. Someday I’ll use zip ties to “clean up” the install but it was getting cold. I’ve got similar pigtails coming out from under seats or access panels on all of my motorcycles. They’ve ridden thousands of miles that way with no issues. There’s a little waterproof cap on the pigtail too.

Pics or it didn’t happen. Here’s the biggest baddest ATV of two decades ago when big and bad meant “it has 4×4 and a massive 325 cc motor”. I’m rather impressed how well the little ATV has held up.

In 2022 I decided to get my mechanical ducks in a row. I’m half-assing my way in that general direction. My machines and gear are/were a bit of menagerie. Most stuff is well used (over used?) and my budget is low so it’s slow going. Plus life is chaos.

Anyway I did some stuff in 2022 and more in spring 2023… then the world temporarily ended. Shit happens. And machines degrade while you’re otherwise occupied.

If you’re not dead you haven’t been defeated so I started moving forward again. To my great delight and relief I managed to start two long ignored machines (plus handled a routine happenstance).

The zeroth challenge was that Mrs. Curmudgeon’s car wouldn’t start. Her car really is a daily driver so that sucks! But it was darned cold out and the battery is long in the tooth. These things happen. It was -20 Fahrenheit (or maybe a little less). The little car just couldn’t fire up.

I keep a Noco Boost Sport GB20 battery pack with my dirt bike. I never leave home without it. I wandered into my stone cold garage and grabbed the device from where I’d strapped it to my bike. It started her car like a boss! I can’t overstate how impressed I am with these things! (I also use mine for camping. It can charge phones and my SpotX and an iPad or my shortwave radio. Also it’s a flashlight. Really nice piece of kit!)

I don’t use it on cars much. I was so impressed how easily it started a car that I went out and ordered a second Noco Boost GB20. This way I could put mine back with my bike and gift a new one to Mrs. Curmudgeon. I was prepared to buy a bigger unit for use with the car but Noco recommended the diminutive GB20 for “normal sized” cars (it won’t start my diesel truck I’m sure).

The story gets better. It came via Amazon a few days after I ordered it. I handed it to her but Mrs. Curmudgeon didn’t open the box. The very next day it dipped down below -20 again. As before her car was bricked. (I sense a new battery purchase in the near future.) Mrs. Curmudgeon was convinced you need a Y chromosome to operate anything involving a car battery. I assured her that unlike most of my gear, this one was easy to operate. I mean it. It’s stupid easy to operate and has a thousand safeguards. Heck, it’s almost cuddly! She clipped the thing to her car’s terminals and jump started her car with absolutely no drama. Those little battery packs are miraculous!

So now we have two, mine lives on my motorcycle and the other is in a regular car.

The first challenge was my old ATV. It was serviced in 2022 but time flies when you’re in the shit. It sat all winter from fall 2022 on. In spring 2023 I shamelessly raided it for the battery. No regrets, I needed the battery and I was broke. The poor thing sat unused (with the seat removed and everything) until this weekend. The battery had been taken off its temporary duty and had been sitting on a maintainer for at least 6 months. I rolled the ATV into a warm-ish place where it was 40 degrees instead of -20 and gave it a week to warm up.

I installed the battery and buttoned it up. I had no optimism it would start.

But it did! In a fit of joy, I tore off on a dirt road to “warm it up”. I wasn’t well dressed for a winter ATV excursion and promptly froze. I only went 4-5 miles. But that was enough to get everything up to operating temp. It’s running pretty darned well actually!

Back in the past, I’d parked it plum full of gas and that was the hint I’d shown some foresight. The gas hadn’t gone bad! I can only assume past Curmudgeon had the minimal intelligence to top it off with Stabil and non-oxygenated fuel. Nor were the carbs mucked up. Probably I’d run the carbs dry during “decommissioning”.

Damn it’s nice when past me doesn’t fuck over present me!

The second challenge was my old truck (sometimes I call it “Jeep-thing”). It’s an old 4×4 beast that I haven’t seen fit to unveil on my blog. It is a bad ass off road machine but it’s still in recovery after long neglect. One serious limit is that it doesn’t have heat. I don’t mean the canvas top and the ungasketed windows are drafty, I mean it’s utterly 100% unheated. The components that once did that are long gone. There is no insulation anywhere and no heat at all. In winter it’s like riding in a vibrating refrigerated steel box.

Patience old truck, your time will come again.

Anyway, it hasn’t been started since the beast playfully forced me to spend a weekend driving around in the dirt… back in October. (The story is here: My Truck Takes Me For A Walk, Parts 1, 2, 3.)

Without a battery maintainer, I feared the dual batteries were toast. But, and this was the second miracle of the weekend, it started!

I took it for a 20 mile jaunt. It ran like a top. I returned half frozen but grinning.

Enjoy every little bit of good luck. Then build on it.

I’m slowly improving my “fleet” of battery maintainers. You may think this is lame but it’s a major achievement to me. My personal battle against entropy starts with keeping batteries charged.

