Morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
Some of you are too young to remember why microwave ovens and electricity were invented. It’s a fact worth knowing.
The pioneers, when they invented this country, lived mostly in dugouts. Dugout canoes in the summer, dugout houses in the winter. Those winters tended to get them cold on their backsides and necks. So they started growing wheat, milo maize, rice, to try heating up and putting in some warm container to throw around their necks to try to keep warm.
They tried all manner of containers, those cold natured ancestors of ours. Tried skinning rabbits and sewing up grain inside the hides, but it didn’t take any time at all before the only benefit they were getting from it was the smell of burning hair. So they invented sweat socks to put it in.
But they needed a way to heat it up without burning it, so they invented microwave ovens. Trouble was, the microwaves sat there for generations full of sweatsox waiting for electricity to be invented.
Then along came Nicoli Tesla Edison with the solution.
So nowadays all you have to do is plug that mama in, that microwave, shove in a sweat sock full of grain, run it about five minutes, and you have a thingamabob you can drape around your neck when it’s cold, or stiff, or for when the old shoulder’s reminding you of a motorcycle that wrapped itself around a tree 40 years ago, and you can toss in another one for putting at the foot of your blankets to give the cats a place to get hacked off when you throw them off it and go to bed.
Got two of them in that microwave right this very moment.
Thankee universe for nicola tesla edison and joseph h. microwave and their yankee ingenuity inventions. And thankee universe for joseph cotton’s development of sweatsocks. Also Horatio Milo, the developer of Milo Maize.
We lucky to have this universe to provide such blessings.
1964 was a big year in my life. I rode the USNS Breckinridge troop ship back from Korea with 2000 other GIs coming home, separated from the army late in June. Hung around Portales, New Mexico for a while, applied to join the Peace Corps, then hitch-hiked to New York to pass the time until I heard from the Peace Corps.
Beatniks hadn’t yet been displaced by hippies and Greenwich Village was jam-packed with thousands of us implying we were beatniks but carefully not saying so. Hanging around coffee shops writing poetry, playing chess, saying momentous deep-thinking things back and forth to one another. Listening to folk singers.
Being rocked back on our heels in mock, simulated shock and disgust when wheat-straw blondes from Westchester down for the weekend to be beatniks, too, refused our advances. “WHAT? You don’t believe in FREE LOVE?”
Which, surprisingly, almost always worked. Provided you’d done a convincing enough job trickling out the bona fides of being a REAL beatnik. And wouldn’t even think of hopping in the sack with someone so uncool she didn’t even believe in free love. Even if she did iron her long hair out straight.
So after I hopped the freight to go back to New Mexico, got thrown in jail in Rochester for taking the wrong train, The Hitch-Hiking Hoodoos, got released to hitch home, things stayed eventful for a while.
A guy from Buffalo picked me up on the Interstate, older guy in his 30s. When I got in I threw the pillow-case with my belongings into the back seat. “I don’t know why I picked you up,” he glanced at me with disgust.“I never pick up hitch hikers.”
Over the next few miles he questioned me about who I was, where I was from, what I was doing hitching, what I’d do when I arrived, and I explained it all in loving detail.
“Well, I’ve never had any trouble with a hitch hiker the few times I’ve picked them up. But if I do ever get killed by a hitcher it will probably be some half-baked kid who doesn’t know what he wants in life.” He thought about it a minute. “But I don’t have to worry about you. You threw your gun into the back seat in that pillow case when you got in.”
We talked a lot over the highway between Rochester and Buffalo. Enough so he didn’t take the Buffalo exit and carried me down to where a tollway squeezed the traffic going south to Cincinnati, Ohio. He pulled up beside a car with a family in it, man, woman and a couple of kids. Motioned for them to roll down the passenger-side window.
“Are you going on through Cincinnati? I’ve carried this guy all the way from Rochester and he’s okay. He’s going to New Mexico. But I’d like to get him a ride past Cincinnati. He’ll never get through that town walking.”
The couple said they were just going to Cincinnati, but we were all watching the traffic edge forward to the toll gates. “We’d better take him anyway. He might not get another ride.”
The Buffalo guy was right, but it began the next phase of a long story. Guess I’d best hold it for another day.
If I were prone to regrets of things done and undone I’d regret not being more observant when something was going on around me worth observing.
