Time With the Family

My mother had lots of brothers and sisters. She was the oldest. I was the oldest grandchild.

My father had 2 brothers. He was in the middle. I was the oldest grandchild on that side of the family, too.

I can remember all my cousins when they were little kids because I was old enough when they were born. Most of my relatives still lived in either Sacramento or Amador counties. A couple have drifted farther north. When I was young, kids didn't play soccer and adult lives didn't seem so busy. Families spent a lot of time together.

These days it often takes a special occasion (most often, and sadly, a funeral) to get families together. Cousins these days often don't get to see much of each other when they're growing up.

Bob's dad, John, grew up in a family where he got to see his cousins frequently. Now they're mostly all retired, but they enjoy getting together and talking about their old times. They do this once a year, a great tradition I think. This year's Cousin Reunion was in the foothills near Placerville at cousin Vic's house. It was a totally beautiful day. We sat outside most of the time.

The guys cooked chicken and tri-tip in a barrel and sipped some Jim Beam right out of the bottle.

L to r: Mike, John, Vic, Robbie
and Princess the dog

Beam from the bottle

The next generation of "cousins" got to visit a bit.

Aaron, Nicole, Lura, Bob

And we took some pictures.

Uncle Mike took this picture and didn't get in it, so here's a picture of him.

Uncle Mike

Bob, who loves to cook and party, is ready to host some family get-togethers this summer. Hope to see you there cousins!

Lush Season

I'm talking about how plants have reacted to our recent weather in Sloughhouse, not about human alcoholics.

We had a very dry winter, then some good rains about a month ago. A few days after the rain, the tulips suddenly sprouted, some of them with flowers ready to bloom when they were only a few inches out of the ground. Zap! They were just there. Bob wrote a poem once about how tulips are like little roosters, crowing in the garden to tell the rest of the plants to wake up.

That's what happened. I've just been enjoying the garden for a couple of weeks. There have been lovely lilacs, clouds of white dogwood flowers from the three trees and from the Banksia that grows halfway up the redwood, camellias to die for, huge columbine plants, and lots of smaller daisies and pansies. Last Saturday it was still damp from the rains, but the temperature was almost 90°. We aren't accustomed to that kind of humidity here, many of us thought we would die. But the plants loved it.

This year for the first time my peonies are gorgeous, not just a mound of green with one flower each.

We have another couple of days of rain, then hopefully some dry weather so the grass hay and oat hay can cure properly this year. Out on the hills the native grasses are just starting to dry in spots, as the later wildflowers bloom. The green won't last much longer.

But today, right now, surrounded by my lovely flowers, I feel that my new coffee cup says it all.

Please, No

I was scrolling through Hulu looking for something to watch when this popped up. 

I love animal stories, and certainly do not require that every story have a Disney ending. But there's no way I'll watch something that's pretty much guaranteed to depress me for a month.

When Bob was young and we still had a TV, it was often tuned to the PBS station. We especially liked to watch their animal programs until we were totally turned off by a narrator I called Captain Depresso. The story was always the same. The Captain would drone on about the topic animal, getting us interested in its welfare, then whack! Something would kill the animal. Captain Depresso would conclude by saying something like, "...and that's how it is in the wild."

I know how things are in the wild, pretty much. I live in a rural area and we have an abundance of predators that love to eat my chickens and pigeons, and occasionally a pet cat. When I watch a show about wild animals, I like learning about the animals. I understand their lives are not easy, but don't hit me over the head with that.

The last PBS animal program I watched was at least 18 years ago. Captain Depresso was talking about arctic birds. We watched the birds pair up and lay their eggs on a cliff above a beach. We watched the birds sitting on their nests for weeks, and the babies hatch. The Captain told us what the parents fed them and how hard it was to fly back and forth for miles between the hunting area and the nests.

The babies were finally big enough to fledge and the Captain's voice almost took a cheerful tone. Then the camera showed the babies splatting on the beach below the cliff and being gobbled by foxes. "Unfortunately," the narrator droned, "very few of the fledglings survived."

