Every night someone, coons, deer, hogs, break into Fortress #1 where I keep the two younger roosters and the Communist Americauna, the Commie because it’s the only where she’ll sleep, roosters because daytimes they want to beat hell out of TGSB.
Every morning I go out and repair it before releasing the roosters into the pen and the Commie hen to free range. And by mid-day the two roosters have usually found a way out, by which time TGSB is usually in the other henhouse anyway, stove up and just wanting to rest.
If they don’t find a way out, I usually let them out mid-afternoon because I don’t care for the idea of anything being penned up all time. It allows them to run free for a few hours before bedtime.
But they’re still a potential threat to TGSB, and they’re a nuisance to get back into the pen, will never go in until the Commie hen re-enters to roost.
Today I’m pulling a page from the immediate, current activities of the US Congress and Whitehouse. As of today I’m going to fix that pen so they can’t get out. Period. Until I take it into my head they’ve been there long enough so’s I feel good.
Suspending Habeus Corpus, I am. Indefinite detention for anyone strikes my fancy. Maybe if I decide I don’t like one of the cats I’ll put him/her in there, too.
The Cohoe women raised and sheared the sheep, made the dye, hand-wove this rug.
As the post-non-Y2K hard times hardened, I did a lot of scrambling trying to make ends meet. One by-product of that squeeze was that I began doing some trading with the tribes for pottery, rock art, rugs, and other products to resell.
This got me acquainted with a Navajo man who became a running buddy for a while. Curtis Cohoe. [Not to be mistaken for his namesake, the Mescalero referred to on several posts.] A man about 50 years old. Pine Hill (Self-determination) Rez. Good family, a generation earlier. His mom and aunt still raise sheep, shear, dye the wool with dye they make from crushed rock and plants, and weave good rugs the old way.
Early in his life, Curtis started out pretty well. He was intelligent, talented, and I’ve always assumed he must have attended a university. When he was being an artist everything he did was in demand. He was an excellent shade-tree baling-wire and chewing-gum vehicle mechanic, and he could chop a cord of wood with an axe almost as fast as I could cut one with a chainsaw.
Worked for the US Forestry Service as a fire fighter, then as a Ranger in California until things went haywire. Back in New Mexico, a cop raped his younger sister and got by with it. Curtis came back and beat the cop to death with his fists, which got him 10 years in prison.
Once that decade of bars was over, Curtis never really got back onto the right track. He had a lot of anger in him, and he had some brothers who were in and out of prison a lot, who kept the pressure on from the law. (Curtis was fairly frightened of one of the brothers, whom he described as a bad-ass. The other was an evangelical preacher who sold some drugs and stole in between times).
Curtis was much of a man in a lot of ways when he was sober, or mostly sober. I’d known him a considerable while before I ever saw him drunk, never realized he was sometimes a drinker. He shifted his residence frequently between the family place on the Rez and Grants, New Mexico. Maybe that’s how it escaped my notice.
But early in our friendship one day I drove up to a place he was doing some artwork painting on a table top in an alleyway next to the railroad track in Grants. I was just in time to see three semi-drunk Din’e toughs in their mid-20s approach him, exchange a few words, and start swinging.
By the time I got out of the truck to help him he didn’t need any help. The two fully conscious ones got to their feet and left at a stumbling run. The less-conscious one stuck around long enough for me to try to stop the bleeding by tying a bandana around his head while Curtis intermittently kicked in his ribcage. I’m glad I never met the brother Curtis was scared of and considered a badass.
I don’t know whether I knew Curtis didn’t have a license to drive an automobile. He frequently drove my truck running errands and chores. I had no qualms about loaning the Ford pickup to him when he needed to go out to the Rez for one reason or another provided my old Isuzu was running okay.
One day we were preparing for a trading trip to Shiprock and Curtis left in the Ford to get it gassed up for the trip. When he didn’t come back for a couple of hours and I saw a wrecker go past towing my truck I immediately went over to the wrecker to find out what was going on.
“Is this yours?” He grinned because he knew damned well it was mine. My apartment was no more than 150 yards from his yard and we both occasionally had coffee a few feet apart in the Chinese restaurant between his place and mine. “Your damned Indian’s in jail. Towing fee on the truck’s $50.”
“What did he do?”
“They stopped him for a routine traffic check. He didn’t have a license and when they called it in they found out he’d had a lot of DWIs. He’s going to be in there a while.”
I paid out the $50 to get the truck out of hock and seethed about it considerably. It would have been too easy for it all not to happen and I found myself thinking Curtis had about outlived his usefulness in my affairs.
But mutual acquaintances brought me a message from Curtis asking me to bail him out of jail, telling me how sorry he was about it all. He was going to be stuck in there for at least six weeks if he couldn’t raise bail. Swore he’d pay me back everything he’d cost me.
