Why I quit working for the Census

They need to speak to their mid-level supervisors about making giggly remarks when “they” instruct a trainee to fill out pay-forms to reflect what hasn’t actually happened, just to make it line up with the state work laws. If the people in the offices back east make mistakes about mileage and time in rural areas, they need to work that out, not encourage employees to cheat on the pay-forms.

Signing up to work for the Census was me overloading myself again, when I have prior commitments (like my intern in July!), and having to back out before both jobs go to pieces. And I have these books to finish processing — and I can’t take forever on that, either.  It’s got to get done sooner rather than later.

Dan doesn’t know I’ve scheduled three more chickens for the back coop.  Sorry, but when one can trade eggs for salmon and elk-burger, and the co-op is asking for eggs, ya just gotta go for it.  He did tell me yesterday he'd never had such big, rich eggs in his life, that they were better than the ones his grandfather raised -- with the reasonable caveat that hens and feed were probably better today.  He did admit Red and Black are pretty spoiled chickens.  Pets, that's all.

Pet pigs, pet lambs... it's how they're treated and raised up here.  We're eating ground beef from Triple Nickel Farm on Highway 112, out of a bull the owner said, "He was my pet -- but his calves killed six of my heifers."  They were too big.  But he was a food animal, and they had to eat him. 

Anyway, the Census wasn't paying enough to make me cheat on my pay-forms, possibly get no pay for hours worked, or send me up dirt roads to find people with shot-guns.  Admittedly, they pay for all injury and hospital time -- but when one of their safety instructions is "Wear comfortable shoes, in case you have to run" (it's in their handbook!) it does tend to set off alarms.

And this on-line book thing is working, as money trickles in from all sides.  Not a huge amount of money, but certainly enough to take care of things.  Not spending money is the same as earning it -- and when, like yesterday, you run into a paint shop that is clearing for inventory and gives you enough paint to finish the inside of the house -- "Free!  Just get it out of here!" -- that's the same as making a lot of money.

I made more money in ten minutes getting free paint than I'd ever make on another job.  "Poverty is a full-time job" can be rephrased as "Independence is a full-time job." Depends on what you do with it.

Note:  new Census rule.  A "lot" (supervisor quote) of people up to no good have been impersonating census workers. If the Census worker is NOT wearing a bright-orange vest with green fluorescent stripes that say "Census bureau" down the front and on a green fluorescent patch on the back, CALL THE POLICE!  If you invite them in and they do -- it's not a census worker.  The new rule is:  NO going into anybody's home.  If they ask to come in -- CALL THE POLICE!

On the way home, I helped several people with census questions.  One guy in a business which -- admittedly -- a lot of folks with warrants patronize, was looking at his form and said, "I don't know if I want to fill all this out."  When I told him the punishment for a census worker who revealed anything about personal information was 5 years in jail and/or a $250,000 fine, and that a CW could be waterboarded before they'd give up that info to anybody, including the sheriff or the IRS, and that NO information could be released for 72 years to ANYBODY, he went ahead and filled it out. He can help out his more nervous customers, too, now.

For every census form filled out, a community brings in on the average $1400 of gov'ment money.  It's about cutting up the pie  we all pay into-- they can't come fix your roads if they don't think anybody's living up there.  Our library has been closed for a week at a time up here.  It's a lifeline for a lot of locals -- knowledge that we have so many people here will help with funding.

The numbers the census collects goes into a pool. They don't look like "The Hernandez family with six kids lives here."  It looks like: "This area is 15% Hispanic."  And that, by the way, is how you get listed -- the way you insisted on writing it.  Evidently people have put down race as "non-white" and "German." I put down "Vaguely Ethnic" and "American Mutt." If Obama can call himself a Mutt, so can I. 

Dan, who is 1/8 Wyandotte and living here where "American Indian" can bring in nice funding, listed himself as such.  It's not about the little box you belong in permanently -- it's about where people are in their lives for this decade's funding and numbers of representatives in the House of Representatives.

I asked, "What if a gay couple puts down 'husband or wife?' Is it based on laws or society?" and was told, "Put it down. It's what they say they are. Don't argue."

Thomas Jefferson said we have to do this if we live here, so might as well do it.  But -- if you got a problem, call the Census office.  They're actually pretty helpful. They just want to get this job done.

All Those Nasty Trees Gone

Pillar Point on Highway 112 used to be shaded by big, nasty, old trees.  As you can see, the local lumber company has opened up the other side of the road, so you don't have to look at all those horrible big-leaf maples, Douglas Fir and hemlock any more.  

This is on the Scenic By-Way.  Merrill and Ring logging knows that "scenic" means teaching the iggernant citifolks what a Workin' Forres' looks like.  Tourism ain't got no money for the local economy, of course. The sooner all these in-the-way trees and fish are gone, the sooner the owners can sell to a developer and turn the place into someplace the citifolks can live.

Workin' For Da Man


Got a job with the census.  I'm expecting it to be pretty huge -- a lot of people don't have direct mail delivery out here.  And with the meth-heads, scammers and other run-aways, it just may get entertaining. But what the hell, every once in a while I have to get a job that will remind me why working in comics is so much BETTER.  And some extra cash for some of the house upkeep we're doing would be nice.

My bees are really cold.  They're barely moving.  But THIS gives me hope.


I'll keep providing food and water and staying out of the hive.  I don't even know if the queen is alive.  Whether she is or not, I'm getting a new monarch from these guys this summer.


Start worrying about your little insects and I'll guarantee you, you'll stop being afraid of them.  All you can think of is how to keep the Girls alive.

Too Close and Not Close Enough

Out in the garden, bent over plucking some greens, I heard a winnowing sound that I'd barely identified as wings  -- in that split second wondering if it were angry bees and then a crow -- before I had to duck out from under two hurtling bald eagles. They zipped over the fence and flew off along Bear Kill Ridge on a courtship flight.

(Nobody knows who was killed -- the bear or whoever was hunting it)

About six eagles are hanging out in the area; three adults, three immatures (nothing yet from this year).  We call one of the youngsters "Bird-Killer" because she zeroes in on and takes ducks out of the water.  We think it's a female; she's big. A month ago she rose from the reef and flew toward where we stood on the beach, rising over sea-ducks feeding near the shore. 

She hovered, then suddenly dropped and powered along the waves, targeting a buffel-head drake.  The drake took off and flew for his life, Bird-Killer like a big dark jet behind him, her great wings scything through the air, closing the gap by the moment. There was a sudden explosion of spray as the drake dived underwater in full flight.  Bird-Killer overshot, then swung around.  She wafted up, watching for where he would resurface.  He came up, but no sooner than she'd dropped through the air, he dropped back under the surface. of the water.

You could almost see her shrug, before she headed off down toward the mouth of the Clallam Bay River.  She's evidently learned what she can take or not, and doesn't waste action. She's going to be a serious competitor once she gets her white head feathers.

April Is The Cruelest Month

Rats.  Our white chicken died.  No weird foaming, green droppings, nothing.  Just laid down and died.  The poultry site says, "Sometimes chickens just drop dead."

Her eggs had been getting smaller -- I thought she was just ramping down for summer.  She SEEMED completely energetic.  Her eyes are clear and bright.  Who knows? The site recommended some Baytril, which we keep on hand.  But they also said cut grass is bad for chickens -- and I'd been giving them grass (I thought chickens ate grass!).  Maybe they meant oily lawnmower grass, not hand-pulled or hand-cut grass?

