I didn’t know I was joking when I composed this post a couple of days ago. But even though Jeanne’s visited me here and knows me better than anyone else, when she read it she thought it was so outrageous I must be joking. After I explained I was serious and consider it a viable alternative she thought about it a day and just told me again she likes the blog entry as a joke. But she’s really uncomfortable about the concept as a serious possibility I might try living this way.
So I suppose I must be joking unless I decide it’s the right way to go. But I’m concerned about the bearings on bicycle wheels. I’m thinking maybe light motorcycle wheels might hold up better:
The financial constraints involved in trying to get the old F350 capable of pulling a travel trailer and the unknowns involved in why it was left on this place when Gale and Kay bought the property are seeming a bit overwhelming at the moment. That, combined with the uncertainties of whether I can find an old travel trailer I can fix adequately got me thinking about this.
A couple of years ago when I thought my life might proceed differently than it has, there was a middling possibility I might have an extended trip into the high mountains left in me. My thought at the time was to spend a month or two in the Gila Wilderness in the immediate vicinity of the Continental Divide.
But at that altitude and the years creeping up on me, combined with the length of the stay that would be required, caused me to think I didn’t want to do it carrying a backpack the way I’ve always done in the past. My initial thought was a burro, but the fact is hauling a burro’s a bit of a problem.
A few times in the mountains, decades ago, I encountered packers with llamas and talked with them about it, but those animals are as difficult in the size department as donkeys.
However, I ran into someone once in the Gila with a string of goats doing the packing. Goats, to my way of thinking, have a lot of advantages over the larger animals insofar as transport. Considering it led me to join some Yahoo Goat Packing groups:
I began doing some shopping around looking for a couple of young goats I might train, but intervening events led me to see that another long trip into the mountains isn’t in the cards for me in the immediate future. And further consideration about that particular use for them in that area also mightn’t be the best. They’d be a magnet for large predators, risky to leave unattended, and they’d need a lot of attention.
But thinking about pack goats during the years since has caused me to think there might be a role for them to play in a more urban setting. Namely, for older folks who could hike to the store for groceries, but have difficulties carrying them home without a vehicle. Maybe a goat cart, for that matter.
Feeding them would be no problem because goats will eat just about anything and thrive on it.
But a pack goat would provide a lot more mobility than a shopping cart for people living on the streets and under bridges, as well. A goat can go almost anywhere a person can, climb into places where a person would have a lof of problems climbing into. The ability to easily move residency out of the clusters of street people living under bridges would keep the owner out of police sweeps, out of reach predatory humans preying on the people living under those conditions.
In fact, I’ve been acquainted over the years with several people living in small house-wagons traveling around pulled by burro-power as a lifestyle and talked with them about it at some length. It strikes me a person with a willingness to walk alongside the contraption instead of riding in it might actually be able to construct a small, light house on an aluminum frame with bicycle wheels sturdy enough to carry everything it took to live, move without buying gasoline, big enough for four cats.
Maybe something along these lines only larger
Something large enough to haul some luxuries such as a camp stove, some groceries, a place out of the weather, but small enough to get out-of-sight come nightfall.
Maybe about that size, but constructed with bicycle wheels, ball bearing axles, built on an aluminum frame from salvage aluminum rails and door frames. Actually aluminum mightn’t be durable enough as the frame. Maybe steel bed frame angle iron frame as a base for everything above aluminum.
Equipped with photovoltaic charged LED lawn lights to allow night reading, cooking, etc, a chuck box and a small gas fridge. Maybe a guy would have to move up to a pair of donkeys to pull it. But maybe not.
I’m thinking maybe two bicycles welded outside a steel bed frame with a tie-rod between the handle-bars behind a yoke might serve, and a swiveling tail-wheel [bicycle wheel] to stabilize the weight and balance on the overhang behind the two rear bicycle wheels might be a good starting place visualizing the possibility.
I’m going to have to puzzle about this more as a potential way to keep living without going under a bridge if circumstances demand I have an escape route.
