Tag Archives: country life

Running the Obstacle Course – the F 350

Posted on February 15, 2012 by | 10 comments

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Maybe I was too much like the guy in the picture above trying to find a vet to work on his dog.  I borrowed Little Red yesterday and drove into Harper to talk to the Real Mechanic I had in mind to work on the New Truck.

He seemed a nice enough guy, but when I explained what I had in mind, described the truck and the problem, he explained he didn’t care to have anything to do with it.

There’s another Real Mechanic in town, but I decided to back off and think about how to approach this a bit more rather than ask and have him say, ‘no’, too. 

The frustrating thing about it all is the fact I could get that truck running well enough to drive it into town myself if I could find photographs of the wiring on a running 1983 F350 with a similar engine.  I’d replace the wiring myself, then just take it in to get whatever else needs doing for an inspection sticker.

Today I’m posting a plea on Kerrville and Fredericksburg Freecycle groups for under-the-hood photos with the air cleaner removed from anyone owning a running truck of that vintage.  If that doesn’t turn up anything I’ll post on Kerrville Marketplace group offering whatever price it takes to get photos, I reckons.

Crazycrazycrazycrazy.  I honestly never anticipated a man in the bidness of fixing cars would refuse to fix one.  Guess the economy isn’t as bad as I’ve been hearing it is.

Maybe I need to find a vet.

Old Jules

Today on Ask Old Jules: 

Old Jules, what was the happiest time in your life?

Happiest Time?

10 Comments

Posted in Trucks

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Another Bug on the Windshield of Life – The Tow Bar

Posted on February 14, 2012 by | 18 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

Nobody much uses a tow bar anymore.  The only thing available to rent in town was something called a ‘car dolly’, and I didn’t like the idea of renting one, even a little bit.   But Gale’s reluctance to pull the New Truck into town with a chain was expressing itself full volume without him having to say anything outright.

I’d put notices on Kerrville Freecycle, Kerrville Marketplace, done everything I could think of without success.  But a week or so ago Gale mentioned he’d seen one for $100 at a thrift store in Kerrville.  At least he thought it was a tow bar.  He said it had been sitting there a goodly while.

Those of you who read here probably know the idea of paying price-tag prices for something isn’t in my makeup.  And $i00 for a tow bar, while probably a reasonable price, just wasn’t something I was about to do.  I’d rent a car dolly first.

I borrowed Little Red and made a special trip to town in the hope it was a tow bar, and in the further hope they’d be ready enough to see it gone to be willing to do some horse trading.  When I arrived unsuspecting began a bargaining session lasted maybe two hours.  Tough, tough, tough, those people have become.

The only time in my life I ever recall having to dicker that hard for anything was in Mexico when I was 17 years old bargaining for a pair of needle-toed, fancy-stitched turquoise-dyed-stovepipe topped boots.  I’d only tried one of them on and the fit was perfect.  Got that guy down to $17 for the pair.  But when I got back to Portales and put them on, turned out they were two different sizes.  Killed my feet, wearing them.

But I’ve digressed.

As you can see from the pic, the tow bar’s now here, same size for both feet.  And now it’s only going to be a matter of prying Gale away from whatever else he thinks he ought to be doing to get the New Truck to a Real Mechanic.

Old Jules

 

18 Comments

Posted in Texas, Trucks

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Incentives Not to Go Off Food – Rice and Veggie Steamer

Posted on February 13, 2012 by | 17 comments

I’ve been mildly curious watching myself for a considerable while.  Weight was peeling off me and I was forgetting to eat.  My body would notify me I hadn’t eaten anything in a day or two by a dose of the blind staggers, or just a dizzy spell to get me thinking back on when I last ate something.

Most of what I cook around here’s cheap and simple because of the fact I ran out of propane early last year and haven’t refilled the bottle, and because hauling water makes washing cookware an expense measured in hauling trips.  So I was living mostly on potato combinations, yogurt combinations, fruit combinations and various bean concoctions.  I was at the point of hating to look any one of them in the eye.

Then one day in the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Kerrvillle I saw that rice and veggie steamer still in the box for sale for a dollar.  It didn’t appear to ever have been used.  So, I bought it, thinking rice and steamed veggies would at least be different.

Sheeze, the best purchase since my High Roller back in 1972.  The tow bar I bought the other day might turn out to be a better deal, but I haven’t figured out anyway to cook with it.  But I’ve digressed.