We've been keeping cats for 30 years and nearly lost one to a whole WTF? episode with asthma.

And my bees aren't looking so good today.  I SHOULD have kept them warm in the house and put them in today.  I hate saying "live and learn" when other things die.

We were also calling the hen "Steve" (McQueen, in The Great Escape) because she'd got out once by burrowing under the fence.  NEVER NAME A GOLDFISH OR A CHICKEN.

Amateur Bee Rodeo

Drove two pounds of Carnolian package bees home from Sunny Farms in Sequim today.  But of course, it was cold and wet -- it always is when I have to travel or carry something fragile, like art or insects -- with occasional spring-time flashes of sun.  By the time I got home, the bees in the box were chilled, but I couldn't bring them in the house because there were stragglers clinging to the outside of the wire box.  

At the next short sun-break, I whipped open the hives and poured 'em into the hive.  That I forgot and left two of the wax frames out and had to open the whole thing again was just first-timer jitters.  Oh, I didn't tell you I was working these bees without veil or gloves?  That's how I was taught, over 30 years ago, at Ohio State University. I won't work veil-free once the bees are established, but I needed to be able to see and manipulate everything without confusion during this ticklish operation.

The bees were so cold they were balling up and wouldn't pour out of the box.  It took several tries, and by then some of them were beginning to warm up and defend their new home.  They got me in the left wrist and elbow -- but it hardly hurt.  I guess all that working with nettles for soup and greens the last couple of years has made me more immune to stings.  

They're finally hived up humming for the evening; I hope the queen is all right.  I lost about 30-40 bees, but out of 10,000 that ain't bad. When I re-queen with the more aggressive and hardy Olympic Grey this summer, I will burqa up for those babes. And if I ever have to package again, and it's cold, I'll have to make the hard decision to brush off the stragglers in a spare wooden box and take the rest of the girls into the house to stay warm until the weather clears.  They're like the cells of a brain, not individuals.  But if you've ever let a small cold bee crawl up on your finger and carried her to safety, it's hard to think of her that way.

I must get this from mom.  When camping, she paid no attention to yellow-jackets, except to give them their own little pile of food and lids of soda away from the cooking area, or to dip them out of the stew.  She called them "Mountain Kittens."

ALMOST LOST KIKI -- file under stupid accidents

Our cats had been coughing lately, especially Kiki.  She's the cute calico we rescued up here a few years ago. After a treatment of hairball medicine, the only one still coughing was Kiki. We thought it might be worms; one of our other cats once had worms and the cough sounded like that.

In palpating her belly, our vet commented that she was tensing her lower body muscles.  He thought it might be connected to her breathing. I began to remember that she seemed to cough more when she was excited, or purring.  Could it be asthma?

We thought about what do do next.  He said we should try some cortisone for possible asthma, and it wouldn't hurt to worm a cat in a multiple-cat household.  We could x-ray.  I said we should start slow and go from there.  Our vet is funny.  He said, "Well, I can run the bill up as high as you want today."  We both laughed.

The cortisone shot caused no trouble.  She began to gag on the worm pill and then to slobber and finally to retch.  We petted her, waiting for her to keep the pill or cat it up.  Then the coughing started.  "That's it, that's the cough," I said.  Suddenly, she keeled over.  The vet's face went flat; nobody had expected that.

He picked her up and rushed her into the operation room.  I got out of the way.  I felt my heart turn over when I saw her carry her across a hall wrapped in a towel, but he was only taking her for x-rays. He put her back on oxygen, and then leaving her with a technician, called me in to see her x-rays.  They showed an airway no larger than a straw, and a small pool of vomit in the lungs. She'd inhaled vomit, then the muscles around her lungs had cramped hard, locking her lungs closed.

Each time she was taken off oxygen, the vet said, "She keeps trying to die."  As she lay there, her chest and belly muscles roiling, I put my face down close to hers and spoke to her.  Her wide black pupils shrunk, and her eyes focused on me. Each time the tech touched her, the pupils flared again.  Apologizing to the tech, I asked her if she couldn't take her hands away, in case a stranger was stressing her.  She did so, and Kiki focused on me again.  A cat down the hall began to complain, and her attention flicked toward the sound; there was a cat she was going to have to beat up.  Perhaps the distraction began to allow her muscles to relax. After about a half hour, the vet tried to take her off oxygen. She continued to struggle to breath, but the vet said it was much better.

When he thought she was "critical but stable," we placed her in a kennel, dark and quiet, and I called Dan.  Ever tear somebody's heart out over the phone?  To give her a chance to calm, I went and got the rest of my errands done, with my cell phone on (we live far away from town, and the chickens needed food and the house needed things).  When I came back, she was much better. The vet gave her a shot of antibiotics, to give her lungs a chance against the vomit, and sent her home.

She's much better today, but we're watching her.   She'll probably need cortisone once a month, but from now on everything she gets will be topical; we can't risk another vomiting episode. I told the vet's receptionist they were lucky I'd had a lot of cats and knew this was caused by accident and DNA, or I'd be going ballistic.  "Broken heart, small soul," as my character Lt. Winzig once told me.

Damn dropping oxygen levels on the planet.  Well, you know what they say:  "Cure asthma -- shoot a logger."

WATCH YOUR MOUTH!

After the liquor store was robbed and I sent in the article, the store owner said she was mad at me because the article said the store had a safe and a computer. Wtf? Did she think we all thought she'd been carrying the store funds around in her pocket or recording inventory on a piece of bark? 

She should be mad at the employees who led me around the store, pointing things out and describing what was there and what was missing or not. They made jokes about my reporting in town and watched me writing down quotes and waited while I got 'em right -- which I thank them for, because it was very helpful. 

Now about the security -- even though i didn't have to -- Freedom of the Press -- I stopped writing when the cop requested it, as "an ongoing investigation."  I e-mailed the editor when the local informer asked to to have its name left out, and he did so.  So where was the store owner watching her employees' mouths?  Why did she not make her store security policy clear to them?  I've told these people repeatedly "You're talking to a reporter" and tried to 'splain FotP.

Journalists -- which I'm pretending to be -- have no souls.  We'll send in anything that we can put quote marks around, mostly because editors hassle for it. So watch your mouth around a reporter, especially a freelancer only doing it because nobody else will bother, because it's all meat. WHAT have I said about writers??

Anyway, I just said, "Yeah, you're right, it was an editorial call," and then bought the bottle of wine Dan wanted.  That's another thing a reporter will do -- just nod and agree.  You never know if they'll say something you can use in details for a later article....

EATING PETS

Well, it might as well be eating pets, these hogs were so pampered.

Photo in our mini-fridge (left to right): Pulled pork, home-made soymilk, bacon, home-made hummus, rough-cut sausage.

Latest co-op goodie;  fresh home-raised pork.  The woman who owned the pigs was going to keep the shoulder for herself, but sold it to me instead, out of the stack of paper-wrapped meat at Sunsets West Co-op.  $4.00 a pound is NOT pricey for home-grown, boneless, clean pork.  Chopped and cut and spiced it into three dishes (about six meals each): 

• pulled pork:  end third slow simmered with red wine, apple juice and sausage mix (see below)

• bacon: center third thin-sliced with an ulu knife while partly frozen, packed in glass jar with kosher salt, brown sugar.  Chunky hard meat cures quickly to tender, flattened bacon.

