Tag Archives: lifestyle

A Matter of Aesthetic Perspectives

Posted on May 19, 2012 by | 5 comments

In town the other day I stopped into the Autozone store for a roll of electrical tape, nosed around a bit and found some titanium drill bits I think might be an improvement over the simulated drill bits I have around here.

Paid my money and went out the front door into the heat.  Sitting beside Little Red was a shiny 20 year old sedan with tinted windows rolled up, engine running, making the damnedest racket I’ve ever heard an automobile make.  The noise could have been heard across the street and the car almost seemed to be shaking with each new sound.  I stared at it a moment trying to figure out what could be wrong with it, what was happening to it.

“That car’s got a MAJOR problem,” thinks I.  “I’ll bet the owner’s going to love coming back out here and finding a pile of auto parts instead of what he rode in on.”

I perused the distance between it and Little Red to consider whether I dared go back inside to warn someone, or needed to get further from it.  Decided to take the chance and stepped back inside.

A line of people were at the cash register waiting to pay and the clerk was ringing someone up.  I interrupted him and he looked up.  “That car out there sounds like it’s about to explode!”  I gestured behind me, still looking at him.

Three people backward in line a guy who looked as though he just got out of prison, muscle shirt with a lot of muscles to go with it scowled at me and took half-a-step out of line.  “No.  That’s my music.”  Questioning, tentative look, brink-of-threatening, deciding, considering.

“Oh.  Okay.”

I did an about face and moved outside sharply.  Stared and listened to the car again, trying to squeeze the concept of music into the equation.  I couldn’t pull it off.  Shook my head and got in Little Red feeling slightly foolish.

It’s what I get for poking my nose into someone else’s business, I reckons.

Old Jules

5 Comments

Posted in 2012, Survival

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Current Brush Dam Project

Posted on May 18, 2012 by | 2 comments

When I began this a person couldn’t tell there was an oak tree without standing off at a distance because it was so choked with cedars.

A gully was being cut down to bedrock in the swale.  I’ve got a lot more cedar in the immediate area I’ll be clearing, but I’m figuring before I put anymore on the dam I’ll stand atop what’s there and cross cut as deep as the chainsaw bar will reach to compact it as much as possible before adding more material.

Incidently, once I got most of the cedar cleared from around that oak I found this great, long, straight one.  It’s a keeper, though I don’t know what for.  Assuming I can get it loose and untangled from the upper parts of the oak without having to cut it.

There’s a watershed of maybe fifteen acres with a lot of slope draining into this spot.  My thought is I’ll bring the dam roughly six feet high after compacting, then thicken it with whatever cedar’s left in the immediate area.  Afterward I’ll move upgrade and create a series of brush berms across the grade to slow down concentration times.

Lots of work left to do on it, but watching that dam grow’s a smiler for me.  Someday I’m going to try to figure out what makes me tick.  This whole sudden new joy of doing all this came out of nowhere.  Gale’s up there laid up, doesn’t have a clue I’m doing most of it on his property, though I describe most of it to him.  He shrugs and tries to seem encouraging, but I doubt he can picture what’s going on here.

Meanwhile, me just down here working my arse off for the hell of doing it, not a clue why.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Adventure, Country Life, Outdoors, Science, Texas

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They Ought to Add ‘Barbara Allen’ to the Controlled Substance List

Posted on May 18, 2012 by | 5 comments

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

I’m really glad I don’t have free will.  If I’d had free will I’d almost certainly have screwed things up something awful.  I can’t see any way a person making a lifetime of deliberate, conscious choices could have made the necessary ones to allow me to eventually become me.  If I’d had to find my way through that maze all by myself there’s no guessing what I’d have become, what would have become of me.

I’m a firm believer the Universe gave us scorpions, black widow spiders, brown recluse spiders and similar poisonous orthropods to train a man to shake out his trousers and boots before he puts them on.  But he no sooner learns it than he begins to forget slowly, and eventually he’s pulling on his britches or boots same as if the Universe hadn’t blessed us with Brother Scorpion.