But here are a few other concept pics from the Practical Action website, Cabelas, and elsewhere, just to remind myself of the directions my mind’s going on all this:
There’s something mildly annoying and intrusive about having ourselves tagged and numbered by some damned academian somewhere as a particular personality type. But when my good friend, Rich, sent me this link along with the question, “Does this remind you of anyone you know?” I clicked it.
“INTJs are strong individualists who seek new angles or novel ways of looking at things. They enjoy coming to new understandings. They tend to be insightful and mentally quick; however, this mental quickness may not always be outwardly apparent to others since they keep a great deal to themselves. They are very determined people who trust their vision of the possibilities, regardless of what others think. They may even be considered the most independent of all of the sixteen personality types. INTJs are at their best in quietly and firmly developing their ideas, theories, and principles.” —Sandra Krebs Hirsch[15]
If I were the kind of person who allowed himself to get pissed off about things other people do and say this would really piss me off. In the first place, I don’t even believe in psychologists and psychology. What the hell do they know about anything?
Secondly, wrapping people up into a nice little package and putting a colorful bow on it, sending it out as though it were a gift for anyone who wants to claim he knows something about people and the way they think is an invitation for more of that sort of insufferable thinking-behavior disguised as learning.
Thirdly, the way institutional science is forever confusing itself with engineering without ever pondering the consequences, next thing you know there’ll be all manner of psychologists getting themselves government grants to devise ways to profile their homespun stereotypes so’s some branch of government with an opinion about a particular type can identify them for their own purposes.
For instance, every day you can read about physicists at CERN and other labs patting themselves on the back and saying, “Oh yeah, we’re creating baby black holes. They just vanish. No danger of one of them getting away and gulping up the planet earth.” As though they know what the hell a microscopic black hole is doing, or likely to do in orbit. Heck, maybe it was just in a slower orbit and got left behind until the next time earth comes around Old Sol to pass through and grow a little every pass.
Think about it. Those Manhattan Project guys developing the atomic bomb consisted of a significant portion of whom thought testing that device might set fire to the atmosphere. They got out-voted, not because anyone knew it wouldn’t, but because most believed it was a low probability.
How’s that for some exercise in risk-taking judgement? “Hey, let’s put it to a vote. How many think there’s a big chance if we detonate this thing it will destroy all life on the planet by setting fire to the atmosphere?”
40 PhD physicists raise their hands.
“Okay, how many don’t think there’s a very big chance it will?
60 PhD physicists raise their hands.
“Cool! Let’s run with it!”
And the majority turned out to be right. Whoopee! Now, generations of scientists later all over the world consortium of pointee-heads in laboratories and behind desks at universities can hold that up as an example of how to measure risks they’re taking without ever getting outside their closed circles of wisdom and knowledge.
But I’ve digressed. Back to these grant-prostitutes calling themselves psychologists.
You and everyone else can be assured there are graduate students somewhere creating a box to hold all your personality traits, figuring out the buttons to push to produce a particular behavior from you. What words, images, sounds will inspire you to buy a particular type of product, vote a particular way, choose a direction for your life. The grad students just do the work, but some hotshot pointee-headed prof will give a paper about it when the National Association of Prostitute Psychologists meets next spring and position himself for more grant money.
But you can be equally assured that cop shops and the ilk have hired them out to help them see what else is in the box they have you in. Yeah, you’re all these things, so you’re also probably a serial killer, terrorist, baby-raper, or someone who just doesn’t have any damned use for authority figures.
You’ll be damned lucky if they don’t outlaw you sometime because some hired-hand grad student working for a grant-hack prof put the wrong thing in your box.
Here’s an example. A gentle, harmless personality box. But just listen to what else is in there to light up the eyes of the cop shops. But I suppose old John Denver’s probably not concerned about it.
Old Jules
The John Denver Show (BBC), 1973 – Poems, Prayers and Promises
A person used to hear young men say, “I’d give my left nut for [fill in the blank]” and everyone knew precisely what he was saying.
Sometime over the past few decades I filtered out allowing myself to precisely ‘want’ anything without consciously intending to do it. When I get the silly-assed notion I ‘need’ or ‘want’ something I just stuff it into a file folder in my mind marked, ‘tentative’, and go into a patience mode. That just involves waiting for the Universe to drop whatever it was, or the components to fabricate it into my life. Which the Universe consistently indulges eventually.