• sausage:  rough-chopped with the ulu knife, mixed with kosher salt, fresh chopped oregano-rosemary-alpine mint, dried garlic-black pepper-nettles, packed in glass jar.

Meals so far:  yesterday, one home-laid egg each, one half slice of bacon.  Today, sausage red-eye gravy over home-made whole wheat biscuits.

I got the idea for storing food to be used soon in glass jars in the fridge from the letters column of Mother Earth Magazine.  Well, where the hell else?

No, we're not filling up a freezer with food.  We raise a few eggs, will soon add honey and fresh veg, to trade with those who DO have freezers full.  Just swapped a dozen eggs for a huge fillet of silver salmon; three days worth of meals and a big chunk just for the cats.  Yes we share -- no sharing, no sense of abundance.  Both sides of the swap thought we made out better over the other guy.  I don't mind cleaning the hen cage once a month, the guy doesn't mind hanging out in the cold water and gutting fish, but both parties got food that was fully cleaned and neat and ready for the pan.  We're having so much fun swapping stuff, we don't care.

"Not us!  Not us!"  

That's what the other militias are saying after these guys got caught.

We have a bunch who run around up here with the same kind of ideas, if not methods.  They're very proud of themselves because they have an email list.  One of them pointed me out and said, "She knows!  She knows about Adolf!"  Hitler or Menjou, dear?

Hopefully this will quiet them down, now, too.  And their swastika-painting friend.

     God, I hate some religious people.
     I won't go into the whole discussion about slavery, tribal history, yada yada, but at one point, one of the people involved said:
     "That's why that tribe is all gone -- God got them."
      After I picked my jaw back up:  "What?"
     "For taking slaves.  He sent a tsunami.  The tide went out and all the women and men went down to gather clams and -- ."
     "You do know that's what tsunamis do?  The tide goes out?"
     "Yes, and it left only the old people and the children --."
     "I would be pretty careful about saying god got somebody for being bad, considering where we live.  You don't want to ask why he got you if a tsunami came in.  And as Americans, I don't think we should be pointing fingers about slavery."
     Let's just leave it at that.  I'm beginning to think we're living in the 1880's.  Wasn't that time for one of the Afghan wars, too? And the American South running amock trying to turn the clock back?  With the help of the nuttier of the religious orders?  It's hard to keep track sometimes.

Mussel Chowder
Just felt like wandering down to the reef and picking up a few small mussels for chowder. The big ones are too coarse; they're best for bait for greenling or lingcod.  Oddly enough, Dan doesn't like the mussels.  I find them rather yummy. This chowder also had onions, potatoes, golden beets, garlic, butter and soymilk (a bit sweeter than milk for cooking). You can see the little mussels in the broth.

Sorry, Loggers

     The girls on the Crescent Lake Loggers basketball team didn't get named in the photo I sent to the Forks Forum, and it's not even really their coach's fault.

     I'm a bonobo.  We're different than the chimps of the human race.  We don't like noise and team sports.  We don't scream in groups. We don't follow.  We love sex and we get a lot of it but we don't like to watch; we're the ones during the extended sex-scenes in Sundance films who finally yell, "More plot!"

     I managed to stick around at the game long enough to get a photo of the girls, including a shot of one of the Clallam Bay Lady Bruins  reaching for the flying ball while pelting through a gang of Loggers.  It was easy to identify the Bruin -- she was on the home team -- but I couldn't get the Loggers' coach's attention.

      I'm not going to say he was rude; he's a coach for a sports team, after all, and they're like soldiers: too much maturity and brains and the job isn't getting done.  I'm not blaming him for acting like a snotty 16-year-old, because otherwise his girls don't win (well, they weren't winning anyway, but it was the Bruin home court).  It's how the older men men try to talk to women up here; it's like it's 1955 in their own minds.

     But -- people -- here's the rules when working with a journalist, even a small-paper nothing job-trained stringer like me:

      1.  If you want to be in a paper for something good, you have to push your own agenda.  You have to stand still and get your names spelled right.  Those kids are your little bags of DNA and if you don't have time for me as the deadline clicks closer, they'll end up being "unidentified" rather than mis-identified.  They're not my kids, I don't care about 'em further than the bucks I'll get for the photo  and/or article.  My editors know this is only my day job.  They'll pay more attention to the passionate local than the payment-driven free-lancer.

     2.  If you want to be in a paper for something bad, just bleed or do something stupid or very illegal. You don't have to try.

     3.  Nobody "promised" they'd get what you gave them in the paper.  A car wreck can knock the inches that you think might have belonged to your community meeting right off the page.  The only way to put a meeting on the front page is to shoot somebody at it.

     4.  If you buy an ad, don't expect extra coverage in your area unless it's newsworthy.  Buying an ad is like buying a male prostitute -- you get the inches you pay for, and no love.
     5.  Don't ask the reporter, "What paper are you with?" if you're making it a condition for information.  Neither the Paris Match nor the New York Times is going to come cover your piddly little game. You're lucky I showed up.  You and your town are NOT the vortex of the universe, especially when you are complaining and demanding to be treated like the local high-school cheerleader queen.

     6.  If you want to find out just how nice newspaper people are, get a copy of His Girl Friday.  It's still not that far off. 

     That said, thanks so much to the very cooperative people who helped me get the right names for the K-3 kids hand-signing the "Star-Spangled Banner."  And to the folks who called me about the game and the signing in the first place.  They promoted what was important to them, and I showed up and took the photos and got them to the paper that evening.

      Thanks god and their good manners and thoughtfulness that  they sent the stats in for the games; if I had to stay around all that shrieking and running much longer I would have crawled under the bleachers and strangled myself on my camera-strap.
     Front-page coverage!

    

Now I know how the rooster feels.
     E.B. White may have waxed romantical about hens, but when our hen White is standing outside yelling just to hear her head funnel sound, it's hard to think about anything but braised chicken (yeah, that's right, birdbrain, I'm thinking recipes when I look at you).
     She does these fertility dances with her throat out there whenever anybody lays eggs.  Black doesn't say much, and Red just drops 'em in the pen. But White talks her brains out the whole time like she's responsible for all the production around here.
     We figure all this noise was originally about letting the roosters in the original jungle-fowl flock know there was an egg, and to get him revv'd up to fight off anything under the trees. 
     I'm not using "brain like a chicken" to describe stupidity any more. I don't care what our antique sciences (read: religions) say about animals not thinking, the modern sciences are finding out how wrong that was. Chickens think, and it's mostly about how we're Not Doing It Right.

Land of Eggs and Honey

     We have a problem; too many eggs.

     We can't eat more than one a day each, in whatever form -- they're just too rich -- and the girls are out-laying us.  We'll have to take the excess to the folks who give us salmon.  Poor us.

     The eggs are color coded; the two pale yellow-green (bottom left, top right) are from White.  The large pale brown (lower right) is Black's.  Red lays the dark red with white speckles (upper left).  Black's eggs are the richest -- but she's by far the fattest.  Lift her up and feel the rolls of blubber and all you'll think of is duck-style-roasted chicken.