I wasn’t Mister Moneybags, but I could squeeze $500 if I had to, and I did over a few days, selling things cheaper than I’d intended. Once he was released he brought a friend from the Rez over and told me he was going back to Pine Hill for a while. Asked if he could borrow my pickup for his friend to drive him back out there. His friend had a license, and I loaned it to him, figuring it would be gone for a day, maximum.
The truck never came back. Curtis and his friend evidently got drunk on the way to Ramah and got chased by a Navajo-hired cop on the State Highway until they ran the truck into a tree, Curtis driving. I wasn’t long finding out he was being held in the private penal facility outside Grants, and that he was looking at two years in prison, and I was looking at losing the bail money.
A week or two later I heard a guard had grabbed him and Curtis knocked him down. He was now looking at no-less-than five years hard time.
Everything else being equal I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still there.
Sometime afterward I had a buyer for one of the rugs his mother and aunt made, so I stopped in on her for a visit at Pine Hill. Naturally the subject of Curtis came up.
“He needed to stay out of town,” was all she said.
This video is called Shopping at the Third Hand Store, aka Dumpster Diving. I love these guys. Shopping carts, cell phones, watermelons. Too cute for words.
We have been eating out of dumpsters for a little more than a year now. We have never gone hungry and we have never been sick. In fact, we now eat way better than we ever did when we had money, and our immunity to illness seems to have been bolstered from dumpstering for food.
A while back I received the following comment from Poland on one of my YouTube dumpster videos:
That’s possible only in America!
In Polish dumpsters we have only stinky dump, and i mean it, just dump.
What you have here it’s not dumpster as i know it, just place when people leave useful stuff. I think i’ll just move to America and live from Dumpster diving, it would higher…
That line of misbehaving sunspots that were marching across above the equator so long finally got its comeuppance. Today there are only three honest-to-goodness ones and the litter of little peckerwoods just coming around the horizon.
Astrophysicists aren’t in agreement about what was getting out of hand up there, but many now assert it might be mud and all this rain that finally got it under control. There’s been so much rain lately every stick of firewood here’s been soaked, and even though cooling down Old Sol with wet firewood would be a big job of work, eventually it was bound to happen. Probably the reason for this cold snap, too.
But the other line of thinking among Hopi Elders, surviving Mayan track-of-time keepers, and the folks at BUREAU INTERNATIONAL DES POIDS ET MESURES, ORGANISATION INTERGOUVERNEMENTALE DE LA CONVENTION DU METRE, believe there’s a more novel reason that line of sunspots dwindled. They couldn’t stay in step.
Time, they assert, is so screwed up it’s impossible to keep anything going with any regularity and the sunspots finally just got too frustrated to keep trying.
There might be a lot to that. I get the email reports from the Hawaii Konate folk, and the circular always starts off with the caveat:
“Coordinated Universal Time UTC and its local realizations UTC(k). Computed values of [UTC-UTC(k)] and uncertainties valid for the period of this Circular. From 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, TAI-UTC = 34 s.”
Those uncertainties cover a lot of ground all over the planet and the people making a living trying to keep track of what time it is send out the Circular to advise interested parties of what time it wasn’t, mostly, any given day in cities of clockwatchers. But even telling what time it wasn’t has a considerable uncertainty factor, which they aren’t ashamed to admit.
I don’t know why they even keep those people on the payroll if they can’t tell us what time it wasn’t.
I’m going to kick this around with the cats and chickens. See if we can’t figure out a way to get a piece of the action on this timekeeping racket.
In case you hadn’t noticed it, WordPress has evidently installed a planetarium software over-ride here with the stars speeded up and going across the blog north-to-south instead of horizontally. I’ve no idea why.
After they filmed the scene from the movie 21 grams at the motel next door to where I lived in Grants, New Mexico, I got the job of helping to clean up the site afterward. While I watched them finish things up I saw wossname, Sean Penn smoking the cigar above and leave it in this ashtray.
Those folks left a hell of a mess.
But being the sort of guy I am, I emptied those butts into a baggie and stored them away for whatever future use I could put them to. That’s bound to be an expensive cigar and I always figured on smoking it on down, but I could never build up the certainty I’d advanced to that level of risk level yet. Whatever’s on that cigar always seemed to me potentially more lethal than whatever I’ve already got and don’t know about.
But I’ve digressed. What I wanted to say is, “DAMN those movie people are a messy bunch.”
That, and, “Why don’t WordPress stars move horizontally across the screen like normal stars?”
Every year I wonder about these pictures of Scrooge and others wearing pointee nightcaps. It’s a subject dear to my heart because I became an aficionado of sleeping hats when I used to do my slumbering outdoors a lot.
The function of a nightcap is to keep a person from losing his body heat through his exposed scalp and hair. Besides doing that it needs to stay on the head while you toss and turn. Those pointed hats do none of that.
