Saturday October 25, 2025

I ripped all the fixtures out of the bathrooms to get inspiration to get back to “The View from the Outhouse”. Not really, just to finish painting and flooring.

Great meal. Excuse the serving dishes. Don’t like to wash any more dishes than necessary. No paper plates this time. Fine dining.

Bumper crop of potatoes. Ready to store. Should last until next year’s harvest.

Wild winter on the river. First time on wheels. Not typical at all.

My ride to work sometimes. Pollux Helicopters.

The View from the Outhouse

Hello from Silty Slough. I’ll bet some of you may be thinking that I passed on, taking the final flight West. I’m still around. I check the In Memoriam section of ALPA magazine every month to confirm. It has been so long since the last View, I scrolled back to review my previous post from the outhouse, just to keep the lies straight.

I finished up flying on December 14. It all started several years prior when I told Lars “Too bad I’m too old to fly the jet.”. Well guess what, now I am too old. 73 is old enough to hang it up. I had a great couple of years flying around North America, not sure where all we went but Lars and I sure saw a lot of stuff. My favorite places were Yellowknife, NWT and Iqaluit, NT..300 miles from Greenland. When I first started flying I had about $624 in my checkbook, now 55 years later I have $324 in my checkbook. What a wild ride for only 300 bucks. Now it is back to the real world at Silty Slough, no more commuting to Anchorage by helicopter or Beaver on floats.

Mayor Cooper, Teddy, and I have been laying low since Elon ginned up DOGE. Some of the grants we applied for, EV charging station for cars and snowmachines in the slough, funds for Silty Slough Power & Light, and the converting piss to electricity project were somewhat questionable. We are still sweating the student loans for the boys to go to K9 University. It seems to have quieted down somewhat and now with the government shut down I think it is safe to come out of hiding. BTW, is the government still shut down? I haven’t missed them. Anyway, what could they possibly do to a 73-year-old man and a couple dogs. On that note I read where the average life expectancy for men is like 75.6 and women is like 79, so now I’m going to identify as a woman. If DOGE comes after us I’m going to identify as a dog or a grizzly bear. Even ICE won’t screw with a grizzly.

It was quite a winter traveling on the river. We made the first trip Jan. 3. It was glare ice with no snow for most of the winter. The river was the flattest I’ve ever seen it. You could go as fast as your gonads would allow. We got everything hauled and made the last trip back to the cabin March 24. Then we hung out at the cabin during the river breakup working on various cabin projects to try and giter done. Try being the keyword. Always more projects than time or money.

Sometime in the spring we were in town and I went to the ER for lower abdominal pain. They did a scan and decided that I had a bladder infection and by the way do you know you have triple A. I figured ER doctors were paid fairly well and didn’t think they needed to be selling AAA or extended car warranties. I misheard, is that a word, like misread. Kari cleared it up, an AAA is an abdominal aortic aneurism, a bulge in my aorta down where it splits to go to each of my legs. I’m thinking this isn’t good, so I hung around in town and went to a couple of specialists. Another scan and they decide it isn’t big enough to repair, they don’t do it until it is 5 centimeters. But you don’t understand I live in a cabin 60 miles from the end of the road. Are you sure it is ok?….no problem…any restrictions on lifting heavy things?…NO, come back in 6 months and we will do another scan, but if you want your FAA medical back we will fix it right now. I’ve been milling logs, lifting heavy chunks of wood and everything else. So far no problem. Scan scheduled in Jan.

We decided to bring the Wine Down out for a trip since it only made one half a trip the summer before. Thor and I were in the Wine Down following Kari in the Sea Ark. About a mile into the journey I told Thor to bring some weight forward. We were in a slight right turn when he brought one tote up and I reached over to move it. I also pulled the wheel to the left at the same time. When I looked up we were heading directly toward the shore several boat lengths away at about 30 mph. Hard right with the wheel but I couldn’t save it. We are off in the pucker brush high and dry. A nice gentleman came by in a barge and gave us a tow back to the landing. I was very sore the next day with a couple big bruises on my leg. The worst thing hurt being my pride. Lesson learned, mind the store, pay attention, do not get distracted.

