Breakin' rocks.....

7:38 am - Tuesday - January 14th - TWW - 16° F (COLD!!!), humidity 58%, wind 9 mph out of the east.....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 46° F.  On this date in 2016 TLE and I were boondocking at Quartzite with good friends.....

......left to right: Steven, Bill, Jodee, Linda, moi, TLE and Michael.  We met Steven and Linda at Cape Blanco in 2014, and Michael at Amazon in 2012.  Bill and Jodee were guests of Steven and Linda.

Monday was a good day.  We got a lot done, and I even took some pictures!  I've been wanting to break up some of the large rocks which dot the road into TWW for a long time now, and finally decided to take a whack at it Monday.....FINALLY.  Rocks embedded in any dirt roadbed are like ice bergs.  What you see on the surface is about 10-20% of the actual rock, and my experience Monday did not deviate one iota from that theorem.  Using a mid sized sledge hammer, a pick axe, and a long, steel pry bar, I slowly removed large rocks which were protruding 3-4" above the road bed.  It was slow, tiring work, but after about an hour I had a large pile of excised rocks, and a hole about 4' x 4' to fill.....

.....in the picture above I've outlined where the rocks were before I dug them out....not a very big area, and there are probably a dozen spots, or more, like this along the 1/2 mile road into TWW....

....there are a lot more areas like this, and we'll slowly clear them over the next few months...I hope.  From there we drove out to the main north/south arterial road to install 'The Wilson Wilderness' sign I wrote about previously....

.....we managed to find a spot free of sub-surface rocks to pound in the sign using a dead blow hammer. 

The temp barely reached 40° F Monday, and at 7:36 am it was barely 27° F......

......it was after 1 pm by the time we returned from ripping rocks out of the ground, and installing the sign.  While TLE retreated to the warm confines of the Newell I headed out to the garage to apply a coupe of coats of paint to some metal work I'm going to install on the cedar shed to close up the hole I cut for the Honda EU2000i generator exhaust, and the the 6 foot seam which runs from the roof to the floor at the back of the shed to seal it from the cold air. Lithium batteries do not enjoy temps below 32° F.  With the doors closed, and all the holes sealed the heat of the batteries will keep the interior well above freezing.....

.....I had to employ Charles' propane heater to get the temp above the required minimum temperature for painting of 50° F.....I was able to get it to 59° F.....

.....I'll let them dry overnight, then install them Tuesday when it will be significantly warmer than Monday (46° F.....lol).

I ran the onboard diesel generator in Phyllis' Newell for about an hour to exercise it, and keep her batteries charged.  I've been using the BIG Champion generator to do that in the past, but it makes more sense to exercise the onboard generator and charge the batteries at the same time.  I was back inside the warm confines of the Newell by 3:15 pm.....just in time for dinner.

The final NFL game of the 'Wildcard' weekend pitted my L.A. Rams against the favored Minnesota Vikings.  The Rams finished the regular season at 10-7, while the Vikings finished 14-2.  However, you would have thought their records were reversed as the game progressed.  The Rams totally dominated the Vikings from beginning to end racking up 9 sacks.  The final score read 27-9 as the clock expired.  The game had to be moved from SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, CA to State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona due to the wild fires, and smoke in SoCal, but the Rams played like they were at their home stadium.

As I type today's missive at my laptop the temperature finally reached 23° F at 8:41 am.....

Thanks for stopping by!