What I’ve re-discovered is the absolute, euphoria-laden joy of food.  I’m making better meals on that thing than I could even find in a restaurant in town, but if I could, couldn’t afford them.  I’ll make up a batch of one or another Asian-like mix thinking it will last two days, then find I have to fight a war with myself to keep from eating it at a single sitting.

It does require loads of fresh onion, garlic, jalapeno, cayenne, curry and ginger.  I buy bags of trail mix of various sorts, dried mango, papaya, raisins and cranberrys at the Dollar Tree and pour on top, a little of each.  The food bills went up something awful last month.  But I don’t forget to eat.

And the simple truth is, some of these meals turn out to be classed among the best I’m able to recall having anytime in my  life.

Anyone says an old dog can’t learn new tricks is kidding himself.

Old Jules

 

17 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Country Life, Senior Citizens, Survival, Thrift Stores

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Clarifying the clarification

Posted on February 9, 2012 by | 9 comments

Let no fate willfully misunderstand me and snatch me away, not to return. Robert Frost

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.

Evidently some readers were left with the impression yesterday post was a farewell notice. It wasn’t. I’ll be posting here, but not so often, is all, until I’m where I can’t. I just won’t be spending so much time online.

Keith: I got your email, but I can’t do Facebook because of the slow connection. Check your Yahoo mailbox, amigo. I know you have computer issues, but I think that’s the only way available from this end. J

The invader cat has raised the ante here. It’s evidently a female and in heat. Walks around mewing all the time, to the disgust of the four resident felines. But I’ve begun feeding it because I’m not going to have it starving while I figure out who it belongs to.

My friend, Rich sent me a RAM upgrade for my offline computer and it arrived yesterday. Jumped me from 4 gb of RAM to 12 gb with Readyboost, and it allowed me to follow some computations I’d never been able to do before. Uplifting, satisfying day.

Gale’s fairly under the weather, but he brought down the RAM chips and we conversed a while. Seems he might have come across a tow bar for sale without recognizing it for what it is. Got me fairly excited, because the towing issues are the reason the New Truck isn’t in town being worked on, or isn’t finished, licensed, inspection stickered, lock stock and banana peel. I’m borrowing Little Red to go into town today and try to chase it down.

Maybe I shouldn’t have made the post yesterday, though I wasn’t smart enough was the reason I did. It seemed an explanation of why I’d be making fewer posts.

For those who read it rapidly I suppose it seemed I was about to take off all my clothes and run naked into the sunset.

It’s too cold still for that.

Old Jules

 

Previous posts about the transportation issue saga:

 Got me a new truck! Scouting the Escape Route Wobblehead Extensions, Crowfoots and Mayan Ruins in Georgia   The New Truck Resurrection Post-Y2K Cross-Cultural Trials, Trucks and Unwelcome Wisdom The Communist Toyota 4-Runner  

 

9 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Senior Citizens, Solitude

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Juggling Priorities

Posted on February 8, 2012 by | 19 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

When I began posting this blog just before the end of June last year,

The Great Speckled Bird: Respecting our Betters, my life was a  somewhat different place, though it hasn’t changed much by outward appearance.  Mainly what’s changed is priorities.  Time has speeded up for me in a sense.  Things I’ve needed to be doing all along, but were on the back burner indefinitely have fought their way to the front burner and now are holding the high ground. 

The season that’s been attempting to pass itself off as a winter here seems every day to be assuming the attire of early spring.  Which is to say, I need to be doing spring-like things inside the priority mix, instead of winter things, and the spring activity demands this year will be somewhat different from last year. 

One of the ways that will manifest itself is that I’ll be posting less regularly on this blog, trying to spend more time doing higher priority activities.  A lot of the projects I had planned, or was working on during the blog months are going to be abandoned or allowed to be pushed into abstractions for some future time, except one.

So the frequent and somewhat regular posting here will change to a target-of-opportunity mode. 

Jeanne will continue posting the Ask Old Jules entries, and I’ll probably occasionally post something there also, as time allows.

I’m no good predicting the future, but my intention, within the context of what the Coincidence Coordinators will allow, is to have this shelter and the area immediately around it back mostly as it was when I arrived several years ago.  Including me being somewhere else.   Most of my priority juggling is going to try to fit itself into that as best it can.

Hopefully the ancient Mayans had all that figured out and that’s what all the hoopla about the Mayan calendar’s really about.  The cats and me experiencing another pesky reincarnation without the Universe raising any eyebrows.