But if the timing is good, if the Universe is feeling generous, and if the asteroid Pallas is 85 days since a conjunction with Old Sol and 293 days since an opposition, sometimes the Universe will cut us a break.  A man can slip on his britches, pull up his galluses, feel something crawling up his leg under the cloth, dance around slapping his pants, and shake out a regular big bug carcass instead of the various alternatives.

But I’ve digressed. 

Yesterday I borrowed Little Red and headed to town feeling good, but worn down to a small frazzle from cutting big cedars with my expensively repaired chainsaw, dragging them over piece-by-piece to construct a tasteful aspiring beaver dam.  Made all the feedstore, thrift store, grocery store and dollar store stops grinning like a possum, joking with the store clerks.  Bought a can of Chinese boot wax and asked the clerk whether he could tell it from Shinola, which brought a blank look.

Even bought two packages of this for a buck each at Dollar Tree.  I’ve never seen the stuff before, but my thigh was itching something fierce from that non-black widow earlier.  I was feeling a strong urge to find a restroom and drop my pants for a looksee.

As a backup, in case whatever was going on down there was as full of drama as it felt, I picked up a tube of this, too, at a buck.

But I’ve digressed again.

On the way out of Dodge I swung by the Boys Ranch Thrift Store, second to the last stop.  Not much of interest there except a shopping cart full of hardback books with a sign, “Free Books”.  I nosed around, popped open an anthology, A Treasure of the Familiar.  It opened to “Barbara Allen“, which I haven’t thought of in half-a-century.  Walked out singing to myself, trying to remember the words to “Barbara Allen“, putting the first few stanza together.  Sang it a mile down the road to the dog-catcher thrift store, debating with myself whether to go inside, or just head home.

In the parking lot a joyful sight grabbed me.

The finest off-road vehicle I’ve ever owned was a 1986 Montero.  Thousands of giddy miles up and down mountains, desert and canyons in my old Montero.  That truck would squeeze between any two trees the Universe could invent, climb anything, go through hip-deep water.  But when you got it stuck, it was for-sure, lead-pipe cinch, STUCK.

So I left that place singing “Barbara Allen” at the top of my lungs, pretending Little Red was my old Montero, remembering and flying low to the ground.

Stopped in to drop off a few bags of feed at Gale’s, needing to lift something to bring myself down, but even after unloading a few hundred pounds of sacks, still singing, still flying.

Middling good day, it was.

Old Jules

5 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, America, Country Life, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Texas, Thrift Stores, Trucks

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Morning Gratitude Affirmations

Posted on May 17, 2012 by | 4 comments

A previous blog post from April 10, 2005

Hokay.  I try to think of five particularly communistic things going on in my life every morning, every evening, during the day, to find reasons for being grateful for.  It’s a ritual I try to practice constantly, but if I begin the day with it, it’s a lot easier to remember for the rest of the day.

Soooooo.

I’m going to let the numbers on the lottery draw last night be my first, even though it’s really easy.  Those numbers did good and I have a lot of good feeling about what hit last night.  It’s cheating, but I’m going to be grateful for that anyway.

Hokay.  Number two.  It snowed last night.  It’s April, everything was budded out, and it damned well snowed.  Maybe you think I’m not grateful, but I am.  If the frost gets those buds for a third time there ain’t going to be any apples, apricots, grapes, pecans, but there’s always another year, and we need the moisture, probably more than we need the fruit this year.  It’s been a long drought and the moisture deficit isn’t entirely made up, even with all the rain and snow this winter.  Yeah.  I’m grateful.  Yes, I am.  I can feel it, reluctant, squirming, fighting every inch of the way, but grateful is emerging.

