Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
We were blessed with a few days of rain here, beginning with a frog strangler during the night. Most of the cats and I were in the RV when the tree fell on the roof of the cabin, but it made enough noise to satisfy our needs to hear something.
I made a run for the cabin to see how bad things were, but it turned out nothing came through the roof this time. Just a wake-up call, though. Lots more dead trees around the cabin.
After the big rain came a day of light, intermittent rainfall which allowed me to chase down and caulk various roof leaks in the RV roof I’d noted and I plugged a good many of them. Found a few more when the rain began again, but it’s coming along.
Second night after the rain the feral hogs came in, snorting and banging around between the RV and the cabin. I just ignored them, let them do their own thing because I wasn’t needing any altercations with that sort of individuals.
Meanwhile, the neighbor up the hill was able to burn a lot of the piles of cedar he’d been pushing up, clearing it. Looked like a thousand campfires across there. Beautiful sight in the dark. Must have been the way it would have appeared for a Civil War army looking across the landscape at the enemy camps the night before a battle.
Next morning the cats and I had our muskets loaded, bayonets fixed crouched in our hidey holes, waiting for all those Yankee soldiers to swarm across the meadow, but I reckons we scared them off.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
A nice little norther blew in here the past couple of days, cooled things down something awful. I slept in the RV, and by ones and twos the cats volunteered to join me inside for a bit of quality time, sleeping on my chest, purring and kneading claws pleasantly. They tell me, with reservations, they think they’re going to be able to hunker down and live in there.
Came just in a nick of time, too, because what? Three daybreaks ago? I noticed something coming out of the now-open chicken house just after dawn. Double-take revealed it to be a bobcat, small for a bobcat, but large enough to make a meal out of any of these wannabe toughies. Last night the cats and I played fruit-basket-turn-over, two inside alternating with two nearby waiting their turn to come up next time I got up to pee.
Got my ‘Work for RVers and Campers Newsletter by email this morning:
Work for RVers and Campers: Employment, Volunteer Positions, Jobs, and Business
Nowhere near as many listings in there for west Texas, New Mexico and Arizona as there were last issue, which had a couple I found exciting. This issue only has a couple in Texas, neither far enough west to suit me, and one in Arizona up in the neighborhood of Sedona. They want someone in an RV park up there to do various things in exchange for a place to park.
But me going to Sedona would be carrying coals to Newcastle, I reckons. Besides, they wanted applicants to send a photo of themselves, along with a resume. With winter coming on I reckons I’d have to figure out which winter pic of me to send:
I’d naturally want to throw out the best possible impression of myself I could.
And they want the resume to demonstrate how I’m a people person, which of course, I am. Ain’t hardly any more people people out there than I am, taken from certain perspectives. But I’m not sure how I’d go about conveying it to them.
Been a long time since I wrote a resume, though I used to count myself a fair hand at doing it. If I was the one doing the hiring out there, I’d jump at me.
Me: Why so quiet there Ms. Australorp? Thinking of giving up on those chalk eggs?
Her: No. I’m just feeling a little reflective and sad. I spent yesterday honoring the oceans.
Me: You WHAT? You spent yesterday wearing down those chalk eggs, same as every other day for the past couple of weeks. Honoring the oceans? I need to pull those eggs out from under you. A few days out chasing grasshoppers will help you regain perspective.
Her: No. Really. I was thinking about all that radioactivity in the North Pacific. Thinking about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. All those poor turtles and plankton.
Me: Thinking of signing some petitions? Thinking of voting for someone who knows what to do about that garbage in the ocean vortices? Those two roosters caged over there know as much about what to do about it all as any human being.
Her: I know. Still, I feel sad about it. I think an empty, meaningless gesture or two might help me feel better. Maybe a rally and a few petitions after these eggs hatch.
Me: Rest your mind on that one, babe. I’m pulling those eggs. The golf ball, too.
Me: Soooo. How you cat-folks feeling about some canned cat food this morning? Can I hear some ‘Amens’ on that?
Invader cat: Amen! Amen! Amen!
Naiad: Hold that thought a minute. Any idea what they put in those big bags of Purina food? Where they get it? That sort of thing?
Me: No idea at all. I just thought you guys would want a dose of something out of a can.
Invader cat: Amen! Amen! Amen!
Naiad: I’m not so sure. Got any liver and bacon flavor?
Me: Probably some of that in here somewhere. But the cans on top are salmon, tuna and chicken and tuna. Below, is seafood supper. I’d rather not dig down in the package if it’s okay.