      After feeding them for a year, was thinking of just buying grown layers next time, but now realizing the rich feeding while they're growing up is what's making them good layers, despite their youth and the season of winter.  We've discovered a source of great calcium; dried-out sea-urchin and crab shells from the beach.  It's where we get the good grit, too, with the addition of sea minerals.  Fat hen + loads of calcium = loads of fat eggs.  Well, d'uh.

     Speaking of feeding animals right to get a return: after years of thinking and research, finally bought a beehive from Sunny Farms.  It has two fully-framed brood bodies and a honey body.  All the amateur -- and I do mean "WTF are we doing?" amateur -- beekeepers up here are listening to me when I tell 'em NOT to feed the bees crappy sugar and corn-syrup to get them through the winter.  Hello?  Colony Collapse Syndrome?  The bees are having enough trouble without being given crummy ersatz food.  Or, to quote, "Thou shall not muzzle the ox that treads the corn," if you need something from that antique-science book. The local Olympic Grays ("Pioneer" bees from Caucasian stock brought in by white settlers over a century ago and gone feral) are pumping out honey and white wax -- from the Douglas Firs, would you believe! -- like little machines.   One keeper has over 100 pounds of honey on one hive. Imagine what fir honey tastes like.  If you like pine-nuts....  At least I'm imagining it; nobody's tasted it yet.  

     My hive is actually painted; I found some neutral base, so the hive can have that nice raw-wood look and still be protected.  I'm not going to buy bees; I'm going to ask one of the local keepers if I can put one of my hive bodies next to his until we get a swam to inhabit it.  Maybe offer him some eggs.

Final Goodbye
     Went back and dug down a bit into Hector's grave, and placed a large butter-clam shell containing a slice each of butter and margarine into the little hole, then poured milk into it until it overflowed.  Covered it back up, replaced the big square beach-tile back on top after scratching "Hector '92-'10" on the surface.
     My brother's cat Holly died the same day. He and I had better have our ducks in a row when we go, or the Old Basement Cats will GET us.  Purr with Bast, guys.
     Dan and I keep looking at the sofa where Hector lay, to check if he's hungry, or comfortable, or needs washing.  Exhausted, emotionally and physically. Now I have a bad case of the 'flu that is turning into bronchitis; will have to have some Skookum tobacco (age-controlled site) on the beach today and actually -- YUCK -- lung-suck it, to kill the germs and clean out the phlegm.

You Can't Keep A Good Cat Down

     First, a poem from Kate Murray:

God bless all pussycats
And keep them safe and warm
Especially those who are in heaven.
Give them a safe path to the Rainbow Bridge
And if they have no human friend help them to find one.
And today especially bless Hector
who showed us that even Basement Cats are full of love
(especially for those who give him smoked rabbit).
Give him lots of prey to chase and subjects to rule with a firm yet gentle paw
and salmon to fress, Amen.

     Thanks to the gods for a hideous head cold/'flu that showed up yesterday morning.  We are much less torn by grief when we're dripping snot out of our skulls.  Digging a deep hole through rocky soil is no fun with aching muscles and a fever, but it's a lot better than trying to do it bawling the eyeballs out of the head.

      Hector was washed down one last time, then formed into a comfortable position on a towel in the cold back-bedroom shelf.  When he'd cooled down (putting any warm cells into a cold hole gives me the willies), his fur looked like it had as a young cat, thick, dark and rich, with only a few grey hairs.  He was wrapped in an old quilt I'd made years ago, and then into an old tatami.  He was given his bowl and plate and bits of nice food, including smoked rabbit, cheddar and milk. Unfortunately, I think I gave him the soymilk.  I will have to go pour real milk on the grave (the cat equivalent of the human bottle of whisky).  I also forgot the margarine and butter.  I'll have to do something about that.  We've dedicated the spirits of all protein we'll eat to him and the other cats.  Or he will be back stomping on my pillow with dirty feet: "WTF??? Fake milk?  Are you high?"

      His grave was planted with white Dutch clover and dark red and pink Columbines.

      Yeah, yeah, he can't feel a thing.  Funerals are for the survivors; ritual is like medicine.  Such as Gratefulness Candles.  Try 'em; they work.
     Then the whole of Sunday was thrown away watching Dead Like Me DVDs. That's another thing that works.

Hector's leaving
     These notes aren't really for you.  They're for us.
     He had a good dinner last night, then began to fade.  Last night he couldn't move any more, but he was breathing quietly.
     This morning, his heart rate is going up and down.  When I tried to re-adjust his head, he told me to stop it, that he was doing this himself.  He has begun to take the final deep gasps.
     19 years, doing whatever he wanted to do, and the last few being Top Cat with all the purr-ogatives.  He'll be buried in the back yard with Lina and Treat, lying together just as in this 1989 photo (Hector's the black guy, Treat the calico kitten, Lina the striped).  A fruit tree will be planted in the middle of their circle.
     We should all go so well. 
     He just left.  I've bathed him and the fancy funeral is later on, as soon as I dig the hole.  I'm the daughter and granddaughter of grave-diggers.  Explains my shoveling skills....

The Hector Report

    Hector's still here!  We think we've found the secret for turning around the don't-eat, don't-drink phenomenon at the end of a cat's life:  bathing.

     We'd given him meds, hydrated him, worked on his bad stomach.  Nothing really seemed to make him feel better.  Then I began, morning and evening, to scrub him rather briskly all over with a washcloth.  This was originally because it's becoming hard for him to walk and he's had some toilet accidents.  He's easily exhausted.  After the first head-to-tail scrub, he seemed better.  I remembered how I'd scrubbed our cat Lina as a tiny kitten when she'd gotten crusty from her food bowl.  So I started regular baths and bed changes for Hector.

      It seemed to turn him completely around.  He's purring, alert, and eating readily, even hungrily. No, he's not getting better, but he's enjoying himself, or at least sleeping, watching us and his food.  As long as Grampa can do that, he's not going anywhere.  It's not hard to keep up, either.  His brain and his heart are still good, so the rest can be supported a bit.
     Oh, and if a cat won't drink water, heat it up.  They come from desert areas and what little water they drank was probably from the hot edges of the oasis. When they weren't just getting it from the meat they ate (Don't feed your cats dry catfood if you can afford it -- they'll die of kidney failure for sure. Well, don't they?).

Hoko River Shake Mill
     Ever seen a sawmill saw sharpened by machine? 
     Tim van Ripper runs the cedar shake mill at the Hoko River sawmill.  Even when he doesn't run into the rare rock, he has to regularly pull the big saw out of his shake cutter and sharpen the massive teeth (in the film, you can see the swoop of the metal rim that contains the saw as the camera swings back into the sawmill after showing the Hoko River and the old sawdust burner).

     Sharpening is a three-step process. The first two steps, which usually take from five to fifteen minutes each, true the teeth.  The final process (shown) normally takes about three complete revolutions of the saw in the sharpener.  If the cedar chunk contains a rock grown into its wood, it can chip a sliver out of a tooth and then re-grinding the teeth and final sharpening can take as long as three hours.

     This is van Ripper's newest saw.  He has two others; the oldest is marked 1899. These big circular saws have been sharpened by machine since they were invented, by devices orginally powered by steam and then by electricity. They required machine-grinding to keep them true, or lined up absolutely flat to their cutting surface. The sharpeners take surprisingly little power.  All that's required is a 1-horsepower motor to turn the saw and lift and apply the grindstone.  The grindstones are replaced every couple of years.
     Note to art welders:  Tim's got some old saws over ten feet in diameter and piles of massive old gears and parts. Think of those in your next installation.