Number 3.  Tres.  I’m grateful for these affirmations.  That’s an easy one too, cheating, but they’ve had an enormous influence on my life for the past decade, and sometimes I forget to be grateful for knowing how good they are for me.  And besides, it fills a slot, allowing me not to have to confide to you what some of the ‘really communist’ troubles I’m going to have to be grateful for before I get past these affirmations in my private mind, this morning.  But those are none of your business, so I’m going to try to keep this clean and well lighted.

Number 4.  Quatro.  Lessee.  A cat just took a dump on the rug over there across the room.  Knows better than that, but did it anyway.  It means, hopefully, that the cat was communicating to me the litter box is getting too full.  I’m grateful that cat reminded me of my neglect.  I haven’t cleaned it up, but when I do I will examine the stool and make certain the cat wasn’t telling me something else, something more important.  I’m grateful a cat will tell a person willing to listen what’s going on with it, what sort of health problems might be hidden there in that pea brain, wanting to come out but not knowing how.

Number 5:  Half an hour after daybreak and the wind’s coming back up outside.  I’m grateful for that wind, that howling and clattering of things loose on the porch, the rabid windchimes, the cold air whistling in around the old wooden frames of the windows.

Maybe you think I’m not grateful for that wind, but I am.  Here’s why.

Hmmmmm.  Hmmmmmm.  I am.  Just give me a minute here.

Ahhhh..  I’m grateful for that wind because it’s going to melt the snow quickly.  Maybe even soon enough to save the blossoms and buds.  Maybe that old wind will just evaporate enough of the snow, good old wind, temperature 37 degrees F, maybe it will have all that snow gone in no time at all and the new grapevines won’t lose their buds, the apples will be okay.

A lot of people mightn’t be grateful for that wind howling to blue blazes out there, me sipping my coffee here, typing, feeling the cold air on my bare ankles, but I am.  Yes, I am.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, Animals, Country Life, Human Behavior, Lottery, New Mexico, NM, Placitas, Spirituality

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Nocturnal Target Practice? Poachers? Or Just Shooting a Prowler?

Posted on May 16, 2012 by | 3 comments

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

1:55 am I must have been on the verge of awakening anyway.  Someone fired off six rounds from what might have been a .22 magnum rimfire pistol, rapid, but somewhat spaced.  Then a pause, maybe to reload, then a single shot.  Close enough and loud enough to get one of the roosters crowing and me considering the matter.

Then, 2:15 am, ten, maybe 13 rapid fire shots from a large-bore autoloading pistol.  Afterward, silence.

It’s none of my affair, but I’ll confess to lying there awake pondering it all.  Doesn’t make any sense at all.  That first six shots sounded aimed, maybe someone shooting a coon, hitting, but not getting a killing shot.  Reloading, issuing a coup d’grace. 

Okay.  But what about the second set of shots, thinks I.  Something didn’t die, or run away?  Someone crawling around amongst the ticks and rattlers looking for a target to shoot back at?

What the hell?

I don’t mean to be nit-picky and overly critical, but I’m thinking it might have been poachers who didn’t have a clue. 

Dammit, that isn’t the way you road-hunt deer.  You use a .22, spot it between the fences, drop it with one shot, get it into the trunk or back of the truck and get out of Dodge.  And you don’t road-hunt on a road where there’s only one way out [back the way you came], such as this one.

That’s all assuming it’s outsiders.  Anyone living around here hungry for deer meat would just knock one on the head with a hammer daytimes when they’re trying to run them out of the front yard.

Okay, poachers road-hunting seem unlikely.

On the other hand, those cops from Beaumont who rent the lease half-mile southeast of here were up there a few days ago.  Maybe they just got noisy-drunk again and had a firefight over one of their lady friends who sometimes squeal and go shrill after midnight.  That might make sense.

Or maybe the new neighbor was just trying out his night-vision on something moved in the bushes and the dog barked.

Hell, I don’t know.  Ain’t my affair.  I’ll keep an eye open for the vultures circling, anyway.