But yesterday in town I saw this and it stopped me in my tracks. “Wow!” thinks I. “That thing could wash a lot of clothes at once, and it has a wringer.”
I’ve been using the Thrift Store busted near-freebee 1947 Kenmore for some time and I’m generally tickled pea-green with it: Clean Underwear and Hard Times. But it has the decided disadvantage of not having a wringer. This results in not getting so much water out of the clothes, so they take a lot longer to dry on the line.
I tagged and numbered the concept of the washer above and sent an order for something along those lines out to the Universe. But as I thought about it driving away it dawned on me what I actually ‘need’ if I were going to do some needing is a carwash chamois wringer.
But the cheapest of those new runs almost $100, which doesn’t fit into any strong likelihoods of me ever forking out. Even on EBay they run that price and upward.
But those things appear to be built to last. I’m betting when car washes go out of business they end up in places nobody expected, taking up space and not getting much use. I’m going to watch for them at flea-markets, auctions and garage sales. And maybe I’ll post something on the Yahoo FreeCycle groups for Kerrville and Fredericksburg.
I wouldn’t give my left nut for one of those wringers, but if I wanted one I might.
Steve Goodman knew all about the trap of wanting dream things, though. In this song he just about says it all:
After the literary Mehitabel, the first namesake to enter my life was in 1967. She was a stray, moved in ahead of a hurricane reputed to be headed for Houston. My new wife and I took her in because she was hungry, pregnant, and a violent storm might be coming.
She was near to giving birth and decided my sock drawer was the best option, refused to be dissuaded. So I built her a cat house behind the apartment. She didn’t stay around long after the kittens died, evidently because of drinking her milk.
Mehitabel #2 was a bob-tailed calico. Amazing cat, a loyal companion for 17 years. I once watched her in horror and awe as she mauled a full grown German Shepherd and similarly sized mutt, though they intended it to be the other way around, then found themselves surrounded, blocked repeatedly in their attempts to escape by a feline seemed to prefer two at a time.
I could spend pages telling Mehitabel #2 stories, but I won’t, except to say she was the mother of Hydrox #1, Hydrox #2, Xerox #s 1 and 2, and The Great Rumpus Cat #1. I always figured she was reincarnated from Mehitabel #1.
Over the years I always kept the cat population contained in a set of names lying in wait for a cat to fit in them, Mehitabel, Hydrox, Xerox and The Great Rumpus Cat being the primary ones. The method always worked well for me, but cats needed to fit particular qualifications to seize a particular name. Hydrox and Xerox were always jellicle cats. Mehitabel had to qualify by meeting other standards, generally following the Don Marquis model.
Mehitabel #3 came in around 1996, me fresh out of cats, her being a pregnant bookstore cat in Socorro, New Mexico. When Mehitabel #3 emerged from sleep and demanded I pick her up I asked the lady-owner, “She’s close. When these kittens are weaned could I have one?”
“You can have HER.”
“I don’t want half-a-dozen cats.”
“I know. As soon as the kittens are weaned you can have her.”
The enthusiasm and insistence of the lady told me I had the right cat. Mehitabel and I hit it off beautifully. But I was on the road a lot, and despite the cat door she was able to use to go in and out, I sensed Mehitabel was lonely.
Mel, a good friend, had a pregnant jellical female, Electra, living in his garage, and when the kittens were born I picked out Hydrox #4, or maybe 5. Freshly weaned, I carried him home to introduce him to Mehitabel #3. She hated him.
Mehitabel showed no signs of accepting him, so I went back to Mel and borrowed the second-best of the litter, Niaid, on an indefinite loan to keep him company. I didn’t try to fit her into the name thing because she was just a loaner.
As the pair matured I’d frequently ask Mel, “You needing this cat back?”
“No,” he’d assure me, “I’m fine.” Then Mel partnered with me on the Y2K land, though he stayed in town except for a week leading up to January 1, 2000, so the Niaid issue wasn’t a concern.