I didn't watch War Horse, either. Some people said it was a good story. I'll just take their word for it.

Did the "No Call" List Expire?

For the past week, every afternoon between 2 and 5, I've been called by different charities asking for donations. You would think, since I'm paying a lot for my landline phone, I'd appreciate getting a call on it once in a while. Not so. Calls from people I know are great, calls from people who want money are not.

What happened to the "no call" list?

I've also received calls this week from people in foreign countries selling Viagra. I must admit, that makes me really, really angry. I have a semi-polite answer to charity calls - "I make contributions to charities of my choice; I do NOT contribute on the phone, bye!"

The Viagra callers get a significantly different version that contains several bad words and usually ends with, "If you ever call here again, I'll hire someone to hunt you down and blow off your ...." In other words, the caller (and they are always male) will have no use for Viagra himself.

Is this how our society is going to operate in the future? We won't have enough real jobs, so those of us who have anything (even a pittance) are going to be pecked to death by those who don't?

I hope there are no phones in Blogland. Well, except I want to take my iPhone so I can play Bejeweled. And so I can text a couple of friends.

I suppose the next thing the peckers will start doing is texting me on my iPhone. The first one who does that, and interrupts my game of Bejeweled, is doomed.

Blogland

A few months ago a fellow blogger, Sir Yorkshire Pudding, informed some of us that he had procured an island for us. This is a map of it. My place is on the right, see the nice big yard I have for chickens?

We were all supposed to leave for Blogland last week. Sir Pudding is the only one who made it, the rest of us have had problems with our everyday lives. In my case I have chicks in the brooders and I'm still waiting for my passport. Also, a couple of YP's blogs about the island were reminiscent of Jim Jones, substituting kool-aid with beer. That gave me a "wait and see" attitude.

If you don't know what's going on, you can find the link to Yorkshire Pudding in the column on the right and catch up.

I really would like to be on an island with all these people. If you've read their blogs, you know that they are a delightful assortment of literate, sassy, fun folks. It beats assisted living.

Last Fire of the Season

Gollum and Velcro

We're all enjoying one last fire in the woodstove this morning. We may have some more cool mornings, but I'm through hauling wood into the house, everyone will just have to wear a sweater.

Velcro is fat, but she's not really a big cat. Gollie is a runt, only 4 pounds. Even her tail is thin.

Hope it's cozy where you are. I'm sure the weather will be perfect in Blogland.

I can see clearly now

Some of you know how it is when you get older. At 40 you need glasses to read, and it's all downhill from there.

I got my first pair of glasses when I was 8. I was nearsighted and had an astigmatism. By the time I was 15, one of my eyes was no longer correctable to 20/20. The other was a bit better, but not much. At 25 my glasses were thick as Coke bottle bottoms.

From 25 to 60 I seldom needed a new prescription for lenses. I mostly went to the optometrist because the frames were broken or worn out. I was very thankful when thin plastic lenses were invented. Those old, heavy glasses would slide down my inadequate nose and my prescription was so strong that if I wasn't seeing out of the middle of the lens, I couldn't see much.

And then at 60 my eyes started to change. Every year I've had to go back and get new lenses because the old ones didn't work anymore. My eyes keep getting better and the old prescriptions are too strong.

I saw the optometrist on Friday and, once again, I need new lenses. I left my frames there to have new lenses installed. In the meantime, I'm wearing a pair of glasses from two years ago. They were my computer glasses then. Now I can use them to drive.

In 5 years my prescription is less than half as strong as it once was. That means I'm nowhere near as nearsighted as I've been all my life. The astigmatism is also mostly gone. I don't need glasses to read. I wouldn't need computer glasses except I keep the screen about 3 feet from my face and that's just barely out of my clear reading range right now.

At this rate I might not even need glasses in another 5 years. Thank you, God.