Old Jules

 

19 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure

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A Search for the Meaning of Life

Posted on February 2, 2012 by | 33 comments

In 1992, when my 25 year marriage dissolved and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, one of the projects I was determined to pursue was an attempt to understand the meaning of life, or something in the neighborhood.  I did a lot of thinking and planning about how to approach the matter in a way I considered the most likely possibility for success.

Part of the project involved learning everything I could about religions and metaphysics, and I began with an intense study of Christianity, early Christian history, pre-Nicean Christian documents, practices and beliefs at a time before anything qualified as Canon.  For a couple of years I submerged myself in the subject.

During the same time period I got up 3:30 am and spent a couple of hours watching Christian television to get a better understanding of what was going on with Christianity today.  I found I got a lot of enjoyment doing it, and I discovered one I liked particularly well and thought of almost as an old friend.

Garner Ted Armstrong.  I spent a year or so in my early 20s working for Rainbow Baking Company in Houston loading bread trucks off a conveyor belt 12 hours a day, and I filled some of the solitude listening to Garner Ted over a portable radio and earpiece.  I considered him one of the best rhetoricians of the 20th Century already when I found him preaching on television.

But what I hadn’t realized was his level of scholarship and open mindedness about Christian history.  The fact I was submerged in it at the time led me to write a letter to him asking his take on some issues I’d found ambiguous.

From that time until his death several years later, Garner Ted Armstrong and I indulged in exchanges of 20 page letters discussing the nuances of Christian history, Christian texts, the implications of the Nag Hammadi codices, news coming out of the Dead Sea Scrolls, where Christianity had been and possibly where it was going.

A truly strange time of my life, though just one of those side-trails that had little to do with my coincident search and research involving a lost gold mine, nor with understanding the meaning of life.  The former, I never found, and the latter, when I found it, didn’t need elaboration.

I still miss old Garner Ted Armstrong and those long letters.

Old Jules

33 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, History, New Mexico, Relationships, Science, Senior Citizens, Solitude

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Clarifying a General Point – Politics and this Blog

Posted on February 1, 2012 by | 8 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

When I post a blog I frequently do so in complete ignorance of current events.  I don’t have a television, the radio never gets turned on, and I don’t read newspapers or magazines until they sometimes fall into my hands many years after they were printed.

I don’t know and don’t wish to know who wants to be king.  The Challenge of 2012: Not Knowing Who Wants to be King   And I’m not likely to get any joy from knowing which readers prefer which liar and scoundrel, and which prefer some other one.  I have no intention to participate in the scramble to assassinate characters of the occupants of one side of the pool of corruption to give advantage to the occupants of the other side of the pool.

 If a post here manages to convey an impression I’m giving support to one political illusion over another, it’s entirely by accident and not to be taken as a launchpad for more intense and focused discourse on the issue.

Old Jules

Today on Ask Old Jules:

Old Jules, why are there so many religions and spiritual beliefs?

8 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Politics

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The Backyard Chickens Conspiracy

Posted on January 30, 2012 by | 15 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Yesterday I got an email from someone called himself Rob, AKA ‘Nifty Chicken’ of the Backyard Chickens newsletter telling me I need to re-register. 

“This is Rob, AKA “Nifty-Chicken” of www.BackYardChickens.com.   I noticed that you’re registered for our newsletter, but can’t find you in our community membership.  This quick note is to let you know of some important changes and to help you get re-registered so you can continue receiving the BYC Newsletters.”

Naturally, I’m deeply suspicious about this.  Someone’s wanting me to become a part of their ‘we’ over there without me having done anything to deserve it, other than subscribing to their newsletter for several years. 

Then I went over to the site instead of clicking the ‘register’ part of the email and the first thing I saw was:

Welcome To BYC!

Hi Peeps,   Welcome to the new & upgraded version of the BackYardChickens.com website!   There are a ton of exciting new features and areas of the site for you to explore.  To help get started we suggest you… » read more

Can you imagine that?  I go over there with more-or-less neutral intentions, other than a few suspicions about what manner of ‘we’ someone was demanding I include myself in, and the first crack out of the box he calls me a ‘Peep’?   The guy thinks people joining his ‘we’ are peeps.

Whatever the hell a peep is.   Strikes me this might be a group of ‘we’ folk who go around looking through windows trying to see naked women.  Nothing whatever to do with chickens.

Or he’s an agent provacateur for Homeland Security trying to identify all the people who’d be gratified to belong to a ‘we’ that considered itself peeps.

