Monthly Archives: June 2013

Tough year here for cats

invadercat1

Something snagged the Invadercat here a while back, tore him up badly and took out one eye.  He hung around here a week-or-so for food, didn’t appear to be getting worse.  But then he vanished, as he’s always been prone to do.  I know he was getting food at one of the ranches around here, probably several.

But once he left he hasn’t been back.  Might be one of the other folks who’ve been feeding him took him to a vet and had him doctored, or maybe something got him in the woods.  Life’s dangerous enough in the real world for a cat with two good eyes and no serious injuries.

Meanwhile, Ms Tabby’s having worse than her usual battle with spring and summer leg and skin troubles.  Getting welts from either cactus, or fire ants on her legs, belly and tail.  I see her crouched in the meadow stalking things in places where I know there are fire ant beds, so that might be the problem.  But she’s looking worse now than anytime since she’s been with me.

Ms Niaid and Mr Hydrox are doing generally okay, though Niaid’s looking skinnier than I’d like.  She’s bringing in several mice per day to show off before she eats them, but still wants the catfood and is the eagerest eater of them all.  After I used the sheep shears on her she hasn’t picked up burrs and gotten matted hair so badly, seems a lot more pleased with herself.  Gets around well for a senior citizen.

Mr Hydrox only has half of himself sheep sheared, avoided being caught to have it finished after we had a difference of opinion during the operation regarding how much more to take off.  But last night he wanted to sleep with me, so I’m thinking he’s going to have less hair soon.

All in all central Texas probably just ain’t the exact right place for these felines and this 70 year old man and the Coincidence Coordinators are raising the ante for staying any longer than I have to.

Thinking positive about bologna – The new paradigm

If you think you’ve reached the point where you just can’t look a bologna sandwich in the eye one more time, maybe it’s time to begin using your noggin.  Even if all you’ve got is a frying pan and a Coleman camp stove you can make a concoction you’ll savor.

Chop up that bologna into bits the size of dill pickle slices and throw it in the pan with chopped onion, minced garlic, and a teaspoon of grapeseed oil.  Turn it and stir it until the bologna browns and curls up on the sides.

Once it’s done, throw on a teaspoon of chopped dill pickles, and smear it all between those two slices of bread.  Curry, ginger, ancho, jalapeno, green pepper, all of them will add some variety to carry you through until payday.

The old ‘pound of red and a loaf of bread’ method of squeezing through hard times was never good past the second day.  Torturing yourself to death after the third was just a method of robbing life of potential joy.

This ain’t the 20th Century anymore.

Capers

Been intending to mention this.  When you’re making up your pimento concoction for pimento and cheese sandwiches a few chopped onions and capers added to the mix changes the entire scene.

Also, using cream cheese instead of mayonnaise works fairly well to give it variety if you’re eating it several days in a row.  Add capers the second day, add chopped up onions the third, chop up jalapeno and mix it in the day after that.  Dash of chopped garlic, ginger, curry.  It all works.  All good.

A whole new culinary experience every day.

Reincarnation – Life after the evidence locker

dodge powerwagonWhen I came across this picture on the web a while back I was fairly certain I recognized it.  I believed and still believe it’s the truck belonging to the man and wife wood cutter couple murdered in Catron County, New Mexico while I was working Fox Mountain.  An incident I described in loving detail in the Adams Diggings book.  They were found several months later, a bear having dug them up where they were folded yinyang style into a 4’x4’x4′ grave in an ancient ruin site.

Damn I love that truck.  Nothing sissie at all there.  A guy could drive that thing around just about anywhere he might wish to go.  It’s been pre-disastered so the odds of anything bad happening in it would be nil.

In God We Trust

first man in space

I’m not sure what I think about this proposal to take Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Andrew Jackson and so on off the currency and put Bill Gates, Donald Trump and the Koch brothers on there instead.  Certainly there’s merit to the idea.

Old Ben Franklin would probably find the knowledge people are rolling up his picture snorting coke and meth through him unsettling.  Building him a karmic load he didn’t pay for.

There are certainly more currently recognizable people guilty of all Andrew Jackson did, one-upped him in a hundred different ways.  But Jackson might be said to have set the pace and nailed down the precedents, earned his place on those bills.  Even though the people handing them over to supermarket clerks to pay for dog food mostly don’t who he was, nor what he did.

A series of bills reflecting their actual value in the world marketplace after the national debt is subtracted might be a good idea. $1 bills with a minus $1 Million across the bottom.  A picture of the last couple of presidents on each side.