Braised Rabbit

     This is the rabbit after marinating in brown sugar and salt, slow-roasting in a woodstove-top oven, then slow-braised with a homemade Chinese-style sauce base and a 1/2 can of cranberry sauce in a dutch oven on the same woodstove. 

     A French braise would have included wine and Herbs de Province.  
     These intense flavors will allow us to use the rabbit for over a dozen different rice dishes for at least a week.  Pen-raised rabbit is costly, but a gourmet treat, and needs to be extended to be enjoyed as long as possible.  Especially these prime bunnies, purchased on the farm where they were raised.  

     What would we do without Wikipedia?  We'd have to be typing in all these descriptions of common, basic methods over and over again.  This is like providing a dictionary, right in the article. And don't tell me you've been reading a traditional book and NEVER almost raised your hand to Search or hit a Link.
     Liar.

Gourmet Cat Food
Finally -- something Hector will eat in chunks:  marinated and slow-roasted, slow-simmered Chinese rabbit.  He didn't want it marinated, or raw, or roast.  He wanted it falling-off-the bone, saucy COMPLEX (No, he didn't get the whole rabbit -- rabbit's expensive.  His stomach is pretty touchy, too, so a few nice nibbles did it).

Did the rabbit with my complex home-made version of a Chinese sauce base and -- my whammo ingredient -- canned cranberry sauce, It adds a sharp, slightly bitter sweetness that resembles -- but doesn't replicate -- plum sauce.  Mix it with apple-cider vinegar and sesame oil, and forget the ketchup dipping sauce.
Or add some hot chili sauce and garlic.  NOM!
I was going to smoke the bunny after marinating it, but decided to try a roast-and-stew treatment.  I've done it with goat, and it's luscious.  Takes a while, but it's worth it.  Makes the rabbit go a long way, because the flavor is so intense.  That tasty gaminess still comes through, but richer and more developed.

Dan was refusing to touch the rabbit until it came out all saucy and oriental.  He had some on rice.  He can't eat a lot of complex things, due to a very touchy digestive system -- his rice was eaten with tomatoes, tofu and a little cheese -- but he had to have a taste of the rabbit.
Me?  Bad weird health and all, I have a great blessing -- a stomach like a leaf-grinder.  I get to eat anything I want.

Hector's still here!


He can barely walk, now, but his spirit is still there.  Cats hang onto their spirit until the bitter end.  He still purrs and staggers off to drink water and rest where he wants during the day.  He just went into the back bathrooms to drink his helping of hot water, and then sat down to suck up a load of cold.  He is doing better today.




A less beloved animal would have been gone by now. You know how it is.

Basement Cat 
Hector is a LOL again.

Friend who left bag of smoked rabbit should know Hector just about stretched his eyeballs and neck out sniffing after the bag as I carried past.

He did NOT want little bits he could swallow (predators don't chew). He wanted a WHOLE BIG HUNK he could attack and shear with his back teeth.  He managed to scissor that big chunk in half and lick it all over.  Then he sat back, full of smoked rabbit grease and juices and looked happy.  Happy Basement Cat. 

Unwatered Wine

The Greeks said not to drink unwatered wine, for it would lead to madness. I'm snorking down the Gallo Paisano with no care for Homeric safety regulations.

Mostly it's because we're still on death-watch for Hector. I have a million things to do, and can only circle uselessly around them. Or watch Hector to see if he will even eat a smidgen of food. Or to see if he wants me to put on his green leash and let him all rickety pull me around the yard.  The other night he did it in the dark, three times through the working wood-pile.  No doubt to lose me so he could go die under the house.  I'm sorry, but it's the only thing I'm not letting him do.  Mr. Weird is now Mr. Flat-ass Stubborn. Anyway, after two and a half months, all the grief of my life -- humans as well as animal, including a terrible loss and a missed opportunity recently -- is circling my head and turning me into a vegetable (this is drunk writing, so I'm not taking responsibility for any of it).


Ran into a very dear friend on the beach today, who said that their household fell apart as their old dog died.  So I don't feel so lost and stupid about it now.

She had smoked rabbit.  We swapped for our smoked salmon.  Then we spent the evening blathering and laughing. She's one of the few people up here on my intellectual level, and her daughter is a living spark.  I, of course, did not recognize the kid.  How am I supposed to recognize someone I could once pick up and carry and who can now look me in the eye?  Some kid is going to figure out that adults -- especially we old farts -- cannot recognize them before and after the growth spurt and scam us to dead.


Next step, if I can just get anything done:  build the basis for the bee-hives.  I love honey.  The 3 hens are laying what comes to an egg a day.  The seeds just came in the mail.  With honey, eggs and veggies and the occasional fish, we'll have more than enough to eat and swap.

I may have talked myself into milking the old farmer's cows for him.  As he said, his 80 + years hands can't do it any more, and he's had to let the cows dry up.  If I do, it's half the milk, and I don't care how that makes me sound.  CHEESE.  And yogurt.  Which I'll share with him, too.  Fuck, I'm becoming a farmer.


And another shot of the young whale on the beach the other day. Note how close to the shore. It shelves off very abruptly.

Young Gray Whale feeding on the Clallam Bay Beach.

Smokin' Dem Salmons
Ah, smoked salmon.  The neighbor gave us a big frozen Silver salmon. Because they don't like Silvers.  Yes, we live where people get to have preferences for salmon.  I, for instance, prefer to smoke pinks.  I find them less greasy once smoked.  Most people don't prefer them.  I don't smoke the big White Salmon: extremely fat Kings.  Once smoked, they only taste like smoked pork.  Delicious, yes, but why pay salmon prices for the same taste?  White Salmon is best just barely grilled. I don't much care for trout or steelhead except for the crispy fried skin; the meat is actually rather thin and sour. Oh, have I gotten spoiled.

Here's the salmon itself.  I tried a Gravlax recipe, but found it too sweet and rather insipid.  I'm sticking to simple salt brine, the meat then well-rinsed and dried, from now on.  Or no salt, Indian Style.  Are we getting gourmet up here or what?

Here's the smoker.  These folks have asked for a photo of it.  It's just some cedar shakes from the Hoko River sawmill and some old grills and broken concrete bricks. That thing in the background is the greenhouse, another scrap building project.  Not pretty, but works great!  Especially now the arctic winds for the melting cap ice are turning our summers into cold, windy horrors for gardening. Guess I just have to wait for all the cap ice to melt and then enjoy hot weather gardening for a little while before we all choke on the carbon dioxide.  Trade-off.


I've made the text larger for this blog. As much for my eyesight -- near all my life, now wandering farther out -- as for yours.  Odd that we get far-sighted but the focus remains as clear.  Are the elder apes supposed to sit on the home hill and watch for lions?


 

Home-made blackberry wine,  with oranges from the neighbor's niece's orange tree (she lives in California). 

Home-grown oranges taste like drinking very fresh Nee-Hi soda.

The wine has a fresh, fruity flavor -- but it's got the kick of a crowded mule.

Gonna make a LOT more of it next year.  Not a commodity... but a gift.

Finally got the new chicken cage pretty much done. It's made of junk lumber, so it's not necessarily so pretty.

That's Red, White And Black enjoying the new place.