But in the background, throughout her life, Mehitabel bullied both of them unmercifully. When we went to live in a single-room apartment in Grants, New Mexico, toward the end of 2000, she could lay down the law and they couldn’t get away from her. But eventually Mehitabel #3 went on permanent mouse patrol, relieving the household of a lot of tension.
That’s where the screw-up happened in the life-long cat naming procedures. A stray pregnant cat emerged from catdom at a motel Jeanne was staying in while visiting me in Grants, which she took back to Kansas with her. Named her Shiva, largely because of my lousy abilities at prognostication.
I had no idea the was going to eventually fill the Mehitabel #4 slot.
But she did and it’s screwed everything up from a cat naming perspective. I doubt I’ll live long enough to get it back on track. One of Shiva’s litter’s living with me, as well. Sheeze! Her name????
Salvaged wheelbarrow, salvaged nightstand and salvaged material stapled over door opening
Salvaged microwave stripped of components with the back cut off makes a great means of keeping the cat food dry
Heavy rain and the cool snap last got me scrambling to give the cats a way to get out of the weather and keep the food dry. Looks as though it will serve, but I’ve got to work on several more shelters. They’re there, but need upgrading a bit.
I’ll confess I’m behind the curve on a lot of things. I should have re-wrapped that electrical tape around the busted phone line before the rain hit. Internet’s back in tin-can telephone speeds this morning.
Gale and Kay were working the Mesquite Show in Fredericksburg this weekend, so I borrowed Little Red today and went into town for necessaries. But when I’m on the road I always shop the grader ditches and investigate any potentially useful items thrown or blown out of vehicles. Today was great insofar as upgrading cathouses:
The top was missing on this, but otherwise it's in good shape
The cats will be fighting over which gets to sleep inside this
I find a lot of these lids in the ditches and this one almost fits.
Also found these rubber bungie cords near another bunch of trash in the ditch
I should have known this was coming yesterday when I took a nap and kept noticing a few things crawling on me occasionally. But I was preoccupied with musing about other goings on.
Then last night I went in there to rest a few minutes and conked out, only to be awakened around midnight-thirty with a lot of things crawling on me. Pretty much all at once, doing a little stinging here and there.
That half of the bed is taken up by upwards of a hundred books, some read already, some partway through the experience of being read, some waiting to be read, some held for re-reading. They’re usually not enough of a problem to outweigh the advantage of having a book near at hand when I need something to read. But when I turned the light on, here’s what I saw last night:
It’s not the first time that’s happened and I could have prevented further invasion if I’d been paying closer attention. I keep a container of boric acid powder nearby and usually try to do a pre-emptive strike on them on a fairly regular basis. But it requires taking the layers upon layers of books off and squirting the boric acid powder all over the underlying bed surface.
This, I’m reluctant to do, because everything gets disorganized and I lose track of which things have already been read, which are waiting to be read, which are occupied holding something else up, and generally where things are.
So they sneaked up on me. I had to do it in the middle of the night with no pre-planning, no organization at all.
Sheeze. Now it’s chaos in there.
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9:30 AM edit:
Heck, I might as well add this since I’ve got them there together now. Here are a couple of authors I’ve come across lately I’ve enjoyed a lot.
They’re thrift store books, so I’m not certain you could find them easily, but both authors have an interesting approach, plotting is tight, characterization’s good, and they hold the attention well.
Upfield writes about an aboriginal who’s an Australian police homicide detective and his mystery solvings, along with his ethnic difficulties trying to do his job in that setting, along with his internal struggles demanding he go back to being a bushman. Good reads.
Alexander’s a completely different bag of tricks. He’s created a blind brother to Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones, who’s a magistrate-cum-detective in London. His characters include Dr. Johnson, whores, a pirate, poets, actors, and all manner of peasantry. The narrator is actually a ‘Boswell’ sort relating the activities and events, a young teenager taken off the streets.
I don’t have enough distance from the Alexander books yet to decide whether it’s his unique and innovative setting, plotting and characterization intrigues me so much about him, or whether he’s also a damned good author.
Old Jules
11:20 AM edit:
Heck, I might as well add these since everything’s screwed up in there anyway:
Mari Sandoz – Crazy Horse, and Old Jules. Mari’s my daughter in a previous lifetime. Her biography of Crazy Horse is better than a lot of others about him. Her biography of me during that lifetime is as good as you’d expect from a daughter.
