Spending your time out in the sticks would appear to be one of relatively quiet days with nothing but the wind  going on and the quail and doves chirping at each other as they try to kick the others ass off of the bird block.  The birds are squabbling with each other but there’s  always more going on than that.   I went out to throw garbage in the can and smelled propane a week ago.  Yummy! That’s a smell that makes you want to go somewhere else for a lot of reasons.

I was heading into the big city of Pahrump that day anyway so I stopped by Amerigas.  Denny, the owner/manager/worker/whatever he is, came out that afternoon.  We had propane smell before and one of their guys came out when it was pouring oceans of rain and fixed something underneath the hot water tank at Vickie’s house.  We also had other times where we could smell it but could never figure anything out.  Yah, we know how to squirt that soapy water on all the fittings, et al, and see if we get air bubbles, hicks from the sticks know all the tricks. So…Denny hooked up a meter, checked this, checked that, pulled out a handy dandy tool that goes off like a red alert if it picks up propane, searched everywhere high and low and could find nothing.  Umnhhhh.

One of the crazy points of propane is that it pools on the ground, it doesn’t dispel with wind, it simply moves.  You can smell it 20 feet from where the problem is.  Turning off the gas where it enters Vickie’s house, and leaving the underground line hooked up to the tank, the gauge had an ever so slow drop in pressure.  Denny’s decision was that there are two couplings where the pipes come up out of the ground – of course those couplings are under the ground – and one of those is probably the point where the leak is at.  Yippee! Fuck!

“So who does the digging?  Both of us, you, or me?”

Being without any helper at the moment, Denny is doing all of the fills, repairs, blah, blah, blah right now so if it’s to be dug out, guess it’s you Ms. DigDug.  Luckily the truck driving duo is out on extended cross country driving right now.  Denny did offer to hook up a small propane tank at the side of the house for them if they were coming in for a few days – but I would need to let him know in advance as much as possible.  The fitting to their house is completely removed and capped off at the tank and there’s a tag on the pipe going into the house that reads something like, ‘this line is closed and a problem and if you screw with it, it’s against federal law’ or some shit.  I didn’t read it.

But I did start digging.  He said I’d find the coupling about a foot out from the bottom of each pipe, the hose is yellow, blah, blah, blah.  I know he was relieved that I offered to do the digging because he had the look of an overworked, whipped dog when I asked who would do it.

I started on the house end, down about 20 inches, I found the pipe, the hole is about 2 1/2 feet across and three feet long – it was about 2 feet long but when I started in a straight line from the other end by the tank, I dug to around 3 feet deep and couldn’t find the frigging hose.  The tank end was much more tedious and irritating because the pipe coming up out of the ground is on the opposite side of the tank from the house.  Perfect! As the tank end progressed and I compared the straight line of the hose in the first hole to the pipe on the tank end, the yellow hose was nowhere.  So I went back to digging in the original hole, extending it toward the tank.  The yellow hose appeared to wend its way to the right.  Why would that be?  What fucking idiot in the world of construction and trenching and laying out lines would veer it off from the straight line?  DipShit!

I started widening the hole to the right – BOOM – no, I didn’t explode, there’s no gas in the line,  but there was the mystery yellow hose.  The worst of it was that I had to dig further and further underneath the tank to find the connection.  Digging in the desert is not even close to what you’d expect.  There is no sand.  The dirt in this area is silt and just like packed concrete, in some spots filled with rock and just in general, a real pain in the ass.

Hick from the Sticks tip:  About three years ago, Maxwell House coffee changed their 2+ lb. packing to a plastic container with a handle.  Use that baby to scoop dirt with when your on your knees leaning into a hole.  Use a small hand tiller to rake the dirt from around pipes and lines you are digging out and don’t want to break or replace, use an old rug for kneeling to protect your baby knees, and always go to Home Depot and buy their leather and denim work glove – pricing in at $1.97 and wearable for a 1000 uses or so.

So…it took Ms. DigDug three different days, to dig the pipe out (missing some days due to excessive wind) and the call was placed yesterday to Amerigas to come out and FIX IT!

With that out of the way, my next outdoor project is to lay in the drip water line for the cedar/shrub trees in the back.  And then there will always be more.

Let’s move on to poker.  Everyone should know by now that Peter Eastgate has given up poker.  Everyone should also know by now that he is selling two items on eBay – one is his 2008 WSOP gold bracelet, latest bid $45,100 – and the other a Tiret Automatic Chrono – all proceeds to go to UNICEF.  It’s with sincere curiosity that I ponder his not regretting the sale of the bracelet some years later in life…giving up poker once you’ve won around $8M is not even deserving of pondering, I completely understand it, but the bracelet?

I have been playing the Daily Dollar on Full Tilt Poker, I love it.  Nope, I haven’t cashed but I’ve tried.  There are usually 9k runners and twice I’ve made it to within close to 150 players out of the dough.  I still like the tournament and would recommend it to anyone that wants to run a buck into a nice playing tournament win.  I’m going to keep firing at it.  I played a freeroll on Full Tilt this week that gave me a ticket into a freeroll on Sunday with a $1k prize pool.  Yah, it’s like the old Chasing Chris Ferguson daze, play a freeroll, win a ticket to a freeroll that pays cash, blah, blah, blah.  Damn it!  I have more fun playing these than I do beating my head in trying to play a buy-in tournament and score some cash.

PokerStars has a daily freeroll to their Daily Ninety Grand that I’ve started playing in the mornings when I’m home and have the time.  This one is pretty brutal – but it’s free – and does give one the opportunity to practice their donkey poker game and prepare for bad-beat-itis.  First to 7th get a seat in the 90 Grand and 8th to 60th get $5.50.  The downside?  It is always maxed out with 40K runners.  This one is one that I just pick a hand in the first 10 minutes if at all possible (no, I’m not talking about The Hammer – more like K-10 suited or anything 10-higher suited), and push.  So far it’s worked very well.  I’m out in the first round.  Tee hee!  No stress or pain there.

And I played their 20 FPP No Limit Holdem tournaments twice, once coming 286th out of  5370 to win 48c.  I’m super jazzed over this.  I now have 81c in my bankroll there.  It is sick…but I’m having a great time with it and since this is about me…there you have it!

A sunset:

Over and out, I’m just starting a Badugi Freeroll.