No, I'm not naming anything we may have to eat someday.

Hector's still here, and has stabilized. He's slipped into a weak, thin, but interested old age. So far, his water bag IV is set at two units (about an inch) of water per day, he gets Diazepam (Valium) twice a day, and while he usually eats a dry kidney-support diet, we let him have anything he wants. What can it hurt, now? Knowing he has purr-ogatives lets him know he's still top cat. Or, officially, Top Cat Emeritus. Leo is Top Cat, now, sort of. Living with Leo is like living with Denny Crane, but without the penis comments.

Chicken emergency resolved. As the hard rains of the El Nino came in, the chicken cage became unbearable. It was originally built for security, but this made it almost impossible to clean. So for about a week, I threw myself into building an actual mobile cage -- a bit too heavy to be an actual chicken tractor -- to get them out of the filthy, muddy, ammonia-reeking trap their home had become. Red, the hen as tall half-way up my thigh, and the boss chicken, was yelling for help.

Yesterday I ignored the lashing rain, each hammer-blow splashing water as though it were coming down in a puddle, and slammed through the project until the cage was at least sturdy and completely enclosed. The neighbor was so upset at seeing me soaking wet in the rain she brought me a nice red rain jacket. I tried to tell her I had spent much of my childhood in the cold rain. My father was injured and in pain much of my early life, and mom just threw us out in the rain to fend for ourselves. We didn't know we were abandoned; we had woods and beach and fields to play with, ponies and peacocks, seagulls and wandering hounds. But we did spend most of our time soaking wet, sometimes just stringing our tennis shoes (we got one pair a year) around our necks on our shoelaces and running barefoot.

But, back to the present. I ran in the house and changed my sloppy sweatshirt so I wouldn't get the nice red jacket wet on the inside and dashed back outside before I warmed up; it's running in and out of heat and cold that makes a weatherproof person sick. By the time I got the cage finished, it was the hen's bedtime, and no time to move them. Red did lay her first egg, however. A PINK one. White's are yellowish, Black's are light green. Easter eggs!

This morning Dan helped me move the hens. Red was squawling to us to come rescue them, and came to my hands to be handed out of the hutch. While Dan ran with her to the new cage, Black came in to be caught, too. My God, is that a fat hen! She's rather gorgeous -- in the sun, shimmering black/green with black edges on each feather. White was an idiot -- white chickens usually are -- and had to be cornered and caught in the muck.

The moment they were all together in their new hutch and cage, they happily started scratching the grass. This is growing over a concrete-tile path that is nearly covered over. Let THEM clean the damn' weeds off the path. Then we'll roll the cage to the next patch on the path and sow the edges with white Dutch clover. Ha! They can replace the nasty thin grass with nice rich clover while they're at it -- and they lay just enough eggs for us to have scrambled eggs twice a week.

Surfing Deer

There's no photo for this, but today we watched a blacktail deer doe swim steadily across from Kaydaka Point in Sekiu to Slip Point in Clallam Bay.

When she got to the breakers over the reef she-- well - pretty much surfed in on the waves, walked out of the foam, and trotted along the pebble beach before hopping up into the underbrush on Bear Kill Ridge and out of sight.

Didn't have my camera with me, but it doesn't have a telephoto lens, so it wouldn't have shown much anyway.

A lot of the deer swim from island to island and across the Strait of Juan de Fuca and in Puget Sounds. Give 'em a few million years and the earth might see a sea-going mammal descended from our local deer.

Why not? Whales come from the family that spawned hippos and seals from the dog clan. I wonder what a deer-based whale would look like....

Dan on the Clallam Bay beach yesterday with Echo, the neighbor's malamute, and the other neighbor's lab, Willy. With film.

It is Clallam Bay Unincorporated Law that before you walk on the beach, you must be issued with a large, friendly beach dog. Take your pick between Greyhound/labs, pit bulls who eat fish heads and then try to kiss you, etc.

Hector's still nibbling food, but he's getting water injections, Kaopectate before every meal, and Valium twice a day. He's very thin. He still likes his back rubbed, and even erects his tail a little.

He is constantly reminded he is still Top Cat, with a special place on the couch (it's actually my work place, but since it's Mommy's place, he considers it a Purr-ogative). He doesn't sleep on the pillow with me any more, and gets snotty about it if I try.

Mr. Weird still gets indignant at medicating. He's always done just as he pleases, and retains his stubbornness, which is amusing. It's HARD to see the black ones -- I have to study shadows to see if Hector is really there or not.

He was carried to the beach yesterday. He couldn't walk back, but he wanted down to sniff wet grass a little. As long as he can show any interest -- and glare at the dog -- he's staying.

Those of you who have been following Hector's story at the Desert Peach site, the old guy is still here! He's lying on the sofa beside me, munching his kidney diet bits.

Hector's Christmas video.

This is a shot at the beach the day after Christmas, 2009. Still pretty handsome, huh?

After he got down from my lap and walked on the log.

Hector walking back from the beach.

Today he can't walk back from the beach any more, but he appreciates being carried down and allowed to smell the bunches of grass down on the trail.

The neighbor's malamute, Echo, was begging to be taken to the beach today and stuck his head in the door. Hector gave him such a look: "If I could get up, you would get such a zetz!"

Rebuilding the chicken tractor, or building a new one. The old one turned out to be too heavy to move!

I'd had the new one partially built, for light weight and security, but it didn't pass the waterproof test. So I had to tear it apart and start again.

Part of the problem is building with junk materials; this is actually much harder than starting fresh with a plan. You have to play jigsaw, and the stresses and balances are much more difficult.

I'm glad I'm stubborn.

Two more eggs since the last one -- one pale brown, the other more yellow. So all the girls have had their first period. If these are the pullet eggs, then the adult eggs should be a very nice size.

I haven't posted on this blog in a long time, but I'm going to start using it again for actual posts about our non-art life. The farm stuff, sort of.

Here's the first egg, laid by White (the other two are Red and Black; I don't name anything we may have to eat). This egg -- with a tinted shell reflecting White's ArAmerican blood -- was micro-poached, served on homemade bread. The shell was quite strong, from all the crab shells I pick up on the beach and crumble. The yolk was orange, not yellow, and sticky-rich.

Am building a new cage, one I can actually MOVE. I figure it will be better to have an actual chicken tractor, to clean the garden at end of season, get the weeds out of the walk, and not get nasty. It’s made of junk lumber and nails, so it’s not at pretty as the ones at the Chicken Tractor site. I have a terrible time visualizing where boards will end up, so of course it will be a bit crooked and ugly. But the hens will be happier. Happy hens = more and better eggs.

Consolidation

To pick up the thread, go get a helping of Wolf Food.

Fishing Hurts.

I have the worst pinched nerve in my neck today.

That happens whenever I put any strain on my back. I try not to do it. But last night, a big lingcod surprised me.

Friend and fellow artist Chris Wasankari was with me when I was fishing for greenling.

A lot of greenling fishing involves starting to haul in a foot-long fish, and suddenly have a huge pole-bending fight on your hands, and then the fight goes out of it, or the fish escapes. You wonder that such a small fish has so much fight.

A greenling started its small steady pull on the line, and I started to reel it in. Suddenly the pole dropped and I had a real fight on my hands. Reeling in so hard and fast is what hurt my neck.

