Old tools

Way back in the day (30 or 40 years back), my Dad made up a transport belt. It wasn't much-- it was just a large leather belt with a large brass ring tacked on with a strip of leatherr and two rivets. He kept it all through his years as an investigator. While clearing out a storage unit of his recently, I saw it and asked if I could have it, since he's retired now. The other day, I put a large prisoner into it before putting him into my car. It's simple: you just buckle buckle behind him, with the belt passed through the brass ring in front. Then the handcuffs are passed through the brass ring, and his hands are cuffed in front. It's very safe, but FAR more comfortable to the prisoner. I am a fan of not hurting my prisoners.

A few days ago, I had a low-risk warrant to serve on my day off. I put on some blue jeans and a department polo shirt and an ID card, and put my pistol on my hip. I reached into my sock drawer, and got Dad's old sheep's leather 'cuff carrier from his days as an investigator, and put my cuffs into it, and looped it over my belt. It all went swimmingly, and the guy got booked in, in no time flat, without pain or injury. 

Dad's old leather is still working. 

Demolition man.

Two leaks ruined my hardwood living room floor. That's been pulled up, and is in the back of the van to go to the dump.

The old AC unit that leaked all over my living room floor is pulled out. It's on my lawn. The furnace is still good, and I'll probably Craig's list that old thing.

My living room floor has a 6 foot trench that I jackhammered into it, to replace the rusted drain pipe from the washing machine to the main house sewer line. That was the second leak: a slab leak. Of course I managed to hit the supply lines whilst hammering out the concrete and digging out the drain pipe. The plumber only charged me $251, which I actually was grateful for.

I'm currently in the processes of removing the floor from the utility closet that the updraft AC/Furnace was in; it's been waterlogged. I've pulled the gas hot water heater, and the furnace and AC and jerry-rigged plenum adaptor, this evening. This would have been a LOT easier if the SawzAll hadn't died on me today. I didn't know that they did that. I've never seen one do that. Poor old SawzAll. It served me well. This is the first time it's given me reason to cuss it.

I'm painting the new floor (made of doubled 3/4" CDX) with exterior "oops paint" that I bought at Home Depot for $5. It's brick red. Whatever.

The new A/C, new furnace, new exterior unit, and new copper lines are all at the house, ready to install today. My partner's dad is generously helping me for free.

Gotta get back to it.

Empowered kids.

"Dad, can you help me with my bike tires?" asked my 11 year old daughter. This gets me moving pretty quickly. I don't much care for requests that I do it for her. But help her? You bet.

I was surprised that I'd never worked with her on her bicycle.

First, I had her get the compressor, plug it in, and try to air up the tires. The back one took pressure, but the front one was a no-go. The valve stem had partially separated. I had suspected as much, and my wife had purchased a new inner tube the week before, after I gave her the tire specs.

I showed her how to stand the bike on its seat and handlebars, because we didn't have a bike stand. I showed her how, when working on low projects, it's worth the time to seek out a stool. (I procured for us each a 5 gallon bucket to overturn for that purpose.)

I asked her first what she thought we should do. She thought that we should take the wheel off. I told her that sounded like a good idea, and said to do that. She looked at the nuts on the axles for a few seconds, and went to the garage, coming back with a crescent wrench. She adjusted the wrench until it fit to the flats of the nuts, and removed the nuts and washers from the axle, and then pulled the tire, being careful as it came through the caliper brake.

I asked her how she thought we could get the tire off the wheel. She wasn't sure. I asked her to fetch me two large screwdrivers. She did so. I showed her how to pop the tire from the rim, twice. We took the tube off. She took out the new tube, noting how much heavier it was than the old tube-- about 3 or 4 times heavier. This new one was "thorn resistant." We put the tube on, and I showed her how the tire just pooped on with finger pressure, without tools.

At about this time, a 9 year old neighbor boy came by, with a dead snake in a box. He had been retrieving eggs from the henhouse, and found the chicken snake in the hen house. I asked him how he killed it. "I brained it with a rock," he said with a grin. "Got 3 others, yesterday." I admonished him not to just kill all snakes, as they keep down the rat population. He claimed he didn't.