I was on a business trip in a New Mexico State vehicle meeting city officials in Portales, the town where I grew up. I visited with my old friend and classmate Fred Stevens and, we ate out together the previous night at a local restaurant.
Next morning hanging around City Hall I chatted with my 6th grade teacher, Bill Walman, then Parks and Recreation Director, and Mack Tucker, director of something else, with whom Kurtiss Jackson and I had worked for Skeeter Jenkens on the ranch ‘way back when [ A Sobering View of Y2K].
If I’d been paying attention I might have noticed something at the meeting. Or maybe during one of the chats with friends I mentioned the route I’d be taking home. Maybe I’d have examined the car for something attached to it. Years of hindsight would have been helpful. Some of the details of the following sequence of events might be out of order, might be inaccurate by having dimmed with the years. But it’s a fairly close portrayal of something that I still don’t understand with whatever’s been gained by the passage of time.
After the meeting I left late-morning and headed west to go home to Socorro. Probably there was a lot I could have noticed if I’d had my senses tuned. But I was on autopilot.
The road between Portales and Roswell seems a long one to motorists and I probably was exceeding the speed limit. There was almost no traffic, and I didn’t notice whom I passed and what they might have been driving.
I’d consumed a lot of coffee that morning and somewhere out beyond Elida I stopped and walked to a tree along the fenceline to relieve myself. A battered old truck pulled up behind the state car and stopped with the engine idling. When I finished I went to his window.
“Anything I can do to help you?”
The guy was dressed in a shabby bodyshop shirt, bad teeth, nasal twang accent of a local. “Ah was just wondering why someone in a government car passed me going 80 miles an hour.”
“What makes you think I was going 80 miles an hour? The speed limit’s 55. If I passed you going 55 I might have been speeding to go past just to get around you.”
“What gumment agency you working for going that fast? I jest want to know why you’re driving so fast in a state car!”
I told him to take the tag number and call it in if he had a complaint, but he went on and on with a nasal, makes-no-sense questioning.
I got back into the car and drove on, but stopped again at Kenna. The village had become a ghost town, but it had a lot of memories for me because Skeeter’s ranch was outside Kenna, and when Portales was ‘dry’ most Portales teenagers used to drive here to buy beer because the Portales bootleggers wouldn’t sell to them.
I’d begun to awaken a bit, though, and was wondering about the guy in the truck. I watched as he drove past on the highway and probably considered the fact he was now ahead of me again. A few miles out of town I passed him again, this time carefully not exceeding the speed limit by much.
Once he was out of sight far behind me the coffee was working on me again, and I pulled down a side road and behind an abandoned schoolhouse for another bladder call.
I paused and poked around the old school yard waiting for him to go past, figuring I’d wait until he went by, let him get out of sight in front of me, then drive on to Roswell with him well ahead of me. I don’t recall why I did this precisely. I wasn’t alarmed yet at this point. Maybe I was just enjoying the bits and pieces of school yard litter from so long ago. Even the old outhouse was still standing.
I drove on, taking my time now. But when I arrived at the intersection north of Roswell where traffic goes north toward Santa Fe, south into Roswell, or west into the mountains, there he was, pulled off and waiting. He somehow knew, I suddenly realized, I’d gotten behind him. So instead of going on I drove into Roswell and got some lunch, figuring he’d be out of my life by the time I headed west.
But a few miles west of Roswell, there he was again. He let me go past, so up the road a way I pulled off and parked behind a convenience store, went inside to let him go by while I had an ice cream bar. He did go by, and I finished my ice cream and headed west again. But at the intersection going to Ruidoso into the mountains, or Lincoln and westward to Carrizoso there he was again.
I drove on by, pretending to be going to Ruidoso. I pulled over again a couple of miles up the road, out of sight of the highway and waited for him to go past for half-hour, but he didn’t. So I figured I’d lost him, headed back through Lincoln, and there he sat in front of a museum, engine running. I pulled in behind him, determined to confront him.
I drove out of town behind him and a few miles up the road he turned into a picnic/camping area and turned around, stopped at the entrance facing the highway. By now I was pissed, but also damned confused and slightly alarmed. I couldn’t understand how he could be doing this.
I was armed and I walked up behind his car so he could see me in the rearview, but with the firearm behind me out of sight.
“Why are you following me?”
“Ahhhm not following yew. I just stopped here to take me a rest.”