I nearly had the fish to the beach when the heavy pressure came off, and the fish I pulled in was again just a foot-long greenling. Good eating, but where comes this huge fight? Are greenling that strong?

The fish was scored with the marks of larger jaws, and the vent was torn open. I had proof of what I'd long been suspecting.

When you hook a greenling and drag it out of a kelp bed, sometimes a lurking lingcod rushes out and grabs it. A ling is a big mean cousin of the little mollusk-eating greenling.

If the ling can haul the greenling off the hook, you lose the fish. If the ling can't get the greenling off the hook, it spits it out and you get a bit-up fish. I once saw one of the Hat boys haul in a three-foot-lingcod, its greedy mouth stuffed with a hooked greenling. The fish was dragged clear into the shallows and the only reason the kid didn't grab it is because, unlike its smooth-mouthed cousin, it has a mouthful of tiger teeth, befitting a predator. That one managed to yank the kid's catch loose and take off.

So if you're ling-cod fishing, grab fast, don't get your hands near its teeth -- and don't reel in too fast or hard.

Ow.

Ducking the Bullet

Had the guys from Rainmasters putting up a new roof on Thursday.

Friday, 70-mph winds hit the coast.

We ducked that bullet by ONE day. Jeff Layman, who owns the company says that our roof was just beginning to rot and go soggy. The storm would have brought a flood down on our heads.

BUT now we have a lovely new roof that should take us the next thirty years.

"Good!" I said. "We'll be dead by then."

When you're 53 and 58, you see this big projects as something you won't have to do again because you won't outlive them. It comes as a relief. THAT's done. One less worry in life.

Anyway, the Harvest Brown roof matches our little yellow double-wide just perfect. The roof can air out now, because it's vented all along the ridge. The old double-wides were too airtight, and they'd rot from the ridge. The new venting will let the house breathe.

A guy I was talking to about roofing, who had put his own roof on a couple years ago, didn't know this, and he had to do it all over again. And Labor and Industry won't sign off on your roof unless a bonded company does it. Maybe not a problem now, but who needs to jump through more hoops come time to sell? The job wasn't that expensive, anyway, not for the great job they did and with all the materials.

Up here you don't fool around with roofs. Maybe in Arizona, but up here the rain will just eat a house to death if that roof isn't put on right. It's worth the money to get a professional with a long history of putting up roofs between the rain squalls.

Even though the power went out Friday at about 11:00 am and didn't come on again until about 3:00 pm Saturday, we sat by the woodstove and listened to the wind howl and whip at our perfect ease. Because I couldn't get on the computer -- everything was down, trees, electricity, dsl -- I just sat and did pages for the newestDesert Peach all day long.

I don't get depressed in the dark. Some candles in some cut-glass vases -- which act as Fresnell lamps -- and I'm good for the day.

We will have to build some kind of shelter for the Bug. Or hold the tarp on the car better with the punji cords.

Ling Cod Back

Eagles at Slip Point:



With the fish having taken off for vacation or something since September, we hadn't been getting much fish in the diet.

The greenling do seem to be back on the beach. Caught three nice ones within the last week, which means that I can feed raw fish to our old cat Spuds.

Yes, Spuds is still around. His nose is still blooming, but we're keeping the virulence of the growth back with a silver/sulphur cream. He'll probably end up with a Jimmy Durante nose, but at least we won't have to drag him all over the place for biopses and surgery. The old man is 17. Dan and I have a living will so nobody will put us on machines. I've threatened to have "Do not resuscitate" tatoo'd on one wrist, and "no heroic measures" on the other, just so the emergency personnel would read it for sure while trying to take my pulse. After having inflicted heroic measures on other old cats, we don't want to do it to Spuds. He's having too much fun sleeping in front of the wood stove and running out into the sun.

Anyway, about the ling cod: threw the greenling heads and guts and skins back into my favorite fishin' hole. So I shouldn't have been surprised when something HAULED on my line today and chewed it off, twice. If I'm going to chum for ling cod, even by accident, what do I expect?

Ling cod season opens in May. I'm getting a wire leader.

Dan on the first nice day in a long time. He's watching eagles:

Brakes

Yes, the busses in Clallam Bay's school district DO have brakes. In an earlier post, I guess I scared people by making it seem like the busses won't stop. I meant that the brakes are very very delicate, being air-brakes. One has to step on them softly but firmly.

I'm getting not half bad at driving these things, or so Bob Cain says. Bob owns Cain's Marina, and does the maintenance on the busses and got stuck with teaching me to drive. I'm not scaring the willies out of him when I back up any more. At least he's not ducking behind the seats.

I didn't grow up driving trucks and boats or backing them up, so backing up is difficult for me. Bob's got this extremely narrow little alley beside his property that he's using to teach me to back into. It's a bear, but it's a good idea. If I ever get the hang of back-turning the bus into that alleyway I'll be able to back between the line of traffic cones during the test. Bob's a pretty good teacher.

Cyber-Fish

After 3 and a half months without a bite, I finally pulled a decent-sized female greenling in off the Slip Point beach. Fish haven't been biting all over the straits and into the ocean, so this one was a bit of a surprise.

She looked a bit odd. Her golden back was nearly red and the light places on her gill covers and belly were more white than the usual yellow.

When I opened her up, her flesh was bright blue. Not the usual greenish-blue of a greenling, but bright chemical blue. Her stomach was pale artificial blue and very stiff. In fact, everything in her except her heart and liver was like hard plastic. It was like cutting into Cyber-Fish.

Her fillets, after two days soaking in milk, came out nice and white, but the milk was chemical blue. We ate the fillets anyway. They cooked up lovely white and tasted great. No ill effects.

No one I described her to could explain why a fish might be bright light blue, until Dan and I were out cutting wood with Tim van Riper. He said that the divers around here sometimes illegally use copper sulphate crystals to drive octopodi out of their holes in the rocks. This greenling, in her foraging for crustaceans on the reef, had probably swallowed one of the crystals.

At least now we know.

Already On Television.

I'd been thinking this place would make a good setting for a play or a book or a movie.

It's been done.

Picked up a dvd of the second season of "Northern Exposure" at the library the other day. In the course of watching the show I started recognizing the characters and places and situations around here.

If that ain't that bunch of red-headed kids I don't know what is. And the way everybody is always running around doing something with kayaks and second-and-third-hand trucks, and moose in the streets (or, in our case, eagles and the occasional cougar).

Or maybe these little rural towns are just all like that. When I was watching that show a decade ago, I never realized I'd be moving to it.

Nice Review

Francois Pernaud gave my latest color book, Pithed, real nice review at:

http://gaycomicslist.free.fr/pages/blogarch.php?month=2005-11#187

Maybe we should get them Safeway cards.

WISH I'd had my camera today. Guy had shot a 7-foot female cougar and she was lying in the back of his truck.

Of course I had to go pet. Cats are my totem animal. Some other guys were gathered around the truck. While I was petting her, I asked: "So what do you do with a cougar?"

A young guy said, "They eat real good." (He was petting her, too).

Another young guy said, "They jerk good, too."

And then another guy said, to the first young guy who was petting: "She ain't gonna feel your affection!" To me he said, "They eat a lot of animals."

I said, "Well, they can't go to Safeway."

The second young guy said, "And they would get children, too."