This will be the year I have maintainers on all of my motorcycles! I didn’t have one for my ATV but I will soon! In my garage I had a NOCO GC002 X-Connect M6 Eyelet Terminal Accessory. I bought it in 2022 and never got it installed. It’s a miracle I hadn’t lost it! (ATVs and motorcycles and lawnmowers have pipsqueak batteries. They need a smaller pigtail than things with “regular sized” batteries. All of the Noco stuff I’ve bought comes with the bigger pigtail. I have several stashed in my toolbox.)

Even though I had the pigtails I didn’t have another maintainer. I ordered a NOCO Genius 1. It’s a tiny spud of a maintainer but it’s plenty for a motorcycle or ATV. I haven’t tried the tiny Genius 1 on a car, it seems a little too small for that. (I have used Genius 10 on cars, and that works fine. I did have a Genius 10 malfunction after it got froze into a snowdrift and flooded in snowmelt many consecutive times. I don’t blame that on the device, the user (me) beat the shit out of it. ) A NOCO Genius 1 looks like this:

I put a NOCO Genius 1 on all my toys that sit unused all winter. When the ATV maintainer arrives I’ll have assembled a “fleet” of 3 NOCO Genius 1 devices and one battery tender. (The battery tender pigtails came pre-installed in the 1989 Pacific Coast 800 I bought in 2023. I didn’t feel like swapping to different pigtails so I just bought the right maintainer to go with the pigtails. It’s kind of a shame because it would look super cool to have 4 identical maintainers all lined up.)

But wait there’s more! I was on so much of a roll that I changed the oil in my tractor and generally gave it a minor service. The tractor has a block heater but had no maintainer. It’s a Kioti tractor and it is a bit cold blooded. I decided to go nuts and buy a maintainer for the tractor too. That’s a bigger battery and I use the tractor in the coldest weather. So I bought a Noco Genius 10:

It’s a little bigger than the tiny GB20 but a tractor needs a lot more grunt than a motorcycle or basic car.

I also learned to open the hood of my tractor when I park it. The tractor gets hot and melted snow runs down the hood. When you shut down that ice freezes the hood shut like it’s welded! Took me a few years to learn that! (I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out on day one but maybe I’m dumb.)

Between the block heater and the battery maintainer the tractor starts like a champ. On the other hand I replaced the tractor battery last summer, so it hasn’t been tested over time with an older battery.

So long as I’m on the topic, my Dodge has twin 12v batteries in parallel and I have an on board maintainer installed in the truck. I use it anytime it’s not particularly warm. I think it makes the batteries last longer too. I can’t remember the brand I installed, it wasn’t a Noco though.

Now I’m shopping for one last maintainer. My 4×4 truck has two 12v batteries in series making 24 volts total. I have no idea who sells a maintainer for a setup like that. If you know of one, shoot me a comment. Thanks.

My story of Project Daily Driver (2022) is here:

• Project Daily Driver / Gift From Past Me
• Project Daily Driver: Coming Apart At The Seams
• Project Daily Driver: Who Are You Calling An Antique?!?
• Project Daily Driver: Strange Observations In The Hinterlands
• Project Daily Driver: Pre-Paid Emergency Room

Note: I get tiny kickbacks if you buy from any link on my blog that goes to Amazon. It costs you nothing. But that’s not why I linked all that stuff. I really am impressed with Noco gadgets and I’m super stoked whenever winter doesn’t kill expensive batteries. I have good luck with Noco and battery maintainers in general are a good way to make my life easier.

One last note, “jump start” and “maintain” are two different things:

A “boost” or “battery pack” will jump start a dead car. That’s all it does. (OK fine I use mine for charging USB gadgets and as a flashlight, but it can’t “charge” a car battery.) The “boost” carries within it a battery with the energy to do jump start engines. It works wherever you are and you’ll feel smug and superior when you don’t have to beg someone to help you with jumper cables.

A “maintainer” won’t do jack shit if you’re off grid. It’s not for wilderness use. It’s plugged in at your house. It uses “shore power” (the AC power grid) to keep you car’s battery thawed and topped off. It’s not meant to jump start a dead anything. However, any functional battery on a maintainer will be more or less at peak performance for its age. It also takes a lot of stress off winter stretched batteries, I think they last longer if carefully “maintained”.

[I’m getting nowhere with wordpress, so here’s a fun distraction post.]

It’s a short list but there are some songs which I like but which also cause folks to break out in hives. Among them, is “Brand New Key”. I don’t care what anyone thinks, it’s sweet. Anyway, the artist “Melanie” has died and I’d like to honor her memory (and/or torture you with an earworm).

Comic geniuses “Kids in the Hall” seized upon “Brand New Key” as an ideal post-apocalypse torture:

Another song on my list is “Vehicle” by “Ides of March”. I think it’s a damn fine song with a rocking beat and lots of brass. Mrs. Curmudgeon says it’s a skeevy stalker’s anthem. Can it be both?