I don’t have a clue what this thing was originally intended to do.
Neither did the people running the Salvation Army Thrift Store.
I watched the value reflected in the price tag for about six weeks falling from the original $50 to $14.95.
Every time I went in there I folded it, unfolded it, stood it up this way and that way, squinted at it trying to figure out what it was for, but seeing other possible uses the people who designed it never thought of.
This thing is a tough, expensive piece of work.
It was evidently intended to lock something in, or out.
And clamp to something along one side.
Whatever it might have been, it’s about to become a part of something else. I pointed out to the manager that it’s been there at least six weeks.
He picked it up and examined it every which way, same as I’d been doing.
“What do you suppose it is?”
“I figure it’s a way to block off the wind going through the chainlink door into my chicken house. They just added a lot of extra parts.”
First, at the Hospice Thrift Store in Kerrville I found these gloves with no fingertips for $1.50. When it’s cold in this cabin I go to 18 layers of longjohns and sweatsuits, Sorel snowboots and innovative headgear. But my fingers stiffen until I can only use the computer with a lot of mistakes.
I’m thinking those gloves are going to fix that one.
But on arriving back home and tuning the computer to this frequency I found to my delight that Michael had explained the solution to another one I’ve been scratching my head over longer than I care to admit.
The Making of the Roman Army From Republic to Empire, Lawrence Keppie
I don’t recall ever reading the Keppie version.
Myles Keogh Biography by Charles L Convis
The Art of War, Sun Tzu, forward by Liddell Hart. My version’s paperback and doesn’t have the Hart forward, so I’m tickled pea green with this.
Frontier State at War – Kansas 1861-1865, Albert Castel
I’ve already got this, but it’s an old copy and doesn’t have the dust jacket.
Brown Water Black Berets – Lt. Commander Thomas J. Cutler
Never read this one.
I’d have been back sooner if it hadn’t been for this billy goat on the Ranch Road. Spent considerable while trying to find an unlocked gate to one or another ranch nearby. He was tame, really tame, and I could have lifted him over one of the fences, but didn’t know which side of the road to choose. Gale and Kay are calling around to try to find who owns him.
Lots of roadkill deer and exotics in the ditches between here and Kerrville. I’d hate to see this guy join them.
But the biggest, most exciting haul of the day: Someone dumped an intact Kenmore Water Softener in the grader ditch. The outer shell is rigid nylon, looks to hold 20 gallons, and inside’s a fiberglass cylinder might hold another 7, 8 gallons if I can think of something to use it for. And the pump appears to be undamaged, also. Something really heavy in there somewhere. The whole shebang must have weighed over 100 pounds.
The HEB grocery store parking lot was jam-packed and I REALLY didn’t want to go in there. But I said to myself, “If you’ll go in there and promise not to be forever whining and complaining about it I’ll give you a special treat.”
“Hmmm,” says I. “What do you have in mind?”
“How about a pie? Or some Elgin sausage?”
“If you don’t want me whining and complaining you ought to fork over Elgin sausage AND a pie. All or nothing.”
“Cripes! You’re driving a hard bargain, but time’s wasting. You got it.”
A lot of sudden wear and tear showing up on my clothing. I attribute a lot of it to this:
I picked it up at the tail-end of a garage sale in Kerrville, still in the box, evidently never used, for $7.00 US. I thought it would make a great addition to the old Kenmore by offering a means of rinsing one load while another was being washed. Neither of the two uses a lot of water, but this one uses a bit less than the Kenmore. I was hugging myself with joy.
But I believe this thing wears out clothes instead of washing them. At this rate I’ll be running around naked under my outer clothing before another change of underwear’s required.
My current thinking is I’m going to have to figure out something to do with this thing that doesn’t involve washing clothes.
Meanwhile maybe it’s time to test a theory I’ve been chewing on for some while that nobody would notice or care if they saw a 68 year old man in town doing business, buying groceries and chicken feed, bare-assed naked.
Maybe they’d like it better than one who has plenty of cotton and chinese poly-whatchallit covering his privates, but stinks to high heaven.
I said when I made the post I’d be talking more about it, but way led onto way and I never got around to doing it.
This was a one-man-band project. The footprint of that structure has about an inch-or-less of topsoil over hardpan caliche or limestone. Digging holes for the uprights wasn’t something I wanted to contemplate.
I knew I wanted the pickup camper as a roof, the shower-doors as part of the walls, wanted uprights with lateral stability without digging into limestone. But otherwise it was plan-as-you go, driven partly by material availability.
Those lower walls are two sides of a huge packing crate I picked up for $5 from a guy in Kerrville. Bought 30# of large lag-screws [$1.00 per pound] from Habitat for Humanity Recycling Store for the project because I anticipated difficulties in the lateral stability department. The shower doors were free. The 4x4s were from the same guy who sold me the packing crate.