Both my girls poked at the recently-dead snake with interest, and then the neighbor boy and my younger daughter fed it to my chickens. The omnivorous birds pecked at it, cheerfully.

My elder daughter put the wheel back on the bike and bolted it back on, before airing up the tire to 60 PSI. She flipped the bike over, hopped on, and rode away, with a quick "Thanks, Dad."

I should have told her to come back and put the tools away. But I didn't. I put them up myself. It was my pleasure.

Pocket pistol.

My friend Marko, who some years back pared back to just 3" K frame revolvers for main carry duty, decided to get himself a Ruger LCP pocket pistol. He even includes a photograph of it in his hand.

Hm. He claims that it's as small as the KelTec, but when I pulled my P3AT out of my pocket, my gun seemed a bit smaller in comparison.

Maybe it's just personal perception.

Heh.

Ahhhhh....

That aforementioned anticipated package was actually in my mailbox. Updating one's old desktop memory from 250 meg to 2 gig of Muskin makes you actually like your machine again. Total time spent in the upgrade: 100 seconds. That was a few bucks well-spent. :)

Things that I'm loving right now.

Z Packs.
Flonase.
Steroid shots in the butt.
Dense cardboard boxes found at my front door, with my name and "ORM-D" plastered on the outside of them.
Marked-down whole bean "Fair Trade" Brazillian coffee, still vacu-sealed, that we got at the thrift store for $2/lb, which we're going back for, because the rabble won't buy it without a recognizable brand label onit.
Hamilton Beach digital slow-cookers (Blows the old Rival Crock Pot right out of the water.)
Pork roast with fresh herbs, fresh out of the HB slow-cooker.
New mattress.
Excited little girls on the eve of their 7th birthday.
Cool spring dew on the lawn while I'm covering my tomatoes for the night.
The strong feeling of a framing hammer driving long ring shank nails into 2X6's as I quickly assemble garden frames without a wasted stroke. (Surprised me.)
Fresh chocolate cake.
A call from a co-worker who genuinely wants my input, and who doesn't get mad when my answer isn't the one he was hoping to get.
Home made strawberry icing.
Powerful LED flashlights.
Washing machines (clothes or dish) that actually work right.
A coffee machine at the PD again.
The prospect of another package arriving at my door soon, to provide me with octuple the memory currently on my desktop machine.

Double-edged sword.

I'm a believer in teens having cell phones. My daughters, when they get into their teens, will have 'em zip-tied to their wrists. New ones can dial only approved numbers. You can look up who they're calling, for how long, and when. You can look up their chats. Some, you can even get GPS-enabled.

But beware-- don't get your kiddo a new sexy cell phone, and think that you can cut off his or her Internet access by pulling the laptop from their room. I'm finding more and more underage kids hooking up with older kids/pervert adults, using their web browsers on their phones. These are NOT iPhones, people. This is 1999 technology.

You want to trust your kid? Awesome. Me too. But understand-- that useful tool that is the Internet browser on her useful tool that is her cell phone is a very, very sharp double-edged sword, that can leave quite a mark, if misused.

Just like the gun in my pocket right now-- it's nothing but a tool. But we have to respect tools, and we don't let kids play with them.

So I've got this cool washing machine.

It's a Whirlpool Duet front-loader. It has more controls than an Apollo command module. I've wanted one for awhile, and after we went through two used washers just since moving into this house (one, we had bought used 5 years ago and it finally died. The other, we bought used at an auction, and it died before the first load was through.), we just went out and bought one, right before Christmas.

We shopped around, played the stores off each other, and got it deeply discounted at Lowe's, with no interest, no payments for a year. They delivered, installed it, and even carted off the other two washers. All well and good. Yes, I'm paying for this service, but not very much, and it's my first new washing machine that I've ever had, in the history of ever. You're damned right, I bought the extended warranty.