Naiad: I’m not all that hungry Might go out and catch a mouse and just settle for that. I heard you grumbling and muttering about that radioactive bunch of tuna they caught out of San Diego the other day.
Me: Yeah, they did. But it was just ceisum 134 and 137. Not dangerous levels yet.
Naiad: So you figure they just threw them away? Or ground them up into fish meal to feed to pigs? Maybe put them into cans of food of one sort or another?
Me: I don’t know. I don’t think there’s any routine testing anyway. The article said, “The real test of how radioactivity affects tuna populations comes this summer when researchers planned to repeat the study with a larger number of samples. Bluefin tuna that journeyed last year were exposed to radiation for about a month. The upcoming travelers have been swimming in radioactive waters for a longer period. How this will affect concentrations of contamination remains to be seen.
“Now that scientists know that bluefin tuna can transport radiation, they also want to track the movements of other migratory species including sea turtles, sharks and seabirds.”
I reckons they’ll be checking it out, directly.
Naiad: You go ahead and feed the rest of these guys whatever you want to. I’m going hunting.
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.
I’d just settled in for my afternoon nap when the phone rang. Sheeze!
Radio announcer voice explained he was Dan Somebody-or-Other with the Police Benevolent Association fund raising.
“This number’s on the no-call list. It’s illegal for you to call here. Same as if you’re giving me a ticket for five miles over the speed limit.”
“Uh…”
“I paid a $35 fine for a burned-out license-tag bulb last time I had any dealings with your kind. Think of that as my contribution.”
Spang hung up on me just when I was getting warmed up to ask to see his license and proof of insurance.
Meanwhile, went up atop the hill with my spyglass. Counted 14 buzzards circling around the ranch house for the 4000-plus acre ranch half-a-mile to the north. Widow lives there alone, but maybe she had grandkids visiting killed something last night. The buzzards are swooping but not landing, maybe skittish because it’s so close to the house and barn.
No buzzards circling over toward Gale’s, the new neighbor’s place, or the CopShop Party Hunting Cabin. Only other buzzards swooping are probably checking out a coon that was on the front porch a couple of nights ago, tore half-an-ear off the invader cat. I shot it through the window screen during a pause in the action and it flopped some, dropped a lot of blood on the porch.
But by the time I got my shoes on and went outdoors it was gone. Looked around all over from hell-to-breakfast for it next day, but couldn’t locate it.
Buzzards think it’s under a clump of dead cedar 100 yards from the cabin. Glad it didn’t die on the porch and dump all those fleas for the cats.
Built a humongous rock and brush dam I’m hoping will prove to function as though a beaver built it. I’m a firm believer the only reason a beaver dam holds water is because nobody ever told it science don’t allow beaver dams to hold water.
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.
Note from Jeanne: I’d like to thank those of you who commented on yesterday’s art work. I appreciate it. It has been a while since I’ve worked on large drawings (spending more time recently on jewelry) and just getting the feedback from you has been an encouragement to follow through on some other ideas I’ve had. I’ll post a drawing here every once in a while and I’ll try to fix the categories so you’ll be able to find them all easily. Old Jules has been spending a good deal of his time cutting cedar and working on a huge erosion control project for Gale and Kay and hasn’t been online much. I’m sure he’ll update you at some point, but I have some posts scheduled ahead since I don’t know exactly when that will be. Thanks again for visiting, reading, and commenting here, we both appreciate it very much. ~Jeanne
Previously posted June 7, 2005 (Placitas, New Mexico)
Out in the currently vacant chicken house I found a rattlesnake skin the other day. It was in one of the layer boxes, so I don’t know how long it was there before I noticed it. But it caused me to do some thinking about old brother rattler and what manner of nuisance he’s likely to make of himself if he’s still around.
I’m a man who holds rattlers in fairly high regard, but with a lot of respect for their clumsy bad manners when it comes to getting underfoot. I usually try to keep enough of an eye on the places they like to show up unexpectedly to avoid offending them, and when I can corner them I’ll carry them off into some likely spot well away from humans. Mostly they’re just minding their own business, trying to make a living the same as everyone else and don’t have the good sense to keep themselves out of harm’s way when humans are around.
This one looked a lot bigger last year (I’m assuming it’s the same one) when I lifted up a piece of plywood in a pile of debris in the corner of the lot and let out an involuntary yelp as I jumped backward in time to avoid his strike. That skin shows him to be about two feet long, but I’d have called him an easy four from my brief look at him.
Rattlers are few at this altitude, and the one who slithered off into the cane leaving me to to decide whether to just breathe a while and let my pulse slow down, or take another tug at that plywood is almost certainly the previous owner of that skin in the chicken house.