I used the crate-sides to get three of the uprights generally in place by bolting them together. Trust me when I tell you this ought to be a 2-man job. I fudged on a lot of things by not paying a lot of attention to right-angles because I couldn’t be two places at once and knew I wasn’t going to live forever.
I took about a week building it, but probably it could have been done in a day with two people working.
As you can see I trenched below the lower walls and dug to bedrock, only an inch or two, to level the lower walls and provide a base for the corner posts.
Before putting the camper shell on top I built an interior frame and stabilized it with a steel bed frame salvaged from a junk pile:
Once that was in place I ran the front bumper of the truck up against it from whatever angles I could get to it, hooked a chain to the uprights from other angles pushing and pulling it with the truck to test the lateral strength. We get some high winds and I didn’t want it coming down, even if the additional strength the camper shell structure would add became fractured.
I constructed a lean-to ramp using 4 2x12s and positioned the camper shell diagonally on it, skidded it up with a come-along until I had it in place, then bolted it to the top frame. As I was finishing, Gale dropped down to see how I was doing and helped a lot during the final positioning of the shell.
The camper shell was missing the door, so for ventilation I used salvaged refrigerator shelving. It keeps the predators out but allows a good breeze. But to keep out the water I added the additional planks at an angle sloping away from the roof runoff.
Evidently a bat got confused and got snagged in the buglight instead of coming into the cabin to fly around as they usually do.
Every m0rning the chickens feast under that light as soon as I turn them loose. But I think I’d best unplug it before I poke around with a stick trying to get that bat out of there.
Ah well. Maybe the chickens will eat it.
This cool morning had me putting on clothing instead of running around with nothing but shoes on to turn out the chickens and feed the cats. But it reminded me I’ve been almost a year without any gas for the cookstove and no way except the woodstove to knock the morning chill out of the cabin. I’m going to have to do something about that.
Then there’s this:
It’s coming nigh onto time to haul water again. Probably also ought to try to figure out what’s wrong with that well pump. It’s been since last December it quit, but I didn’t want to rush anything. If I need to pull that pump I didn’t want to do it in cold weather when it happened, but didn’t want to do it in hot weather the rest of the time.
Saw this in the parking lot of the Humane Society Thrift Store the other dayInside the guy was easy to identify, looked about like you'd figure
He was poking around in a box of old LP records. I tried to start a conversation with him about old music but he wasn’t having any of it.
This old XP’s going kerplunk. I picked up a replacement at the Thrift Store and if I can figure out where all these wires go I’ll have it in here in a jiffy as soon as I get around to it.
FOOD: There’s an all-you-can-eat pizza joint where you get all the salad you want, a drink and a selection of all kinds of pizza slices as many times as you go back for them and as many kinds as you want for $5.00. You wouldn’t believe how much salad and pizza a person can eat in an hour-or-so.
Only trouble is I always feel sort of bloated and sometimes have stomach cramps after I eat there. Maybe it’s something in the food.
Thrift Store 25 cent books acquired:
A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M. Miller: Good SF I read every 10 years or so.
Rebel – Bernard Cornwell – I like Cornwell fairly well but I haven’t read this one. Civil War historical fiction
Quick Silver – Clark Howard – Never heard of the author. Taking potluck on this one.
Double Jeopardy – Colin Forbes – Another potluck. Never heard of the author.
The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene – I might have read this one sometime. But the only Graham Greene I’ve ever not liked was Brighton Rock, required reading in some English course.
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco – Time I read this one again.
High Sorcery – Andre Norton – I might have read it 40 years ago. Usually liked Andre Norton.
Fuzz – Ed McBain – Potluck. Never heard of him. Looks like an extortion, cops and robbers yarn.
The Third Man – Graham Greene – Once more before I die.
Hobbit and others – JRR Tolkien – Hell, for .25 why not one more time?
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco – I dunno if I can do this one again. I ain’t as young as I used to be.
The Blue Hammer – Ross Macdonald – I read all these 30 years ago, loved them but ran spang out. Nice finding this one.
The Forge of God – Greg Bear – Never heard of him. Appears to be SF.
Flashman at the Charge – George Mcdonald Frazer – Sheeze. I love finding these. I must have read the entire Flashman series a dozen times over the decades. They never grow old.
A person used to hear young men say, “I’d give my left nut for [fill in the blank]” and everyone knew precisely what he was saying.