So back to what this thing can do-- it centrifuges your clothes dry at 1050 rpm. If you have someone take sick in the house, it has an on-board water heater that will kick your house hot water up to 165 degrees farenheit. It will tell you, at any given moment in the cycle, exactly how many minutes it has left to finish. It will throw in an extra rinse, if that's your game. It will give you different chimes to tell you the cycle it's on, or not. It will let you adjust the volume for same. It uses half the normal amount of detergent, and less than half the normal amount of water. It makes your drying time take about half as long. And, with it up on the wooden home-made pedistal (I'm not paying $120 for their store-bought one.), I can move clothes from the washer to the dryer all in the same motion, with everything on the same plane of interface.

The very observant reader and picture-viewer will be able to detect just how proud of this thing I was, when I first got it.* It seemingly could do anything.

What it will NOT do, is run without power. When the ~40 year-old electrical outlet, which has held a plug in its teeth for probably all but one of those years, decides that it has no spring tension left in it, it drops the electrical cord right out of itself. This can somewhat interfere with one's getting-ready routine, when one can't even open the sealed door to the washing machine that has stopped mid-cycle. I tried three times before jumping the cord to another outlet.

Bah. Time to replace all of the house electrical outlets. Snarl.

______________________________________________________________

*Note the date of the pictures. 3 weeks ago. The plug hadn't given up the ghost yet, but I was some freakish fellow, taking pictures of his washing machine. What? Was I going to put them in my wallet??!?

Well, that's encouraging.

I noticed a small spike in hits on my SiteMeter. I went looking for where my referrals were coming from, and found that there's a significant number of hits from Google searches for "concealed carry," "concealed carry holsters," and at least one "concealed carry in the mall."

To you newcomers: welcome. This blog is written by a cop who appreciates it when good people carry responsibly.

While I assume that this post and this post brought you here, please also read this post, and understand that it's a pain, and a responsibility. Please enter into the bearing of arms not lightly.

Also of interest: Cold carry. Oh, and I here reference a superior post by Marko on the responsibilities of carrying concealed.

Curiouser and curiouser

A year ago, I posted a link to a site that attempted to calculate what this blog was worth. Strangely, it claimed that this thing was worth... nothing. Nada. Zilch.

One year and about 300 posts later, it's supposedly worth:

My blog is worth $63,228.48.
How much is your blog worth?

Huh.

Well, thanks for that, I guess. It's more than this poor public servant has ever earned in a year, so that's something, I reckon. Now, if only I could get the folks at Technorati.com to make good on their appraisal, this would be a very merry Christmas, indeed.

Strangely, Tamara's blog is now worth EXACTLY the same as it was last year, by their calculous:

Tamara's blog is worth $5,080.86.
How much is your blog worth?

Well that makes about zero sense.

Thanks, Billy!

I'd just finished an email to Billy Sparks today, when I heard the postal lady drop something off on my porch and jump back into her truck. (Remember when they used to knock? When they used to make sure the package, if it wouldn't fit in your box, made it inside and safe?) I checked the porch, and there was a box from Billy himself, contiaining the very topic of my email: 100 feet of good rope.

Constant readers will recall my post of about 4 weeks ago, in which I voiced my appreciation of good rope. My mama actually gave me a length of it and some snaplinks for Father's Day. It's massive, thick twisted white rope, and it was a really nice (if different) Father's Day gift.

Billy, who works in the first responder field, mentioned that he might have some extra rope lying around. I figured that he had some old rope that was ready to retire. In fact, he had some static line that had never been used, but had been shipped in the wrong color. Different colors are often assigned different tasks. Life-saving climbing rope usually has a built-in 7 to 12% stretch, which can save your bacon when you hit the end of it after a lengthy fall. It's expensive, and has to be disposed of after a couple of falls-- one should never use good climbing rope for general purpose chores like towing or hauling. It also should be kept as clean as possible, as sand and grit will cut and fray the fibers in it, reducing its strength and ductility. So when you order it, you get it in a specific color -- say, neon orange or yellow, and you make your utility ropes another color, preferably a contrasting color. So the general purpose rope that Billy sent me is brand-spanking-new rope that's never been used. Since I don't carry climbing rope or the like with me, the fact that it's Emergency Orange is not a problem-- it could be purple with pink flecks in it. Billy threw in a locking carabiner as well.