Old Jules

3 Comments

Posted in Adventure, America, Country Life, Human Behavior, Police, Texas

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About Trust and Knowing Other Humans

Posted on May 15, 2012 by | 5 comments

Originally posted on another blog Tuesday, October 24, 2006 

Maybe this is all bull, but it’s the most painless way I’ve ever found to view reality and my human co-conspirators here in this lifetime.  Riding the mudball around the star and watching the two-legged critters wade around the muck beside me hasn’t caused me to admire us as a species.

As for knowing other humans, we mostly don’t allow ourselves to ‘know’ anyone. Instead, we construct them as we wish them to be, assign a set of behaviors required of them.  Often the people we’re trying to hammer into our mold haven’t  agreed to try to satisfy these requirements.  Still, we count it a violation of ‘trust’ if they don’t perform according to the rules we created.

But, even if they told us they agreed to be what we wished them to be, (and they might have meant it when they did it) obeying contracts of that sort just aren’t part of the usual human machinery. The flesh is weak and time and circumstance erode the best of intentions.

Trusting human beings based on unrealistic contracts probably leads to more heartache than simply abandoning the concept of ‘trust’ and the demands that go with it, and adopting a consistent readiness to forgive and continue loving them. (With no joint checking accounts or shared credit cards).

Old Jules

5 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, Communication, Human Behavior

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Salt Cedar Latillas for Erosion Control

Posted on May 14, 2012 by | 2 comments

During the toughest times of the post-Y2K years the blessing I appreciated most, but enjoyed least was cutting salt cedar in the bosques, trimming it,and selling it as latillas off some busy intersection in Albuquerque.  The best bosques weren’t accessible by vehicle, were loaded with ticks, and all the bosques on the Rio Grande are home to more rattlesnakes than live in the rest of New Mexico combined.

But when nothing else was working, when they’d cut off the utilities because I couldn’t pay the bills, I’d hitch up Old Faithful, the pickup bed trailer, load the chainsaw and loppers, and head for the bottomlands for a couple of days.

The work was grueling.  Bundling them and pissanting them back to the trailer took forever and assured a person would have a dozen ticks fighting over every inch of skin, and avoiding Brother Rattler required lightning reflexes along with a wary eye.

Once I had a full trailer-load I’d bundle them, pack them down and find a busy street corner where I’d sell them for $10 per bundle.  Usually took all day, but I’d try to get back to Grants in time to reach the city offices, pay the utilities and have the power turned back on first thing the next day.

It’s a lot easier in Texas, though I doubt there’s any market for them.  Never heard of anyone in Texas using latillas.  But salt cedar’s as water-hogging, damaging, invasive and pervasive here as in New Mexico.  Grows in the grader ditch between here and the State Ranch Road 385.

I can get a truckload of it in half-hour or so, and in a lot of ways I think it might be better than juniper for erosion control.  In that particular length of driveway between Gale’s front gate and his house the last runoff bypassed some of the earlier work and cut some new channels.  The salt cedar’s easier to obtain in this instance than juniper, so I’m shoring it up with salt cedar.

I’ve built four more rock and brush dams downstream from the first one in the creek to the east, hopefully to catch whatever washes out of the main one, come next runoff event.

Hmmm an aside.  A digression.  A parenthetical remark:

The new neighbor up the hill’s got him a spanking new machine to back up his track loader dozer and his rubber-tired backhoe/frontend loader. 

It’s a lopper of the magnum variety mounted on a Bobcat with tracks over the tires.  Air conditioned, everything computerized, even got a rock rake with it.  Only $57K.

I reckons I’ll just stick with my $8 thrift store Chinese repair job loppers.

Meanwhile, on a more exciting note.

I was telling my friend Rich on the phone about weirdness and anomalies I was getting on barycentric calculations for Old Sol positions.  While we were talking he went to the US Naval Observatory site and pulled up the ‘Read Me’ file for the MICA software. 

Rich, generous, amazing friend that he is, spang right-then-and-there ordered a copy for me.

