The View from the Outhouse
Good morning, from Silty Slough. It’s 26 degrees at 9 am. The forecast is for a high of 33 this afternoon, but I don’t think it’s going to make it. The sun is just peeking under the overcast. Sunrise at 9:31 and sunset scheduled for 4:09, total daylight 6 hours and 37 minutes. We will continue to lose daylight for 31 more days. The river is showing a few more wet spots than yesterday. Sometimes in years past we were able to travel in the local neighborhood to get together with neighbors for Thanksgiving dinner. It doesn’t look like the river is going to co-operate this year.
That makes an annual event that happened last week really important this year, The Alaska Turkey Bomb. Years ago, just before Thanksgiving Kenney Hughes would drop turkeys to residents in this area. I believe he passed away and the residents did without turkey for Thanksgiving. About 3 years ago a lady from town that grew up out here in Skwentna resurrected the event. With the help of donations and volunteers it has expanded and covers more area now. Turkeys are dropped from airplanes to families that are out here and are unable to travel to town to get one for Thanksgiving. This year a nice burlap coffee bag was dropped that contained a turkey, candy, and coffee. I tried to place a link to a YouTube video for the story. https://youtu.be/k1YHGrHQwPU
Yesterday a neighbor showed up in a helicopter completely full of Amazon packages, fresh fruit, vegetables, a turkey, and a Starlink Mini to test out on the trails.
In one of the packages were a couple thermometers to monitor the woodstove. Since I added the Cadillac converter (catalytic…see previous post) there has been a learning curve on operating it with the most efficiency. There are a few good YouTube videos for our particular stove that I have been watching. One thing about YouTube is you have to be able to sort the flyshit from the pepper. Anyway, one thermometer monitors the top of the stove (also good when Kari is using the Alaskan crock pot) and the other monitors the stack temperature or EGT in airplane talk. When the catalytic converter lights off the stack temperature will run 1100-1200 degrees. I don’t think you want to go to Wal-Mart for your stove pipe. One good feature of the thermometers is that you can set a temperature for them to alarm in case it gets too high. Setting the parameters with instructions translated from Chinese is a college level course. I think I may have gotten a passing grade. The next time in town, I need to bring my infrared thermometer from the hangar out here. Not so much for the stove but to check the temperature of the ice and the flowing water in the river. May be interesting.
I would like to go fly the drone and check the river, but things may be more peaceful if I go out and pump 220 gallons of electricity into the diesel tank for the generator. Kari always helps and it is a nice enough day for it.
We let the fire go out this morning since it is fairly warm outside and we need to clean out the ashes. I guess the biggest reason is that Thor is in town for Thanksgiving, so that puts me on wood duty. Conserve, conserve, conserve.
Mayor Cooper had a birthday a couple days ago, 7 years old. He and Teddy are cooking up a new scam. The Silty Slough Ice Classic, and The Adopt a Yentna River Iceberg program. They are working on a waiver for the definition of iceberg. Google says it has to be 15 meters long so ours may not qualify. If you have access to Google you know it all.
That’s about all the happenings at the Slough. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
Thank you, Lord, for watching over us and for giving us enough.
I’ll be in touch.
Blue Skies!!
This and prior posts are at siltyslough.com
The View from the Outhouse 