6:52 am - Friday - November 1st - TWW - 34° F, humidity 37%, wind 5 mph out of the east by southeast.....partially cloudy today with a forecast high of 67° F. On this date in 2016 TLE and I hiked to Mobius Arch in the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, CA......
Mt. Whitney in the distance as seen through the Mobius Arch
Thursday was a day of small projects, and TLE was right there by my side assisting me, and giving great suggestions, the entire time. We put in a 5 hour work day....one of our longer ones, but none of the tasks was difficult, or required much bending over....all good things for old farts like us. The skies were clear, and not a breath of wind most the day.
Our first project was to cut new 2 x 4's to length (48") to use for the saw horse bases we found. The wood on them was rotten, and needed replacing for them to be useful, so we did it.....
.....now we have two functional saw horses! We have a saying here at TWW, which goes "The land will provide", and so far it has, in spades. The IBC water tote we use was here, unused for years, on the property, so we cleaned it, and now have a place to store water for use in the Newell. I could go on and on, but there is a great supply of materials here (pipe of all diameters and lengths, wood, plumbing fixtures, etc.) just for the picking.
Next up we needed to build a platform for the wood we are cutting, and splitting, to keep it high and dry off the ground. Once again the land provided.....there was a small wood frame platform that we just added to with other 2 x 4's, and then some 1 x 6 wood planks....it turned out better than I expected....
.....we placed it between two juniper trees, and then moved the dry wood we split the other day. We'll move the green wood that still needs to dry for a few months on Friday.
Finally, we brought two 4" x 4" x 8' posts down from Likely that we bought to use there, but never did, so brought them with us to TWW. We're going to use one of our rectangular sail shades to provide more shade for the wood deck on the front of the house. We only got as far as affixing them to the safety rails on the deck, but will get the sail shade installed on Friday....
.....we finished our work day around 4 pm. I took a shower, and then a short nap before heading out with TLE to have another sunset fire.....
....TLE prepared hot Rum and chocolate drinks for the occasion, which were delicious! There was a nice afterglow, but I didn't hold the camera steady enough, so its a little blurry. I've been turning on the LED lights on our two market umbrellas at night, and they look nice....
....kind of adds a little atmosphere to the place at night.
We watched the latest episode of 'Survivor' before going to bed, and this is where things got interesting. Somehow the block heater switch (the block heater is used to warm up the big Detroit Diesel on cold days, so we can start it more easily. She is cold blooded), which is located on the shelf in behind the head of our bed, got turned on accidently, and around 2 am our three Bluetti batteries hit zero. Off went our power...power we need for our electric blankets, which keep us from turning into frozen popsicles during the night...doh! The block heater draws around 10 amps while it is running, which is over 1 kilowatt, and will drain our batteries very quickly, which it did. We have a UPC (backup battery) to keep our Starlink online when we lose power for short period of time, and when power is lost it begins emitting a warning beep so you know you have 30 minutes to restore power before it shuts down....that warning beep is one of the things one does not want to hear 2 am in the morning. Other things one does not want to hear at 2 am in the morning are the smoke detector, the carbon monoxide detector, or the propane detector....those alarms will wake the dead. That UPS warning beep is what woke me out of a sound sleep. At any rate, I had to get dressed, go outside, turn on the Honda E2000i to begin replacing the depleted electrons, so we could stay warm in our bed....lol. The Honda did its job, and order was restored. The batteries, as I write, are almost back to 100%, and the sun is just coming over the trees now, so we'll be able to turn off the generator, and let the sun take it from here very shortly.
Thanks for stopping by!