Between trips to town, Cory came to help us work on the cabin, mill some logs, and get a fuel/storage shed framed up. I bought metal roofing at a good deal for the woodshed we built previously. There was some left over, so I felt compelled to use it, thus the fuel shed. There was only half enough metal for the roof, so I had to buy more. Now I just have a little left over to start another shed. Looking for ideas…wood fired oven shed… maybe Mayor Cooper and Teddy could get a SBA loan to start Silty Slough Pizza.

I submitted the draft to the censor, and she reminded me about my tooth, so back up a bit I went to town late October to fly. Several, meaning up to 5, years ago Kari gave me one of the big Hershey’s kisses. One evening I decided I needed some chocolate and proceeded to take a bite out of it. Big mistake, I broke my upper right front tooth…on a candy kiss. The next morning I got in to the dentist he said it couldn’t be repaired, needed to come out. Ok, they could do it the next day. No problem I have dental insurance so the dentist gave me an estimate for the treatment plan. Like taking your wrecked car to a body shop for a damage estimate. Extraction, bone graft, implant, new tooth to screw into the post, and only $700 for a fake tooth to wear while all this is happening. Total estimate about $8000. Lets see if you had all 32 teeth done that could run into some money. My insurance has an annual $2000 maximum so that was quickly used up. Tooth extracted, a very poor fake tooth made. Looked like a Chicklet stuck inside a mouthguard like I wore playing high school football. You had to remove it to eat so I ended up wearing it only once. So I waited until June for my insurance and the bone graft to heal up and went to a specialist that drilled a hole in the bone and inserted a titanium post to screw the new tooth into. Now I’m waiting for my insurance to heal up again so I can get my new tooth in 2026. Bonus, I got to look like a Jack-O-Lantern for two Halloweens.

Back to business. I think it’s great that our President is adding a ballroom to the White House. Presidents have been remodeling it for decades on the taxpayers dime. Mayor Copper and Teddy also agree. Mayor Cooper is going to write the President and suggest he name the addition “The Monica Lewinski Memorial Ball Room”. Any other suggestions?

It’s time to give everyone a break and continue this saga at a later date. Kari cooked a great meal, red wine braised beef shanks on the wood stove, home grown mashed potatoes, green beans, and fresh baked sourdough French bread courtesy of “Hoochie Mamma” that resides in our refrigerator most of her life. I told Kari that I really liked the green beans.

Time for a nap after such a good meal. I’m sorry for such a long post but think of all the post you didn’t have to read the past 47 weeks.

Thank you Lord for watching over us and your many blessings!!

I’ll be in touch.

Blue skies!!

Saturday December 30, 2023

The View from the Outhouse

Good afternoon from Silty Slough.

-25 now up from -30 when I went outside at 4:30 this morning.

I shot myself in the foot with my post on Friday. I said I wasn’t going outside unless the generator failed to autostart. Guess what….Saturday morning Kari looked downstairs and a light was flashing on the autostart controller. I better check it out. -27 when I went out to check it and reset the control box on the generator. I attempted one start, didn’t start. Ok save the battery. This job is going to take more clothes. The heater in the generator shed that also semi warms the outhouse was flashing a 33 code. I made several attempts to reset it but I can’t get it going. I’ll get the Honda 2000 that I keep in the shop because it is almost impossible to start cold. I try it inside and it won’t start. No problem I have an outlet powered from the house system in the generator shed just in case. Under the deck I have a new bullet heater. Feels light when I pick it up, so I know it needs fuel. Carry it out to the diesel tank. The fuel hose there is so stiff it won’t bend or twist to get the nozzle in the filler. I finally get the heater jockeyed around enough to fill it. I know when it is cold the nozzle sticks and won’t shut off, so I quit early. Let the handle snap. The fuel slowly stopped flowing and the handle fell out of the nozzle and promptly rolled into the snow. I shut the tank valve off, will get to the nozzle repair on a warmer day. Ok take the heater to the generator shed. Plug it in and it fires right up. Position it so I don’t burn the place down. I’m not cold yet so I might as well try to see how much propane is in the 100 pound bottle for the heater. It is frozen down, so I picked up a chunk of 4×4 and give it a couple whacks. The tank rocks, the frozen rubber hose cracks and starts shooting propane at me. I rock the tank back and it stopped, so I shut off the valve. I guess the tank isn’t empty. I took the rubber line off and looked for a replacement in the greenhouse, which is 3 degrees inside without any heat source. Maybe I should move the generator into the greenhouse. Anyway the one copper line I have has too small of a fitting on the end that connects to the regulator. I have another rubber line with the end broken off. I’ll use an air hose barb and clamp to make it work. Ok now I have a good hose with a POL fitting on it to connect to the tank. Do you know why it is called that? Prest-O-Lite is the company that developed them and set the standard. Enough education back to trouble shooting and problem solving. I installed the hose, hooked up the POL fitting to the tank and turned it on. It has been long enough so I tried a start on the generator, started but died, second attempt it ran. We are in business….cooking with gas, diesel, and electricity. I’ll go in and google the 33 code on the heater. With a smartphone, an internet connection, and Google anybody can be a know it all. I need the model number so back out to the shed and photograph the data plate. I’m sure I have a photo in my phone but I don’t want to look through 30,000 picts. Has anyone heard from Kamala lately? She hasn’t checked in with me about this cats-ass-trophy I’m faced with. Probably couldn’t handle it anyway.