“You waited back there at the intersection. You waited again in Lincoln. Why are you following me?”
“I’m not follering yew. But I still want to know why a person in a gumment car passed me going 80 miles an hour.” And so on.
“I’m warning you. Don’t follow me anymore.” I shrugged it off, curious how far he’d go with this.
We played cat-and-mouse, me in a busy parking lot in Capitan during a thunderstorm as he went by, him waiting for me in Carrizoso. He wanted me to know he had a fix on me.
I was convinced by the time I passed him on the hood of his truck west of Valley of the Fires that he was a cop… couldn’t see any way a private citizen could have the equipment it would take to do what he was doing.
It’s a long drive through that desert between Carrizozo and Socorro and my mind was working 90 miles an hour. As I approached Socorro I became convinced I was about to be arrested for something.
I called a friend with the City of Socorro and asked him to go look at my house to see if there were a bunch of cops waiting there. There weren’t, and I didn’t see the follower until several years later in Albuquerque during a much later phase of what came to be a decade of that sort of crap.
A week later I described it to my Bureau Chief in Santa Fe. When I’d finished telling it I asked, “Do you know of anything I ought to know? Could this be Internal Affairs following me around for some reason?”
He thought about it frowning. “No, I don’t think it could possibly be that. I’d know it if any questions were being asked about you. They’d have asked me.” Then he looked me in the eye. “You need to be careful about that speeding, though. If you get stopped for speeding in a State car working for DPS it’s no questions asked. They’ll fire you.”
What began that day lasted almost a decade. Long after I’d left DPS and through several post-Y2K years.
But back in the beginning, all manner of other mysterious happenings intruded into the lives of those who climbed that mountain with me, and to me. I don’t know to this day whether the two parallel sets of happenings were connected.
Maybe if I’d been paying more attention from the beginning.
By the time this was published in 1999, I was no longer going up that particular mountain. I was busy on my Y2K land and dwelling preparations about 50 miles northeast of Quemado.
But this will give you an idea of the general local psychological environment in the area, both while I was working the mountain and [it turned out] later, while I was doing Y2K.
Unsolved Slayings Have Small N.M. Town Living in Fear
Crime: With seven people killed since 1996, residents are openly packing heat. Authorities see no connections among the deaths.
November 20, 1999|PAUL DUGGAN | THE WASHINGTON POST QUEMADO, N.M.
— There’s not much to the town. You come upon it in the vast, yellow-brown emptiness of southern New Mexico’s high desert grassland. It’s mainly just a strip of old storefronts on Highway 60, with some dusty side streets.
In a 40-mile radius of Quemado you might find 500 people, about half of them ranchers living like pioneers on the plains and in the foothills, miles from any neighbor. The rest live in town, in trailer homes and faded stucco bungalows amid the tumbleweeds and pinon trees.
The sheriff, Cliff Snyder, said it used to be a peaceful place in its lonesome way, before all the killings. Now there’s fear in the air, like a foul wind.
Who murdered Gary and Judy Wilson? It’s a mystery. They disappeared in November 1995 and turned up eight months later, so many bones in the woods. Who shoved Gilbert Stark into a 20-foot well and closed the cover in ’96? Who shot the elderly Clark couple and their daughter in ’97? Who put a bullet in the heart of James Carroll, 59, as he stood in his corral just north of town one autumn day last year? The sheriff doesn’t know.
He and the state police said they are convinced the cases aren’t related. They were random eruptions of murder where murder used to be rare, Snyder said. He has no clear explanation for it. All of the victims lived in the countryside around Quemado, about 125 miles southwest of Albuquerque. Before the Wilsons were slain, no one had died by another’s hand in this part of sprawling Catron County in nearly a decade.
And no one wants to be next. In a swath of America where gun control means hitting what you’re aiming at, a lot of folks are packing iron. They’re propping shotguns and rifles beside their beds; they’re driving with pistols on the front seats of their pickups. The sheriff said he doesn’t mind. This is the rural West, he pointed out, and guns are a heritage.
“We’re raised with them,” said Snyder, 42. He shrugged. “If I pull over a vehicle, I figure they’re armed, if they live in this county.”
At El Sarape Cafe on Quemado’s main street, Irene Jaramillo, 43, keeps a .22-caliber semiautomatic on a shelf near the griddle. One morning last week, Paul Strand, 67, who owns a horse ranch south of town, was sipping coffee in the cafe with his wife and holding forth on the subject of their firearms.