I can understand killing any animal to eat or use the hide -- circle of life and all -- but I don't understand sports. If you're going to KILL something, tell me you did it to eat it or because you were cold. Don't be making excuses because you just wanted to shoot it. I don't catch-and-release fish, because let's face it, there are kids on the beach, and teaching kids to torment animals for the fun of it is just asking for future trouble -- you can end up being one of the animals.

And I thought cougars were a lot bigger than THAT. If this is a big one, they're really kind of small.

When I got home and let the cats smell my hands they had no reaction. Which was a surprise to me.

Scared More Witless Than I Am.

Sooo....... we don't need a LOT of money up here, but when all our appliances and the roof and the car and my teeth and the computer die at the same time, some part-time cash is going to come in handy. I mean, my art works out for non-emergency situations but this got a little ridiculous.

I've been testing for the Commercial Driver's Licesense to drive a school bus, and now I have my learner's permit. And today Bob Cain, who keeps the Cape Flattery school buses so clean and safe, was out letting me haul the first big rig I ever drove around the Clallam Bay area roads.

Talk about scared. What really scared me was the brakes -- they didn't seem to BE there! They're air brakes, and I'm used to the Squash-Me-Hards on the VW bug. Trying to back the bus out of the bus barn I managed to feather the brakes into exhaustion and had to put it into neutral with the parking brake so the compressor could fill the system back up. But Bob let me do it. Well, I'll have to do it twice a day anyway, now won't I?

I just know what's going to happen. I'll end up driving the Neah Bay route. Yeah, go look at this: Washington State Maps

It's truly twisky-betwiskt. And I hear the woman who drives it now needs some time off. When I threatened as a child to "go live with the Indians," I didn't know it would mean DRIVING THEIR SCHOOL BUS.

So if you hear any reports of a Cape Flattery School Bus going off the edge into the Strait of Juan de Fuca..... just hope it's not me.

My father the truck-driver must be laughing his head off in Heaven.

At least I haven't got a Has-Mat license!

Yet....

Baby Whale in Clallam Bay

Dan and I were down walking the beach today, Sunday, in the grey mizzle. We had done a tour of the reef and were starting to wander back toward the town or river end of the beach, when Dan looked back and said, "Look!" and pointed.

Right next to the beach, barely 15 feet out, where the gravel shelves down about 10 feet deep, a 20-foot baby gray whale was feeding. If we'd wanted to, we could have jumped in and petted her. Her white-and-dark-gray mottled flukes and flippers waved in the air as she fed, and disappeared as she rolled to blow.

A couple of times, it became pretty obvious that she wasn't feeding, but was circling around to watch us. At one point she ground up on the shallow gravel shelf and had to kick a bit to get back into deep water.

We could see her light mottled form under the surface. She went out about 50 feet and then turned back and came straight toward me, quick as a torpedo. I might have been standing on the beach, but I gasped and backed up. All right, YOU have a 20-foot streamlined leviathan come at you and see what you do.

I ran back to get my camera, and on the way yelled at the kids that were walking along the street in the rain: "Baby whale on the beach!"

As I ran back from the house, one of the girls passed me at a dead run. They should have her out for track next year.

By the time I got back to the beach, all we could see of the whale was light puffs out by the kelp line as she moved off into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Salmon Egg cheese

Went fishing for a break -- the bait was old and fermented so I threw it into the creek. Sugar+salt+salmon eggs + 6 months cheezing up. Two otters came right over and dived for it. Otter candy! Hey, you and I eat fermented animal milk fat. We can't talk.

Salmon eggs packed in a cedar box and buried for 6 months while they turned into salmon-egg cheese were once a delicacy and emergency food mongst the natives, here. They still use eulachon (candlefish) oil. They still bread and fry up the salmon egg sac, too -- and the balls of lingcod eggs found in the rocks are stewed up, too.

I'm glad the otters enjoyed the salmon egg cheese/candy... but they can have it.

Fun Things To Do At Airport Security.

All of which I’ve done and they’re very satisfying.

1. As you remove your jacket or shoes, hum The Stripper.

2. Don’t take your shoes off ‘till the last minute – and if anybody asks you why, snap, “Only prisoners sluff along in line in their socks.”

3. Wear very high-laced shoes or boots and sit on their tables to undo them (slowly) and take them off.

4. Baa like a sheep in line. Or moo like a cow.

5. Drop your ID and say, “Oops! Dropped my plasteek!”

6. Reply to snapped orders with a very loud and pointed “You’re welcome” until snapper begins to mumble “please” and “thank you.”

Admittedly this will get your baggage damaged and things stolen – been there, done that – but pack the good stuff with you and just accept it as part of the good fight. It’s SOOOOO worth it.

Isn't there a song someplace with "Katrina" in the lyrics?

Accepting suggestions or good stories of things to do to -- or you've done to -- airport security.

Back From Boston

That's where I've been the last month, and yes, I should have been posting, but I was too busy getting my teeth fixed -- look! Gold for Charon! -- and learning the basics of InDesign and laying out two whole new books and going mushroom hunting with my friend Eric's very cool mom, Amy.

Amy, by the by, is quite the artist: Amy Schneider's ArtI kinda sorta built that blog for her -- and if you want any of those magnificent paintings, she now takes PayPal! So I'd contact her if I were you, and get those paintings before somebody else does. She's also talking prints, so ask her.

Anyway, I'm home, and today Dan and I are just SHOT. We spent four hours gathering chanterelle mushrooms in the woods yesterday, and it ate us alive. Admittedly we have all the mushrooms we'll need for the year, and any more we pick after that are just gravy -- but it's all stoop labor, and slogging through swamps and ducking fir spikes. Dan is a total mass of bruises (not my fault!) today. And he was wearing those hard hiking shoes of his. I was wearing these neat little running shoes I picked up for a quarter at the too right Clallam Bay One-Day-Going-On-Two-Years Rummage Sale, so at least my FEET aren't dead. If you're going to stomp over rotting logs and hillocks in a slash forest, do wear dem running shoes. They are just a fancier form of moccasins. And I've got that long Rom back that lets me put my hands flat on the ground, and do stoop labor all day, so while I've got the usual pinched nerve when I get tired, I'm not so banged up. Hey, we're not spring chickens here any more!

Anyway, weird and goofy things going on up here. More later.

Boston Spuds

No postings lately -- I'm playing health tourist (for my teeth) near Boston. To see where I've been and what I've been doing, check out www.youtube.com (search: Rummelhart) and www.flickr.com/photos/stinz.

Been doing a LOT of work on the Desert Peach novel. And on Peach #31 -- "Pithed" -- in full color.

The novel will ship from Diamond in January. IF they will order directly from www.booksurgedirect.com If not, the retailers will have to order directly, themselves.

"Pithed" will ONLY be available from www.lulu.com as soon as I get it posted -- and then only directly to customers. The site is working on getting as publisher-friendly as Booksurge. In the meantime, order it directly. It's the only site where I can put up POD for a reasonable price.

Lovely place I'm staying with lovely people. But as we used to sing in the army, "Lord how I wanna go home." For one thing, I want to see Spuds. The silver sulphur cream we're putting on his nose seems to be doing the trick at least for now.

And while gone I put the VW bug up and down for sale 4 times. I CANNOT bring myself to sell that thing. I'd have to get a lot more than $1500.00 to let go of it. It's been through a lot with me. I have four separate selves to contend with -- brain, soul, body and now heart. Oy.