After some study a 33 code is a $6 switch. Of course it is a holiday and I can’t get one shipped until Tuesday. I’ll order a couple to have an extra one on hand to be assured that some other part will fail next time.

I’ll leave the generator run until bedtime so it won’t need to start until Saturday afternoon. What’s a couple gallons of diesel fuel in a bankruptcy of this size anyway.

The women are still cooking like some army is coming over.

Needed to get the prime rib to room temp to cook it last night. I guess sewing and quilting got in the way so we had Portillo’s Chicago style hot dogs. One twist, Kari had some relish made with green tomatoes that she canned a couple years ago. Awesome!! Jess made bearing sausage gravy, sausage patty, biscuits, and scrambled eggs for breakfast this morning.

-21 now. Couple more degrees and I will attempt a start on the generator. Their sewing and ironing have sucked some juice. Made sure they took the prime rib out. I’ll carry in a couple loads of wood. Surprisingly we aren’t using very much. It stays about 70 in here. I suppose all the cooking and baking helps. Rattle those pans ladies. Next week is going to be diet city for me.

One more thing… the dogs were going crazy, barking, and carrying on. Jess looked out and 3 coyotes were running down the river. Must have missed the roadrunner.

Everyone stay safe and healthy, and stay out of Walmart.

Thank you Lord for watching over us!!

I’ll be in touch.

Blue skies!!!

Friday December 29, 2023

A couple of the many varieties of cookies.

Make your own pizza night. Kari’s pear, ham, blue cheese, topped with hot honey.

We were hungry and ate before I could get a picture. Blackberry sourdough star.

Panettone. Makes wonderful French toast.

The women are in the house looking through the screen. Does the screen make me look fat?

The View from the Outhouse

Good morning from Silty Slough. This year is rapidly winding down. Soon I will have to be retrained to write 2024, just after getting 2023 mastered.

Woke up a couple minutes after what I read on my phone as 6 this morning. It is clear and bright out. The dogs want to go out and I might as well go to the outhouse. The snow was crunchy and I could feel the hairs in my nose frosting up. I’m in my pj bottoms, t shirt, and Crocks. No socks but I have the winter Crocks that are fur lined. I didn’t have to tell Mayor Cooper and Teddy to come in. It must be really cold out. When we got inside I checked the temperature on my phone with the Weather Underground app. Silty Slough reporting station KAKSKWEN7 if you are interested or even if you aren’t. 27 below zero and the time was actually a little after 5. Must be a different time zone upstairs. Anyway it is colder than a well diggers arse in the Klondike. I’m in trouble, I hear footprints on the stairs and I haven’t started the coffee. Jess is already in the dark kitchen looking for coffee. Luckily the coffee pot wasn’t loaded last night and ready to brew, so I get a pass. I’ll wait till later to get in trouble.