I’ve donealready got plenty of ‘we’ stuff in my life.  I ain’t including myself in any we bunch of peeping toms even if they’re peepers that like chickens.  Heck, maybe it’s chickens they’re sneaking around spying on.  Maybe they’re trying to find out where I am so they can come in here nights spying on the Great Speckled Bird and the hens do and talk about when I shut them up in the fortress nights.

Or more sinister yet, maybe they’re trying to see if I gather the eggs every day.  Or whether they’re doing okay on the milo feeding I’ve been doing lately to save money.   Or somebody over there read the post, Shame and a Confession About Inter-Species Sex and thinks because I have a perverted chicken I’d want to draw my circle of ‘we’ bigger and feel a part of some group of peepers. 

I think it might well be one of those government traps like the one they did in Colorado a few years ago, sending in agents to open up a taxidermy shop, putting out the word they’d buy endangered species carcasses under the table.  After a couple of years they’d bought and paid for hundreds of otherwise healthy endangered birds and animalcules and collected names dates and places of the folks killed them because there was suddenly a market.

Indicted half the community before it was over.

I ain’t joining no government plot to arrest my rooster.  As far as I know he can’t even get out nights to do any peeping.

Old Jules

15 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Chickens, Country Life, Creative Writing, Outdoors, Senior Citizens, Texas

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A Scene of an Ancient Massive UFO Crash

Posted on January 29, 2012 by | 19 comments

This is located almost atop the Continental Divide in the Gila Wilderness at around 8000′-9000′ above Mean Sea Level elevation.  Nobody much goes up there.  I was actually looking for something else when  two comparatively ‘small’ parallel gouges mid-picture first caught my eye.

Trench deep on our left pushes up rocks ahead
Closer view of key impact
 
 
Bad things happening to good people
 
 
Impacts and energy events stage 1
 
Stage 2 Along path breaks up and explodes
 
Impact trenches
 
Hot spots
 
Stage 2 energy events
 
  

 
Main pieces remaining
 
Interesting local geology
 
Aftermath investigation and cleanup
 
Better view of initial ground contact
 
Pilot applies full power – Dire emergency attempt at recovery
 
Meanwhile a couple of ridges away 1
 
  
 
 
Meanwhile a couple of ridges away 2
 
Mother nature anticipating and waiting – It only needed the human imagination to complete the picture
 
Skeptics probably won’t believe this is a UFO crash site.  I personally don’t. and so far as I’m aware I’m the only person who’s ever suggested it might be.  I’d surely like to get up there and have a look at it sometime, but for other reasons than the UFO story.
 
I’d like to spend about a month up there with half-dozen pack goats just nosing around the immediate area.  Some places don’t need a crashed ancient UFO to have appeal.
 
Old Jules
 
Edit:  You can have a look for yourself by going to flashearth dot com and entering the longitude/latitude coordinates in the lower right corner of each image.

19 Comments

Posted in Adventure, Nature, NM, Outdoors, Prospecting, Senior Citizens, Solitude, UFOs

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Blogging to Keep Off Boogie Street

Posted on January 28, 2012 by | 24 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

I’m a bit out of sorts this morning.  That pic above was taken for the post about hats worn backward, but if I paused and had a look in the mirror it think it would be me again, minus the backward High Roller.  Hats You Can’t Wear Sideways or Backwards

The protracted computer fiasco put me fairly far behind on one of my projects, which I went a hundred miles an hour for a lot of hours yesterday playing catchup without getting there.  But I think doing it must have worn my mind down along the edges and frayed my thinking processes enough to have me wondering if I’m not getting old.

If I had a vehicle and enough slack in the budget I think I’d probably forget everything for a day and just go for a road trip for a day.  Try out my Texas Thumb and Finger Signs and let the projects, the chickens, and the cats fend for themselves long enough to get a recharge on my batteries.

But that’s not going to happen, and the project’s going fairly well once I reconstructed where my head was when I got distracted by computers.  The roosters are singing up Old Sol and I hear cats hissing at one another on the front porch, so all I have to do is wait until my head clears, kick start myself into motion.

I’ve been fighting off urges to write long written works lately, which I’m not going to do, and one of the ways I avoid doing it and push the urges back involves typing words on this blog.  Pressure release valve, more or less.

I appreciate the role you readers play in the process.  If you weren’t here I think I mightn’t write the blog, and find me sneaking up on myself writing a book instead.  A pure disaster.

Thanks, all of you, for coming by occasionally.

Gracias,

Old Jules

24 Comments

Posted in 2012, Communication, Country Life

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