Turns out they discovered an error for multiple calculations that didn’t exist for single calculations.  They’ve released a new version, 2.2.2, with the errors corrected, along with some other improvements I’d grumbled to myself it needed but suffered silently.

Only trouble I’ve found with it is that it won’t allow me to import my hundred-or-so custom locations.  I’m having to feed them in individually, longitude, latitude, elevations, each freaking one!  The Location Manager’s designed so I can’t even copy and paste them.

And when I luckily installed it on the old machine first, just in case, it over-wrote my old location manager.  Freaking erased it spang off the damned computer.

Damned pointee-headed astronomer bastards.  Rot in hell.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2012, Astronomy, Country Life, Nature, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Science, Senior Citizens, Survival, Texas

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A Plethora of Pinatas

Posted on May 13, 2012 by | 7 comments

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

Mostly it’s just a hodge-podge here at the moment.  Got a call from Gale and Kay before sunset, they were on the way home, he’d been released from the hospital.  So things are good on that front.

The rainfall event following the most recent post was about three inches according to the new neighbor.  Below’s a pic of Ranch Road 385 crossing the Little Devil Creek [locals are adamant it’s a ‘river’, not a creek].  Provides some perspective about how frequent three-inch rain storms are in this vicinity, and how much more maudlin and sentimental another inch would have been.

The rock and brush dam survived.

There’s a goodly bit of silt  dropped ahead of it, the parts that washed out weren’t maudlin and sentimental enough to kill the deal.

Speaking of which.  Although there’s a surprising dearth of bumper-stickers for an election year, this [I conjecture] non-political one is still at the top of the charts on Texas bumpers and back windows.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about what drivers who choose this in one form or another are attempting to convey about themselves to other drivers, but thus far it escapes me.  No parking lot in Texas is complete without a few vehicles decorated with some variety of the plethora that must be available from the bumper sticker/decal magnates of imagination.

A roll of toilet paper on the ground there under the hat would go a long way to clear things up, if that’s the intended message.  But most likely it ain’t.

The demand by Texas drivers that other drivers support undeclared Presidential Military Adventures might be becoming stealthier, though it was fairly stealthy from the start.  Replacing the red-white and blue with cammie at least, is an uncharacteristic approach to honesty in motivation.

But as for explicit political bumper stickers, I only saw three.  One for some wannabe king who isn’t, the other demanding the current king be dumped without confessing a preference for an alternative.

The other political bumper sticker:  SHAFFER FOR SHERIFF – The Next Generation In Law Enforcement, struck me as a bit ominous.  Evidently the candidate wants voters to know he intends to incorporate more sophisticated surveillance, cameras, cow prods, computerized profiling of drivers at traffic stops, weaponry with more fire power, and newer vehicles for deputies to ride around in.

Finally, I got my chainsaw back finally from putting it in to let a real person work on it, finally.  Haven’t fired it up yet, but I know from what it cost to get it worked on and how long it took, that it’s gonna be a bull-goose chainsaw now. 

You folks looking for an entrepreneurial enterprise to occupy yourselves might be well served by considering small engine repairs.  This guy had a parking lot filled with riding lawn mowers waiting to be fixed, and if the chainsaw’s any indicator, there’s a fortune waiting to be made.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2012, Country Life, Politics, Texas

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Septuagenarian Scandal

Posted on May 13, 2012 by | 3 comments

Headlines and commentary from Saturday October 21, 2006:

Old enough to be her Father. Ehhhh?

SEPTUAGENARIAN SCANDAL:

Sister Silvia Gomes De Sousa, 39, has been  charged with threatening to murder and with arson after allegedly setting fire to the house of the village priest in Roccalumera, Sicily,  Italy.

Why?

She stopped by the house where Fr. Carmelo Mantarro, 70,   lives and “I just flipped when I came to the house and caught him in  bed with another woman who is married,” she testified in a court  proceeding.

“We had been together four years and I had even had two abortions because of him.”

(London Daily Mail)

The burning question:  Who takes her confession?