Jess arrived last Saturday on the helicopter with more stuff to cook for the holidays. She and Kari have been cooking nonstop. Cookies, cakes, ham, soup, all kinds of bread and rolls. You name it. We went to the neighbors on Christmas Day for a get together. Took a whole tub sled full of food, had a great time, and didn’t bring too much food home, so they are at it again. Cinnamon rolls for breakfast a couple mornings ago. Macaroni and cheeseburger soup-no Velveeta allowed. Yesterday morning it was quiche with biscuits and homemade jam. Last night was Carne asada. I’m waiting for prime rib and lobster night. I saw it come off the helicopter.

Last night they started making Panettone. I heard them talking about setting an alarm at 1 am to do something in the process when I went to bed. Tomorrow I have to make sure I have a full 100 pound propane bottle hooked up. I would be in deep doo-doo if it ran out in the middle of baking a tasty treat.

Jess is here until the 4th, if I keep up this eating pace I will need to walk to Deshka Landing pulling a groomer.

28 below now. Temp going down and bathroom scales going up.

With indoor plumbing I guess some of you are wondering what I was doing in the outhouse. Let me rephrase that. Why am I going outside in the cold to the outhouse. While I was on my last trip, Kari told me the toilet and shower were draining slow. Then a later report was bring a snake it isn’t working at all. I don’t like snakes that is part of the reason I live in Alaska. So on Steve Gahan’s advice I went too Ferguson and got a couple bottles of Clobber. This stuff is just pure sulfuric acid I think. Instructions are to put on a rubber suit, gloves, and goggles. Poured it down the drain it boils and bubbles a bit but doesn’t go down. I wait a couple days for the acid to neutralize so I don’t kill the snake and try it. No worky. I’ve been outside and checked all the inspection tubes, nothing frozen. So I have Jess bring 4 more bottles of Clobber. Poured one in each drain after I removed the toilets and one in each of the cleanouts outside. Still no worky. There is a clean out downstairs where the drain goes through the wall. This is the lowest point in the system. So far I haven’t been able to talk Jess or Kari into removing the plug so I can run the snake in it.

Christmas Day Roger gave me a balloon that hooks on a water hose. You put it down the drain turn on the water, it inflates, seals off the pipe, and shoots water out the end to blast the clog away. Same thing the doctors had in mind to do to my heart except it was too plugged up. Instead they split me open like a fish and did it right. Anyway back to the sewer. I put the balloon in the first clean out outside and it seemed to help. I did the second one on the other side of the tank. I guess I pushed it in too far and it hung up on the inlet to the leach bed. Anyway I can’t pull it out. So now I have a second block in the system. Can’t get the Kubota to it because the snow is so deep. Probably a good thing. I can just see ripping the system’s gonads out by its vocal cords when I hook the hose to the Kubota bucket and pull, so I cut the hose, folded it over and put the cap back on the clean out. It’s 8 degrees out here and I’m not having a good time. I guess I will wait until the end of May and dig it up. So now it is back to the outhouse and showers over the garage floor drain. I’m thinking I may have covered the outlet to the drain up, because with indoor plumbing we won’t ever shower in the garage again.

In town I could just call someone. But that’s not the way it works 60 miles from the end of the road. You the man. I could write the rest of the day because I’m not going outside, that is unless the generator quits.

I think it is time for Lars to call me to fly a long fictitious trip. (Hint hint)

I better get going. I think the women have something ready for breakfast.

I hope all of you don’t spend as much to inflict pain and suffering to myself like I do, just to say we live way off the end of the road. But after all I have a million dollar view on a sunny day. Show me the money.

From Silty Slough I hope each and everyone has a Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous New Year!!!!

Thank you Lord for your many blessings!!

I’ll be in touch

Blue skies!!

Wednesday October 26, 2022

The View from the Outhouse

Good morning friends, from Silty Slough. Amazing what no communication from the outside world is like. Now I know how Gilligan felt on the island. I’m a day ahead on writing my post. First time ever. I hope everyone is ok. A few airplanes flew by Sunday, so I figure the Russians haven’t attacked or anything. I think the airplanes may have been at the Skwentna Pumpkin Drop. On their way they, could have practiced here at Silty Slough by dropping a KFC chicken sandwich and a root beer float to me.