Rattlers are lucky where it comes to changing their skins. Happens year after year, but generally they don’t change much. People aren’t so lucky in that regard. We change our skins a lot of times in this life, and in a sense we leave the old ones lying around to be examined by everyone with an interest in who we are, making assumptions based on the old skin.
The other night I was down at the Range Cafe in Bernalillo …. met a bunch of old guys my age down there… retirees from the Los Alamos labs…. nuclear physicists who’ve shed their old skins and discovered they’ve let their lives slither off into the bush without doing a lot of things they wish they’d done. Now they’re all off living other places, but decided to rendezvous down here for a hurrah into the mountains, looking for a lost gold mine.
I have a notion I’d have barely been able to tolerate those men in their younger days. There’s a nuance about value judgements involving working on nuclear weapon development that would have influenced my thinking about them.
But these guys had left all that behind, shed that skin and now just wanting to slither off into the canyons, spend some time chewing the fat over a fire and stomp around looking for a lost mine and taking joy in being around one another again.
Strange place we’ve chosen to spend a reality, thinks I.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
WordPress is being a communist this morning. Or maybe the world came to an end last night sometime but it hasn’t gotten to me yet because I’m so far out in the country.
I was going to regale you this morning with some things I dug up online about building and retrofitting hydrogen generators to internal combustion engines yesterday but on the off chance the world ended last night, I won’t. The whole thing might be a moot issue. Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air
I’d also thought I’d share with you a couple of interesting things that appear to occur when the center of mass of a system of orbiting bodies changes, but if the world ended there’s no point getting into that, either. I suppose I’ll be obliged to break my iron discipline and focus to tell you about a couple of things happened here a while back.
A while back this dove flew in here and spent a few weeks sharing the chicken feed on the ground.
I’d never seen a white dove before. It’s forty miles to the nearest town of any size, fifteen miles to a village big enough to have a gas station/convenience store. So I didn’t figure it was a pet.
But when I approached it on the ground it didn’t fly. At first I thought it was injured or sick.
It had no fear at all. Nothing seemed to be wrong with it.
A week or two after these pictures were taken it began spending more time higher in the trees and less on the ground. Then it evidently just decided to move on to whatever was waiting for it somewhere else.
A free spirit. Sort of reminded me of the Rainbow folk I’ve shared campsites with in remote places and occasionally picked up as hitch hikers. Didn’t have much in common with the wild doves around here and nothing at all with birds somewhere else in houses with cages. Marching to her own drum, not letting anything get into the way of doing it. But not living in fear.
Which behooves me to tell you a bit about the Rainbow Family.
I first attended a Rainbow Gathering as part of a team of New Mexico Emergency Management Planning and Coordination [EMPAC] personnel assigned to be there with the National Guard during the Taos gathering of the early 1990s. I’d never heard of the Rainbow group prior to that, had no idea what to expect because neither did anyone else in New Mexico government.
What I observed was Woodstock without the music, a lot of folks who reminded me of my own younger times of long hair, protest, sex, drugs and rock and roll on the family side of things.
On the other side I saw National Guard troops loaded with live ammuntion and no clear instructions and rules of engagement being frequently hassled, treated with condescension alternately with re-enactments of some flower-chile ‘Come Join Us’ pleas from earlier times. ‘Family’ members running alongside government vehicles engaging in every form of engagement except disengagement.
And to complicate matters further, a civilian group of Taos Hispanics who wanted nothing so much as the gathering broken up and out of those mountains they considered their own.
I spent a harrowing week or two up there trying to keep my mind from falling into a state of spacial-time disorientation. When it was all over we drove back to Santa Fe wiping our brows in relief that nobody’d been shot, beaten to death by locals, no major incidents. My thoughts at the time were as far from ever wanting to see another Rainbow Family member as they could get and stay on the planet Earth.
I count myself lucky to have encountered many of Family members in other settings during the two decades afterward, picking them up hitch hiking, sharing remote campsites, discovering there’s a side to some part of the Rainbow Family membership I hadn’t noticed in the Taos experience.
Gypsy-like free-spirited, thoughtful and considerate people just doing their own thing, trying their best not to leave any bigger mark where they’ve been than they absolutely must. Good pleasant folks to spend some time with.
So long, I’d have to add, as a person stays clear of the party-animals and really cool people drawn to the mass gathering.
This was written before I realized the rats are just a diversion and Chinese containerized cargo-boxes are the real invaders.
“Trouble!” says you. “What trouble?”