“I sleep with a Colt .45 under my pillow,” he said. “I have a loaded assault rifle beside the bed, a Russian-type, ready to roll. And a sawed-off shotgun next to that, loaded, legal, but just barely, in terms of the barrel length.”
Across the street, Carl Geng, who is in his 60s, runs the Allison Motel with his wife. They also own a ranch outside of town. Geng said he thinks he knows the culprit in one of the homicide cases. “I’ve got a .38,” he said, gesturing to his truck in the parking lot. “He sets one foot on my ranch, I’ll blow his head off.”
The sheriff said he and the state police think most or all of the victims were murdered by acquaintances with whom they had personal disputes. As for suspects, investigators have only “theories,” he said.
It’s a crime in New Mexico to carry a concealed loaded weapon in a public place but legal for anyone 21 or older to carry one openly, no permit necessary. James Clark, a Vietnam veteran, started packing two handguns after his parents, William Clark, 84, and Pearl Clark, 74, were slain in 1997 along with his sister, Sharron Hutson, 44. Folks in Quemado are used to seeing him in town with a .45-caliber Colt Peacemaker on his right hip and a .40-caliber semiautomatic in a shoulder holster.
“Which is fine,” said Irene Jaramillo’s husband, Jimmy, who is one of Snyder’s deputies. “I told him, ‘As long as I can see them.’ “
James Clark and his wife, Elaine, 42, now live in the remote trailer home where the elderly couple was murdered. Elaine Clark, who prefers a lighter-weight .35-caliber, sat in the kitchen one day last week with her husband’s heavy semiautomatic on the table in front of her. There was a loaded hunting rifle propped against the freezer by her left hand.
“We always used to brag that it was like the Old West, in the way that your house was never locked,” she said. “Someone passing by, if you were gone, they could come in and get something to eat. But now it’s more like the Old West the way you’re always on guard. You don’t walk up to my house unless I know you’re coming . . . or you could darn well get shot.”
Catron County, with just 3,000 residents, covers almost 7,000 square miles. It’s bigger than Connecticut. Snyder, who was a deputy when the seven homicides occurred, was elected sheriff last year. He has an undersheriff and four deputies, including Jaramillo, who patrols the northern half of the county around Quemado. Half a dozen state troopers also work in the county. But with such a vast area to cover, it sometimes takes an hour or more to reach the scene of an emergency.
One of my personal goals during the past several decades has been to live through an entire presidential term without knowing which politician occupies the White House. A second goal is to not know which segment the single party occupying the Congressional seats disguised as two parties pretends to be the one in power.
I almost made it through a presidential term without knowing who was up there once, but I fell off the wagon inadvertently because of 9/11. I don’t recall who the guy was who was president then, but I do remember having to know who he was then for a while.
This time around I hornswoggled myself into knowing. Him being a black guy, I was curious to see whether he’d be any different than the string of white ones preceding him. But now I’ve satisfied myself he isn’t and my curiosity’s receded sufficiently to allow me to pound it down into the seldom-referred-to compartment of my brain where I try to keep things that are none of my affair.
Old Sol and I have that in common, not wanting to know who is president of the US. He doesn’t want to know, either. Notice how he’s got his face squinched up in preparation for what he knows is coming.
But the challenge doesn’t begin with a new president. It begins early during each election year as a Chinese fire drill of power-hungry liars telling the truth about one-another, but lies about themselves. Along with the attitudinal lackeys of each among the citizenry saying things back and forth, repeating the lies in favor of their own preference and in opposition to those they vilify for one reason or another.
I’m going to be modifying the reading material online and offline I expose myself to so’s to help me in my goal of not knowing the names of all those lowlifes and read whatever lies they’re telling about others, and what truths are being told about them by their enemies.
From my point of view the greatest presidents of the US are those nobody ever heard of. They did their jobs so well they barely get honorable mention in history because nothing noteworthy happened while they were president. Which ought to be the goal of every president.
Here are some presidents I consider the great ones:
Martin Van Buren
Millard Fillmore
Franklin Pierce
Rutherford B Hayes
James Garfield
Chester A Arthur
Warren G. Harding
I’m including Jefferson Davis because nobody even acknowledges he was once president of half the country:
Here are two candidates for future greatness:
Gerald Ford
Jimmy Carter
Once the willow switch and razor strop went out of style as a method for dealing with loud, greedy, demanding children, the only methods left were ‘reasoning’ with them, which didn’t work, then ignoring them.