Doug Stanton, In Harm’s Way is the hair-raising account of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during the last days of WWII, and the ordeals of the survivors in shark infested waters off the coast of Japan.
Dan van der Vat, The Pacific Campaign is nothing to write home about. Of the thousand-or-so books following the steps, events, tactics and strategies of the Pacific War this one ranks in the bottom third,in my estimation.
Lauro Martines, Fire in the City, is a narrative of the strange and
surprising emergence of Friar Girolamo Savonarola in Rennaisance Florence. So little attention has been paid this fascinating man and time it’s worth the read even if you aren’t crazy about Martines’s particular style of writing and his method of organizing his material.
Niaid was curled up on the bed, [I double-checked] so whatever else that critter was, it was an outsider. The chickens were ranging free and I couldn’t hear any alarm from them, but this guy just looked too big to have roaming around without interruption.
As I came around the cabin where I could see him better:
It was obvious the feline was operating out of a different reality. Which didn’t necessarily mean he didn’t need to be the focus of protective measures. But how does a person protect his chickens from a shadow-cat? I’ve done some websearching on the various news sites and checked out the methods incorporated by the US Government into programs to avoid having shadow-cats disrupting citizen-like critters such as these:
The consensus seems to be you have to get one of these:
No matter what the cost.
I’m not certain I want to have one of those running around here loose, even when I have dangerous shadowcats skulking around peeking at my holdings.
Once something of that sort gets a foothold there’s no predicting where it will end:
Sugar pills in toy jars
Candy counter cures
For the sensory deprived
For the spirit that yearns hardship
Facade struggle for the
Stagely frightened
Sedentary soul
Living a reality
Where gangster boss of fantasy
Celluloid deeds and words
Are worth repeating;
Gladiator wars in plastic armor
Oaken clubs and pigskin missiles
Pudding danger jello struggles
Hard and real inside the mind
Inside the molded plastic
Toy of the mind
Man who cleans the windshield
At the signal is an actor
In the show last night
On MTV or HBO
Sexy girls dancing
In the background
As he postures
Rag and bucket
On the glass
Toy hero pushes button
In the Kevlar coated dragon
Of the field
Sees the enemy extinguished
In a prophylactic
Box of evening news
Before and after
Old war movies
All the same
Any loss is accidental
Cost of war’s
In higher taxes
Salaries for heroes
Fuel bullets
Not in blood
Not in blood
Sterile sealed
In plastic baggies
Plastic baggies
Hold the artificial
Flavor
Of the life
When life was real
Yet the sickness
Needs a remedy and cure
Sugar pills in toy bottles;
New candy counter pudding
For the soul.
Three of these four worthless felines are getting a bit long in the tooth, two longer than the next in line. It’s been a tough summer with the drought and heat wave, so I’ve had to take some measures to give them some relief I couldn’t provide for myself.
Shiva’s not one of the two oldest, but she had a health event a couple of winters ago that’s taken a long time to recover from, and she has a special job here if the cows ever come back. She’s Shiva the Cow Cat. Loved chasing cows back when they were bothersome. [ Artful Communications – White Trash Repairs 3 ]
I might add some other meanderings here today as other things come to mind, but what’s on my mind this morning is I need to start working on the front porch cat houses I put together last fall to give them all places to get out of the elements. Now that the heat’s bending in the other direction I wouldn’t be shocked to see a winter rearing it’s head before I’m ready for it.
Old Jules
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7:45 AM – Escape Route Possibilities – Fridge and trailer
Another issue that’s been on my mind a lot lately is creating myself a place to live if anything intervenes to insist I get the hell out of Dodge. The whole thing’s complicated by the contract I have with these cats, all but one of them, to take care of them until they die off, or I die off. I’ve talked with them about it, and they have some strong views about minimum living conditions, etc, which I’m obliged to consider. A tent or under a bridge doesn’t meet their minimum criteria.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m looking around for an old travel trailer I can get for a price I can afford, and the new truck up there Gale’s going to help me pull to town to let an honest-to-goodness mechanic fix the wiring mess, inspect it to get it legal, and eventually pull whatever I come up with for it to pull.