As soon as I figure out where my absent wife stashed the checkbook, Billy, your costs for postage will be in the mail, buddy.

I went out to a medium-velocity high-water rescue the other night with our fire department. A lady had driven into a puddle in the road that turned out to be a rising creek, and her car began floating right down the road. The firemen waded carefully out toward her, but stopped several times-- they didn't have a rope!! My new one was still in the trunk of my P.O.V., not yet transferred to my patrol car, so I was of little help. I will, tonight, though.

Thanks, Billy.

Frickin' bovines.

When I heard our local deputy check out with about 40 head of Hereford mix cattle running loose a half mile outside of our city, I thought about bug spray.

I had bought a can for my patrol bag during the early summer about 6 years ago, while looking for the missing driver from a wreck. I had run by a convenience store, asked if they had bug spray, and after they poured a bottle of water over me to revive me from the faint I felt at the sticker shock, I paid $5.97 for a can of Cutter bug spray. And it lived in that bag for years. But recently, it went missing, and I've been thinking about that.

It is my understanding that some of y'all up north and in other areas don't have chiggers; consider yourselves lucky. They're a bane down here, and it's just now entering their season. What you can empathize with me on is mosquitoes. As I have alluded to, this last month has been one of the wettest on record for north Texas. Fact is, we've got standing water everywhere. Mosquitoes swarm around every light shining. I've actually seen them swarming around the license plate lamp of a car stopped briefly at a stop sign. Fueling under a lighted awning at night is utter hell on earth. Until we've got some wind and some hot dry sun to dry things up, it's going to be like the worst part of the tropics around here.

So I checked my bag again, and finding that my spray was still missing, I went down to the convenience store, the only place open after 8:00 PM. They were happy to sell me a 6 ounce can of Deep Wood Off... for (I'm not making this up) $6.95, plus tax. It came to $7.53. This is not poetic license-- I have the damned receipt.

I thought about it.

The clerk double checked it with wide eyes. Yep-- they really wanted that much. She shook her head.

I bought the can. If I didn't, the Irony Gods would smite me.

5 minutes later, the deputy hollered for me to come help him.

- - - -

The grass wasn't too bad-- only knee high in lots of places. Waist high in others. Chest high in others. I left the thicker stuff alone.

Our plan was to let the cattle owner push 'em toward us, and we would haze 'em into the open gate, with our cars and our persons creating a diversion in their natural path. It was a great plan, that only required me to wait with my car, and to stand mostly on pavement. I just put on a little bug spray on my ankles and arms and neck, and rubbed some on my face.

Stupid cows.

The herd made it around the guy in the 4X4 out in the muddy field, and I started walking north along the asphalt road. Half a mile up, I began cutting across a pasture, and met up with a helpful guy with a QBeam, a heavy beer buzz, and a lot of enthusiasm for a man of 46. We started an end-around maneuver that Nimitz and Chesty Puller would have been proud of. We pushed 'em into a corner, and then insinuated ourselves just so, so that they trotted to our open gate, and ran in.

All but four. A calf, a cow with a little calf, and a Bull. Frankly, I was mostly concerned about the mama with the little one. I've been charged by a mama cow before, and it makes one pucker. Hereford bulls aren't notoriously mean. I figured we'd make short work of this.

The bull had other plans.

Tasers have a laser, the beam of which created a dot that concerned the mama enough to run into the gate when I moved it over the grass to her off-side. Ha! I thought. This will be easy!

The bull had other plans.

The bull started my way, and in a flash of brilliance, I pulled off my taser cartridge and fired off an arc. The bull checked up hard, and stared at me. I put the laser on his face, and zapped the taser arc again. He looked away, and then started my way. Fast.