I’m going to skip the reasoning and just ignore them.
Even though Gale’s change in plans for last week postponed the schedule for The New Truck Resurrection the new year seemed a good place to start examining the next steps for exploiting the possible. I didn’t have a clear enough idea about the options and my thinking was bouncing around inside a range from becoming Joe Palooka’s pal, Humphrey Pennyworth:
to building a house on a trailer http://tinyurl.com/7a95xyo, to finding some trashed bumper-pull trailer and fixing it to live in RAZ Auction and an Aborted Escape Route. I needed to narrow things down. So I finally did the obvious and visited Craigslist to see what’s out there within the price-range of what I might be able to manage. The results were surprising, welcome and uplifting.
I received this travel trailer in a trade. It has been sitting for a while. We are in the process of cleaning it. {lots of dust} The trailer is in overall good condition. Would make a great hunting trailer. The outside looks dirty because it has been sitting onder a oak tree. I tried the A/C and it will have to have the dirt dauber nests removed, the fan makes noise. The water pump runs but I am not going to put water in the tank until the weather warms up. Not sure about the ref. but one the same size at Home Depot or Sams are about $100.00. I am selling the trailer as is where is for $1500.00. It has the propane tank with the small fitting. New tanks are about $20.00 each. The trailer looks great inside, it has not been abused.
And inside:
Or if the New Truck doesn’t turn out to be dependable after a Real Mechanic gets it going:
1983 Toyota RV – $1500
One Owner
Runs and Drives Good
53k on 4 cylinder
5 speed manual trans.
Missing door on camper…
Needs TLC..$1500 obo..
Inside:
What I found is that within a 200 mile radius of here there are a number of already livable dwellings on wheels available for $1000 to $1500. Livable, or capable of beng made so without a lot of expense or labor.
It took me a year to set aside a thousand bucks to be sure I could pay a mechanic to get the New Truck licensed, mechanic-worked, and inspection-stickered, or the Toyota fixed. But the work mightn’t require all of it. In any case, putting together whatever remains between what’s left and buying something will require some squeezing of turnip-blood.
But I need something I can pull out here and move the cats and me into so I can begin putting the cabin into the shape it was in when I moved here. And start pulling down the chicken house and pens, garden fence, and the upside-down hot tub project so’s nobody’s left with a mess I made of the place.
I think I managed, at least, to define the critical paths and some potential realities as a means of finding my way out of a situation I’d come to think of as too nigh-onto-hopeless to contemplate in any meaningful way.
All in one day, January 1, 2012.
I feel 30 years younger than I was December 31, 2011.
Good morning readers. Here’s wishing each of you whatever you consider best for yourself in 2012.
Some years are better viewed by hindsight than during the actual living of them. 1954 was such a year, and I have an idea 2012 might be another. Long hindsight smooths down the rough spots and helps remove a lot of the detritus keeping us from viewing it in ways we can appreciate the strong points.
Almost everyone in that picture is dead, with the possible exceptions of the blonde kid next to me, cousin wossname, the girl behind me without glasses, and my ownself. The blonde kid might be dead, or he mightn’t.
He and I never had much truck after the time that picture was taken. He lived in Pennsylvania was part of the reason, but the other part was in the fact I accidentally shot him in the lower leg with an arrow and his mom didn’t care to bring him down our way anymore. Next time I might have improved my marksmanship, she alleged.
Fact was the kid and I were shooting at a target, taking turns. He was down close to the target waiting for me to shoot so’s to retrieve the arrows and take his turn. But just as I released, he ran in front of the target and ruined my shot, sank that arrow spang into his calf a goodly distance.
On the ground bleeding and squalling to high heaven, he denied that’s how it happened, and there was an element of belief among the adults present. Them knowing how much I despised that spoiled little prick.
Anyway, with the softening provided by the passage of all those decades and all the protagonists either dead, or might as well be, 1954 shines out as a middling good year.
Similar to how I think there’s a good chance most people who are online January 1, 2013, will have fonder recollections of 2012 around January 1 2050, than they do recapping it 2013.