“The Ruskies went home a decade ago,” You say. “Berlin wall came down and no one even remembers it. The Germans are all running around hugging one another worrying about mad cows and leaving everyone else alone.
“We kicked the holy bejesus out of Samdam Hoooosane and his royal guards,” you say, “And might do it again if he doesn’t behave,” you say, “And we’re all safe and sound here in the land of milk and honey…..Ain’t gonna war no more,” you say, “Except the occasional invasion of a minor third rate Middle Eastern or Balkan country,” you say…..”All safe and sound, swords into plowshares, all that.”
And you really believe that, do you?
Well, if you believe that, you’d better prepare yourself for a shock down to your carefully manicured and polished toenails……’cause the real challenge is still out there, the real challenge is happening right there in your back yard even as we speak, in your attic, in the sewer under your squeaky clean porcelain commode; in the trees behind your quiet complacent little hidey hole you’ve made for yourself to stick your soft American head into.
You kept your guard up all those years because one of the Marx brothers talked about lulling the West into a false sense of security, and of course he was right. Of course he was.
Only the time-skid was slower than anticipated and all the Marx brothers died.
Yeah, Groucho and Harpo sleep with the fishes, but it’s still going on.
The fifth column is here, now, at work near you, near your home.
“Rats.” I say.
“Rats?” You say.
Yeah. Rattus Rattus, the good American rat, the roof rat, is the only real American who knows, and he ain’t saying much.
Old Rattus Rattus suffers silently in his simple Christian American way; fighting quietly for his homeland with American know-how. Sure, it sounds silly and pointy headed, Rattus Rattus, but that’s his damned name, same as yours is Homo Sexian or some such thing.
Rattus Rattus struggles without complaint for his tiny children, while slowly, the habitat and other lousy habits, recede every year. You ought to know by the name; Rattus Norvegicus, the Norwegian rat, the dreaded wharf rat: the foreign rat the communist pinko athiest moslem heathen yellowjapaneseinvader super rat of the future is bullying him back.
While you sleep there in your complacent soft pillowland, it’s going on outside and up in your attic, in the streets, the alleys, the sewerplants, the amber grainfields, the feedlots, the silos, Rattus Rattus battles for you against the silent invaders. Rattus Rattus draws his lines in the sand, digs his little burrows, fortifies, and retreats as the highly mechanized divisions of Norwegian rats advance, house by house, burrow by burrow……Every year the Rattus Rattus line moves inward a few miles, seven miles in along the whole perimeter.
Yeah. There are bulges, enclaves of encirclement. Enclaves of resistance, but Norvegicus takes no prisoners, spares no one. And you sleep silently, peacefully while your own good American rats are diminished, you who gutsylike bomb the bejesus out of other commie pinko foreign middleastern terrorist muslim and Balkans, sleep while your own brother-rats in your own back yard die without your help.
And what do you think, you sleeping bastards, will happen when the final conquest is complete? Do you think you will be left alone, when the last fighters have all fought on your behalf, when the silent armies of Rattus Rattus are all destroyed, all the food for ravens scattered on the battlefields of America? Don’t bet on it. The sound of scratching in the ceiling, inside the walls has barely begun.
Time to join the battle, fellow Americans, time to get out the cyanide, the 1080, the pellet guns and the mousetraps, time to stock up on cheese, and warfrin, and time to prepare for the big battle for America in the American way. Time to begin the manufacture of tiny tanks, (maybe Tonka and some of those can help) and artillery pieces, and scatterguns and nervegas and miniaturized nuclear weapons…..time to join in the real battle for America here at home.
If you aren’t with us, you are against us, behind enemy lines, already under the areas controlled by the foreign devils, and you won’t be spared, unless you form an underground, a fifth column of your own…..
They’ve already got all the other countries, the other continents, and as has happened so often in history, America stands alone against them, a tiny host of good American rats, behind the scenes, fighting against all odds for you, to the end……
And that doesn’t even touch on the imported fire ants killing our domestic fireants, the imported Africanized bees killing our good American queen bees and selfishly taking over the hives, the Russian Thistles (tumbleweeds) cluttering up our prairies, the imported hares (jackrabbits), the English Sparrows (that battle’s already lost), the tamaracs (salt cedars stealing our precious water for their foreign interests), and the imported fruitflies…….it’s all there, all in black and white, been written down, so it’s true …..a multi-pronged attack against all that’s good in America…..while you sleep…….
And now the foreign weathermen, the Canadians and Mexicans, are predicting our weather, keeping the good stuff for themselves……
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 