The indoor toilet is awesome. I don’t think the boys like it since I don’t go outside as much. I liked it so well and decided it was such a convenience that I installed the other one on the main floor in the half bath. Now it is really nice I don’t even have to go downstairs when nature calls. If anyone is thinking about coming for a visit you may want to pack a long raincoat in case you need to use the bathroom. The walls are just studs right now. When Kari gets home we are going to start the sheetrock and tile. For now it is just me and the dogs and cats, they don’t mind. I can’t wait to get the shower tiled. No more showering over the garage drain from a shower head that I plumbed into the ceiling.

We have all kinds of food out here. Kari’s trip to Michigan was unplanned and just popped up. We had already stocked up for both of us to make it through freeze up on a previous boat trip. Now it is just me so the menu choices are what is going to spoil first. I spent an extra week in town, so when I got here I had 6 dozen eggs, lettuce, celery, 3 pounds of carrots, 6 avocados, 2 pounds of cherries, and a container of blueberries that needed to be eaten post haste. Today I have 18 boiled eggs and 25 uncooked eggs left. The boys have been helping me by having their eggs for breakfast. I have polished off the cherries and the blueberries will be gone tomorrow. The celery is gone. A lot of carrots are gone. I grilled a ribeye the other night and had a Caesar salad with it to use some of the lettuce and have been eating the fresh tomatoes from the greenhouse. I had leftover steak so I had steak and eggs for breakfast the next morning. Two nights I had a bowl of vegetable curry with nan bread. One night I had a fillet of cod sandwich with lettuce and tartar sauce. I’ve been getting along pretty good with no chance of starving in the near future. Right now I have a surplus of sour cream so I froze two containers.

I’m still jumping through hoops to get my FAA medical back after my heart surgery. The surgeon that rebuilt my heart included in his post op report that I had been previously diagnosed with cancer, asthma, and arthritis. Never had any of these. He must have cut and pasted from someone else’s report. Would be an easy fix but he has retired and closed his practice. So I guess my heart warranty is no longer valid. He also reported that I had a couple episodes of A-fib when they were taking me off the pump and getting my heart cranking again. Must be like when you rebuild an engine and it misfires a couple times the first time you start it up until everything gets straightened out. Guess what, the FAA has me wearing a heart monitor for 30 days to make sure I’m not misfiring. This is all good but the monitor reports back to my doctor via a cell phone that they gave me. Well I guess they didn’t give it to me, I’m sure it is in the price of the test. They did mention that if I lost or damaged any of the equipment it would be $2400. Sounds good but when you live past the end of the road the wicket gets to be a bit sticky. The monitor is taped to a shaved patch on my chest and reports to their cell phone via blue tooth then sends the data via AT&T. Except AT&T doesn’t work out here. So I have to create a hot spot on my cell phone and WiFi the data from their phone to mine and then to the tower via Verizon. My Carhart bibs are full of phones, chargers, and monitors. So with the cell tower inop now, the folks monitoring aren’t getting a report of my heartbeats and they can’t contact me by phone. They probably think I died and they won’t get their money or the $2400 of equipment back. I expect a chopper to land in the slough at any time to check on their equipment. If they do I hope they bring the cell tower repair man along. It’s only another 15 miles to the site. At least I’ll have them carry a few dozen armloads of wood up the stairs like I have been doing, so I can check their hearts out. I wish I could contact them ahead of time so they could bring me my KFC chicken sandwich and root beer float.

It snowed about 5 inches last night and was warmer this morning about 25 degrees. The wood stove is keeping me and the boys warm without using any propane yet. I have been keeping a tea pot on it so I can have afternoon tea and crumpets while watching for the helicopter.

I have quite a slug of data to upload when the cell gets fixed. 3 Views from the Outhouse and over a weeks worth of heartbeats. Hope it doesn’t overload the system and break it again.

Standing by in Silty Slough waiting for “Verizon LTE” to pop up on my phone. I wish you well my friends.

Thank you Lord for watching over us.

I’ll be in touch.

Blue skies!!!

This and all previous posts are at www.siltyslough.com