While I’m scouting around looking for an old travel trailer I’ve also been looking at this, considering whether it mightn’t offer an alternative:
Of course, if I select this option I’ll be building it from salvaged recycled materials.
This trailer below has been sitting there with that load on it from the time Gale and Kay moved here from Pflugerville. His shop building was full and he didn’t have anywhere to put all that stuff, so it’s stayed there, everything on it getting ruined by the weather and the tires going flat.
another view:
That lathe, left rear, is troubling to see. But so’s a lot of the other once-useful items on there.
another view:
another view:
If I can think of somewhere to put that junk, protecting whatever’s left worth protecting, I just might be able to talk him out of the trailer if I decide the building a house on a trailer option seems the best after everything’s considered.
On the other hand, the fridge is now a sure thing. I was talking with Gale while he was doing some jewelry work the other day and noticed this, down there bottom center:
Turns out it’s the gas/electric fridge out of an old travel trailer I gave him about 30 years ago. He says it’s mine if I want it.
This post requires some background to get to what it’s about. The first part is background. The actual subject of the post doesn’t start until ‘way on down toward the bottom.
Back before Y2K happened I spent a lot of years and energy researching and searching the mountains of SW New Mexico for a particular lost gold mine.
Doing a thing of that sort, the smart individual would keep his mouth shut about it. But I don’t qualify in that regard. I spent several years poring over records and winter nights poring over maps with a magnifying glass, almost always certain of knowing where it was, chawing at the bit to get out into the barrancas to file a claim on it. But also putting my research into a form others searching for it might find helpful. Insane.
Eventually I found a location where evidence on the ground fit the legend locations well enough to keep me working the west face of that mountain, climbing and unclimbing it with friends and associates, building up a lot of muscle, finding a lot of interesting rocks, and getting surprising assays, but no joy to speak of on gold.
“A burned out cabin ruin with an aspen tree growing out of the inside, bear claw marks 12 feet up, 3 hand forged nails, a longtom sluicebox axed out of a 3 foot diameter log, a spring 75 feet above the sluice, an arrastra below. A mysterious map chiseled on the face of a 300 pound rock surface depicting the exact layout of the canyon, the cabin, the waterfall, all so accurately depicted the person had to have scrutinized the layout from the mountaintop, then scratched it on this stone 600 vertical feet below and half a mile away. The rock was carefully placed on the canyon wall above eye-level so it was easily seen, but only by someone looking up.”
By 1998 I’d spent a lot more treasure, worn out vehicles, worn out relationships with lady friends and put a lot of friends to sleep going on about it and spending all my waking hours thinking, searching, or talking about it. I decided it had taken up enough of my life and it was time to move on to other things after one final effort.
I took several weeks of vacation from work and spent it determined to get that gold mine out of my life, or into it in a way that didn’t include continued searching for it. During part of it Gale and Dana, another old friend, joined me up there.
But that’s all another story.
During the 1990s I used to get several letters and phone calls a week from other people who were searching for the mine, asking questions about specifics of my research findings, asking questions about various terrain features, or just wanting me to go climb a mountain where they knew it was but didn’t feel like climbing themselves, willing to give me 10% of it if they were correct. Of course they always knew they were correct.
But gradually that all tapered off. In 2003, in the desperate throes of surviving the desperate financial aftermath of Y2K I published a book about my research, and the calls, emails and letters started coming in again for a while, but again gradually receded after a few years. Those guys all got old and everything quieted down.
That lost gold mine slid spang out of my life.
But finally, here’s what this post is about.
Suddenly, beginning a couple of months ago, my old email address box began a new trickle, becoming a stream, of questions about all manner of details about those canyons and researches I elaborated on in the book. Old guys, some older than I, were suddenly making noises about ideas, searches, evidently studying the book and maps, wanting refinements on what I’d described.
2011, every old worn-out has-been treasure hunter in Christendom is suddenly wanting me to search my memory-banks about canyons I once stomped around in. I’ve mostly answered the emails, tried to remember and flesh out what most of them were asking about, but a lot of it’s just too mixed in with too many other canyons, rocks and trails to recover with clarity.