Okay.  Let’s see if there’s a novel in here somewhere.

  • Nun and priest consumate out-of-wedlock affirmation of holy vows.
  • Nun gets a couple of abortions ‘because of him’.  (He evidently believes in abortion, forces her by threatening her with her job if she doesn’t get one? )
  • Married woman insinuates herself between them trying to become a homebreaker of sorts.
  • Nun sets his house afire and tries to kill him during a fit of anger.

Score card:

Deadly sins, lust and anger?  Only two?  Hmmm.  Maybe a person could squeeze envy and greed in there…. The nun envied the married woman and didn’t want to share.

Commandments, adultery and for a Catholic, homicide of a fetus.  Covetousness.. married woman wanted what the nun felt was hers.  I count three Commandments.

Throw in a little something on the side involving vows nuns and priests take and you’re as close as priests and nuns are ever going to get to sticking up banks and boosting cars.

I’m not a Christian and I’m about to turn 70.  If life gets boring during the next few years I think I’ll convert to the Mother Church.

Old Jules

3 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, Human Behavior, Relationships, Spirituality

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900 Pound Gorillas, Kidney Stones and Dying Texas Towns

Posted on May 9, 2012 by | 4 comments

I talked to Kay on the phone last night.  Gale’s doing a lot better.  His marble-sized kidney-stone is still in there, but they installed some kind of bypass tube until they can identify what it’s made of, then break it up or do something else with it.  His fever’s down and though he’s still in ICU, looks as though this won’t be his excuse for exiting the vehicle.

Marble-sized kidney stones ought to be worth something, considering the trouble a person goes to in the growing of them.  The only one I ever had was only the size of a grassburr, but it was worth every cent I paid for it, plus some boot.  In Peace Corps training I’d passed some blood and the medico told me it was probably a kidney stone, so I thought I knew about them, but I didn’t.  If that Hawaii thing was a kidney stone I must have been living right.

This one came on suddenly, sometime in the mid-1970s, and for a few hours it got so the nearest thing to a painless position was upside down against the wall, bent at the neck, torso, feet and legs held up by the wall.

I decided I was dying fast and agreed to allow my ex-wife to haul me to Scott and White Hospital, 30 minutes away, to die there.  Someone in the emergency room suggested it might be a kidney stone and I emphatically declared it wasn’t.  “I’ve had a kidney stone.  This isn’t a kidney stone.   This is a grapefruit-sized tumor!”

They took me at my word and pursued other avenues for several hours while I demanded they check me in and begin cutting out that tumor.  Around midnight I began telling my wife I’d be dead in just a little while, “You’ve been a blessing in my life, Babe.  I’m sorry to leave you like this.”

But they finally dyed my bloodstream and proved to me it was a kidney stone.  Gave me a shot of morphine and I went around the ER shaking hands, thanking everyone, congratulating them on being genius-quality practicioners of medicine.  They assured me the morphine would wear off and offered the hope I’d pass the stone before it did.

But I’ve digressed.  Get a person telling about a kidney stone and he’ll tell it as long as you’ll listen.  Giardia and kidney stones have that in common, though giardia might be worse in the long haul.  Getting the Egyptian Ducksquirts and abdominal cramping for six months is probably memorable.  Then there’s shingles, which I could tell you about, but won’t.  But all those qualify as 900 pound gorillas, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.  Mostly people survive them.

Yeah, I digressed again.  I began this post to tell you about Junction, Texas.  The County Seat.  Gale and I went over there the day his world took the plunge into the planet-kidney-stone, so’s he could submit his application for the Agricultural Tax Whatchallit.

I was going to tell you how a mile of main street had half a dozen cars parked along it, how a few businesses are still struggling to survive.  How they have a lot of thrift stores, but the prices are too high.  How the town’s got a huge park on the river I’d like to fish in sometime.

But I won’t.  To hell with it.  I’ll tell you some other time.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2012, Senior Citizens, Texas

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