Which isn’t to suggest 2012 won’t be a great year. I fully expect it will. I won’t be the least surprised if 2012 has more surprises in store than almost any year in living memory. Tremendous opportunities for growth experiences. But growth experiences do have a way of needing more hindsight to be appreciated than those years when all we do is sit around watching television.
So, here’s wishing all of you as much potential for personal growth during 2012 as you consider yourself qualified to appreciate as soon afterward as possible.
Morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a visit.
Now that my freezer compartment’s thawed out I was due to make a town run for necessaries. Yesterday I took Little Red in and took the back road past Habitat for Humanity thinking they’d be open, but they weren’t.
But there’s a pallet out front where they always put things that didn’t sell for anyone who wants them, free. Whether they’re open, or closed, there’s often a lot of stuff there a person with the right turn of mind might find a use for. Around the other side of the building there’s a similar area marked, DONATIONS, clearly separated from this one.
The ‘Free’ sign wasn’t out, but the pallet did have a lot of junk on it, so I pulled in and looked it over. I figured the store was just closed for the day for some reason. I picked off three ceiling fan motors and a few other possibly useful items. I’ve got a number of other ceiling fan motors I picked off that pallet here I haven’t decided what to do with yet, but copper’s got a high pricetag on it, at the very least.
But when I got back and swung by Gale’s to brag about it he shook his head. “Man, they’ve been closed since before Christmas. I’m amazed someone hadn’t picked them up.”
“Closed? Since before Christmas?” Wrinkled brow, puzzling. “Sheeze! I’ll bet somebody dropped those off as donations. Just left them in the wrong place.”
So maybe I made a haul of some discarded fan motors and maybe I temporarily stole some intended to be donations to Habitat for Humanity. I’m going to have to contact Linda, the manager, to find out whether I need to haul them back to town. And if they’re closed until after New Year I reckons I’ll have the use of them until the status is nailed down as to whether they’re stolen property or pre-emptively rescued from some other less deserving scavenger.
Morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
This drawing of Jeanne’s was on an otherwise blank draft post page in the whatchallit, dashboard, with the title Order Out of Chaos. It’s evidently a Photoshop manipulation of another work and until I messed up re-sizing it and lost her explanation it also said (sold). Hopefully if she wants to she’ll add an addendum saying whatever else she wants to say about it.
But I was mulling over things that aren’t mainly on my mind deciding which of them to write about this morning, carefully avoiding the one thing that mainly is, when I saw the title in the drafts. It brought to focus what actually is swirling around in my brain. I suppose I might as well write a bit about that.
A project I’ve been working on almost a decade appears to be coming to a climax. Surprising progress began falling into place during the past few days, and preliminary results provide a reason to hope I’m finally examining datasets that will allow testing and formulating a theory. If the tests indicate it’s worth it, there’ll be revisions, more testing, more revisions, until something cohesive emerges, or doesn’t emerge.
I don’t dare speculate on where it will head because expectations have a way of working themselves into outcomes, and I’m doing my best to avoid that.
But the fact is, it’s taken a decade almost, and countless hours and days of research, calculations, accumulation of data, wrong directions untaken, other wrong directions taken and backed out of in getting here.
One way or another I think this simultaneity and time thing is finally going to be allowed to absent my life over the next few months. Order out of chaos finally, either by discovering my fundamental premises were wrong and I don’t have to do this anymore, or they were correct and sense can be made of this.
Either way, it’s a strange place to find myself, a hollow looming up in my life I wonder how I’m going to fill with what must inevitably be another pesky reincarnation.
The folks who run it are insufferably smug, downtalking, and annoying smarty-pantses. But they evidently have a cadre of followers scouting the planet for good ideas, which they post as ‘fails’, or bad, or quaintly bad taste compared to the tastes of the higher-minded posters and readers there.
So several times every day I open an email of the latest good ideas they’ve posted, allow them time to load and study them carefully. Ignoring the source. And every few posts another lightbulb goes off in my head as a result. Someone, somewhere had a problem similar to one I share, and figured out a way to solve it in a way I might also solve mine.
I suppose the people running the place are just out after hit-counts and making as much money as they can any way they can, and the downtalking smugness, they’ve found in their statistics, appeals to more people than the alternative approaches.
But whatever the reasons, I’m grateful they do what they do, and I sincerely hope they continue doing it.
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 