I’ve tried a lot of different types of sleeping caps through the years and found it’s not easy to find one that satisfies all the minimum criteria:
This one’s sheepskin and I’ve used it for 30 years when the weather’s cold enough. But it’s stiff and doesn’t stay on all that well because one of the straps for tying under the chin broke off sometime way back there and I haven’t gotten around to fixing it. The temperature has to be not-too-warm or it becomes a cranial sweat lodge and not-too-cold because it doesn’t provide any protection to the exposed part of the neck.
A balaclava solves some of that, but it’s only one layer thick, somewhat expensive, and tends to wear out at the chin. When the ambient temperature gets down around freezing it needs some help.
They make those fleece caps for women and I find them in thrift stores for a buck frequently. When I find them, I buy them and wear them a lot, outdoors, indoors and as sleeping caps when the weather’s cold, but not cold enough for something more extreme.
During this last cold snap when the water froze inside the house I came up with this, and I like it a lot. It’s a fleece blanket folded four times lengthwise, wrapped around the head and tucked into/zipped in to the fleece vest. It stays in place and is warmer than anything I’ve ever found. It’s tempting to drag out the scissors, needle and thread and cut it down to a four-layer balaclava, but I hate to mess up that fleece blanket. The “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” school of winter headgear might apply here.
When the weather’s cool but not cold, the stocking cap is a seductive option, even though they don’t ride out the night well. I keep a stack of a dozen of them on the bookshelf above the bed so I can reach up and find one for a quick reload without turning on the light. Same concept as a fresh clip of ammo for a rifle near at hand.
Pointee hats are talk. As Tuco observed in The Good, Bad and Ugly, “When you’re going to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”
I watched this movie repeatedly in theaters when it came out in 1970, always remembered it, but never came across it again. Four decades later I still have vivid recollections of certain scenes and a general impression it’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.
I’ve no idea whether I’d still like it today, no idea whether seeing it again would inspire me to think of all of it as still as somehow haunting and valid to the human experience as I once did.
Watching the trailer brought back some reminders of scenes, but it somehow failed to capture whatever it was that captured me.
In some subtle ways my mind connects Brewster McCloud with Balzac’s Droll Stories. A multi-layered plotting capable of being enjoyed for the surface stream hilarity, but containing something fundamental, profound and pervasive about the human condition.
If you’ve watched this movie recently enough to recall it better than I do, or if you should see it after reading this, I’d be interested in learning how it sits with you.
First, at the Hospice Thrift Store in Kerrville I found these gloves with no fingertips for $1.50. When it’s cold in this cabin I go to 18 layers of longjohns and sweatsuits, Sorel snowboots and innovative headgear. But my fingers stiffen until I can only use the computer with a lot of mistakes.
I’m thinking those gloves are going to fix that one.
But on arriving back home and tuning the computer to this frequency I found to my delight that Michael had explained the solution to another one I’ve been scratching my head over longer than I care to admit.
Adventure wears a lot of disguises. In garage laboratories, in pens behind their homes, in backyards, they’re out there enduring the smiles and shrugs of the non-adventurous.
For discussion of Nikola Tesla history, inventions, and coil design and construction techniques. The physics of Tesla’s varied patents, and ideas are especially welcome, even if they generate some heated discussions.
This list is for the dissemination and discussion of all things TESLA. Since Tesla was a man of wide and varied talents, other physical phenomena discussions are possible.
All About Packgoats is a collection of interesting and insightful people who share an interest in hiking and packing with goats. With experience ranging from veteran packgoat professional to weekend hiking enthusiast, the answers to your packgoat questions can be found here.
This discussion group is devoted to the study of gravity and the physics of gravity and the interaction thereof. This forum is intended to allow all views and concepts to be entertained and evaluated by all, regardless of how traditional and fundamental or non-traditional and non-fundamental the ideas might be. Whenever possible, material submitted for discussion should include supporting data when available.
Or this:
In the Sandia mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, there’s about an acre of house and museum built by a man with his own idea of adventure. It’s called Tinkertown. Above the entrance there’s a sign, “HERE’S WHAT I DID WHILE YOU WATCHED TELEVISION”.
He adventured through life creating thousands of Rube Goldberg mechanical animations just to see if he could do it.
If he couldn’t create that animation, or make a Cadillac with the outer-surface covered by pennies, he wasn’t half the man he thought he was.
“We wonder what was the inspiration that could cause a man to spend 28 years to carve a Coral Castle from the ground up using nothing but home made tools. An homage to unrequited love? Perhaps to illustrate ancient sciences that defy gravity? Or maybe just sheer, raw human determination? The Coral Castle is an everlasting mystery to those who explore it.”
Or The Perfect Man Shrine, middle of desert nowhere, Columbus, New Mexico:
Human lives don’t last long. There are plenty of candidates who consider themselves wise and willing to tell us how we ought to spend ours.
The people who built it are dead, or too old to maintain it.
But maybe when we close our eyes that last time we’d consider it well spent if we just did something, sometime while we were stumbling through it.
I’d bet not one of the people above ever voiced the lament, “I’m SO bored!”
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 