But some of them are actually being subtle but provacative, wanting to argue with me about research findings, value judgements I made regarding 160 year old documents I dug up in the US Archives, military records, and a particular Apache I consider a key in the affair.
Heck, it ain’t as though I found the damned mine. I don’t know where it is, though I spent a lot of years, treasure, sweat, and women thinking I did. Now, suddenly I have people coming out of the woodwork wanting me to change my mind about where I thought it was because my reasons for thinking it weren’t the same as their reasons for thinking it’s somewhere I didn’t think it was.
Absolooooodle, incomprehensibly, insane.
Yeah. It’s real important where I think it is. If I don’t think it’s where it is, that old gold mine’s likely to switch places with where it thought it was. Next thing you know it will be where I thought it was. And that ain’t where these other guys now think it is, so I need to change my mind and think it’s where they think it is. Otherwise it won’t be there.
I have no idea what the hell this is all about. Maybe the price of gold combined with worrying about Social Security has the geezers going crazy thinking they’re 50 years old again.
Old Jules
Billy Vaughn And His Orchestra – The Shifting Whispering Sands ( 1956 )
Edited in Preface: Someone’s told me this post is a bit grim, which floored me. That is NOT what this is all about. I might well be the happiest man on the planet, the most joyful and grateful for the roof over his head, for the animalcules, for every moment of this life I’m blessed with. I am sure as hell not complaining about the way I live in this post, not poking around looking for sympathy from anyone. There’s not one of you I’d trade lives with.
Please allow your mind to read what follows with a smile. I love this crap. This post is me laughing at myself, laughing at whatever life might throw at me, telling life, “Do your damnedest! I’ll keep coming.”
“Science,” Hydrox the jellicle cat insists, “You observe, you formulate a premise, you test the premise and revise it, then you test again. Just make damned certain it’s right this time.” Hydrox is one of the two felines indoors during cool, and especially during inclement weather. “If science isn’t cutting it try some engineering.”
He takes a jaundiced view of hiding under something to get away from thunder only to get drenched by a lousy roof repair experiment. Hydrox is attuned Level 3 Reiki.
“Reiki Masters,” he assures me, ” At least cat Reiki Masters, don’t appreciate being interrupted from doing high-minded things by getting sloshed because of criminal negligence on the part of a human being.”
Back when I was attuning him several people thought this mightn’t be a good thing. It’s been a mixed blessing.
That chimney pipe was leaking badly back when it still rained. But this repair job hasn’t had the test of a good rainfall yet.
Edit: This larger diameter stovepipe came from Habitat for Humanity Thrift Store [toward the bottom here: Curiouser and curiouser ] for a couple of bucks. If the current fix doesn’t work I’ll cut the down-end with the angle cutter to match the slope of the roof, cut the top shorter than the chimney vent and sleeve the chimney with it. I thinks it will block of a lot, if not all the pesky intrusion of rain into the chimney pipe.
As you can see, I’ve smeared tar all over the the joints in the sheet metal roof, in addition to the customized chimney. That didn’t work too well, I’ll confess. Got some other things to try though. The light brown or tan you see is the foam you get at the hardware store that is touted as being able to plug large leaks by expanding into them to fill in the space. No joy on that.
The chimney problem’s crucial. Water hitting the side of it goes inside, runs down to the elbow in the bedroom but doesn’t slow down much:
[The gray hat’s a XXXXXX John B Stetson I picked up at a silent auction a few years ago for $10. Man who owned but never wore it died and left it to me, though we never met.]
Naturally there’s a backup plan to keep water from coming down on the bed in the unlikely event it rains:
This has worked pretty well in the light rain arena. Hasn’t been tested in a bull goose honest-to-goodness wind blowing rain sideways daddy-long-legs storm.
But we didn’t reach a consensus, the felines etc. on the matter of roof repairs and leaks. Shiva the cow-cat argues, “What the hell! Here’s a perfect spot for both those indoor cats in a thunderstorm. What’s the big deal? If they don’t like it throw them outdoors with Tabby and me.
“I’m sick and tired of all the age discrimination around here in favor of geriatric cats.”
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 