The only other explanation is the low carb way of eating I've followed for the past 5 years. I did it to keep my Type 2 diabetes under control, and it does that very, very well. I don't take the cholesterol and blood pressure pills all diabetics are supposed to need because, even though I eat a dozen eggs a week, and as much fat (butter, olive oil, fattier cuts of meat, nuts) as I can stand, my cholesterol is between 125-140.

I have never heard of anyone claiming that avoiding carbs helped their eyesight. I don't know if that's the reason mine is improving, either. But I don't know what else to tell you. The optometrist was baffled, too.

Crane Terrorism

Thank you Ken, for today's blog title.

I've been offline for a couple of days. Sloughhouse has been like a war zone.

Sometime in the past week or two, someone sneaked into the fields, cut the locks, and stole fuel from one of Davis Ranch's field tanks. LOTS of fuel. Probably in the same time period, someone sneaked into the fields and took the copper wire from two pumps. Do hard times force people to resort to these crimes? I doubt it, honest people seem to find ways to survive. I think greed is the motivating force.

Just yesterday Sacramento police arrested six recycling plant workers who were caught buying undocumented copper wire. It's not just farm pumps that were being decimated, thieves were stealing copper wire out of street lights in the city, which causes blackouts.

And then we had our own spectacular blackout.

Wednesday night after midnight, Bob was up late playing computer games and I was in bed, reading, when suddenly the electricity went off. The weather was perfectly clear, so we surmised someone had hit a pole. This usually happens on the turn near our house, but we usually hear it. We had heard nothing. About 10 minutes later, though, we heard snapping and popping, and the sound of metal being twisted. It sounded like the "Jaws of Life" were being used to extricate someone from a smashed car. There were sirens in the background and a helicopter overhead. It seemed like a really, really fast response time. We didn't go out. Usually if there's a helicopter the police are looking for a bad guy. OK, bad "person," it's possible it's not always a guy.

Then it was quiet.

I had chicks in brooders. It was a chilly night. I got up and started a fire in the wood stove. I put all the chicks into one box and put it near the stove.

Gollum: "What's in the box, Velcro, a late-night snack?"

Velcro: "Nope, just a bunch of smelly chickens. They're no good until they're cooked."

I texted Katherine, who lives a few miles away in Wilton. She had an incubator and a hatcher going, with chicks due to hatch the next day. She got up and started emergency measures, but her power was only off for about an hour.

The next morning the electricity was still off in Sloughhouse. Jim at the corn stand said it could be off for a few days, and told me the story. Some idiot had stolen a construction crane a few miles west of us and drove it in our direction with the lights off. It only goes 20 mph. This is a huge a piece of equipment that is not meant to be driven on the highway. People who were driving saw him and reported it. When the police caught up with him he raised the boom on the crane and kept driving down the road, knocking out traffic lights, tree limbs, and every single electric and telephone wire that crossed overhead for 5 miles. Lots of poles were snapped off. The electricity went off immediately, he passed here a few minutes later with the cops hot on his tail. The sound of twisting metal was the breaker box being torn off the side of Jim's house.

The idiot finally stopped and surrendered just east of here. It's good he was stopped before he got very far on Dillard Road. It's a narrower rural road. I counted the overhead lines between my house and Katherine's when I took the chicks there for her to babysit. There are 155.

The pole by the corn stand.

The tops of all the phone poles were broken off.

Lots of utility trucks.

In a rural area, you get accustomed to having no power a few times a year. The first thing I do is fill every container I can find with water.

I also fill the bath tub. We get water from our own well. If there's no electricity, the pump doesn't work. There's a big storage tank, though, and enough pressure to fill some containers.

When Bob finally woke up on Thursday morning, I'd already done the emergency chores. He said, "Oh good, this is like a dry run for the zombie apocalypse. I hate to tell you, though, zombies aren't like the witch in Wizard of Oz, they don't melt if you throw water on them."

The electricity was only out for about 24 hours. Our local electricity provider, SMUD was right on the job with lots of trucks and repairmen. It took the phone people a couple more days. Things have calmed down, but if I was a thief or an idiot, I think I'd stay away from Sloughhouse for a long while.