I put the beam of my Streamlight and the laser of my taser in his face, and backed up and...

fell right into a large stinging nettle bush. The bull came on, and I found myself wondering if this was truly about to "get western." He ran on by me. Suddenly the pain got a little intense in my lower left arm and wrist. In the dark, I thought that I was being attacked simultaneously by a large amount of fire ants (something else we are damned with here), and began trying to brush them off. Unsuccessful, I put a light to my left arm, and saw my wrist growing red splotches and bumps on it. Ah.

I ran after the bull, cussing.

A quarter mile later, I got around it, and got in front of him, calling upon help from the ghost of Lord Nelson. "Haw!" I yelled. "Git!" I spat. He kept coming, his breath casting twin puffs of steam clearly visible in the humid 70 degree night air. I stood my ground, crackled my taser in his face, and yelled at him.

He lowered his head, and sped up.

So there I was, a mile out of my city (by that time), and a quarter mile from the deputy that I was helping, putting about 4 lbs of pressure on the 8 lb trigger of the Glock 31 I had in my hand (when did that get there?), with the tritium sight standing out neatly against the white face between the horns of a bull that was about 5 feet away and coming.

I stepped aside. "This ain't my job," I thought. Why push a "Dear Chief" letter?

I headed back.

"Man, you gave it a hell of a good try," the deputy said, which helped. The old man who owned the cattle had driven up in his Cadillac, and told us dirty jokes while we awaited the professional wrangler.

I went by the convenience store, tired, bug bit, rash-encrusted, sweaty, and muddy (I had just shined my boots, too!), and bought a stick of jerky.

Yeah. That's right. Who the boss, now, huh? Don't make me snap into a Slim Jim, yo?

Good rope.

Back when I first started patrolling, I put into my patrol bag a 40' length of good double-braided 5/8" nylon rope. I like good rope, and am loathe to ever cut it. But sometimes, like the guys in Boondock Saints, you're not just real sure why you bring the rope.

Initially I thought that I might use it for all the cattle that I seemed to have to chase, but I learned that without a horse, you might as well try to put a rope around a whitetail deer's neck as a semi-feral cow of any breed. Holsteins, Black and Red Angus, Texas longhorn, Masai, Brahman, Limousin-- they've all given me the slip as I've tried to ease up to 'em with a rope loop on foot. And Texan though I might well be, I can't honestly say that I'm much of a throw with a lariat. I never could get a loop going that I could hold (though few could with that floppy braided nylon). I can usually hit the branch or staub that I'm throwing for, within a couple of throws, when I've got to (and I choose my targets). But that's about it.

The secondary use, I did use it a lot for: clearing road blockages. We get these major-duty thunder storms (see prior post), and they'll knock a tree down. Now, technically, trying to clear the road isn't my job. But if I don't want to spend the next several hours baby-sitting a road hazard, I find a way. The Crown Victoria has a pretty decent anchor point on the back and front, but it's a little sharp at the edges. I used to use a carabiner, but I don't know where that went. So usually I'll just loop the rope a couple of times around the tree, put a two half-hitch with a slip knot in it there, and tie off to the push-bumper of my car. Then I back it up. I've pulled some mighty big trees out of the way this way, enough to allow traffic to pass. Toss out a cone on either side, and call Road & Bridge in the morning, and all's well.

Then there's the other stuff. Occasionally we find ourselves doing something stupid, like Ambo Driver's old partner did. Rationality says wait for the fire rescue guys. But emotion sometimes says that you're stepping in, with or without the rope. It's a poor excuse for proper rescue equipment, and my father is quite right when he declares that it'll only make it easier to retrieve your body. But sometimes... well, it's better to have it than not.

My length of rope spent a weekend holding a gate shut until the out-of-town rancher could get back to repair it. (I now carry a heavy set of linesman's pliers, and nowadays I'll just rob a middle strand of barbed wire from his fence, for the task.)

I used my rope many a time as a lead to take home a stray dog, and to anchor a dog while I went to a call before seeing whose it was.