All in all I think I’d prefer the government to issue a piece of currency molded in the shape of a straw for people to snort their coke and meth through.  If it’s got to have a picture on it, use the first chimpanzee to get launched into space. Or Ronald Reagan for starting the War on Drugs.  Building the need for a lot more of those bills to be printed.

Or any of the legion of celebrities who’ve overdosed on the stuff and become immortal.

FFFuture Shock

The Internet came fast, though it’s tempting to take it for granted and just absorb it as it comes along without having to faint and revive yourself.

A person can hop over to Craigslist to see what types of travel trailers and cheap RVs people have they want to sell in lordee-knows-where places he tried to forget exist in Texas.  Pop off an email or two to the people doing the selling.

Exhaust that and pop over, shoot off an email to the USFS district handling the Gila Wilderness to find out the condition of this-or-that trail nobody in his right mind would use. Whether a particular trail has been cleared enough to a particular spot to allow a mountain bike to use it.

Pop over to Google maps for a quickie satellite look at a mountain or three, reboot the machine to clear the memory when things start to die.

Pop to dogpile.com to do a search of bicycle forums and discussion boards to see what mountain bikes are costing and what people are saying about them.  Then another search or two  to find out how much weight a burro could be expected to carry.  Whether anyone’s got a notion about them as riding animals and the maximum weight of the person they could carry under particular conditions.

Spang, another websearch to DIY sites looking for ideas for load carrier devices people have put together on bicycle frames, or using bicycle wheels.

Doesn’t appear to be any limit to it.  However obscure and esoteric the interest, there’s somone, somewhere on the Internet thinking along the same lines who’s already done some of the heavy thinking.

The neighbor up the hill tells me people are putting together 3D printers in their garages allowing them to duplicate anything that’s ever been manufactured.  Putting what they do up on the Internet so other people can manufacture the same thing somehow.  Some guy making a crescent wrench that works from his old crescent wrench and a printer.

It’s no wonder the governments of the world are suspicious and concerned.  With things like that going on there’s no predicting what will come of it.  People might get used to thinking and begin to make a habit of it.

About a century ago two bicycle mechanics put something together the scientific community was busy agreeing couldn’t be done.  Without any help they took a manned heavier-than-air flight convincing enough to turn everything upside down.

Didn’t even have computers and the Internet.  If they’d had those someone might have been able to convince them they couldn’t do it.  Or everyone and his dog would have been making one in his garage.

A failure to communicate

ivy leaguers

These unfortunate undercover police officers were mistaken for ordinary citizens when they attempted to address uniformed police officers in the way uniformed police officers address ordinary citizens.

The Paradigm Gearshift Knob

atabrine

This a wakeup call for those of you who have ignored the DEA, FBI, and State Law Enforcement shift to required mandatory use of illegal drugs.  The War on Drugs has been a miserable failure in the attempt to either, get everyone in the US addicted to controlled substances, or place the ones not addicted into penal institutions. 

A whopping 25% of the population is neither addicted, nor in prison.  Of that 25%, at least 3% are suspected to actually be policemen, prosecutors, judges, and prison guards.  1% are believed to be politicians and lawmakers, though though a few of these are known to have allergies and adverse health reactions to some addictive and hallucinatory drugs. 

Finally the criminal justice system is going to clamp down on these shirkers and scofflaws who are making it difficult for everyone.  Effective August 31, 2013, any person found within the boundaries of the United States not addicted to a controlled substance will be given a fair trial, then sentenced to be tortured to death with common suspected terrorists at Guantanamo.

This means YOU.

The price you can get for your kids has skyrocketed.

The National Debt

Time was when parents were reluctant to sell their children.  They could barely get enough to pay a week rent for a healthy, hard working, intelligent kid.

However, luckily in this 21st Century all that has changed.  You can get wars, weaponry,  welfare, superhighways, government grants, retirement for government officials, 87 layers of cops, national health care and a lot more.  All you have to do is sell your kids, worthless, illiterate and unlikely though they are. 

Heck, I guess the kids are all already sold.  It’s the grandkids and the rest of your progeny you’ll have to hock.  But the folks who loan money to the US government are still anxious to buy them.

Especially the Chinese.

Symbiopatriosis – the 21st Century Killer Disease

Military Industrial Complex

20th Century had its share, though.

The Yosarian syndrome.  Bastards are trying to kill me!  They’re trying to kill me every time I go up to drop bombs on them.

Support this current war because our soldiers got killed trying to invade them.  Can’t let the troops down.