Sometime over the past few decades I filtered out allowing myself to precisely ‘want’ anything without consciously intending to do it. When I get the silly-assed notion I ‘need’ or ‘want’ something I just stuff it into a file folder in my mind marked, ‘tentative’, and go into a patience mode. That just involves waiting for the Universe to drop whatever it was, or the components to fabricate it into my life. Which the Universe consistently indulges eventually.
But yesterday in town I saw this and it stopped me in my tracks. “Wow!” thinks I. “That thing could wash a lot of clothes at once, and it has a wringer.”
I’ve been using the Thrift Store busted near-freebee 1947 Kenmore for some time and I’m generally tickled pea-green with it: Clean Underwear and Hard Times. But it has the decided disadvantage of not having a wringer. This results in not getting so much water out of the clothes, so they take a lot longer to dry on the line.
I tagged and numbered the concept of the washer above and sent an order for something along those lines out to the Universe. But as I thought about it driving away it dawned on me what I actually ‘need’ if I were going to do some needing is a carwash chamois wringer.
But the cheapest of those new runs almost $100, which doesn’t fit into any strong likelihoods of me ever forking out. Even on EBay they run that price and upward.
But those things appear to be built to last. I’m betting when car washes go out of business they end up in places nobody expected, taking up space and not getting much use. I’m going to watch for them at flea-markets, auctions and garage sales. And maybe I’ll post something on the Yahoo FreeCycle groups for Kerrville and Fredericksburg.
I wouldn’t give my left nut for one of those wringers, but if I wanted one I might.
Steve Goodman knew all about the trap of wanting dream things, though. In this song he just about says it all:
The sign and that line of people outside the building suggests the Christians in Washington mightn’t have anything in common with regular old actual Christians of the old actual Christianity faith.
I don’t know what they’re doing to help those people in there, being a non-Christian, but they must be doing something. That line stretches all the way out into the parking lot.
I don’t need a gas grille, but if I did I’d have snapped this one up from the Salvation Army:
It’s missing the burners and regulator, cheap to add and retrofit, looks barely used, but the price is amazing:
Only thing I can figure is the Chinese have bought out Harley Davidson:
Damned thing is 200cc and has a pull starter like a lawn mower. They charge extra for ape-hangers.
But it looks as though they’re also wanting to cash in on some of the automotive company bailouts:
Notice the suicide shift above the right fender. You have to turn loose the steering wheel to shift gears. Can’t imagine how they got that through Ralph Nader’s US Department of Transportation and Welfare.
Best for last, though. Here’s a free crapper and exercycle from Habitat for Humanity:
Tempting, but I’ve already got the one, and I get my exercise just trying to stay alive. Fact of life.
A while back I was without music to confuse the owl-folk. I’d spang worn out my Kerrville FreeCycle-donated 200 CD Sony player and was scouting around for whatever the Universe had in mind to replace it. A couple of months had passed, to I figured the Universe was ripe.
Salvation Army Thrift Store in Kerrville was having a half-price off on electronics sale. I nosed around among the 8 track tape players, the television sets, the wires with all kinds of connections pretending not to pay any mind to a Sony 300 CD player staring at me as though I was the abyss. The door was open on it and it seemed a bit battered, but someone had taped, “WORKS” on it, along with a price of $65. $32.50 with the half-price on electronics.
The guy I think must be the store manager was at the register, and we’ve done enough business over time for him to know my ways and for me to know his. Between ringing up purchases he was watching me not lo0k at that CD player with a half-smile on his face. I moseyed over to it scowling, making sure in the corner of my eye he was looking, and tried to mess with the door to get it closed. Shook my head, then looked up and met his eye.
“If that thing has a door it doesn’t seem to close.”
“Bring it over here and we’ll talk about it.”
I put it on the counter and we both scowled at it. “That’s a lot of money to have to risk for something might not work. If I bought it could you write down something so I could bring it back if it doesn’t work?”
We both knew the answer to that one. It’s sold as is. “I can’t do that. But I’d sure hate for someone to buy it and get stuck with it not working. What do you think it’s worth risk-wise?”
He and I have been through this enough times before to know how we play the game. “I couldn’t pay more than $20 for it.”
“No,” shaking his head, “I’d rather give it to you free than let you pay that much.”
“I’m not taking that out of here free. I’m not begging. I’m just trying to find a price we can agree on. How about $15?”
“How about a buck?”
“$10? I’m not sure I can go any lower than 10. A man has to live with his conscience.” I feigned away from the counter as though about to walk off.
“Noo, no, no!” Him acting frantic. “How about $5? Could you go $5?”
“Sold.”
He carried it across the counter to the register and started figuring the tax. “It’s half-price for electronics today. But you probably don’t want to use that, do you?”
“Naw. Just ring it up at the full price we agreed to. I’m not looking for any bargain.”
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 