I used my rope, run through a stretch of pipe, to capture a baby opossum out of a bedroom, one morning. No lie-- I was called by the homeowner, a single mother, who hadn't even gotten out of bed before she saw the marsupial sitting on the back of a loveseat in her oversized bedroom. "The door's unlocked-- just let yourself in," she said through her bedside phone. She refused to get out from under the comforter until the 8 lb rat-like creature was removed from her house. I left it hissing at me from a nearby woodpile.

I pulled other cars out of the mud a few times, and more than once had to be pulled out of mud or a snowbank, using my rope. 5/8" braided nylon has a new tensile strength of over 10,000 lbs, and folded double I figured I could probably depend on my used one for about 12,000 to 15,000 lbs.

I never pulled Timmy from a well.

I never yanked a damsel off a ledge from a crumbling cliff.

I never tied up a band of thieves.

I did once use it to hobble the legs of a critter who was threatening to kick out my windows. Tied a knot in it near the feet, tossed the knot out the door, and shut the door. He couldn't lift his feet until we got to the sally port, at which location he had an amused welcoming party waiting, which took the wind right out of his sails.

+ + +
My old braided nylon's swan song was one day when a beautiful-but-stupid thoroughbred stallion reared up, got a foreleg caught between two cattle panels, and came down on it in a terrible way. The horse's weight broke the leg, and he was hanging from it, with his other foreleg just off the ground. I used my rope to attempt gird the horse up and take the weight off his broken leg until we could get him loose.

He was frantic, and screaming, and the whites of his eyes (which you normally don't see on a horse) could be seen as he tried to rear up, which made things even worse as his broken knee and forearm caught, and the hoof, too wide for the gap, caught just below the fetlock. Then he'd come crashing back down, and the screaming was enough to split your head. The top of the cattle panel was cut rough, and it tore open the underside of the forearm, from breast to brisket. A vein was cut open, and blood pooled fast and dark in the powdery red dirt below as I tried in vain to take the strain of the horse's shoulder, as a sobbing trainer risked her life on his other side to get the loop placed forward on his chest. In the end, my rope just served to keep him from rearing up, which at least stopped part of the damage. We got a large animal vertinarian there quickly, but all he could do was inject a large dose of tranquilizer into the poor boy until we could get the fence apart.

When I left, they had the horse loose and sedated and on his three good feet. My rope was saturated with his blood, and we used it to tie the panels together tightly to keep a hoof from getting between them again; I didn't want it back. They put the horse down the next morning. To be honest, if I'd known for certain that they were going to have to do that, I'd have just shot the poor thing and ended his suffering right then.

+ + +

Now, six months after ending a two-year hiatus from patrol, I find myself driving around without a decent rope in the car. I found a 15 foot length of 3" webbing, thicker than your car's seatbelt, which probably would rate about 30,000 lb tensile strength. But there's not a lot you can do with such a short length. Still, we made due with it tonight when a large hunk of black locust was blown down-- the boy that hailed me down to tell me about the obstruction on the side road was driving a nice pickup, and I conned him into helping me by claiming I needed him to show me where the obstruction was. In the driving rain, I got the webbing tied off to the tree and to his hitch, and we yanked it free from its remaining hold to the trunk before dragging it to a wide spot of the ditch next to the fence, and together we got it (mostly) into the ditch.

The boy said, "That's not much of a rope."

I said, "You're right, and I plan to fix that. Still, it's better than the one you had in your pickup."

"I don't have a truckbox..." he began.

"I'm just bustin' your chops," I smiled and shook his hand. "Thanks for your help, kid. Don't wreck that pretty pickup in this rain; they drive poorly with empty beds on slick roads." He squinted at me like I was crazy-- everyone knows there's nothin' better in foul weather than a good ol' pick'em-up truck. Ah well. He'll either learn it on his own, or I'll be working his accident.

So now I've gotta go find myself a decent length of rope. I'm thinking I'll spring for 60 feet this time, with a couple of carabiners and a large snaplink hook.