Though I am writing this near full moon November oh-ait, being currently out of printer ink, I may not be mailing this until later in the month. Unwilling to drive my old truck the eighty-eight mile round trip to where is the closest ink store, I was getting toward feeling desperate enough to actually drive all that wear-and-tear driving when it became known to me that there now was a store in Myrtle Point who will take my empty cartridges and have them refilled (in North Bend) for me and returned to Myrtle Point in a few days; and costs me way less than buying new! Wow. Just found this out today—Fri, Nov 14—and will bring my cartridges down to them on Monday. Thirty-one bucks to fill the two I need. It's a color printer that Jerit gave me, but I only use black and white. I really can't afford color printer cartridges anyway, anymore; but for some unknown reason: the printer needs two cartridges just for black-and-white. Anyway . . .I would write all the seeming requisite cliches to do with how are you, what're you doin', and what's whooping, and what sort of dreams mayhap ye be chasin'? But I didn't want to overly indulge, so . . . ? What? So: What? I mean: It's too understood how what you may be trying to do presents challenges, often seeming insurmountable. Isn't that what “they” tell us? Fall off the horse?: Get up and climb back on again and so on. I heard another one in the same vein the other day: It's not important how many times you succeed, but how many times you quit. That from a football guy on the radio the other day. Boy! I can't remember how many times I've quit, in some manner or fashion or another; one level or another. And, so far: I've kept getting back up and riding on the beast for more.
This leads indirectly to my oft-worried/obsessed about ability to actually pull off transporting a thousand pound load of dry-seasoned hardwood (split) firewood all the way over the two-hundred miles to Jerit's (and 200 back.) Couldn't ignore the getting back part. In an untested for any other than my minimal twenty-four mile weekly trips to town, I did what I could to check everything out to where I could pass any curious state trooper, county sheriff, city cop, or forestry service ranger as to where this load of wood had originated, and where was my wood permit? (a requirement for transporting firewood.) Of course, I had printed out my own permit and forged Marie's signature on it (because she wasn't home when I went up to get her signature) the night before I left at 6:30 AM to go do the trip I had been, in no small part, dreading to have to put this old truck through before snow and icy roads prevent me carrying through on my offhand-but-sincere remark to Jerit when we attended the putting of Delia's ashes in the ground at the family plot out at the Norway cemetery in June that I'd be willing to get him some fire wood for the winter in his new digs, way-the-hell up east of Ashland at close the 3,500 feet or more! I drove all the back roads over the Siskyous from Powers to Glendale near I-5 and on down it (at way too fast of speeds for my preference to not blow the truck's engine up or have some vital parts fall loose at sixty miles an hour), and so I drove the other way, from Merlin out the Galice Road and on over the monster mountain there—thinks it's called Mount Peavine, but the map is not that clear—encountering snow for the ten miles across the higher slopes of said mountain; on the Coastal Route 23 Grants Pass to Agness and Gold Beach “not maintained for winter driving” said the sign on the way up and over this mountain, whose road took thirty miles to traverse; but didn't slip or slide even a wee inch in the small amounts of slush sticking to the (paved) roadbed. The road from Agness-to-Powers is only a dozen miles of gravel up to the forest service's paved roadbed down into Powers, and on to Broadbent and up my gravelled road to home, jiggity-jig. My poor-but-trusty truck started losing power as I pushed it up the last couple miles up to Jerit's place, due to higher elevation's lessening amount of oxygen. I note that the truck had used up an incredible three quarts of oil on the way over there; but then figured that the extra load on everything with it loaded with firewood explains such usage. I burned no oil on the (unloaded) way home, and got four more miles-per-gallon on the drive home. That whole back roads drive is on narrow substandard thin rumply twisty twisty-ass roads, and it was way into that night after I got home before my mind stopped keeping my truck from going over the steep steep-ass edges as I steered one way an another at never over twenty-five miles-an-hour—or so it seemed. Phew! I am so relieved to have actually made this trip without some drastic loss-of-mobility so far from home happening. I know: I worry too much. Heck: We all do. It runs in the fambly.
Jerit's female companion, Bri, 19, tall thin flaming redhead, sings and plays guitar; likes dope . . .was somewhat remote/aloof but friendly enough as her man and his dad played music and talked. She and he played a few with two guitars that they'd already committed to memory without a blush. I had been strong-armed to help out a friend move some shroomz last summer and intended to give them to Jerit for his birthday, which I only missed by seven weeks. Well: Not only did some of these get gobbled, but idiot brother/son/friend threw another handful into that evening's stir fry. This insulted Bri's sense-of-economy, which I found admirable. I am one seriously-motivated economizer—is this where the word miser comes from?--so I was warmed to see her heart moved in that direction. Next day was one of more music-making and d__e-smoking, with a couple of movies thrown in, then: A late night round of the card game of hearts up in the bedroom loft of this cob house built of a mud/straw-mix mortar on chicken wire over a foundation of old tires and boulders in a thinnish stand of old pine and fir trees above the miles and miles of cow pastures down below, with Ashland just a speck way down at a couple thousand feet lower elevation and fourteen miles away. Jerit still didn't have a set of tire-chains for driving in snow, and the last reminder I blurted out to him the next morning about ten AM as I was leaving to drive home was: Go downtown and get some chains. It was raining and pretty cool already and clouds were darkening . . . It rained the whole way home, which took five and a half hours, except for the (light-to-moderate) snow on top of Peavine.
So: I had an adventure off the ranch for the first time since October 2003 and sister Judith's (3rd) wedding.
Here? I am so-oh out-of-the-loop, as pertains ranch business, philosophy, attitude, and outlook. I hem and haw a bit to try to envision other stuff I could do to keep busy and not let myself run down, just because I have now become officially, in writing, been listed as 'retired' on the ranch's and their management's books. Done some carving, did a seven-months-late spring cleaning, but have yet to get the ten-years-cleanup more than maybe twenty percent underway. I am trying to reduce my imprint on this space here by getting rid of stuff that I must realistically admit to myself that I will never do anything with. I see this as about a three year project in preparation for whatever as yet unknown fate or otherwise may befall me in some vague ideas I have about what might be, could be, or should be in the future makeup of my life; but that which will probably necessitate a relocation of some unknowable sort . . .
I was getting pretty lonely feeling after the cat died; the turkeys having been totally gone since June. But about two weeks ago now, one of the hens (and my favorite as to eye candy) whom I had long given up on as having been eaten by wildcats along with her surviving second batch of setting on a dozen eggs out in the wild---this hen who has some genes from one white hen I had eight years ago and I call the white one, though she's more grey with black streaks than white, really—she and three of her now nearly fully-grown surviving young—two hens, one tom—came wandering into my yard and, I swear, she 'spoke' to me of her remembrance of a time last spring when she used to fly in here from her wild clutch for a hurried ingestion of wild bird food/seed, gargle down a bunch of water, and hasten away back to her slowly-cooling toward to cool eggs. Once every three days, almost like clockwork. Well, it has been every day since that she's been disappeared until two weeks ago when she came, with her exceedingly shy skittish youngsters in tow, reminding me of how I had birdseed for them. Twice a day, like clockwork, once shortly after the sky gets mostly light, and mid-afternoon for another refill to put on some weight and fat for the nearby winter coming..........My sense of loneliness is much eased by these arrivals and departures of these luscious beautiful wild creatures who warm my heart so.
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